"Father Crozart assured me," continued the veracious M. le Cat, "that the physicians who were in the train of the princes who passed through Valence all acknowledged the bones to be human, and offered twenty-two pistoles for them." He farther appends a copy of the epitaph of this personage, forwarded to him by the same Father Crozat in 1746, and beginning, "Hæc est effigiis gigantis Baardi Vivariensis tiranni in Montis Cressoli Stantis," &c.
This tall personage, a second whose bones were exposed by the waters of the Rhone in 1456, and a third whose skeleton, nineteen feet long, was found near Lucerne in 1577, were all jokes and swindle when compared with others that were found in later years, particularly the remains of Teutobochus, king of the Teutones, which were discovered near the ruined castle of Chaumont in Dauphine, in the year 1613, by some masons who were digging a well. At the depth of eighteen feet, in light sandy soil, they came upon a tomb built of brick; above it was a stone inscribed, "Teutobochus Rex." Five years afterwards Mazurier, a surgeon, published his Histoire Véritable du Géant Teutobochus, which excited keen controversy, and brought all Paris—the Paris of Louis the Just and of Richelieu—rushing in crowds to see the bones of the mastodon, or whatever it was, whose tomb bore a royal inscription.
This king of the Teutones, who is said to have been vanquished and slain in battle a few miles from Valence, and to have been buried with all honour by Marius, his conqueror, was carefully measured, and found to be twenty-five feet six inches long, ten feet across the shoulders, and five from breast to back-bone. His teeth were each the size of an ox's foot. All France heard of this with wonder, and a belief which the anatomist Riolan sought in vain to ridicule and expose.
Sicily was peculiarly the favourite abode of giants.
At Mazarino, a town near Girgenti, there were found in 1516 the bones of a giant whose skull was like a sugar-hogshead, with teeth each five ounces in weight; and in the Val di Mazzara, thirty years after, the alleged remains of another were found, whose stature was the same!
Patrick Brydone, in his Tour to Sicily and Malta, in 1773, mentions some of these marvellous discoveries.
"In the mountain above it (il Mar Dolce) they show you a cavern where a gigantic skeleton is said to have been found; however, it fell to dust when they attempted to remove it. Fazzello says its teeth were the only part that resisted the impression of the air; that he procured two of them, and that they weighed near two ounces. There are many such stories to be met with in the Sicilian legends, as it seems to be a universal belief that this island (Sicily) was once inhabited by giants; but, although we have made diligent inquiry, we have never yet been able to procure a sight of any of those gigantic bones which are said to be still preserved in many parts of the island. Had there been any foundation for this, I think it is probable they must have found their way into some of the museums. But this is not the case; nor indeed have we met with any person of sense and credibility that could say they have seen them. We had been assured at Naples that an entire skeleton, upwards of ten feet high, was preserved in the museum at Palermo; but there is no such thing there, nor I believe anywhere else in the island."
This Palermitan giant is gravely referred to in the mémoire of M. le Cat, as well as "another thirty-three feet high, found in 1550."
According to Plutarch, Serbonius had the grave of Antæus (the Libyan giant and antagonist of Hercules) opened in the city of Tungis, and, finding his body to be "sixty cubits long, was infinitely astonished," as well he might be, and gave orders for the tomb to be closed, but added new honours to his memory. The bones of a giant, forty-six cubits in length, were laid bare by an earthquake in Crete, as Pliny states with implicit faith; and it was disputed whether they were those of Otus, son of Neptune, who built a city in his ninth year, or of the equally fabulous Orion. But all that we have noted are overtopped by the giant found at Thessalonica in 1691, who was ninety-six feet high (as certified by M. Quoinet, consul for France), and by another found at Trepani, in Sicily—the ancient Drepanum. The latter, Boccaccio states the learned of his time to have taken for the skeleton of Polyphemus, the son of Neptune and Thoosa—the one-eyed Cyclop of the Odyssey.
"A form enormous! far unlike the race
Of human birth, in stature and in face;"