"And now," he continued, "let us be friends; I am firmly determined to become myself a Christian. Receive me, noble people, into your family, yes, I wish from henceforth to belong to your Christian church. I know full well, and foresee that the persecutions of the Christians in our country will not cease. I know that if nothing worse happens to me, I shall have to lay down my crown. But what are earthly crowns in comparison with that crown to which even the humblest and poorest man on earth who believes, hopes, and loves as you do, can attain. Oh, how far more glorious is that Heavenly crown!" Sent by H. C. YEADON.

THE HUMAN RACE.-GIANTS.

Or the many things that excite our wonder, there is perhaps nothing which is more marvellous than the varieties of mankind. Assuming, as we are warranted in doing by the word of God and the researches of the best ethnologists, that the human species is one, it is easy to divide it, as some have done according to colour, into black, white, copper colour, and tawny; or, with Blumenbach and Pritchard, into the Caucasian, Mangolian, Ethiopian, Malay, and North American Indians, and call these the great varieties of the species; but these, or any other divisions, give but a faint idea of the diversity of mankind in a world of ten hundred million people, where no two faces are alike, where no two bodies have been cast in the same mould, and no two souls develop the same faculties in the same proportion.

It is not, however, the ordinary so much as the extraordinary, that has hitherto attracted the attention of mankind; and hence all early writers have filled their books with stories of monsters and prodigies of various kinds, and amongst them with accounts of giants and pigmies of the most extraordinary description. It would almost appear as if there were a natural tendency of mankind to romance in a certain state of their intellectual development, and hence all early travellers see wonders which are robbed of their proportions by those who come after them. Those who first visited America saw many things which have greatly diminished in later times. As an instance of this, Garcilasso de la Vega, in his history of Peru, says that a company of giants came there in a boat, so tall that the natives could only reach their knees; that their eyes were as broad as the bottom of a plate, and their limbs proportionably large

and another writer tells us that he measured several corpses, and found them from fourteen to fifteen feet high. These, however, are only trifles compared with the relations of more ancient writers, such as Homer, Pliny, and others. Here is a specimen from one of the authors of the Targums, Jonathan ben Uzziel-a specimen which may also teach us how much, by their vain traditions and commentaries, the Jewish rabbis have obscured divine truth:

"Og having observed that the camp of the Israelites extended six miles, went and tore up a mountain six miles at its base, and put it on his head and carried it towards the camp, that he might throw it on the camp and destroy them; but the word of the Lord prepared a worm, which bored a hole in the mountain over his head, so that it fell down upon his shoulders; at the same time his teeth grew out in all directions, so that he could not cast it off his head. Moses, who was himself ten cubits high, seeing Og thus entangled, took an axe ten cubits long, and having leaped ten cubits in height struck Og on the ancle-bone so that he fell and was slain."* According to this, Og's ancle must have been forty-five feet high; but even this account is surpassed by some others, for in other places of the Targum he is said to have been several miles in height.

Comparative anatomy has enabled us to dispose very summarily of one set of stories in reference to giants, or what has been termed GIANTS' BONES. Our own historians inform us that, in 1171, the bones of a giant were found in England fifty feet long. The Italian writers, however, have given accounts of still more remarkable skeletons; and if the relics which they describe had belonged to men, Homer's Cyclops would be no fable. An early father also mentions a giant's tooth, preserved in a certain church, which was several pounds weight, and conjectures very truly that it must have been an enormous mouth that held a full set of them. Science has enabled us to appropriate those bones to their rightful owners, and assign them to the mastodon and other extinct animals instead of man. Sir Hans Sloane had the vertebræ of a whale, which was dug up in Lincolnshire, sent to him as a portion of a giant's backbone; but, perceiving it to have been the property of a monster of the deep, the wonder ceased. Thus we have no direct evidence of the existence of that race of stout old gentlemen whom Jack slew, except it be the testimony of those veritable witnesses-the compilers of our early history.

Although we may doubt the fabulous dimensions given by the Jewish rabbis and others, still it is impossible to doubt the fact that giants have existed in almost every country. It is, however, plain, from the notices which historians have given of them, that they were always rarities, and

* See Targum on Num. xxi. 35, 36.

that we have no reliable accounts of a race of giants ever having existed. Indeed, there are many reasons for believing that the size of the human race, taken in its totality, rather increases than diminishes, and that the relations of historians, of gigantic nations of men, have originated in the first impressions of small men when brought into the presence of those of superior stature. An instance of this has just occurred. Our guards have gone to Turkey and astonished the people there by their great size, so that the Turk believes the English giaours to be the Anakims. When the Bashi-Bouzouk returns to his native home he will, no doubt, tell his wondering friends that the English are a race of giants, and, having added a foot to them, will greatly astonish the simple rustics. His descendants will add a yard more, so that some future traveller in the mountains of Armenia, unless in the meantime our missionaries there do their enlightening work, will no doubt hear his countrymen described as giants. Numerous cases of this sort of exaggeration are on record, and many strange scraps of history are explained by it.

