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Stances of Rapid: Rouen

M. Le Cat, in a memoir read before the Academy of Sciences at Rouen, gives the following account of giants that are said to have existed in different ages. Profane historians have given seven feet of height to Hercules, their first here: and in our days we have seen men eight feet high. The giant, who was shown in Rouen, in 1735, measured eight feet sorme inches. The emperor Maximin was of that size. Shenki is and Platerus, physicians of the last century, saw several 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 Cæsar, 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 Le Maire, 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 long. 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 gaunche, which had eighty teeth, and that the body was not less than fifteen feet long. The GIANTS giant Ferragus, slain by Orlando, nephew of Charlemagne, was eighteen feet high. 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 great giant Isoret, who was twenty feet high. In Rouen, in 1509, in 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 long; and, consequently, the body must have been seventeen or eighteen feet high. Upon the tomb was a plate of copper, whereon was engraved, "In this tomb lies the noble and puissant lord, the Chevalier Ricon De Vallemont, and his bones." Platerus, a famous physician, declares, that he saw at Lucerne, the true human body of a subject which must have been at least nineteen feet high. Valence, in Dauphiné, boasts of pos sessing the bones of the giant Bucart, tyrant of the Vivarias, who was slain with an arrow by the Count De Cabillon, his vassal. The Dominicans had a part of the shin bone, witn the articulation of his knee, and his figure painted in fresco, with an inscription, showing "that this giant was twenty-two feet and a half high, and that his bones were found in 1705, near the banks of the Morderi, a little river at the foot of the mountain of Crusal, upon which (tradition says) the giant dwelt." M. Le Cat adds, that skeletons have been discovered of giants, of a still more incredible height, viz. of Theutobochus, king of the Teutones, found on the 11th of January, 1613, twenty-five feet and a half high; of a giant near Mazarino, in Sicily, in 1516, thirty feet; of another, in 1548, near Palermo, thirty feet; of another, in 1550, of thirty-three feet; of two found near Athens, thirty-three and thirty-six feet; and of one at Tuto, in Bohemia, in 1758, whose leg bones alone measured twenty-six feet! But whether these accounts are credited or not, we are certain that the stature of the human body is by no means fixed. We are ourselves a kind of giants, in comparison of the Laplanders; nor are these the most diminutive people to be found upon the earth. The Abbé La Chappe, in his journey into Siberia, to observe the last transit of Venus, passed through a village inhabited by people called Wotiacks, who were not above four feet high. The accounts of the Patagonians likewise, which cannot be entirely discredited, render it very probable, that somewhere in South America there is a race of people very considerably exceeding the common size of mankind; and consequently that we cannot altogether discredit the relations of giants, handed down to us by ancient authors, though what degree of credit we ought to give them, is not easy to be determined. 14