In the time of James II., Lord Cherbury was appointed by the king to investigate some bones which had been unearthed near Gloucester; and there was much discussion about them. Many considered them to be the remains of a giant, but scientific men proved them to be those of an elephant.
In the reign of Louis XIII., the scientific world was greatly excited over the remains of an alleged giant, which were dug up in Dauphiné; and so divided was public opinion, that the doctors took sides against one another, some claiming that they were the bones of the giant Tentobrochus. One doctor, named Mazurier, exhibited the remains in Paris, and stated in a pamphlet that they were found in a sepulchre thirty feet long, on the upper stone of which was written Tentobrochus rex, the name of the king of Cimbri, who fought against Marius.
In 1577 a gigantic skeleton of an elephant was unearthed in Lucerne; and Professor Felix Pläten of Basle made an examination, by order of the council, and concluded that it was the skeleton of a man nineteen feet in height. The natives of Lucerne were exceedingly proud of this. Goliath was only eleven feet tall; and the giant Gabbarus of Pliny, who lived in the time of Claudius, was about ten feet; but these were pygmies compared to this ancestor of the people of Lucerne, and they determined to commemorate his memory in a fitting manner, namely, in employing a representation to support the arms of the city. The design was made by Professor Pläten; and some of the original bones are still to be seen in the museum of the Jesuit college in Lucerne.
As late as 1645, the skeleton of an elephant found at Crems in Austria was considered a giant; though Dr. Behrens argued that such could not be the case, as “the tallest man we know of was Og of Basan, whose bed is said, in Deuteronomy, chap. iii., to have been eighteen feet long: now, allowing the bed to be but one foot longer than the man, he was seventeen feet high.”
Even in the last century, the doctors of Germany prescribed as an absorbent, astringent, and sudorific, the “Ebur fossile,” or “Unicornu fossile,” which was merely the tusk of an elephant.
In the present days, few believers in these old fables can be found: the stories of the milk and hoop snakes, the nautilus and its sails, and other pleasant fictions, seem to have superseded them.
Shakspeare judges this class perhaps not unfairly in “The Tempest,” when he says,—
“When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.”