The Days Of Giants

An opinión was current, in the last century, ühat our ancestors, at sorae time in the past, were the equals or superiors in size of the largest men now to be found. M. Henrion presented to the Academie des Inscriptions, in 1718, a memoir on the variations in the Bize of man from the beginning of the world till the Christian era, in which Adara was given 123 feet 9 inehes and Eve 118 feet 9% inches. But after the first pair the human race, in bis imagination, suffered a regular decrease, so that Noah was only 100 feet high, while Abraham shrank down to 28 feet, Moses to 13 feet, the mighty Hercules to 10 feet 8% inches and Alexander the Great to a bare 6JL feet. The communication, ït is said, was received with enthusiasm and was regarded, at the time, as a "wonderful discovery" and a "sublime visión." The complaint about the degeneracy of the human race is not new, but dates as far back as the time of Homer, at least; for the men of his day were not ike the héroes of whom he sang. It is not confirmed, but contradicted, by all the tangible facts, and these are not a few. Human remains that are exhumed, after haring reposed in the grave for many centuries, as in the catacombs of Paris, have nothing gigantic about them. The armor, the cuirasses and the casques of the warriors of the middle ages can be worn by modern soldiere, and many of the knights' suits would be too small for the cuirassiers of the European armies; yet they were worn by the selected men, who were better fed, stronger and more robust than the rest of the population. The bones of the ancient Gauls, which are uncovered in the excavations of tumuli, whüe they are of large dimensions, are comparable with those of the existing populations of many places in France. The Egyptian mummies are the remains of persons of small or medium stature, as are also the Peruvian and Mexican mummies and the mummies and bones found in the ancient monuments of India and Persia. And even the most ancient relies we possess of individuals of the human species, the bones of men who lived in the tertiary period, an epoch the remote antiquity of which goes back for hundreds of centunes, do not show any important differences in the sizes of the