Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/589

Rh Ferrara. After wandering, under the assumed name of Antonio Rinaldo, for three months through Modena, Milan, and Turin, he at last reached Geneva, where he enjoyed the friendship of the most distinguished citizens, and was on excellent terms with the great publishing firms. But in an evil hour he was induced to visit a Catholic village within the Sardinian territory, where he was kidnapped by the agents of the Sardinian Government, conveyed to the castle of Miolan, and thence successively transferred to (vaa and Turin. In the fortress of Turin he remained immured during the last twelve years of his life, though part of his time was spent in composing a defence of the Sardinian interests as opposed to those of the papal court, and though he was led to sign a rctractation of the state- ments in his history most obnoxious to the Vatican. He died March 7, 1748, in his seventy-second year.

1em 1em  GIANT is the Old English geanz‘, derived through French and Latin from Greek gigas (gigant). The idea conveyed by the word in classic mythology is that of beings more or less manlike, but monstrous in size and strength. Figures like the Titans and the Giants whose birth from Heaven and Earth is sung by Hesiod in the Theogony, such as can heap up mountains to scale the sky, and war beside or against the gods, must be treated, with other like monstrous ﬁgures of the wonder-tales of the world, as belonging altogether to the realms of mythology. But there also appear in the legends of giants some with historic signiﬁcance. The ancient and commonly-repeated explanation of the Greek word yiyas, as connected with or derived from yin/(mfg, or “earth-born,” seems by no means sound as a matter of etymology, but at any rate the idea conveyed by it was familiar to the ancient Greeks, that the giants were earth- born or indigenous races (see \Velcker, Gr-iecliische Getter— lc/zrc, vol. i. p. 757). The Bible (the English reader must be cautioned that the word giant has been there used ambiguously, from the Septuagint downwards) touches the present matter in so far as it records the traditions of the Israelites of ﬁghting in Palestine with tall races of the land such as the Anakim (Numb. xiii. 33 ; Deut. ii. 10, iii. 11; 1 Sam. xvii. 4). When reading in Homer of “ the Cyclopes and the wild tribes of the Giants,” or of the adventures of Odysseus in the cave of Polyphcmus (Homer, (Mg/33., vii. 206; ix), we seem to come into view of dim traditions, exaggerated through the mist of ages, of pro-Hellenic barbarians, godless, cannibal, skin-clothed, hurling huge stones in their rude warfare. Giant-legends of this class are common in Europe and Asia, where the big and stupid giants have often every token of uncouth native barbarians, exaggerated into monsters in the legends of the later tribes who dispossessed and slew them. Besides the conception of giants as special races distinct from mankind, it was a common opinion of the ancients that the human race had itself degenerated, the men of primeval ages having been of so far greater stature and strength as to be in fact gigantic. This, for example, is received by Pliny (Hist. Nat., vii. c. 16), and it becomes a common doctrine of theologians such as Augustine (Dc Civitate Dci, xv. 9), lasting on into times so modern that it may be found in Cruden’s Concordance. Yet so far as can be judged from actual remains, it does not appear that giants, in the sense of tribes of altogether superhuman stature, ever existed, or that the men of ancient time were on the whole taller than those now living. It is now usual to apply the word giant to beings not superhuman in their height, but merely the tallest men and women of our nations. In every race of mankind the great mass of individuals do not depart far from a certain mean or average height, while the very tall or very short men become less and less numerous as they depart from the mean standard, till the utmost divergence is reached in a very few giants on the one hand, and a very few dwarfs on the other. At both ends of the scale, the body is markedly out of the ordinary proportions ; thus a giant’s head is smaller and a dwarf’s head larger than it would be if an average man had been magniﬁed or diminished. The principle of the distribution of individuals of different sizes in a race or nation has been ably set forth by Quetelct (Physique Socialc, vol. ii.; Anthropomélrie, books iii. and iv.). Had this principle been understood formerly, we might have been spared the pains of criticizing assertions as to giants 20 feet high, or even more, appearing among mankind. The appearance of an individual man 20 feet high involves the existence of the race he is an extreme member of, whose mean stature would be at least 12 to 14 feet, which is a height no human being has been proved on sufﬁcient evidence to have approached (.lnt/uwpom., p. 302). In fact, Quetelet considers the tallest man whose stature has been authentically recorded to have been Frederick the G reat’s Scottish giant, who was not quite 8 feet 3 inches. Modern statisticians, though admitting that this may not be the extreme limit of human stature, cannot accept the loose conclusion in Buﬁ'on (Hist. Nat. ed. Sonnini, vol. iv. p. 134), that there is no doubt of giants having been 10, 12, and perhaps 15 feet high. Conﬁdence is not even to be placed in ancient asserted measurements, as where Pliny gives to one Gabbaras, an Arabian, the stature of 9 feet 9 inches (about 9 feet 5:1, in. English), capping this with the mention of Posio and Sec- undilla, who were half a foot higher. That two persons should be described as both having this same extraordinary measure suggests to the modern critic the notion of a note jotted down on the philosophers tablets, and never tested afterwards. Under these circumstances, it is worth while to ask how it is that legend and history so abound in mentions of giants outside all probable dimensions of the human frame. Ore cause is that, when the story-teller is asked the actual stature of the huge men who ﬁgure in his tales, he is not sparing of his inches and feet. What exaggeration can do in this way may be judged from the fact that the Patagonians, whose average height feet 11 inches) is really about that of the Chirnside men in Berwickshire, are described in Pigafctta’s Voyage round file World as so monstrous that the Spaniards’ heads hardly reached their waists. It is reasonable to suppose, with Professor Nilsson (Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia, chap. vi.), that in the traditions of early Europe tribes of savages may have thus, if really tall, expanded into giants, or, if short, dwindled into dwarfs. Another cause which is clearly proved to have given rise to giant-myths of yet more mon- strous type, has been the discovery of great fossil bones, as of mammoth or mastodon, which have from early ages been supposed to be bones of giants, and have given rise to a whole class of giant-myths (see T ylor, Early History of JIanlrinrl, chap. xi. ; Primitive Culture, chap. x. Such anatomical inferences from the leg-bone or tooth of some