GHOSTS 



2489 



GIANTS 



proficient painters of his time, presenting the 

 life of the Renaissance as he saw and knew it 

 in the town which he knew and loved best 

 his native Florence. 



Ghirlandajo, which means garland-maker, 

 was a nickname that clung to Domenico from 

 the employment of his father, who fashioned 

 the metallic garlands worn by the Florentine 

 maidens. His first work of importance, the 

 frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, are notable for 

 their excellence in composition and perspec- 

 tive. Among his best works are the frescoes 

 in the Sassetti Chapel of the Trinity Church 

 and in the choir of Santa Maria Novella at 

 Florence; and his paintings, the Last Supper, 

 Saint Jerome, Coronation of the Virgin and 

 Adoration of the Kings, now in the Academy 

 at Florence. Ghirlandajo had a happy faculty 

 of bringing many notable personages of his 

 day into his paintings, which makes his work 

 invaluable to the student of his time. 



GHOSTS, gohsts, shadowy figures of the 

 dead as imagined by living persons. The be- 

 lief in ghosts has furnished topics for countless 

 gruesome stories and has led to many supersti- 

 tious fears. They have been credited with 

 remarkable powers, and in the past terror was 

 felt for the returning spirit of anyone who died 

 a violent death or who was concerned with a 

 murder. Tales of haunted houses show that 

 this feeling still exists, but in most civilized 

 countries nowadays ghosts merely furnish a 

 topic which permits of unlimited play of the 

 imagination in stories told at dusk or in the 

 dim firelight's glow. 



One of the most famous ghosts in literature 

 is that of Hamlet's father, in Shakespeare's 

 tragedy Hamlet. Marley's Ghost in Dickens' 

 The Christmas Carol changes a miserly, hard 

 old man to a cheerful, helpful giver. Ghosts, 

 one of Ibsen's most thrilling dramas, is a 

 ghost story showing the results of inherited 

 evil. 



Various theories have been advanced con- 

 cerning belief in ghosts. It has been suggested 

 that it arose from dreams. A dream in which 

 a dead person figures may have been so real- 

 istic the dreamer believed the dead had really 

 come back in person; or the dreamer may 

 have believed that while sleeping his own soul 

 left his body and visited and talked with the 

 dead. At any rate, the belief in the return of 

 the dead in the form of ghosts has played an 

 important part in religious beliefs, and various 

 religious theories have developed therefrom, 

 such as ancestor worship, belief in immortality, 



witchcraft, nature worship and totemism (see 

 IMMORTALITY; WITCHCRAFT; TOTEM). North 

 American Indians have a religious dance called 

 the ghost dance, which is performed at night 

 and for which a white cloak is worn. The 

 superstitious fears of negroes are well known, 

 and acting on that knowledge, the Ku-Klux 

 Klan, with its ghostly garments, was organized 

 in the Southern United States at the close of 

 the War of Secession, to frighten negroes into 

 political submission. 



Consult O'Donnell's Ghostly Phenomena; Jas- 

 trow's The Study of Religion. 



GIANTS, ji'antz, a word commonly applied 

 to unusually tall men and women. The aver- 

 age height of men throughout the world is 

 about five feet five inches; but each race has 

 an average height of its own which changes 

 little from generation to generation, and which 

 often varies considerably from the general 

 average of all men. 



Machnow, a Russian, born at Charknow, was 

 exhibited in London in his twenty-third year, 

 in 1905; he was then nine feet three inches in 

 height and weighed 360 pounds. From his 

 wrist to the tip of his second finger he meas- 

 ured two feet. Chang-wu-gon, a Chinese giant, 

 was seven feet nine inches high; Anna Swan, 

 a native of Nova Scotia, and her husband, 

 Captain Bates, a native of Kentucky, each 

 measured over eight feet. 



It was the ggneral belief of the ancients 

 that the human race in their day had degen- 

 erated, the men of primeval ages having been 

 of so far greater stature and strength as to be 

 gigantic. The idea conveyed by the word in 

 classic mythology is that of beings more or 

 less manlike, but enormous in size and strength. 

 Giants of Greek mythology were believed to 

 personify the elements of nature and were 

 said to have sprung from the blood of Uranus 

 (Heaven), which fell into the lap of Ge (the 

 Earth). 



Giants figure largely in Celtic and Scandi- 

 navian mythology and legends. The giants 

 Fingal and his son Ossian belong to the leg- 

 ends of the Irish. The giants of the Welsh 

 are familiar to everyone through the achieve- 

 ments of Jack the Giant Killer. 



Races of giants are first mentioned in the 

 Bible in Genesis VI, 4. 



Og, the King of Bashan, had a bedstead 

 nine cubits long, a cubit being 25.19 inches. 

 Goliath, who measured six cubits and a span, 

 and who was slain by David, is the most cele- 

 brated of the giants mentioned in the Bible. 



