giant in whose house he had been well treated, and that the giant was an affable personage of great simplicity of mind and easily amused, kind to poultry and fond of string music.
Indeed, had he not been so excessively large it is probable he would have been a very ordinary person indeed. This, at any rate, seems certain, that if he had been any smaller he would not have been either so simple or so shabbily treated. It has always been the misfortune of huge stature to be taken advantage of, and so many men of strength have been betrayed and brought to grief by Jacks and Aladdins, Omphales and Delilahs, that it has come to be understood that when a man is preternaturally strong he should be also extremely unassuming in demeanor, and liable, therefore, to unprovoked aggression.
It has, I know, been gravely endeavored, by a certain class, to shake the world's belief in the existence of giants, but the attempt has been fortunately unsuccessful. No argument, however ingenious, erudite, or forcible, can knock out of sight such an extremely obvious fact as a giant; and I consider, therefore, that Maclaurin, who attempted to demonstrate, by the destructive method and mathematics, the impossibility of giants, might have saved himself the labor of such profane calculations. The destructive argument, however, I confess, has this much in its favor, that it explains why many of the Anakim are weak in the knees, for, inasmuch as the forces tending to destroy cohesion in masses of matter arising from their own gravity only increase in the quadruplicate ratio of their lengths, the opposite forces, tending to preserve that cohesion, increase only in the triplicate ratio. It follows,
