GIANTS OF THE PAST.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 223, 10 August 1877, Page 7

GIANTS OF THE PAST.

In a memoir read before the Academy of Science at Eouen M. Le Cat gives the following account of giants that are said to have existed in different ages : Profane historians have given seven feet of height to Hercules their first hero, and in our day we have seen men eight feet high. The giant who was shown in Eouen in 1834 measured eight feet six inches. The E.nperor Maximin was of that size. Shenkins and Platerus, physicians of the last century, saw several of that stature, and Gorebius saw a girl who was ten feet high. The body of Orestes, according to the Greeks, was eleven feet and a half ; the giant Galbara, brought from Arabia to Rome, under Claudius Crosar was near ten feet high ; and the bones of decondilla and Pusio, keepers of the gardens of ;»anuab, were bub six inches shorter. Funnam, a Scotchman, who lived in the time of Eugene 11., King of Scotland, measured eleven feet and a half; and Jacob Le Marie, in his voyage to the Straits of Magellan, reports that on the 17th of December, 1865, they found at Port Desire several graves* covered with stones, and having the curiosity to remove the stones they discovered human skeletons ten and cloven feet long. The Chevalier scory in his voyage to the Peak of Teueriffe says they found in one of the sepulchral caverns in that mountain the head of a gaunche, which had eighty teeth, and that body was not less than fifteen feet long. The giant Fe.rgus, slain by Orlando, nephew of Charlemagne, was eighteen feet high. Roland, a celebrated anatomist who wrote in 1614, says some years before there was to be seen in the suburbs of St. Germain the tomb of the great giant Isoret, who was twenty feet high. In Rouen, 1500, in digging in the ditches near the Dominicans, they found a stone tomb containing a skeleton whose skull held a bushel of corn, and whoso shin bone reached up to the girdle of the tallest man there, beingabout four x'eet long and consequently the body must have been seventeen or eighteen feet high. Upon the tomb was a plate of copper, whereon was engraved : — " In this tomb lies the noble and puissant lord, the Chevalier Eicon de Valletnonb and his bones." PUterus, a famous physician, declares that he saw at Lucerne the body of a man which must have been at least nineteen feet high. Vallance, of Dauphiny, boasts of possessing tbe bones of the giant Bucart] tyrant of the Vivarian, who was slain with an arrow by the Count de Cabillon, his vassal.