would not be allowed to rest peaceably in his grave, and to have taken all possible precautions to prevent its violation, but, as the reader has heard, wholly in vain.

We must not omit here to mention Frederick of Prussia's fancy for gigantic guardsmen, and the unscrupulous means he employed to accomplish his ends. Any unusually tall woman of whom he might chance to catch sight, was forcibly carried off from her home, and married to a colossus of her own proportions. It is said that his proceedings, persistently pursued for many years, have produced a sensible difference in the height of the inhabitants of Potsdam. One of Frederick's grenadiers was eight foot six high, and another in the service of the Duke of Brunswick was of the same stature.

A great deal of the evidence respecting giants is derived from human bones and skeletons, which have been discovered in various places; and most of the utterly extravagant tales of men twenty, thirty, and forty feet high, have been derived from this source. We must not set these down as mere inventions. From the imperfect knowledge of anatomy in early times, the bones of enormous extinct animals have been mistaken for those of man. But there are some cases to which this does not apply. M. Andreas Thevet ("Descript. of America," publ. 1575), tells us that he was shown by a Spanish merchant the skull and bones of a giant who had been eleven feet five inches in height. M. Thevet took the measure of the remains. The skull was three feet one inch in circumference, and the leg bones three feet four inches long. A skeleton nine feet long, enclosed in a stone coffin, is said to have been dug up in 1685 at Repton in Derbyshire ("Philosoph. Transact." XXIV.); and another on Salisbury Plain in 1714, nine feet four inches in length. A report of this is given in the

"Gazette" of October, 1719. Dr. Molyneux ("Philos. Trans." XXII., p. 471), affirms that there is an os frontis in the Anatomical School at Leyden, twice the ordinary size of that belonging to a well-proportioned man six foot high. The doctor argues, therefore, that the owner of this os frontis must have been twelve feet in stature. "But," remarks Mr. Luther Holden, the distinguished writer on Osteology, "though this os frontis does measure 7 inches vertically, and 8 inches transversely, it is a pathological enlargement of the skull cap. The base of the same skull is of the ordinary size. The suggestion, therefore, that this os frontis belonged to a man twelve feet high, is quite untenable."

Quite in our own times, there have been Loushkin, the Russian giant, eight feet five, (whose fac-simile is to be seen at Madame Tussaud's); Chang, the Chinese, said to have been nearly eight feet, though this has been disputed; Brice, the Frenchman, seven feet eight inches; and the two Americans, eight feet six, and eight feet respectively, whose Brobdignag wedding was celebrated in London a few years ago.

CHAPTER XVI.

STRANGE MEN: DWARFS-DWARF RACES-INDIVIDUAL

DWARFS.

QUITE as many stories are current respecting dwarfs, as have been already narrated of their correlatives the giants. But there is not to be noted, in their instance, the same prevalent fancy as to the gradual change which has taken place in the condition of mankind. No one, so far as I am aware, has ever believed that our remote ancestors were persons of insignificant stature, and that the human race has been increasing in size in each successive generation. If what was suggested at the outset of the last chapter be correct, it will account for this circumstance. Any way it is certainly the fact. A belief in the existence of dwarf races-men and women whose heads scarcely reached to the waists of persons of ordinary stature-is indeed. as ancient as the corresponding idea of whole nations of colossal dimensions. But while the latter, in popular belief, once occupied the whole earth, the former have always been regarded as something exceptional-a kind of lusus naturæ, never her ordinary rule. The earliest Greek literature, of which we have any knowledge, tells us of these tiny men. In the third book of the Iliad, Homer relates how the cranes, at

the approach of winter, fly away to warmer regions, where they wage war with the pigmy tribes.

"As when the cranes (he writes),

Flying the wintry storms, send forth on high

Their dissonant clamours, while o'er the ocean stream

They steer their course, and on their pinions bear

Battle and death to the Pygmæan race." ("Iliad,” III.)

Herodotus (II. 32) records that some young men belonging to the tribe of the Nasamones, sent to explore the Libyan deserts, while gathering fruit on a plain, which lay several days' journey south of their own country, were suddenly seized upon by some little men—men (he says) who were even shorter than men of middle size-and carried away.

Aristotle, who is the most precise and careful of all the ancients in the statements he makes, tells us that "the cranes fly away to the lakes above Egypt, from which flows the Nile. There dwell the pygmies, and this is certainly no fable but the pure truth." He adds, "that they had exceedingly small houses, and lived in caves.” Hecatæus states that they were so small, that when they reaped their harvests, they had to cut down each separate ear of corn with an axe. Once on a time when Hercules came into their country, after his victory over Antæus, and lay down to sleep, a whole army of them attacked his left hand, while another assailed his right. They are said also to have placed a ladder against the goblet he carried with him, and to have mounted up, in order to drink from it-details from which it is probable that Swift borrowed many of his fancies in his description of Gulliver and the Lilliputians. Hercules is said to have been so pleased with the courage of the little men, that he wrapped up several of them

in the lion's skin, and carried them away with him.

Pliny, following Strabo and others, writes: "Beyond these (i.e., in the extremest parts of India) the pygmies are said to dwell, who are in height not more than three spans (a little more than two feet). They have a healthful climate, one always germinating, the mountains sheltering them from the North Wind." Aulus Gellius says: "Not far from this spot dwell the pygmies, among whom the tallest do not exceed two feet and a quarter."

Leaving classical writers and proceeding to mediæval times, we are told that in the tenth century Lief, the son of Eric, the Red Headed, sailed in a ship with thirty-five men from old Greenland towards the South-west, and discovered a fertile country abounding in grapes; which, so far as we can judge, must have been either Newfoundland or Labrador, most probably the latter. Here the Northmen first met with a race of savages, whom they termed "Skrællings" (that is sprouts, or dwarfs,) from their diminutive statures. They described these people as pygmies, two cubits high, who had little boats covered with skins, and bows and arrows with which they assaulted strangers. It is said that the same people soon afterwards made their appearance on the Western coast of Greenland, of which country after it was abandoned, or lost sight of, by the Norwegians, they remained for a long time the only inhabitants. (Prichard, II. 400.)

Sir John Maundeville, three centuries subsequently, tells of "a certain river called Dalay which is the greatest river of fresh water that is in the world. That river goeth through the land of the pigmies, where the folks be of little stature but three span long. And they be right fair and gentle after their quantities, both men and women. And they marry when they are half a year old and have children; and they live not more