GIANTS GIANT BEDS. 



441 



the frontiers of the Venetian territory, into the 

 territory of Ferrara. Apprehensive of new persecu- 

 tions, he took the name of Antonio Rinaldo, and, 

 after a short residence in Modena, Milan, and Turin, 

 he retired with his son to Geneva, where he was not 

 only received with respect by the most distinguished 

 men, but also found the most liberal support. He 

 was preparing to publish a supplement to his history 

 of Naples, when, enticed by a villain, he had the 

 imprudence to attend the festival of Easter (1736), 

 in a village of Savoy, where he was immediately 

 arrested and carried to the castle of Miolan, and, 

 afterwards, to the fortress of Ceve, and, finally, 

 into the citadel of Turin. Here he died, at the age 

 of seventy-two years, a victim of priestly hatred, after 

 twenty-two years of confinement, which was, part of 

 the time, so strict that he was denied even the 

 sight of his son. His manuscripts were carried to 

 Rome, by the order of the papal court. His attempt to 

 regain his freedom, during the dispute between the 

 courts of Turin and Rome, by writing in favour of 

 the king of Sardinia, had been as unsuccessful as his 

 recantation of the principles expressed in his Storia 

 Civile, to which he was persuaded by the treacherous 

 suggestions of father Prever. His Opere postume in 

 Difesa delta sua Storia Civile, &c., of which the 

 severest passages against the Roman clergy had been 

 published separately Jit the Hague, in 1738, under 

 the title Anecdotes ecclcsiastiques, appeared after his 

 death, at Lausanne, 1760. 



GIANTS ; people of extraordinary stature. His- 

 tory, both sacred and profane, makes mention of 

 giants. Nothing is more natural, in ages when the 

 past and the future are connected together only by 

 tradition, than that the height of a tall man should be 

 exaggerated every year after his death. In the 

 same way, a small person would dwindle into a 

 dwarf or a pigmy. The same effect which is produced 

 by distance of time is also produced by distance of 

 place, so that a nation of tall men, living on a distant 

 shore, would become, in the tale of the mariner, a race 

 of giants. Nations and individuals, in their childhood, 

 love the miraculous ; and any event which deviates 

 from the common course of things, immediately 

 becomes a wonder, on which poetry eagerly seizes ; 

 hence the Cyclops and La>,strygons of the ancients, 

 and the Ogres of romance. Instances, however, 

 are by no means wanting of uncommonly large 

 persons, hardly needing the exaggeration of a lively 

 imagination to make them objects of wonder. 

 According to the Jewish traditions, a people existed 

 before the deluge, of uncommon stature, called the 

 sons of God. And at a much later period, when the 

 Israelites sent spies into the land of promise, they 

 brought back word that the sons of Anak, in Hebron, 

 were giants, and that they themselves appeared like 

 grasshoppers before them. The last of this tribe was 

 <A r , king of Bashan, conquered by Moses : he had a 

 bedstead nine cubits long and four cubits broad. 

 In the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, a tomb was 

 shown, for a long time after, with the inscription, 

 Here lies the giant Og. In 1670, a tooth was said to 

 have been found in this grave weighing 4 Ibs. 

 The Jewish commentators make Goliath eleven feet 

 high. 



The giants of Greek mythology are believed, by 

 some, to represent the struggle of the elements of 

 nature against the gods, that is, against the order of 

 creation. They were said to have sprung from the 

 blood of Coelum, which fell into the lap of Terra 

 (the earth) . Their mother, indignant at the banish- 

 ment of the Titans into Tartarus, excited them to 

 revolt against Jove. They hurled mountains and 

 forests against Olympus, disdaining the lightnings of 

 Jupiter. An oracle having declared that the gods 



could not conquer except by the assistance of a 

 mortal, Minerva called Hercules to their aid. 

 He slew Alcyoneus and Porphyrion, the most formid- 

 able of the giants. Apollo and Hercules shot out 

 the eyes of Ephialtes ; Bacchus slew Eurytus with his 

 Thyrsus ; Hecate and Vulcan killed Clytius with 

 clubs of hot iron ; Neptune hurled a part of the 

 island of Cos on Polybotes ; Minerva buried 

 Enceladus under the island of Sicily, and flayed 

 Pallas, and made a shield of his skin. The remainder 

 perished under the hands of other deities, by the 

 thunderbolts of Jupiter or the arrows of Hercules. 

 This fable, perhaps, indicates volcanic eruptions, for 

 which the Phlegraean fields, where the chief scene of 

 this struggle is placed, and where the two principal 

 giants were born, were remarkable. Cos and Sicily, 

 which figure in this fable, are also volcanic. Ovid 

 has described the war of the giants in the beginning 

 of his Metamorphoses. 



Strabo tells of the skeleton of Antaeus, found in 

 Mauritania, sixty cubits long. Pliny speaks of a 

 skeleton forty-six cubits long, laid bare by an earth- 

 quake in Crete. In the battle between Marius and 

 the Teutones, at Aquas Sexto, the king of the latter, 

 Theutobochus, is represented as a giant. In 1613, 

 his skeleton was pretended to have been found in 

 Upper Burgundy. A brick tomb was discovered, 

 thirty feet long, twelve feet broad, and eight feet 

 high, on which was the inscription T/i&utobochus rex. 

 According to tradition, a skeleton was in the grave, 

 twenty-five and a half feet long, ten across the 

 shoulders, and five feet through, from the breast bone 

 to the back bone. The thigh bones were four feet 

 long. The bones, the story says, were finally 

 carried to England, and it is not known what became 

 of them. We have similar accounts in the sixteenth 

 century. Thus Dalechamp pretended to have found a 

 skeleton eighteen feet in length ; Felix Plater, one 

 of nineteen feet, near Lucerne ; and Licetus, one in 

 Sicily, thirty feet in length. But it has long been 

 known that these bones do not belong to giants, but 

 to animals of the primitive world, which from 

 ignorance of anatomy, were taken for human bones. 

 The Guanches, the original inhabitants of the 

 Canaries, were described by a credulous traveller as 

 appearing to have been at least fifteen feet long, 

 from an examination of their mummies. Similar 

 accounts were given of the Patagonians ; but 

 captain Carteret, who measured several of them, 

 found that most of them were but from six feet to six 

 feet five inches high. The measurements of Wallis 

 agree with this. The ordinary height of men is be- 

 tween five and six feet, and the greatest deviations 

 from this medium height, in Europe, are found in Eng- 

 land and Switzerland. Frederic William I. of Prussia, 

 had such a rage for collecting tall men as guards, 

 that a man of extraordinary height could not escape 

 being made a soldier, whatever was his profession ; 

 and it is related that Augustus, king of Poland, a 

 man of good stature, could only reach the chin of the 

 tallest man of the Prussian guards with his hand. 

 Very tall persons have commonly a feeble pulse, and 

 do not generally live long. 



GIANT BEDS (in German, Huncngraber) are 

 tumuli, in Germany, particularly near the coasts of 

 the Baltic and on the island of Rugen. They are of 

 different sizes, and sometimes very large, generally 

 enclosed with stones of such weight as would seem to 

 have required machinery to move them. Earthen 

 vessels, metallic ornaments, sacrificial stones, knives, 

 battle-axes, &c., are sometimes found in them ; some- 

 times they are entirely empty. They are supposed, 

 by some, to be general graves of persons who fell in 

 the battles fought in those countries, between the 

 Vandals and Germans. 



