follow us in the delicate and difficult attempt to reduce the phenomena to ascertained physiological laws.

The literature of gigantology is more ample than instructive, writers having been somewhat too diligent with the fables of antiquity, and too negligent of investigated facts. There can be no necessity for our pausing here to examine the once much-mooted question of a race of giants supposed to have existed in ancient time. The same reasons which forbade the belief in a race of dwarfs, forbid the belief in a race of giants: a race of anomalies being a much greater physiological than verbal contradiction; and in reference to giants it has this further difficulty, that they are, without known exception, always sterile. Many persons, however, will present the question in another and more plausible form, asking whether the normal standard has not been gradually degenerating, so that by mounting sufliciently high in the records of antiquity, we should meet with a standard so enormously surpassing our own as to constitute a race of giants. This question has in it no intrinsic improbability. That a race can be degenerated we see in the Spanish nobility, not to mention various animals; but even if the question were affirmatively established, there would be no race of giants for us to believe in, but simply a race of men whose stature enormously exceeded our own,-who were not anomalies at all, any more than the mastiff is an anomaly compared with the terrier. Nor is this a verbal distinction only; the scientific idea of a giant is something rigorously precise, which altogether excludes its identification with a larger race. It will presently be seen what constitutes a giant in scientific language; meanwhile, the reader will perhaps he obliging enough to accept our affirmation. Yet even that is needless, for although we have admitted that there is no intrinsic improbability in the supposition of a larger race having formerly existed, we are

forced at the same time to admit that there is not a tittle of evidence in its favour. Our evidence respecting past races is scanty indeed, but we have absolutely none in favour of the degeneracy of the human form. As far as the evidence of monuments, armour, implements, tombs, &c., enables us to form any opinion, we are forced to declare that the men who lived before Agamemnon, strong though they were, were not of nobler stature than the men who now speculate about them. The geologist has not found a single bone belonging to those pretended giants; not even a single portion of bone, from which some great constructive intellect could show us the probable structure of these ancestral giants, as our own great Owen did for the Dinornis. True it is that, for many years, the bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, mastodons, whales, &c., were exhibited as proofs of human degeneracy, and as remains of the pre-historic giants; but who now believes in these proofs ? We need not read Cuvier's Ossemens Fossiles to know what credit such evidence deserves. A mere glance at one or two of the most illustrative examples would suffice.*

Very well known to fame is the Sicilian giant whose skeleton was found at Trapani, in the fourteenth century, which was at once pronounced to be the skeleton of Polyphemus, dear to all readers of Theocritus. It was calculated that his height must have been three hundred feet; a moderate allowance for a Cyclop. But the erudite believers who thus established the proportions of the giant, seem never to have been puzzled by the fact, that only thirty feet was the height of the cave in which he was said to have been found seated, with a 'mast of some high ammiral' for a walkingstick. Some sceptics indeed pointed out that the bones were very dif ferent in form from human bones; but this objection was set aside as frivolously flippant. Why should Polyphemus, who differed so enormously in stature, not also differ in

1856.]

form from our puny race? He was sixty times as high as the sceptics; why should he closely resemble them in other respects? Did not St. Augustine find the tooth of a giant, in Utica, large enough to make a hundred miserable modern molars ?

Still more celebrated was King Teutobochus, whose remains were discovered in the Dauphiné, not far from the Rhone, in 1613. A surgeon, named Mazurier, brought them to Paris, declaring them to have been found in a tomb thirty feet long, bearing this inscription, • Teutobochus Rex.' Now, then, might all Paris, in exchange for a trifle of silver, behold the veritable remains of the Cimbrian warrior slain by Marius; and, to prove his identity, fifty coins bearing the effigy of Marius were found inside the tomb. No one ever saw these coins; but some people are so curious! Paris paid its money liberally, and gaped in wide-mouthed wonderment. A few sceptical physicians, especially the great Riolan, wrote fiercely against the imposture, but others as fiercely espoused the giant's cause, and this paper war stimulated public curiosity. The bones were the bones of a mastodon.