Giants, as we before remarked, are common to all nations, ancient and modern; but it is probable that there never was a man more than ten feet high. Goliath of Gath was nine feet high, and so also was one of the Roman emperors. A skeleton was dug up at a place near St. Albans, near an urn marked Marcus Antoninus, eight feet high. Dr. Adam Clarke measured a man in Ireland who was eight feet six inches, and we recollect seeing a thigh-bone, which was taken out of a stone coffin found in Devonshire, which indicated a man of eight feet nine inches. There are indeed, we believe, men now living who are about the same height. From nine to ten feet, therefore, is the extreme which we can credit as the tallest man's attainments; and although there are, in profane history, a few seemingly authentic instances of men exceeding this stature, our knowledge of the race leads us rather to doubt the measure than believe in the man.

Taking this height, however, as the extreme, there is still a great diversity in the species; for the giant is set off at the other extremity by the dwarf, who is so far below the common standard as to be equally a wonder. The smallest man, perhaps, that ever lived was two feet high; and rising from this we have every conceivable measure up to the giant. Julia, the daughter of Augustus, was very fond of a dwarf named Sanopas, who, according to the Roman historian, was two feet and a handbreadth high. In the "Philosophical Transactions" two cases are mentioned-one a native of Norfolk, who never weighed more than 34lbs. in his life; and of another, a still more remarkable case in Wales, who, at the age of fifteen, weighed only 13lbs., was two feet seven inches high, and was characterised by all the symptoms of an old man at that

age. General Tom Thumb, who created such a sensation here a few years since, was one of the most perfect specimens of dwarfs that we know of; but it is highly improbable that a race so diminutive ever existed. The Esquimaux, near the pole, and the Bushmen-the gipsies, as they have been called, of the interior of Africa-are the smallest races of men that we are acquainted with, their height seldom exceeding four feet five inches, and from those to the Patagonians we have all the intermediate varieties.

So much has been said about the Patagonians, that the judgment of one who lived amongst them for a time in close captivity may be acceptable. It does not follow, however, that his, or any other description, applies to the whole of the Patagonians, as the author may have seen only a particular tribe; and this suggestion will, perhaps, explain many discrepancies in the works of those who have written about them. Captain Bourne says: "In person they are large; on first sight they are absolutely gigantic. They are taller than any other race I have seen, though it is impossible to give any accurate description. The only standard of measurement I had was my own height, which is about five feet ten inches. I could stand very easily under the arms of many of them, and all the men were at least a head taller than myself; their average height I should think is nearly six and a half feet, and there were specimens that could have been little less that seven feet high. They have broad shoulders, full and well developed chests, frames muscular and finely proportioned; the whole figure and air making an impression like that which the first view of the sons of Anak is recorded to have produced on the children of Israel. They exhibit enormous strength whenever they are sufficiently aroused to shake off their constitutional laziness and exert it. They have large heads, high cheek-bones like the North American Indians, whom they also resemble in their complexion, though it is a shade or two darker. Their foreheads are broad but low, the hair covering them nearly to the eyes; eyes full, generally black or of a dark brown, and brilliant, though expressive of but little intelligence; thick, coarse, and stiff hair protects the head-its abundance making any artificial covering superfluous. It is worn long, generally divided at the neck, so as to hang in two folds over the shoulders and back, but is sometimes bound above the temples by a fillet, over which it flows in ample luxuriance. Like more civilised people, the Patagonians take great pride in the proper disposition and effective display of their hair. Their teeth are generally beautiful, sound, and white-about the only attractive and civilised feature of their persons. Feet and hands are large, but not disproportionate to their total bulk.

* See "Gian's of Patagonia," p. 29.

The women are proportionably smaller than the men, and rather inclined to embonpoint.

Such are the giants of the old Spanish historians as seen by modern navigators. There are, however, other proofs of the enormous stature of the race, which at once set the question at rest; such as the bodies which have been disinterred, and the armour which has been worn by people in various ages and countries. We have bodies, principally mummies from Egypt, which are at least three thousand years old. Since the time when these people lived, not only scores of generations, but whole races of men have been born, lived, and died; and still the mummies, as they lie before us, are, we believe, in no case larger than the same class of people which they represent amongst us at the present day. The same observation applies also to the armour which has been dug out of tumuli and ancient graves. Poets and historians have represented their heroes as men of enormous size and strength. Homer speaks of the men who fought at Troy as hurling stones at each other, that twenty men of these degenerate days could scarcely lift; but when we examine the armour of those redoubtable warriors, we are convinced that it could hardly be worn by our Life Guards. This is found to be the case with the armour of the knights who won such renown by their prowess in the crusades and tournaments of England. They were very terrible, no doubt, to the monks and unarmed peasantry, but even in point of physical strength were in no way superior to the present generation of Englishmen.

Upon the whole, then, we conclude that giants have always been rarities, that there never was a race of giants, and that the common stature of mankind has remained much the same ever since the floodthe Patagonians being as large, and the Esquimaux and the Bushmen as small, as any races of men that ever lived.-Leisure Hour.

THE GOLDEN CHAIN,

BEING THOUGHTS, ORIGINAL AND SELECTED, BY WILLIAM STEWART. REMEMBER for what purpose you were born; and through the whole of life look at its end, and consider when that comes in what you will put your trust. Not in the bubble of worldly variety; it will be broken. Not in worldly pleasures; they will be gone. Not in great connexions; they cannot save you. Not in wealth; you cannot take it with you. Not in rank; in the grave there is no distinction. Not in the recol

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