GIANT, a person of extraordinary bulk and stature. The romances of all ages have furnished us with so many extravagant accounts of giants of incredible bulk and strengtiι, that the existence of such people is now generally disbelieved. It is commonly thought that the stature of man has been the same in all ages; and some have even pretended to demonstrate mathematically the impossibility of the existence of giants. Of these our countryman Maclaurin has been the most explicit. “In general,” says he, “it will easily appear, that the efforts tending to destroy the cohesion of beams arising from their own gravity only, increase in the quadruplicate ratio of their lengths; but that the opposite efforts, tending to preserve their cohesion, increase only in the triplicate proportion of the same lengths. From this it follows, that the greater beams must be in greater danger of breaking than the lesser similar ones; and that though a lesser beam may be firm and secure, yet a greater similar one may be made so long, that it will necessarily break by its own weight. Hence Galileo justly concludes, that what appears very firm and succeeds very well in models, may be very weak and infirm, or even tall to pieces by its own weight, when it comes to be executed in large dimensions according to the model. From the same principle he argues, that there are necessary limits in the operations of nature and art, which they cannot surpass in magnitude. Were trees of a very enormous size, their branches would fall by their own weight. Large animals have not strength in proportion to their size; and if there were any land animals much larger than those we know, they could hardly move, and would be perpetually subject to the most dangerous accidents. As to the animals of the sea, indeed, the case is different; for the gravity of the water in a great measure sustains those animals, and in fact these are known sometimes to be vastly larger than the greatest land animals. Nor does it avail against this doctrine to tell us, that bones have sometimes been found which were supposed to have belonged to giants of immense size, such as the skeletons mentioned by Strabo and Pliny, the former of which was sixty cubits high, and the latter forty-six; for naturalists have concluded on just grounds, that in some cases these bones had belonged to elephants; and that the larger ones were bones of whales, which had been brought to the places where they were found by the revolutions of nature that have happened in past times; though it must be owned that there appears no reason why there may not have been men who have exceeded by some feet in height the tallest we have seen.”

It will be easily seen, that arguments of this kind can never be held as conclusive, because, along with an increase of stature in any animal, we must always suppose a propertional[7:10:500] increase in the cohesion of the parts of its body. Large works sometimes fail when constructed on the plan of models, because the cohesion of the materials of which the model is made, and of the large work, are the same; but a difference in this respect will produce a very remarkable difference in the result. Thus, suppose a model is made of fir-wood, the model may be strong and firm enough; but a large work made also of fir, when executed according to the plan of the model, may be so weak that it will fall to pieces by its own weight. If, however, we make use of iron for the large work instead of fir, the whole will be sufficiently strong, even though made exactly ac∞rding to the plan of the model. The same thing may be said regarding large and small animals. If we could find an animal whose bones exceeded in hardness and strength the bones of other animals as much as iron exceeds fir, such an animal might be of a monstrous size, and yet be exceedingly strong. In like manner, if we suppose the flesh and bones of a giant to be greatly superior in strength and hardness to the flesh and bones of other men, the great size of his body will be no objection at all to his strength. The whole of the matter therefore concerning the existence of giants must rest upon the credibility of the accounts we have received from those who pretend to have seen them, and not on any arguments drawn α priori. In a memoir read before the Academy of Sciences at Rouen, Μ. Lecat gives the following account of giants who are said to have existed in different ages.

“Profane historians have given seven feet of height to Hercules, their first hero; and in our days we have seen men eight feet high. The giant who was shown in Rouen in 1735 measured eight feet some inches. The Emperor Maximin was of that size; Shénkins and Platerus, physicians of the last century, saw several persons of that stature; and Goropius saw a girl who was ten feet high. The body of Orestes, according to the Greeks, was eleven feet and a half; the giant Galbara, brought from Arabia to Rome under Claudius Caesar, was near ten feet; and the bones of Secondilla and Pusio, keepers of the gardens of Sallust, were but six inches shorter. Funnam, a Scotsman, who lived in the time of Eugene II. king of Scotland, measured eleven feet and a half; and Jacob Lemaire, in his voyage to the Straits of Magellan, reports, that on the 17th of December 1615, they found at Port Desire several graves covered with stones; and having the curiosity to remove the stones, they discovered human skeletons of ten and eleven feet in length. The Chevalier Scory, in his voyage to the Peak of Teneriffe, says, that they found in one of the sepulchral caverns of that mountain the head of a Gaucho which had eighty teeth, and that the body was not less than fifteen feet in length-The giant Ferragus, slain by Orlando, nephew of Charlemagne, was eighteen feet in height. Rioland, a celebrated anatomist, who wrote in 1614, says, that, some years before, there was to be seen in the suburbs of St Germain the tomb of the giant Isoret, who was twenty feet in height. In Rouen, in 1509, whilst digging in the ditches near the Dominicans, they found a stone tomb containing a skeleton whose skull held a bushel of corn, and whose shin-bone reached up to the girdle of the tallest man there, being about four feet in length, and consequently the body must have been seventeen or eighteen feet in height. Upon the tomb was a plate of copper, on which was engraved, ‘ In this tomb lies the noble and puissant lord the Chevalier Rico de Vallemont, and his bones.’ Platerus, a famous physician, declares that he saw at Lucerne the true human bones of a subject which must have been at least nineteen feet high. Valence in Dauphine boasts of possessing the bones of the giant Bucart, tyrant of the Vivarais, who was slain with an arrow by the Count de Cabillon, his vassal. The Dominicans had a part of the shinbone, with the articulation of the knee, and his figure painted in fresco, with an inscription, showing that this giant was twenty-two feet and a half in height, and that his bones were found in 1705, near the banks of the Morderi, a little river at the foot of the mountain of Crussol, upon which, according to tradition, the giant had his residence.

