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Show Simple Explanation of Origin of Giant Myths A recent dispatch from India reporting re-porting that natives have found )ones of a giant's skeleton no less than 31 feet high has torn up all .ecords of this particular myth. Not ;ven the Imaginative Doctor Ma-mrier, Ma-mrier, who fabricated In IG13 the ;ircumstantial tale of a brick tomb lot only containing his giant, but provided with equally gigantic iwords and other weapons, and even 'abeled with the name and titles which the giant had borne, dared to nake his Imagined relic more than 2G feet tall. The famous Giant of Lucerne, who Involved scores of Swiss and German scientists In acrimonious acri-monious controversies from 1577 un-:I1 un-:I1 after 1G00, was credited with only 19 feet. England's Giant of Thorne-tvay, Thorne-tvay, In Cumberland, said to have oeen found ln armor which has conveniently con-veniently disappeared, measured but 14 feet, by contemporary accounts. No doubt the new 81-foot marvel )f Calcutta belongs with these oth-?rs oth-?rs among the long list of confusions between human bones and those of fossil animals, mostly elephants. A few thousand years ago several types of elephants, such as the mammoths mam-moths and mastodons, were ranch uore numerous and widespread than my kind of elephant is today. Be- J Ing comparatively recent in geologic history, their bones He close to the ground and frequently are found by diggers or plowed up by farmers, something which Is not true of bones of still larger animals of earlier ages, such as the gigantic dinosaurs. Some elephants' leg bones look superficially su-perficially not unlike human bones. It is small wonder that they and human hu-man giants have been confused, although al-though even in 1G20 the famous William Harvey remarked of the supposed Giant of Gloucester that his bones evidently belonged ln reality real-ity to "some exceedingly great beast, such as an elephant." There Is less excuse for Doctor Mazurier'a manufacture manu-facture out of whole cloth of the brick tomb, weapons and inscriptions inscrip-tions which he said he found with the 26-foot previous holder of the giant record. To students of folklore these misconceptions mis-conceptions about elephant bones supply one possible explanation of the virtually worldwide belief that giants once existed, but not the only one. Another suggestion Is the recollection by primitive people of other human beings able to walk on stilts, as fen dwellers still do ln eastern England or dune dwellers in southwestern Franca Thus probably prob-ably originated the tale of the fast-moving fast-moving seven-league boots. Still another an-other possible origin of giant myths is garbled tales of men standing on towers or platforms, like the movable mov-able siege towers used ln ancient warfare. And perhaps some giant myths date from days when relatively relative-ly short races, such- as the Celts, were In conflict with elatively tall ones, like the Danes or Saxons. But not even folklore has recorded giants 31 feet high. New York Herald Her-ald Tribune. |