156 PLINY'S NATUBAL HISTOET. [Book VII. 



being dried up by the heat of that conflagration to which the 

 world is fast approaching. 11 A mountain of the island of 

 Crete having been burst asunder by the action of an earthquake, 

 a body was found there standing upright, forty- six cubits in 

 height; 12 by some persons it is supposed to have been that 

 of Orion ; 13 while others again are of opinion that it was that 

 of Otus. 14 It is generally believed, from what is stated in 

 ancient records, that the body of Orestes, which was disin- 

 terred by command of an oracle, was seven cubits in height. 15 

 It is now nearly one thousand years ago, that that divine poet 

 Homer was unceasingly complaining, that men were of less 

 stature in his day than they had formerly been. 16 Our Annals 



11 It was one of the tenets of the Stoics, that the world was to be alter- 

 nately destroyed by water and by fire. The former element having laid it 

 waste on the occasion of the flood of Deucalion, the next great catastrophe, 

 according to them, is to be produced by fire. Pliny has previously alluded 

 to this opinion, B. ii. c. 110. B. 



12 Cuvier remarks, that in the alluvial tracts throughout Europe, Si- 

 beria, and America, and probably also in other parts of the world, bones 

 have been found, which have belonged to very large animals, such as 

 elephants, mastodons, and whales ; and when discovered, the common 

 people, and sometimes even anatomists, have mistaken them for the bones 

 of giants. He especially mentions the case of the bones of an elephant, 

 found near Lucerne, in the sixteenth century, and supposed by Plater to 

 have belonged to a man seventeen feet in height. Cuvier conceives that 

 no man in modern times has exceeded the height of seven feet, and even 

 these cases are extremely rare ; for further information he refers to his 

 Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles. Some of the best authenticated facts 

 of unusually tall men are in Buffon, Nat. Hist. vol. ii. p. 276, arid vol. iii. 

 p. 427. B. The skeleton of O'Brien, in the Museum of the College of 

 Surgeons, in London, is about seven feet and a half in height. 



13 The story of the birth of Orion is beautifully told by Ovid, Fasti, 

 B. v. 1. 493. et seq. He was often represented by the poets as of gigantic 

 stature, and after his death was fabled to have been placed among the 

 stars, where he appears as a giant. It is not improbable that, like the 

 Cyclopes, Hercules, and Atlas, he may have been one of the earliest bene- 

 factors of mankind, and an assiduous improver of their condition ; whence 

 the story of his gigantic size. 



14 A gigantic son of Poseidon or Neptune, and Iphimedeia, one of the 

 Aloeidae. 



15 We have an account of this supposed discovery of the body of Orestes 

 in Herodotus, B. i. c. 68, and a reference to it, with some pertinent re- 

 marks, in Aulus Gellius, B. iii. c. 10. B. 



16 TL B. v. 1. 303, 4, B. xii. 1. 449 : this opinion of Homer was adopted 

 by many of the Latin poets ; for example, by Virgil, B. xii. 1. 900 ; by Ju- 

 venal, Sat. xv. 1. 69, 70 ; and by Horace, Od. B. iii. 0. 6, subjinem. 



