GIANT. Man of excessive height, compared with the ordinary height of other men.

The question of the existence of giants has often been debated. On the one side, to prove it, some allege the witnesses throughout antiquity, which make mention of many men of height beyond measure who have appeared in diverse times; the Holy Scripture states this as well; the poets, the secular historians, and the ancient travelers agree in telling these astonishing things. In addition, to give a decisive weight to this opinion, there are reports of discoveries of skeletons or of bones so monstrous, that the men who animated them must have been true colossi: again this is confirmed by the testimony of navigators.

Nonetheless, on the other side, when we come to examine closely all these testimonies; to take the most natural meaning of the words of holy writ; to reduce the oriental or poetic exaggerations to a reasonable sense; to weigh the merits of authors; to place the travelers in a particular order, according to things that they have seen themselves, or learned from irreproachable witnesses, to consider the so-called bones of human skeletons; to appreciate the authority of the navigators considered here, and to follow the wise analogy of nature, nearly always uniform in its productions, the problem in question no longer appears so difficult to resolve. Let us proceed to clarify for ourselves, the manner in which it is discussed.

We take note, first, on the topic of holy writ, that the words employed of Nephilim and of gibborim , which the Septuagint has translated as gigantes , and we by the word giants , signifies properly men fallen into terrible crimes, and more monstrous by their disorders than by the enormity of their height. It is thus that the Hebrew terms have been interpreted by Theodoric, St. Chrysostom, and after them by our more learned moderns.

We say next that the foundation on which Josephus and several fathers of the Church after him, have believed that there were giants, is manifestly false, since they suppose that they had resulted from the commerce of angels with the daughters of men; a fable founded on an example of the version of the Septuagint and on the book of Enoch, who in place of the children of God, that is the descendants of Seth, who had married the daughters of Cain, have rendered the Hebrew word for that of angels.

We observe, in the third place, that it is not a question in Deuteronomy (chapter iii, verse 2) of the gigantic height of Og, king of Basan; it only concerns the length of his bed, which was nine cubits; that is, following the estimation of several moderns, thirteen and a half feet. If at present we consider that the Orientals placed their splendor in vast beds of state, we will find that the most respectable example that is argued for a giant, relates only to the size of a bed that served for his magnificence.

As for Goliath, some believe that it would be very permissible to take the six cubits and a palm that the author of the first book of Kings gives him, as an expression that indicates nothing but a great height above the ordinary; it was such for Goliath, that he appeared to be more than six cubits: he seemed as big as a pole of six cubits and a palm. Our faith is not at all interested in more or less exactitude in the recital of facts that do not at all concern it.

If we move on to the testimonies of pagans alleged in favor of the existence of giants , we think that it is not possible to be surprised by them, when we take the trouble to discuss the character of these authors, and the facts that they put forward.

According to this critique, Herodotus, accused in general of error and even of lying by Strabo, in a hundred things he knows about, is [accused] in particular by that geographer and by Aulus Gellius, on the subject of twelve feet and a quarter that that historian gives to the skeleton of Orestes that he had discovered I do not know where.

Plutarch ought rightly to be reprimanded for having copied from Gabinius, a writer suspect even in his own time, the story of sixty cubits that he said that Sertorius measured on the cadaver of the giant Antaeus, that he had dug up in the city of Tangiers.

The passage in which Pliny seems to attribute to the skeleton of Orion found in Candia, xlvi [46] cubits, if it is well examined, can only have been altered by some scribe, who has placed in front of the figure vi that of xl because it is not natural that the order of a gradation, like the one it seems that this author wanted to follow, in counting from vii [7] up to ix [9] cubits, found himself interrupted by the number of xlvi [46] placed in the middle of the series.

The variation of Solinus on the same fact, gives him no more credit than Pliny, of whom we know he was only the scribe.

Phlegon would be booed for the story of his giant Macrosyris, by the ridiculousness of five thousand years of life that he gave to him in the epitaph that he gives of him.

Apollonius, Antigonus, Caristius, and Philostratus the younger, authors already discredited by the false marvels with which they have filled their writings, become even more so by their fable of a hundred-cubit giant.

A number of other narratives of this nature find themselves destroyed by the circumstances alone with which the authors accompany them. Many [of them] tell us that as soon as they approached the cadavers of these giants, they disintegrated into powder; and they had [to say] this, to forestall the curiosity of those who would have wanted to enlighten themselves on this.

