A love of the marvellous is strong; and even Buffon, the eminent naturalist, fell into the old and vague delusion that "there were giants in those days," and he made the bones of an elephant to figure as the remains of a man of vast stature.
With Scripture for a basis to their assertions, it was difficult, no doubt, for the over-learned, and still more for the unlearned, of past times to subdue their belief in the existence of such foes as were encountered by our old friend Jack of gallant memory—veritable giants, tall as steeples, to whom such men as Big Sam of the Black Watch, O'Brien the Irish giant (whose skeleton is in the museum of the College of Surgeons), even the King of Prussia's famous grenadiers, and the girl fifteen years old and more than seven feet high, "who was presented to their majesties at Dresden,"* were all as pigmies and Liliputians by comparison.
* Gentleman's Magazine, 1753.
The Bible gives us four distinct races of giants, the chief of whom were the Anakims, or sons of Anak, the people of the chosen land, to which Moses was to lead the children of Israel, who were unto them but as grasshoppers in size. Og, the king of this tall race and of Bashan, however, if judged by the measurement of the present day, was not taller than eight feet six inches, as his brazen bedstead measured just nine Jewish cubits; but the Rabbis maintain that the bed described was only his cradle when an infant. The Anakims are referred to in the fifth chapter of the Koran, which speaks of Jericho as a city inhabited by giants. The father of Og is also asserted to have been of stature so great, that he escaped the Flood by—wading!
When told (as we are) in 1 Samuel that Goliath was in height six cubits and a span, that his coat of mail weighed five thousand shekels of brass, that the staff of his spear was as a weaver's beam, and that its head weighed six hundred shekels of iron, it was difficult for the simple people of past days, when, in some remote cavern or river's bed, or fallen chalk cliff, the monster bones of the elephant, the mastodon, or the rhinoceros came unexpectedly to light, not to believe that there might have been many Goliaths in the world once.
Josephus records that in his time there were to be seen in Gaza, Gath, and Azoth the tombs of those mighty men of old, the sons of Anak, who had been slain when Joshua marched into the land of Canaan, and slew the people of Hebron and Dabir.
According to the Moslems, even Joshua was a man of prodigious stature; and the highest mountain on the shores of the Bosphorus is at this hour called by the Turks the Grave of Joshua,—Juscha Taghi,—or the Giant's Mountain.*
* The grave is fifty feet long, and has been called the tomb of Amycus and of Hercules.
Tradition ascribes the origin of the name of Antwerp to a giant whose abode was in the woody swamps through which the Scheldt then wandered to the German Sea, and who used to cut off the hands and feet of those who displeased him; "and to prove this" (vide Atlas Geographus, 1711) "they show there a tooth, which they pretend to be his. It is a hand's-breadth long, and weighs six ounces. Moreover, the city has hands cut off as part of its arms."
Giants figure largely among the earlier fables of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, the two latter contending still for the nationality of the famous