Francis T. Buckland
1868
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Georges Cuvier was one of the first to propose that Classical and medieval references to the discovery of giants' bones were mistaken identifications of the fossils of extinct elephants and other prehistoric mammals. Later writers expanded on his insight, offering new and interesting details about the fossil origins of fabulous beings from myth and legend.
The following discussion comes from the 1868 second edition of Curiosities of Natural History in which the author, a surgeon and zoologist, describes situations in which megafauna bones were mistaken for those of giant humans. |
With reference to the discovery of gigantic human skeletons, Mr. Bartlett tells me the following curious and interesting story:--
An Irish labourer once told him that he had discovered the skeleton of a giant in an Irish bog; he described it as placed on its back; the backbone, the legs and arms were, he stated, quite perfect, and also that, in his opinion, these bones must have been the remains of a person not less than 17 feet high.
Mr. Bartlett, of course, rather laughed at the story, but, being a wise man, determined to go deeper into the matter, and cross-examined the Irish labourer very closely; the man was positive about the story, so positive indeed that it was quite evident he was telling no lies. Mr. Bartlett at last ascertained that this skeleton was that of an ancient Irish elk (Cervus megaceros): the head was missing, but the bones happening to be placed flat on the ground in the manner that a human skeleton would naturally assume, they resembled so much (to the uneducated eye) the bones of a gigantic specimen of the human subject, that the mistake is almost pardonable.
This is a good lesson, always to inquire into stories, however improbable they may appear at first sight.
I cannot help placing with the above a most remarkable instance of a discovery of human bones, which might, if found by anyone but a scientific observer, have been described as giant’s bones. Professor James D. Forbes thus writes: “We found (among the precipices of Mont Colton) the remains of the bones and skins of two chamois, and near them the complete bones of a man. The latter were arranged in a very singular manner, nearly the whole skeleton being there in detached bones, laid in order along the ice; the skull lowest, next the arms and ribs, and finally the bones of the pelvis, legs and feet disposed along the glacier, so that the distance between the head and feet might be five yards; a disposition certainly arising from some natural cause not very easy to assign.”
The disposition of these bones must of course be dependent upon the movement of the ice blocks forming the glacier upon which the bones were placed: if Professor Forbes cannot explain it, it would be presumptuous in me to make the attempt.
Though authentic accounts of giants in the flesh are not very common, we find instances innumerable on record of the bones and skeletons of giants having been found buried in the earth. Some labourers who were digging gravel in front of St. John’s College, Oxford, discovered and trundled off to my father at Christ Church a wheelbarrow full of “giants’ bones,” which he immediately decided to be the bones of fossil elephants. The men were ultimately persuaded into this belief, but they accounted for the presence of the elephant, by coming to the conclusion that the elephant whose bones they found must have been one that died in Wombwell’s menagerie, though no one of the company could “call to mind” such an event ever having happened.
These “giants’ bones” are and have been found and talked about by all nations; and when the rude inhabitants of Siberia discovered the celebrated fossil elephant in the frozen earth, they called it the “mammoth, or animal of the earth,” and believed the remains were those of a gigantic animal that was still living beneath the surface of the earth. Many accounts are given by ancient authors, such as Kircher and others, not “of gigantic bones only, but of vastly gigantic men found buried underground, or in the hollow caverns of mountains.” Of these a learned author, writing in 1722, says:—“Remains, such I mean as are truly bone (for some are only natural petrifactions and lapides sui generis), were bones belonging to some of the biggest quadrupeds, as elephants, or some of the largest sort of fishes of the whale kind; and I am persuaded that the large tooth mentioned by Ol. Wormius was nothing else than the tooth of the Cetus dentatus or spermaceti whale.”
