These combats between the pigmies and the cranes were also dwelt on by Oppian, Juvenal, and others; and what was, to quote an old writer, “only a pleasant figment in the fountain, became a solemn story in the stream.” Strabo in his Geography considered the belief as fabulous, and so also did another old writer, Julius Scaliger; and even Aldrovandus, though ready to accept almost anything, found a difficulty in crediting it. Albertus Magnus, another of the old and over-credulous writers, found as much difficulty as Aldrovandus, but suggested that probably the belief arose from some big species of monkey having been taken for a diminutive man. Even the home of the pigmies was a point quite open to dispute. Some writers placed them in the extreme north, where the growth of all nature was feeble and stunted, while Aristotle placed them at the head of the Nile; Philostratus affirmed that they were to be found on the banks of the Ganges, and Pliny placed them in Scythia. Even their size was open to question, for some would have us believe that the mounted men in their armies rode on partridges, while others placed them on the backs of rams. If the warrior and his steed bore any due proportion to each other, this seems to point to a considerable divergence of ideas as to the size of a pigmy. They were said to have been found by Hercules in the great desert, and to have assailed him with their bows and arrows as the Lilliputians did Gulliver. Their valour, however, in this case seems to have outrun discretion, as the smiling demi-god carried a number of them off in his lion’s skin. Ctesias says that they were negroes, and places a kingdom of them in the centre of India. Shakespeare mentions them, but gives no local habitation. “Will your Grace command me any service to the world’s end? I will go on the slightest errand now to the Antipodes that you can devise to send me on: I will fetch you a tooth-picker now from the farthest inch of Asia; bring you the length of Prester John’s foot; fetch you a hair off the great Cham’s beard; do you any embassage to the Pigmies!” Others of our poets have adopted the myth, though of course without committing themselves to an expression of their belief in it. In Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel,” for example, we find the lines—

and in Young’s “Night Thoughts” we read—

Another English writer whose book is before us does commit himself to an expression of belief, for his title runs as follows:—“Gerania, a New Discoverie of a Little Sort of People called Pygmies, with a Lively Description of their Stature, Habit, Manners and Customs.” The author was one Joshua Barnes, and his book is dated 1675.

Though spelt indifferently as pigmy and pygmy, the latter is the more correct, though perhaps a little pedantic-looking; the word is derived from the Greek name for them, the Pygmaioi.

Tennant in his work on “Ceylon” makes the following very just remark:—“We ought not to be too hasty in casting ridicule upon the narratives of ancient travellers. In a geographical point of view they possess great value, and if sometimes they contain statements which appear marvellous, the mystery is often explained away by a more careful and minute inquiry.” Against the statements of the geographers and historians of antiquity many modern critics have specially delighted to break a lance, condemning them as more or less fabulous and untrustworthy, though in some cases, as that of De Chaillu, the narratives of modern travellers have been almost as mercilessly analysed.

Probably the African race known at the present time as Bosjesmen or Bushmen are the modern representatives of the pigmies, for in their cave-dwelling, reptile-eating, and other peculiarities they agree entirely with those given by Pliny, Aristotle, and Herodotus. The tales of the battles fought with the cranes may have been but a satire on their diminutive size, or they may very possibly have been the records of actual facts. The Maori traditions tell of the contests with the moa and other gigantic birds which formerly inhabited the islands of New Zealand, while the Jesuit missionaries give accounts of enormous birds that were once found in Abyssinia, but are now, like the dodo, extinct. It is, therefore, quite possible that there is more truth in the story of these mannikins and their struggles with their feathered foes than we are at first prepared to admit, and that while many of the details of these old fables are evidently imaginative, there was in more cases than we at once realise a solid foundation of truth at the bottom of them.

Of giants, the opposite extreme in the scale, we need say but little. Probably in many cases the early peoples, who desired to honour their great champions, felt that the marvels they delighted to credit them with must have been the work of men of more than human power and parts. We see much the same feeling in the sculptures of antiquity, the monuments of Egypt and Assyria, where the monarch far outweighs even in mere physical bulk the subjects that surround him. Hence, like Goliath, the champions of old are generally giants; while at other times they themselves are of slender frame, striplings like David, and it is the foes they subdue that are gigantic in bulk. The struggles, for instance, of the gallant few against the crying and mighty wrong of human slavery would have in earlier times been handed down to posterity as a contest with an evil giant; and in the allegories of the Middle Ages we meet, in the same way, with Giant Pope, Giant Pagan, and Giant Despair.