In a word, all the fossils hitherto discovered, and supposed to belong to giants, have, on inspection, been proved to belong to brutes. All the evidence by which a colossal race of men was once accredited disappears; and no one scientifically educated now believes that giants ever existed as a race, although individual giants have been far from rare. Men of seven feet are not so rare but that many readers must have seen such; and a visit to the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons will convince any one that even eight feet have been reached. Among the osteological curiosities of that collection stands the skeleton of the Irish giant, O'Byrne, eight feet high; and beside it stands the skeleton of Mademoiselle Crachami, only twenty-three inches high: two striking types of the giant and dwarf, not belonging to fable, not liable to the scepticism which must ever hang over the reports of travellers, but standing there in naked

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reality, measurable by a prosaic foot-rule. We read, indeed, of eight feet and a half, and even of nine feet, having been attained; but here, at any rate, is O'Byrne, a solid, measurable fact, admitting of no doubt. That one must generally doubt all reported measurements of wondrous types, is illustrated, even in the case of O'Byrne. The Annual Register, in its obituary for June, 1783, vol. xxvi., p. 209, gives this account of him :

In Cockspur-street, Charing-cross, aged only twenty-two, Mr. Charles Byrne, the famous Irish giant, whose death is said to have been precipitated by excessive drinking, to which he was always addicted, but more particularly since his late loss of almost all his property, which he had simply invested in a single bank-note of £700.

Our philosophical readers may not be displeased to know, on the credit of an ingenious correspondent who had oppor tunity of informing himself, that Mr. Byrne, in August, 1780, measured eight feet; that in 1782 he had gained two inches; and after he was dead he measured eight feet four inches.

Neither his father, mother, brother, nor any other person of his family, was of an extraordinary size.

Nothing can be more precise than the measurements here given: eight feet four he is said to have been, and such Boruwlaski reports him to have been, in the passage formerly quoted; yet there stands his skeleton, measuring, upon the testimony of Professor Owen (in the Catalogue of the Osteology of the Hunterian Museum), eight feet in a straight line from the vertex to the sole. This is, of course, only the height of the skeleton; and we must allow about two inches more for the scalp and hair, and the soft cushion below the heel, which gives us eight feet two inches as the absolute height of the living man.

Here closes our descriptive notice of those dwarfs and giants of whom we have accurate details. The examples cited are sufficiently typi cal to enable us to understand all the general phenomena of these marvellous creatures; and in our next paper we shall endeavour to offer something like a physiological explanation of these aberrations from the normal standard.

G. H. L.

WE attempted in a recent numbert to give some account of Sir Archibald Alison's political opinions and speculations: we propose on the present occasion to consider his literary merits.

There are few things in which a writer's capacity is more fairly tested than in the choice of his subject. To undertake impossibilities is the clearest proof which can be given of deficiency of judgment; and a more totally unmanageable scheme than that which Sir Archibald has excogitated, and in a certain sense executed, it would be hard to imagine. The first volumes of this work were published in 1854, and from an expression in vol. i. p. 27, the first chapter of the first volume appears to have been written in 1851; we have now arrived at 1856, and in the last five years Sir Archibald has written, amongst other things, the History of England, France, Russia, Spain, Italy, Turkey, from 1815 to 1840, a period of twenty-five years. When we recollect how long it took Mr. Macaulay to write the History of England alone, for a period of fourteen years, we may form some kind of conception of the relative position of the two historians. It is simply impossible that any man should be able to write the history of the whole civilized world during half a century. That a contemporary should be able to write it is still more out of the question; that he should be able to write it in five years is one of the wildest dreams that an altogether inordinate vanity and self-sufficiency ever conceived. Yet this is what Sir Archibald claims to have done. Something like 3000 closely-printed octavo pages are the produce of less than 1500 working days. If an ordinary person's pri vate correspondence during that period were printed, it would hardly be so voluminous, if he were neither in love nor at law; and yet a performance of this kind, which is bad on the face of it, has been exalted into a separate style of history, something between Montesquieu and Macaulay, and has been one of