All this I fully endorse. It is a curious passage, and one of the first that began to throw light upon the popular legends and stories of former days, when science was yet young, and exhibitions of giants’ bones were not uncommon. In 1721, for example, the hand of a giant was publicly shown for money; this hand being, according to the author above quoted, “the bones of the fore fin of a porpess or small whale artificially joyned together.” Here, then, is a good hint for an English Barnum; for the bones of the fin of a porpoise or whale, when the skin has been removed, marvellously resemble in appearance and shape those in the human hand.
Even at the present day the belief in bones of giants, dug out of the earth, is by no means extinct, for a gentleman sent me a tooth of a fossil horse, when M. Brice was in London, and asked if it was not a giants tooth. I showed it to my friend Brice, the French giant, and we had a hearty laugh when we made the comparison of the horse’s tooth with one of his own.
According to an ancient scientific work, in the “medicine school” at Leyden is a prodigious os frontis or frontal bone of a giant, measuring nine inches transversely, in the convex way twelve inches. A figure is given of this bone alongside that of a man of ordinary stature. After giving many details, the describer of this bone goes on to say, “whence it must follow that the man to whom this bone belonged was more than twice the height that men usually are, according to the common course of nature—that is, more than eleven or twelve feet high.”
Now, here is a difficulty to be overcome. Upon carefully reading the above account, and examining the plate with accuracy, I have no hesitation in granting the fact of the bone in question being human, and of an extraordinary size; but at the same time, I conceive it to be the bone of some person who had been afflicted with chronic hydrocephalus, or water on the brain, and this disease had caused the bones of the skull to assume the proportions it presented. That persons afflicted with this disease will live for several years, I have no doubt, as I once paid a penny to a showman to see such a person, aged about fourteen years. In this case the head was gigantic, the body attenuated and shrivelled up. The skull of this person would have made a famous giant’s skull. If this is not evidence enough to explain the nature of the supposed giant’s skull, I adduce the evidence of but yesterday; for Mr. C. E. Harle has of late occupied himself in measuring with tape the external dimensions, and with dry sand the internal capacities, of most of the abnormal skulls in the College of Surgeons. He kindly reports to me: “I am certain that the skull of the giant O’Brian is of about the same capacity only as that of the individual of ordinary size that stands by his side. From all that I could collect from repeated examinations of very many skulls from nations all over the world, I came to the conclusion that the size of the skull did not, for certain, indicate the stature of the man.”
An Irish labourer once told him that he had discovered the skeleton of a giant in an Irish bog; he described it as placed on its back; the backbone, the legs and arms were, he stated, quite perfect, and also that, in his opinion, these bones must have been the remains of a person not less than 17 feet high.
Mr. Bartlett, of course, rather laughed at the story, but, being a wise man, determined to go deeper into the matter, and cross-examined the Irish labourer very closely; the man was positive about the story, so positive indeed that it was quite evident he was telling no lies. Mr. Bartlett at last ascertained that this skeleton was that of an ancient Irish elk (Cervus megaceros): the head was missing, but the bones happening to be placed flat on the ground in the manner that a human skeleton would naturally assume, they resembled so much (to the uneducated eye) the bones of a gigantic specimen of the human subject, that the mistake is almost pardonable.
This is a good lesson, always to inquire into stories, however improbable they may appear at first sight.
I cannot help placing with the above a most remarkable instance of a discovery of human bones, which might, if found by anyone but a scientific observer, have been described as giant’s bones. Professor James D. Forbes thus writes: “We found (among the precipices of Mont Colton) the remains of the bones and skins of two chamois, and near them the complete bones of a man. The latter were arranged in a very singular manner, nearly the whole skeleton being there in detached bones, laid in order along the ice; the skull lowest, next the arms and ribs, and finally the bones of the pelvis, legs and feet disposed along the glacier, so that the distance between the head and feet might be five yards; a disposition certainly arising from some natural cause not very easy to assign.”
The disposition of these bones must of course be dependent upon the movement of the ice blocks forming the glacier upon which the bones were placed: if Professor Forbes cannot explain it, it would be presumptuous in me to make the attempt.