Though in one’s earlier years we read the exploits of Jack the Giant-Killer with great complacency, and give him full meed of praise for his valour, on fuller reflection we cannot help seeing that the giants he encountered had intellects that bore no proportion to their bodily bulk, and that it was the easiest thing possible to outwit them; that according to the doctrine which by men of science is called “the survival of the fittest,” or in more popular parlance “the weakest going to the wall,” their destruction was strictly according to the inexorable laws of nature. While dwarfs have been accredited with a spiteful vindictiveness that served them in some sort as a defence, giants have ordinarily been considered as great good-natured fellows, fully bearing out Bacon’s remark about tall houses being often unfurnished in their upper story. Perhaps it is a merciful arrangement of nature that this should be so, for a combination of the maliciousness of the dwarf with the physical strength of the giant would be something altogether de trop.

We very early in the Bible narrative meet with references to giants, but it is by no means agreed by commentators that the word nephilim thus translated means men remarkable for their stature. The context in the case of the first reference to them, for instance, seems to render it more probable that these were men not of gigantic stature, but of gigantic wickedness—men who had departed from the true religion, and were sustaining their apostasy by acts of violence and oppression, and endeavouring by these means to gain to themselves power on the earth. At the same time in other passages the references to the size of the couch or the spear clearly implies their ownership by a man of much more than the ordinary stature. According to Jewish tradition Og lived three thousand years, and walked beside the Ark during the deluge, while after his death one of his bones was used as a bridge for crossing a river. According to Moses his bedstead was not quite sixteen feet long, so that it seems the brook that any single bone would span could scarcely have required bridging at all; while the depth at what we may be allowed to term “high water” during the Noachic deluge must have been very much less than all one’s preconceived notions would suggest, if its volume was a thing of indifference to the owner of this sixteen-feet couch. The nearest approach to a giant in modern times was an Irishman named Murphy, who attained to a height of eight feet ten inches. Many of our readers will remember seeing the Chinese Chang, or at least hearing of him, as he was exhibited to the curious in London in 1866 and 1880. His height was eight feet two inches. Patrick Cotter, an Irishman, who died in 1802, exceeded this by six inches; and one fine youth named Magrath, an orphan adopted by Bishop Berkeley, died at the age of twenty, after reaching a height of seven feet eight inches. There is no absolutely authenticated instance of any one in modern times reaching nine feet, though, of course, when tradition and hearsay have taken the place of the measuring-tape, there is no difficulty in going considerably beyond that limit. Plutarch tells of a giant eighty-five feet high, and Pliny of another who only reached sixty-six. Many of the skeletons of giants that were then supposed to be found during the Middle Ages were really the remains of extinct animals. In the imperfect state of surgical and osteological knowledge, the leg or blade bone of some gigantic antediluvian monster was ascribed to some hero of the past, and a very pretty little giant story promptly built upon it.

Any curious natural phenomena were generally ascribed by our ancestors to diabolical influence, or else recognised as the labour of giants. The Giant’s Causeway is a notable and very familiar illustration of this, and there are few mountains in Wales that are not invested with some fairy tradition or legend of the marvellous. Trichrug, in Cardiganshire, which derives its name from three united hills, is believed to have been a favourite resort of the giants, and, like Cader Idris, this lofty elevation was once the special seat or chair of a giant whose grave is still pointed out. In a match at quoits which took place here between the giants of Cambria, he of Trichrug is said to have thrown one across St. George’s Channel to the opposite coast of Ireland, thus winning the contest triumphantly. His grave was fabled to possess such extraordinary capabilities that it not only adapted itself to the size of any one that lay down in it, but also gifted the individual with greatly renewed strength. All defensive weapons placed in this grave were either destroyed or swallowed up. The rocky fortification, or carnedd, on the summit of Cader Idris is in like manner invested by the surrounding peasantry with a mysterious tradition respecting the giant Idris.

The warring of the giants against the rule of Jehovah finds its parallel in the Greek myth of the sons of Tartaros and Ge attempting to storm the gate of heaven and the seat of Zeus, only to meet with signal discomfiture. The common expression for adding difficulty to difficulty and embarrassment to embarrassment, the piling of Pelion on Ossa, refers to this struggle, as the giants piled two mountains of these names on each other as a scaling ladder to reach the heights of high Olympus.

In “Measure for Measure” we find two well-known allusions to giants:—

The second of these is equally familiar:—

In Matthew Green’s play of “The Spleen,” written at the beginning of the eighteenth century, we find an evident allusion to the struggle between David and Goliath in the line—

Coleridge, again, writes—“A dwarf sees further than the giant, when he has the giant’s shoulder to rest on.” This idea is not, however, his own, for in Herbert’s “Jacula Prudentum” we find the line, “A dwarf on giant shoulders sees further of the two;” and in Fuller’s “Holy State” he says—“Grant them but dwarfs, yet stand they on giants’ shoulders and may see the further.” Many other illustrations might, of course, readily be given of what may be termed the literary existence of giants, but enough has been quoted to show how valuable these personages have in poesy and general literature. In the West “Gulliver’s Travels” and in the East the “Arabian Nights’ Entertainments” are two examples that at once occur to one’s mind.