Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 13.djvu/213

Rh and sculptor, declared that any man who called the giant a humbug "simply declared himself a fool." On the 4th of February a number of Solons visited the giant as an official body. They examined it long and patiently; the exterior was tried with acids; the head bored into, and the compass carried around it in search of iron. The conclusion arrived at was very satisfactory, and undoubtedly true, as it was decided to be a "piece of stratified gypsum, probably very old." The subject invaded the Boston clubs, and one whole evening was occupied by the president of the "Thursday Evening Club" to prove that the giant was modern, because its features were Napoleonic!

But a few weeks elapsed ere the proofs of the frauds perpetrated became incontrovertible, and the Cardiff giant was consigned to popular oblivion.

The Colorado stone man proves to be a veritable brother of the giant, having been begotten by the self-same father. Hull cleared some $60,000 by the latter, with which he embarked in business in Binghamton, New York, by which every dollar was lost. Of late he has been given to the pursuit of experimental chemistry, and, taught by the popular views of Darwin, as expounded by the public press, he began planning to again astonish the good people of the United States. This seemed to take great hold upon his mind, and he frequently remarked that he would like to set the scientific men quarreling as to the origin of man, and throw the religious world into a vortex of doubt and controversy.

Finally his ideas and experiments assumed a definite form, and he proceeded to put them in execution. Forming a partnership with one Case, who possessed the funds requisite for the enterprise, an hotel was bought in Elkland, a little mountain-town in Northern Pennsylvania, and, as a blind, it was announced was to be converted into a summer resort and mountain sanitarium. In the rear of the hotel a brick building was erected, ostensibly as an ice-house; but in reality as a kiln and workshop. Here, one after the other, two figures were constructed, the principal composition of which was ground stone, pulverized bones, clay, plaster, blood, and dried eggs, the whole, when modeled, being baked in the kiln for two weeks. The first was irretrievably broken in removing it from the furnace; but the second proved more successful, greater care having been taken in its construction. In it bones were inserted in different localities, including fragments of skull in the head. Cox, one of the confidants of the scheme, thus details the parturition of the image, as communicated to him by Hull:

"Cox, I would give a hundred dollars if you could have been with Case and me the night we took him out. We had a rope around his neck, and a pulley up there; and how we worked and tugged at the rope! I went through torture—my whole existence hung by that rope. It seemed as if I lived a thousand years while we were pulling him out; and when he hung up there by the neck, I tell you, he looked alive; he looked as if