156 
Pliny's natueal history. 
[Book VII. 
being dried up by the heat of that conflagration to which the 
world is fast approaching.^^ 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 by some persons it is supposed to have been that 
of Orion while others again are of opinion that it was that 
of Otus.^^ 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. 
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.^^ Our Annals 
^1 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 
Becherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles. Some of the best authenticated facts 
of unusually tall men are in Buff'on, Nat. Hist. vol. ii. p. 276, and 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 ^ gigantic son of Poseidon or Neptune, and Iphimedeia, one of the 
Aloeidse. 
1^ 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. 
IL 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, sub jinom. 