Where are there more contradictions and anachronisms than in the so-called discovery of the corpse of Pallas, son of Evander? The language in which his epitaph is written, its style, that lamp that does not go out, after 2300 years of illumination, but for the accident of a little hole, and other childish claims of this type, are only proof of the simplicity of Fostat, the bishop of Avila, who took as truth a story from the chronicle of the monk Helinand, made in an era of ignorance.

The bodies of the Cyclops which have been found in different caves, were, according to Fazel, 20 or 30 cubits in height; and Father Kircher, who has seen and measured all of these caves, gives the largest of these a height of only15 to 20 palms.

As far as the discoveries of teeth, ribs, vertebrae, femurs, shoulder blades, that are put forward, considering their length and size, as the bones of giants, that so many cities still preserve, and show as such, the natural philosophers have shown that these are the bones, the teeth, the ribs, the vertebrae, the femurs, the shoulder blades of elephants, the genuine parts of the skeletons of terrestrial animals, or of seals, whales, or other cetacean animals, buried by chance, by accident, in different places on the earth; or sometimes of other productions of nature, which often plays on these sorts of resemblances.

Those bones, for example, that were shown in Paris in 1613, and which were then displayed around Flanders and England, as if they had been those of Teutobochus, of whom Roman history speaks, were found to be the bones of elephants. In 1630, someone sent M. de Peiresc a big tooth that was supposed to be that of a giant ; he took an impression of it in wax; and when it came to be compared to that of an elephant that had been dug up at the same time in Tunis, it was found to be of the same size, shape, and proportions. The deceit is not new: Suetonius remarks in his life of Augustus, that in that time men had thought to pass off some big bones of terrestrial animals as the bones of giants or the relics of heroes. Everything converged to fool the people in these two ways. Although Seneca spoke of giants as imaginary beings, his essay showed that the people believed they existed. The custom of the ancients to represent their heroes as much bigger than nature, necessarily held power over the imagination, to bring it to admit an enormous height to certain men above the common. Do not the statues of our kings impose themselves on us every day in this way? It is possible that among those who will consider in four or five hundred years the bronze figure that represents Henri IV on the Pont Neuf, if that statue still exists, most people will persuade themselves that this monarch, immortal through his exploits and his rare qualities, was a man of the greatest height.

Nevertheless, some moderns, philosophical enough to know the sources of our allusions, versed enough in criticism to tell truth from lies, wise enough to give no confidence either to so-called human bones or to all the accounts from antiquity on the existence of giants, do not cease to be moved by the tales of many voyagers, who report that at the farthest edge of Chile toward the Straits of Magellan, is found a race of men of gigantic height, the Patagonians. M. Frézier said he learned from several Spaniards, who claimed to have seen some of these men, that they were four varres in height, that is nine to ten feet. [1]

But some have very well observed that M. Frézier does not say that he has seen any of these giants himself: and since the vague accounts of the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the first Dutch explorers, are not at all confirmed by the enlightened travelers of this century; and since they are filled with exaggerations or falsehoods about so many other things, we cannot mistrust them too much.

Lastly, it is against all probability, as the author of Histoire naturelle says of it, “that there exists in the world a race of men composed of giants , especially when some suppose them to be ten feet tall; because the weight of the body of such a man would be eight times heavier than that of an ordinary man. It seems that the ordinary height of humans being five feet, the limits hardly extend themselves to a foot above or below that; a man of six feet is in fact a very tall man, and a man of four feet is very small: the giants and the dwarfs who are above and below these limits of height, ought thus to be regarded as very rare, individual, and accidental varieties.” [2]

Experience teaches us that when we encounter giants among us, that is men of seven or eight feet in height, they are generally badly formed, unhealthy, and incapable of the most ordinary functions.

After all, if these giants of the Magellanic lands exist, which time alone can ascertain, “they are at least very few in number; because the inhabitants of the lands of the strait and the neighboring islands are savages of very middling height.”

We read in the newspapers that Father Joseph Tarrubia, Spaniard, has published very recently (1756) a gigantology, in which work he claims to refute Sir Hans Sloane and to prove the existence of giants on monuments of Indian antiquity: but until someone takes the trouble to examine the value of such monuments, which by all appearances are no more authentic than so many others of this genre; the reader curious for a good physical gigantology, will do better to study that of the same Sir Hans Sloane, which had not pleased the good Spanish father; it is inserted in the Philosophical Transactions , no. 404, and extracted in the supplement of Chambers’s Dictionary.

1. The reference is to Amédéé-François Frézier (1682-1773) who led an expedition to South America in 1712.

2. See Buffon’s Natural History in 10 volumes (1797-1807); Buffon’s discussion of the Patagonians is in vol. 4, pp. 330-31.