Who can fail to recognize in this a mystified description of the Tatars of High Asia? Professor Nilsson tries to account in a general way for the huge or tiny stature of legendary tribes, as being mere exaggeration of their actual largeness or smallness. We must admit that this sometimes really happens. The accounts which European eye-witnesses brought home of the colossal stature of the Patagonians, to whose waists they declared their own heads reached, are enough to settle once for all the fact that myths of giants may arise from the sight of really tall men;[1] and it is so, too, with the dwarf-legends of the same region, as where Knivet, the old traveller, remarks of the little people of Rio de la Plata, that they are 'not so very little as described.'[2]
Nevertheless, this same group of giant and dwarf myths may serve as a warning not to stretch too widely a partial explanation, however sound within its proper limits. There is plenty of evidence that giant-legends are sometimes philosophic myths, made to account for the finding of great fossil bones. To give but a single instance of such connexion, certain huge jaws and teeth, found in excavating on the Hoe at Plymouth, were recognized as belonging to the giant Gogmagog, who in old times fought his last fight there against Corineus, the eponymic hero of Cornwall.[3] As to the dwarfs, again, stories of them are curiously associated with those long-enduring monuments of departed races — their burial-cysts and dolmens. Thus, in the United States, ranges of rude stone cysts, often only two or three feet long, are connected with the idea of a pygmy race buried in them. In Brittany, the dolmens are the abodes and treasuries
- ↑ Pigafetta in Pinkerton, vol. xi. p. 314. See Blumenbach, 'De Generis Humanæ Varietate;' Fitzroy, 'Voy. of Adventure and Beagle,' vol. i.; Waitz, 'Anthropologie,' vol. iii. p. 488.
- ↑ Knivet in Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1231; compare Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. v. p. 564, with Martius, 'Ethnog. Amer.' p. 424; see also Krapf, 'East Africa,' p. 51; Du Chaillu, 'Ashango-land,' p. 319.
- ↑ 'Early Hist. of Mankind,' ch. xi.; Hunt, 'Pop. Rom.' 1st series, pp. 18, 304.