Though authentic accounts of giants in the flesh are not very common, we find instances innumerable on record of the bones and skeletons of giants having been found buried in the earth. Some labourers who were digging gravel in front of St. John’s College, Oxford, discovered and trundled off to my father at Christ Church a wheelbarrow full of “giants’ bones,” which he immediately decided to be the bones of fossil elephants. The men were ultimately persuaded into this belief, but they accounted for the presence of the elephant, by coming to the conclusion that the elephant whose bones they found must have been one that died in Wombwell’s menagerie, though no one of the company could “call to mind” such an event ever having happened.
These “giants’ bones” are and have been found and talked about by all nations; and when the rude inhabitants of Siberia discovered the celebrated fossil elephant in the frozen earth, they called it the “mammoth, or animal of the earth,” and believed the remains were those of a gigantic animal that was still living beneath the surface of the earth. Many accounts are given by ancient authors, such as Kircher and others, not “of gigantic bones only, but of vastly gigantic men found buried underground, or in the hollow caverns of mountains.” Of these a learned author, writing in 1722, says:—“Remains, such I mean as are truly bone (for some are only natural petrifactions and lapides sui generis), were bones belonging to some of the biggest quadrupeds, as elephants, or some of the largest sort of fishes of the whale kind; and I am persuaded that the large tooth mentioned by Ol. Wormius was nothing else than the tooth of the Cetus dentatus or spermaceti whale.”
All this I fully endorse. It is a curious passage, and one of the first that began to throw light upon the popular legends and stories of former days, when science was yet young, and exhibitions of giants’ bones were not uncommon. In 1721, for example, the hand of a giant was publicly shown for money; this hand being, according to the author above quoted, “the bones of the fore fin of a porpess or small whale artificially joyned together.” Here, then, is a good hint for an English Barnum; for the bones of the fin of a porpoise or whale, when the skin has been removed, marvellously resemble in appearance and shape those in the human hand.
Even at the present day the belief in bones of giants, dug out of the earth, is by no means extinct, for a gentleman sent me a tooth of a fossil horse, when M. Brice was in London, and asked if it was not a giants tooth. I showed it to my friend Brice, the French giant, and we had a hearty laugh when we made the comparison of the horse’s tooth with one of his own.
According to an ancient scientific work, in the “medicine school” at Leyden is a prodigious os frontis or frontal bone of a giant, measuring nine inches transversely, in the convex way twelve inches. A figure is given of this bone alongside that of a man of ordinary stature. After giving many details, the describer of this bone goes on to say, “whence it must follow that the man to whom this bone belonged was more than twice the height that men usually are, according to the common course of nature—that is, more than eleven or twelve feet high.”
Now, here is a difficulty to be overcome. Upon carefully reading the above account, and examining the plate with accuracy, I have no hesitation in granting the fact of the bone in question being human, and of an extraordinary size; but at the same time, I conceive it to be the bone of some person who had been afflicted with chronic hydrocephalus, or water on the brain, and this disease had caused the bones of the skull to assume the proportions it presented. That persons afflicted with this disease will live for several years, I have no doubt, as I once paid a penny to a showman to see such a person, aged about fourteen years. In this case the head was gigantic, the body attenuated and shrivelled up. The skull of this person would have made a famous giant’s skull. If this is not evidence enough to explain the nature of the supposed giant’s skull, I adduce the evidence of but yesterday; for Mr. C. E. Harle has of late occupied himself in measuring with tape the external dimensions, and with dry sand the internal capacities, of most of the abnormal skulls in the College of Surgeons. He kindly reports to me: “I am certain that the skull of the giant O’Brian is of about the same capacity only as that of the individual of ordinary size that stands by his side. From all that I could collect from repeated examinations of very many skulls from nations all over the world, I came to the conclusion that the size of the skull did not, for certain, indicate the stature of the man.”
Source: Francis T. Buckland, Curiosities of Natural History, Third Series (2nd ed.), vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1868).
