THE MEDITERT A XE AN NATURALIST 
28 
geology Las been much neglected, and, until the 
arrival of Dr. John Murray of Edinburgh in the 
Springs of 1889-90, but little work can be said to 
have been effected for the last twenty years. 
Among those who have been specially engaged 
on Maltese geology, the names of Spratt, Adams, 
Limbs, and Murray, stand pre-eminent. 
All of these workers have labonred during the 
last half century, and, therefore, the views that 
they have expressed, are more or less in accord 
with the latest theories of geological science. 
peroi at Vienna, by offering him, a large elephant’s 
molar, which they asserted, had been found in the 
vicinity of Jerusalem. They represented this 
tooth as having formerly belonged to the giant 
Og, and in support of their statement, they aver- 
red that the cave contained a tablet bearing the 
Chaldean inscription 
“Here lies the giant Og.” 
The folk-lore of India, China, Rome, Greece, 
and of all of those nations possessing an ancient 
iiberature, abounds with myths having for their 
But records show, that it was not in the present 
century only that observers had been attracted to, 
and had attempted some explanation of the physi- 
cal phenomena of the islands. Dana(l) in his 
“Manual of Geology 1 ’ notes, that in the year 1670, 
Scilla, the Sicilian painter, made several sketches 
of the remains of a huge carnivorous whale, Zeu- 
glodon, that he had met with in the Maltese beds; 
these sketches Scilla (2) afterwards embodied in a 
work entitled “De corporibus marinus,” a copy of 
which still exists in the public library of Valletta. 
In 1647, Abela,(3) the Maltese historian, men 
tions the discovery of certain large bones, which he 
assumed to be the remains of a giant race of people 
that had formerly inhabited the Maltese Islands. 
The size of the bones indicated an immense 
stature, and he therefore inferred that they were 
the remains of the fabled race known as the 
“Cyclops”. 
That such races had formerly existed was a 
common belief among all classes in the middle 
ages. 
{ origin the colossal organic remains that have been 
| exhumed from the strata: myths, that were the 
more readily accepted because they were often 
supported by the expressed opinion of the most 
eminent sages of the time. St. Augustine, speak- 
ing of the existence of man before the flood, refers 
to the physical degeneracy of his times, and leads 
his hearers to believe in the former existence of a 
race of men of gigantic proportions. He says, “I, 
myself, along with some others, saw on the shore 
at Utica a man’s molar tooth of such a size that, 
if it were cut down into teeth such as we have, a 
hundred, I fancy, could have been made out of it”. 
And Strabo, Pliny, and Herodotus, respectively, in 
their works, proffer similar opinions, concerning 
the origin of the colossal teeth and bones that haci 
come under their notice. 
During the period that elapsed between the 
issue of Abela’s work and 1791, there are no 
records to show that any attempts had been made 
either to controvert or to supplant the theory that 
he had propounded. 
Mediaeval literature teems with accounts con- 
cerning them, and, therefore, Abela’s opinion was 
neither original nor singular. Cervantes causes 
his Don Quixote to tell us in one of his raphsodies, 
that, “In the island of Sicily, there have been 
found long bones, and shoulder bones so huge, that 
their size manifests their owners to have been 
giants; for this truth geometry sets beyond 
doubt”. 
And Lambecius, too, gives us a very quaint 
account of the manner in which certain savants of 
Constantinople sought to impose upon the Em- 
(1) Dana Prof. J. “ Manual of Geology” p. 169. 
(%) Scilla '“De Corporibus Marinus” 1670. 
(8) Abela, F. F. “ Descrittione cli Malta” 161$. 
In 1791, however, a writer named Dolomieu (1) 
came forward and in a work entitled, “Malta par 
un voyageur Francais,” he not only entered into a 
detailed description of the Maltese strata, but he 
also attempted an explanation of the, more 
striking of tie physical phenomena connected with 
them. 
The work contains much that is highly credita- 
ble to the intelligence of the author; but in conse- 
quence of the very incomplete state in which the 
Science of geology then was, the deductions "hat 
he has drawn from his observations can now be 
considered as being of but little or no value. 
(1) Dolomieu “ Malta par un voyageur Francais 
p. p. 74. 
