CHAPTER XXIV.
GIANTS AND DWARFS.
“Have dwarfs and giants ever really existed?”
“Only so long as no traveller penetrated the countries they were supposed to inhabit,” would be the reasonable reply. For since the globe has been explored in all directions, and tourists are compelled to be more measured in their narratives, travellers’ wonders are greatly diminished.
A belief in the existence of nations of giants and dwarfs was, however, long entertained; one of the many errors bequeathed to us by antiquity, and adopted by modern credulity.
The ancients had their Titans and Cyclops; of whom Polyphemus, the most towering, was three hundred feet high; while we moderns, more moderate, allow only ten feet to the Patagonian. From the period the Magellan regions became better known, their proportions were still further reduced; and we now allow only an average of seven feet. Credulity, distance, and the love of the marvellous, tend greatly to the exaggeration of such allotments.
The Bible, like mythology, has its giants; but in most cases, they are exceptional; and it is undeniable that nature often digresses, and produces individuals differing in stature from the ordinary standard of mankind.
Most people have heard of Bébé, the famous dwarf of the King of Poland, who came to Paris in the early part of the Consulate; and of Friand, the giant, whose height exceeded seven feet two inches. But these two were exceptions, not the types of a race. Excepting the Greenlanders, Laplanders, and Samoyedes, there is little variation of stature among the different populations of the globe, certainly not more than a tenth. As regards the inhabitants of the arctic regions, we must bear in mind that their stunted proportions are in harmony with the rigid, and unkindly nature of their climates; in proof of which may be cited the similarity of climate between Lapland and certain vallies of the frozen regions of Switzerland. A similar influence is manifest in the inhabitants of the two localities; the peasants of the Valais, afflicted with the goitre, having more analogy with the Laplanders than with the fine population of Switzerland.