Dr. Hitchcock, in one of his geological works, informs us that "Felix Plater, Professor of Anatomy at Basle, referred the bones of an elephant, found at Lucerne, to a giant at least nineteen feet high, and, in England, similar bones were regarded as those of the fallen angels!"

The discovery of remains of a fossil elephant beneath the cliff at Plymouth was not very long ago held by some to furnish demonstrative evidence not only of the strictly historical character of Geoffrey of Monmouth's idle romance respecting the landing of Brute and his Trojans in England, but of the precise locality where the mythic champion wrestler, Corineus, hurled the equally mythic giant, Gogmagog, from the cliff into the sea![34]

At Coggeshall, in Essex, similar remains have been found. One of the earliest notices of these interesting discoveries is by old Norden, who says that at Coggeshall "ther were to be seene 2 teeth of a monstrous man or gyant of so great magnitude and weight as 100 of anie men's teeth in this age cannot countervayle one of them."

White Watson alludes to the discovery, last century, of the skull of a fossil elephant, at Wirksworth, in Derbyshire, which was commonly believed at the time to be the brain-pan of an enormous giant.

In the second place, it does not appear a difficult matter to recognise in these giant legends, one form in which the memory of the dethronement of the gods of the various Aryan myths has been preserved. In fact, the very feats performed by the giants in Cornwall, such as the hurling of huge rocks, and striding across valleys, are, as I have previously shown, attributed in Lancashire and the north of England to the devil. A tradition yet exists that the Roman highways, which cross each other not far from Fulwood Barracks, near Preston, extended from the North Sea to the South Sea, and from the East Sea to the West Sea, and that the devil made them himself in one night. Indeed in mythical and traditionary lore, giants and devils are frequently convertible personages.

Mr. A. Russel Wallace, in his "Malay Archipelago," tells us that the present inhabitants of the island of Java, "who now only build rude houses of bamboo and thatch," look upon the ruins of the colossal edifices, the remarkable examples of ancient sculpture, and other evidences of the extinct civilisation amidst which they dwell, "with ignorant amazement," and regard them as "the undoubted productions of giants or of demons." The mythology of the Southern Aryans presents a similar confusion; their tribe of demons, the Râkshasas or Atrins (devourers), Kelly regards as the "earliest originals of the giants and ogres of our nursery tales. They can take any form at will, but their natural one is that of a huge misshapen giant 'like a cloud,' with hair and beard of the colour of red lightning. They go about open-mouthed, gnashing their monstrous teeth and snuffing after human flesh. Their strength waxes most terrible in twilight, and they know how to increase its effect by all sorts of magic. They carry off their human prey through the air, tear open the living bodies, and with their faces plunged amongst the entrails they suck up the warm blood as it gushes from the heart. After they have gorged themselves they dance merrily." These Râkshasas, certainly look very like the originals of the monsters described by Sir John Mandeville.

The story of the Titans, overthrown by Zeus, and cast into Tartarus, is the Hellenic form of this giant myth, which Milton has imitated in his Paradise Lost, where Satan and his host, formerly angels and archangels, are hurled from heaven into the bottomless pit. Milton's devils are, in fact, veritable giants. Speaking of Satan, the poet describes him as

In bulk as huge
As whom the fables name of monstrous size;
Titanian or Earth-born, that warr'd on Jove,
Briareos or Typhon, whom the den
By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea beast
Leviathan, which God of all His works
Created hugest that swim the ocean stream.

Again, speaking of his ponderous weapon, he says,—

His spear, to equal which the tallest pine
Hewn on Norwegian hills to be the mast
Of some great admiral, were but a wand.