“On the 11th January 1613, some masons digging near the ruins of a castle in Dauphine, in a field which, by tradition, had long been called the giant’s field, at the depth of eighteen feet discovered a brick tomb thirty feet long, twelve feet wide, and eight feet high; on which was a gray stone, with the words Theviobochus Rex cut thereon. When the tomb was opened, they found a human skeleton entire, twenty-five and a half feet long, ten feet wide across the shoulders, and five feet deep from the breast-bone to the back. The teeth were each about the size of an ox’s foot, and the shin-bone measured four feet. Near Mazarino, in Sicily, in 1516, was found the skeleton of a giant thirty feet high; his head was the size of a hogshead, and each of his teeth weighed five ounces. Near Palermo, in the valley of Mazara, in Sicily, a skeleton of a giant thirty feet long was found, in the year 1548; and another of thirty-three feet high, in 1550. Many curious persons have preserved several of these gigantic bones.

“The Athenians found near their city two famous skeletons, one of thirty-four and the other of thirty-six feet in height. At Totu, in Bohemia, there was found in 758 a skeleton, the head of which could scarcely be encompassed by the arms of two men together; whilst the legs, which they still keep in the castle of that city, were twenty-six feet long. The skull of the giant found in Macedonia in September 1691 contained two hundred and ten pounds of corn. The celebrated Sir Hans Sloane, who treated this matter very learnedly, does not doubt these facts, but thinks the bones were those of elephants, whales, or other enormous animals. Elephants’ bones may be shown as those of giants; but they can never impose upon anatomists. Whales, which, by their immense bulk, are more proper to be substituted for the largest giants, have neither arms nor legs; and the head of that animal has not the least resemblance to that of a man. If it be true, therefore, that a great number of the gigantic bones which we have mentioned have been seen by anatomists, and by them have been reputed real human bones, the existence of giants is proved."

With regard to the credibility of all or any of these accounts, it is difficult to determine any thing. If, in any castle of Bohemia, the bones of a man’s leg twenty-six feet in length are preserved, we should have indeed a decisive proof of the existence of a giant, in comparison of whom most others would be but pigmies. Nor could these bones be supposed to belong to an elephant; for an elephant itself would be but a dwarf in comparison of such an enormous monster.

