ly overdrawn, the
reported cases of hypnotic trance, and of voluntary interment, among the
Hindus and elsewhere, lend probability to these stories, because of the
fact that long periods of trance have been undergone by various
individuals--who awakened from these states in apparently perfect
health, and none the worse for their remarkable experience. Several
spontaneous cases have been reported quite recently, in which the
subject has passed several months, or even a year or more, in a
sleep-state--awaking every few days or weeks, speaking a few words,
taking perhaps a little nourishment, and then lapsing into oblivion! The
older cases of extended sleep thus find a close parallel in the newer
cases.

One of the chief constituents of every fairy story is the giant or
dwarf, who occupies a central position. That giants and dwarfs exist
today there can be no doubt. They are frequently to be seen in the
side-shows, and even in public life. But it is now known that giants and
dwarfs suffer from a certain disease, which renders them particularly
short-lived; and they are, generally speaking, muscularly weak for their
size. They are not the stalwart, fierce race of beings imagined in the
fairy stories, and which popular belief still pictures them. For the
fairy tale, the giant is always enormous and powerful, and generally
cannibalistic in his habits! Have giants of this character existed?
Could such a race have existed? To this question it is almost certain
that we must answer "No." M. Dastre, of the Sorbonne, Paris, has gone
into this question at great length, and has given us the result of his
researches in his essay on _The Stature of Man at Various Epochs_. Here
he says:

"It is incontestable that beings of gigantic size do appear from
time to time.... Giants are men whose development, instead of
pursuing a normal course, has undergone a morbid deviation, and
whose nutrition has become perverted. They are dystrophic. Their
great stature shows that one part has gained at the loss of
another. It is a symptom of their inferiority in the struggle for
existence. Their condition is not only a variation from the
ordinary conditions of development--that is to say, they are
'congenital monsters,' the study of which belongs to the science of
teratology--but it is a variation also from a state of health,
physically and normally sound. In other words, they are diseased,
a