Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/334

324 the gigantic Rakshasas of the Indian mythology. The remains of the Dun Cow that Guy Earl of Warwick slew are or were to be seen in England, in the shape of a whale's rib in the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, and some great fossil bone kept, I believe, in Warwick Castle. "The giant sixteen feet high, whose bones were found in 1577 near Reyden under an uprooted oak, and examined and celebrated in song by Felix Plater, the renowned physician of Basle, has been long ago banished by later naturalists into a very distant department of zoology; but the giant has from that time forth got a firm standing ground beside the arms of Lucerne, and will keep it, all critics to the contrary notwithstanding."

It would be tedious to enumerate more instances in which traditions of giants and huge beasts have been formed both in ancient and modern times from the finding of great fossil bones. But the remarks of St. Augustine on a great fossil tooth he saw are worthy of attention, as throwing some light on the connexion of such bones with the belief that man was once both enormously larger and longer-lived than he is now, and that his stature has diminished in the course of ages to its present dimensions; as it is held by the Moslems that Adam was sixty feet high, of the measure of a tall palm-tree, and that the true believers will be restored in Paradise to this original stature of the human race, and that the houris who will attend them will be of proportionate dimensions. It seems as if Linnæus may have held such an opinion, at least his editor gives the following as his reading of a passage in the notes of his northern tour, where unfortunately the original is obscure. "I have a notion that Adam and Eve were giants, and that mankind, from one generation to another, owing to poverty and other causes, have diminished in size. Hence perhaps the diminutive stature of the Laplander."

St. Augustine's observations are contained in his chapter "Concerning the long life of men before the flood, and the greater size of their bodies." He makes these remarks, he says, in case any infidel should raise a doubt about men having lived to so great an age. "So some indeed do not believe that men's bodies were formerly much greater than now." Virgil, he