Giant’s Causeway, a vast collection of basaltic pillars in the county of Antrim, on the northern coast of Ireland. The principal or grand causeway consists of a most regular arrangement of many hundred thousand columns of a black kind of rock, very hard, almost all of them of a pentagonal figure, but so closely and compactly situated on their sides, though perfectly distinct from top to bottom, that scarcely any thing can be introduced between them. The columns are of an unequal height and breadth; some of the highest, visible above the surface of the strand, and at the foot of the impending angular precipice, may be about twenty feet; and they do not exceed this height, at least none of the principal arrangement. How deep they are fixed in the strand was never yet discovered. This grand arrangement extends nearly two hundred yards, visible at low water, but how far beyond is uncertain; from [7:10:501]its declining appearance, however, at low water, it is probable it does not extend under water to a distance any thing equal to what is seen above. The breadth of the principal causeway, which runs out in one continued range of columns, is in general from twenty to thirty feet; at one place or two it may for a few yards be nearly forty. In this account are not included the broken and scattered pieces of the same kind of construction which are detached from the sides of the grand causeway, as they do not appear to have ever been contiguous to the principal arrangement, though they have frequently been taken into the width; and this has been the cause of the wild and dissimilar representations of this causeway, which different accounts have exhibited. The highest part of the causeway is the narrowest, at the very foot of the impending cliff from which the whole projects, where, for four or five yards, it is not above ten or fifteen feet wide. The columns of this narrow part incline from a perpendicular a little to the westward, and form a slope on their tops, by the very unequal height of the columns on the two. sides, by which an ascent is made at the foot of the cliff, from the head of one column to the next above, gradatim, to the top of the great causeway, which, at the distance of half a dozen yards from the cliff, obtains a perpendicular position, and, lowering in its general height, widens to about twenty or between twenty and thirty feet, and for a hundred yards nearly is always above water. The tops of the columns for this length being nearly of an equal height, they form a grand and singular parade, that may be easily walked on, but rather inclining to the water’s edge. From high-water mark, as it is perpetually washed by the beating surges on every return of the tide, the platform lowers considerably, and becomes more and more uneven, so as not to be walked on but with the greatest care. At the distance of about a hundred and fifty yards from the cliff it turns a little to the eastward for twenty or thirty yards, and then sinks into the sea. The figure of these columns is almost without exception pentagonal, or composed of five sides; there are but very few of any other figure introduced; some, indeed, there are of three, four, and six sides, but the generality of them are fivesided; and the spectator must look very nicely to find any of a different construction. Yet, what is very extraordinary, and particularly curious, there are not two columns in ten thousand to be found, which either have their sides equal among themselves, or whose figures are alike. Nor is the composition of these columns or pillars less deserving the attention of the curious spectator. They are not of one solid stone in an upright position, but composed of several short lengths, curiously joined, not with flat surfaces, but articulated into each other like ball and socket, or like the joints in the vertebrae of some of the larger kinds of fish, the one r end at the joint having a cavity, into which the convex end of the opposite is exactly fitted. This is not visible except by disjoining two of the lengths. The depth of the concavity or convexity is generally about three or four inches. And, what is still more remarkable of the joint, the convexity and the corresponding concavity is not conform to the external angular figure of the column, but exactly round, and as large as the size or diameter of the column will admit; and consequently, as the angles of these columns are in general extremely unequal, the circular edges of the joint are seldom coincident with more than two or three sides of the pentagon, and from the edge of the circular part of the joint to the exterior sides and angles they are quite plain. It is still further remarkable, that the articulations or those joints are frequently inverted; in some the concavity is upwards, and in others the reverse. This occasions the variety and mixture of concavities and convexities on the tops of the columns, which is observable throughout the platform of this causeway, yet without any discoverable design or regularity with respect to the number of either. The length also of these particular stones, from joint to joint, is various; in general, they are from eighteen to twenty-four inches in length; and, for the most part, longer towards the bottom of the columns than nearer the top, and the articulation of the joints something deeper. The size or diameter of the columns is likewise as different as their length and figure; but in general they are from fifteen to twenty inches in diameter. There are really no traces of uniformity or design discoverable throughout the whole combination, excepting in the form of the joint, which is invariably by an articulation of the convex into the concave of the piece next above or below it; nor are there any traces of a finishing in any part, either in height, length, or breadth, of this curious causeway. If there is here and there a smooth top to any of the columns above water, there are others just by, of equal height, which are more or less convex or concave, and show them to have been joined to pieces that have been washed, or by other means taken off. And undoubtedly those parts which are always above water have, from time to time, been made as even as might be; whilst the remaining surfaces of the joints must naturally have been worn smoother by the constant friction of weather and walking, than where the sea, at every tide, is beating upon the causeway, and continually removing some of the upper stones, and exposing fresh joints. Further, as these columns preserve their diameters from top to bottom, in all the exterior ones which have two or three sides exposed to view, the same thing may with reason be inferred of the interior columns, whose tops only are visible. Yet, what is equally curious and extraordinary in this phenomenon, it appears that, notwithstanding the universal dissimilitude of the columns, both as to their figure and diameter, and though perfectly distinct from top to bottom, the whole arrangement is so closely combined at all points that hardly a knife can be introduced between them, either on the sides or angles.

The cliffs at a great distance from the causeway, especially in the bay to the eastward, exhibit in many places the same kind of columns, figured and jointed in all respects like those of the grand causeway. Some of them are seen near to the top of the cliff, which in general, in those bays to the east and west of the causeway, is about three hundred feet in height; others again are observed about midway, and at different elevations from the strand. A very considerable exposure of them is seen in the very bottom of the bay to the eastward, about a hundred roods from the causeway, where the earth has evidently fallen away from them upon the strand, and exhibits a most curious arrangement of many of these pentagonal columns in a perpendicular position, supporting in appearance a cliff of different strata of earth, clay, rock, &c. to the height of about a hundred and thirty feet or more above. Some of these columns are between thirty and forty feet high, from the top of the sloping bank below them; and, being longest in the middle of the arrangement, and shortening on either hand, they have obtained the appellation of organs, from a rude likeness in this particular to the exterior or frontal tubes of that instrument; and as there are few broken pieces on the strand near it, it is probable that the outside range of columns which now appears is really the original exterior line, to the seaward, of this collection. But how far they extend internally into the bowels of the incumbent cliff is unknown. The very substance, indeed, of that part of the cliff which projects to a point, between the two bays on the east and west of the causeway, seems composed of this kind of materials; for, besides the many pieces which are seen on the sides of the cliff that circulate to the bottom of the bays, particularly the eastern side, there is, at the very point [7:10:502]of the cliff, and just above the narrowest and highest part of the causeway, a long collection of them seen, whose heads or tops, just appearing without the sloping bank, plainly show them to be in an oblique position, and about half way between the perpendicular and horizontal lines. The heads of these, likewise, are of mixed Surfaces, convex and concave, and the columns evidently appear to have been removed from their original upright to their presènt inclining or oblique position, by the sinking or falling of the cliff.