316 HISTORICAL TRADITIONS AND MYTHS OP OBSERVATION. 



gi"eat towers, for this truth, geometry sets beyond doubt." 

 Again, tlie fossil bones so plentifully strewed over the Sewalik, 

 or lowest ranges of the Himalayas, belonged to the slain Ea- 

 kis,^ the gigantic Eakshasas of the Indian mythology. The 

 remains of the Dun Cow that Guy Earl of Warwick slew are 

 or were to be seen in England, in the shape of a whale's rib 

 in the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, and some great fossil bone 

 kept, I beheve, in Warwick Castle. " The giant sixteen feet 

 high, whose bones were found in 1577 near Reyden under an 

 uprooted oak, and examined and celebrated in song by Felix 

 Plater, the renowned physician of Basle, has been long ago 

 banished by later naturalists into a very distant department of 

 zoology ; but the giant has from that time forth got a firm 

 standing-ground beside the arms of Lucerne, and will keep it, 

 all critics to the contrary notwithstanding.'''^ 



It would be tedious to enuraerate more instances in which 

 traditions of giants and huge beasts have been formed both in 

 ancient and modern times from the finding of great fossil 

 bones. But the remarks of St. Augustine on a great fossil 

 tooth he saw are worthy of attention, as throwing some light 

 on the connexion of such bones with the belief that man was 

 once both enormously larger and longer-lived than he is now, 

 and that his stature has diminished in the course of ages to its 

 present dimensions ; as it is held by the Moslems that Adam 

 was sixty feet high, of the measure of a tall palm-tree, and 

 that the true believers will be restored in Paradise to this ori- 

 ginal stature of the human race, aud that the houris who will 

 attend them will be of proportionate dimensions. It seems as 

 if Linngeus may have held such an opinion, at least his editor 

 gives the following as his reading of a passage in the notes of 

 his northern tour, where unfortunately the original is obscm'e. 

 '^ I have a notion that Adam and Eve were giants, and that 

 mankind from one generation to another, owing to poverty and 

 other causes, have diminished in size. Hence perhaps the di- 

 m.inutive stature of the Laplanders."^ 



St. Augustine's observations are contained in his chapter 



' Torrens, 'Ladak,' etc., p. 87. - Olfers, p. 3. 



' Linnseus, ' Tour,' vol. i. p. 28. 



