ersons, perhaps of even
higher authority, have affirmed their belief in the reality of his life.
If the St. Thomases of paleontology were present, they would
reverentially touch him with their fingers and believe in his existence,
thus acknowledging their obstinate heresy. I know that science should be
careful in relation to all discoveries of this nature. I am not without
having heard of the many Barnums and other quacks who have made a trade
of suchlike pretended discoveries. I have, of course, heard of the
discovery of the kneebones of Ajax, of the pretended finding of the body
of Orestes by the Spartiates, and of the body of Asterius, ten spans
long, fifteen feet--of which we read in Pausanias.

"I have read everything in relation to the skeleton of Trapani,
discovered in the fourteenth century, and which many persons chose to
regard as that of Polyphemus, and the history of the giant dug up during
the sixteenth century in the environs of Palmyra. You are well aware as
I am, gentlemen, of the existence of the celebrated analysis made near
Lucerne, in 1577, of the great bones which the celebrated Doctor Felix
Plater declared belonged to a giant about nineteen feet high. I have
devoured all the treatises of Cassanion, and all those memoirs,
pamphlets, speeches, and replies published in reference to the skeleton
of Teutobochus, king of the Cimbri, the invader of Gaul, dug out of a
gravel pit in Dauphine, in 1613. In the eighteenth century I should have
denied, with Peter Campet, the existence of the preadamites of
Scheuchzer. I have had in my hands the writing called Gigans--"

Here my uncle was afflicted by the natural infirmity which prevented him
from pronouncing difficult words in public. It was not exactly
stuttering, but a strange sort of constitutional hesitation.

"The writing named Gigans--" he repeated.

He, however, could get no further.

"Giganteo--"

Impossible! The unfortunate word would not come out. There would have
been great laughter at the Institution, had the mistake happened there.

"Gigantosteology!" at last exclaimed Professor Hardwigg between two
savage growls.

Having got over our difficulty, and getting more and more excited--

"Yes, gentlemen, I am well acquainted with all these matters, and know,
also, that Cuvier and Blumenbach fully recognized in these bones the
undeniable remains of mammoths of the Quaternary period. But after what
we now see, to allow a doubt is to insult scien