114 MIGHTY ANIMALS 



that once there were giants in the world. This is the 

 reason there are so many stories about giants in the 

 books written long ago. The Greeks believed that 

 these giants were mighty warriors, and they worshiped 

 them as heroes. Once when they found the knee bone 

 of an elephant they thought it was the knee bone of 

 Ajax, one of the tallest and strongest of these heroes. 

 But the Greeks were not the only people who 

 thought that the elephant bones which were found 

 buried in the earth were those of human beings. In 

 Switzerland about three hundred and thirty years 

 ago a violent storm uprooted an oak tree in the 

 neighborhood of Lucerne. Sticking out from the 

 big hole thus made in the ground were some enor- 

 mous elephant bones. A professor in a college at 

 Basel, after carefully examining them, said that they 

 were the bones of a man, who in life stood nineteen 

 feet high. Then he took the bones and put them 

 together so that they looked something like the 

 skeleton of a man. The people of Lucerne, believing 

 from this that their ancestors were giants, thereafter 

 used the figure of a giant as part of their city arms. 

 And even to-day a picture of the skeleton made by 