them any passports which have pushed its author forwards to all sorts of honours, literary, social, and political. The arrangement of this extraordinary book is as singular as its bulk. Chapters on different subjects are heaped together, apparently upon no principle whatever. The following are the subjects treated of in vol. v. 'Constitutional History of Germany from 1814 to 1848.-Literature of Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century.History of France from December, 1831, to June, 1832, and the treaty with Holland in 1833.-France from June, 1832, to June, 1834.-England from 1833 to 1834.-Turkey, Greece, Egypt, and the East, from the Treaty of Adrianople in 1828, to the treaty of 13th March, 1841.' All these matters, with an infinite quantity of speculation and repetition, are treated of in 689 octavo pages. Sir Archibald's space is as disproportioned to his subject in one direction, as it is to his or to any other human being's powers in another. It is impossible that any man should write upwards of 3000 pages worth reading in five years, and is only less incredible that any man should write the History of Europe for the last half century in 3000 pages. That one man should know all about England, France, Russia, the south of Europe, and the East, is inconceivable; but it is still more hard to believe that if any one did possess that knowledge, he should arrange it in such a manner as to heap up in one mass, the history of German literature, the history of the troubles which followed the Revolution of 1830, the history of Lord Grey's Ministry, and the history of Turkey, Egypt, and the East. We need look no further than the table of contents to get a very clear notion of the real value of the book by which Sir Archibald Alison has, according to some of his critics, done for our own time what Gibbon did for the period to which his history refers. One advantage the author no doubt derives from his extraordinary voluminousness, — it

them, we feel no sort of doubt that his material is by no means superior to his workmanship.

His sentences are hardly ever elegant, and are constantly entirely ungrammatical. We give a few instances, which might be indefinitely extended. Capital punishment was taken from many offences which it was a disgrace to English legislation to have ever affixed to them' (vol. iv. p. 114). 'His expedition to Portugal was done on the call of an ancient ally, and necessary to maintain the character of England,' &c. (vol. iv. p. 120.) Mr. Grant immediately resigned, and this was soon after followed by that [what?] of the Duke of Clarence' (vol. iv. p. 126.) As to the petitions got up last year, they were obviously done so for a political purpose' (vol. iv. p. 137). The public indignation was loudly expressed against what was deemed the treachery of some, the slavishness of others, the tergiversation of all, and a great and irremediable shake [? was] given to the confidence of the people in the integrity of public men which as it had been in times past the palladium of the nation's fortune, so its loss presaged its [the nation's, or the integrity's, or the fortune's?] future boundless calamities' (vol. iv. p. 174). Death, and extreme prudence of conduct, alone saved him from dethronement' (vol. i. p. 5). 'Effects which have left indelible traces in the future [subsequent] history of mankind' (vol. i. p. 7). I see at the bar he who first,' &c. (vol. v. p. 598). The following is good grammar, but it expresses the very reverse of Sir Archibald's meaning. The forces of the Czar never could have re-established despotic power in Austria, if the brief experience of revolutionary anarchy had not made it generally felt [these four words might have been expressed by 'proved'] that it [? revolutionary anarchy was preferable to the storms of faction.' We might enlarge this list to any extent. We can hardly read a page of Sir Archibald's writings without meeting with some solecism of the kind, which might have been removed by very slight alterations, if the author had thought it worth his while to

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make a fair copy of his manuscript. It is impossible not to see that a man who writes thus is either entirely deficient in education, or utterly careless as to the quality, so long as he is at ease about the quantity, of his workmanship.

Sir

Of the literary merits of Sir Archibald's style we need say the less, as he has himself given us an altogether unparalleled opportunity of estimating them. To an account of Queen Caroline's trial he has appended a note in these words:The reader of Macaulay's incomparable Essay on Warren Hastings need not be told what model was in the author's eye in this paragraph; but no one can feel so strongly as he does the futility of all attempts to rival that noble picture.' Archibald would have done wisely not to challenge the comparison, but the attempt and the execu tion are both so remarkable, that we could give no better illustration of his style. Some parts of Sir Archibald's description are original, and some are copies. We do not know which are the most characteristic. Thus Mr. Macaulay describes Westminster Hall as the Great Hall of William Rufus;' and he goes on to refer to its having been the scene of the trials of Bacon, Somers, Strafford, and Charles I.

This is Sir Archibald's exordium:

Within that august hall, fraught with so many interesting recollections, where so many noble men had perished, and innocence had so often appealed from the cruelty of man to the justice of heaven; where Anne Boleyn had called God to witness, and Queen Catherine had sobbed at severance from her children; where Elizabeth had spoken to the hearts of her people, and Anne had thrilled at the recital of Marlborough's victories; whose walls were still hung with the storied scene of the destruction of the Armada-was all that was great and all that was noble in England assembled for the trial of the consort of the sovereign, the daughter of the House of Brunswick.

Sir Archibald's' interesting recollections' are to us exceedingly questionable. In the House of Lords it seems so many noble men had perished.' We should like to know who they were. People were often condemned there, but an execution