It is easy, therefore, to trace the origin of these exaggerations.  Those old navigators, for instance, who saw so many fine things which were not to be seen, how should they help peopling the barbarous realms with races of giants?  Job Hartop, who three times observed a merman rise above water to his waist, near the Bermudas,—­Harris, who endured such terrific cold in the Antarctics, that once, perilously blowing his nose with his fingers, it flew into the fire and was seen no more,—­Knyvett, who, in the same regions, pulled off his frozen stockings, and his toes with them, but had them replaced by the ship’s surgeon,—­of course these men saw giants, and it is only a matter for gratitude that they vouchsafed us dwarfs also, to keep up some remains of self-respect in us.  In Magellan’s Straits, for instance, they saw, on one side, from three to four thousand pigmies with mouths from ear to ear; while on the other shore they saw giants whose footsteps were four times as large as an Englishman’s,—­which was a strong expression, considering that the Englishman’s footstep had already reached round the globe.

The only way to test these earlier observations is by later ones.  For instance, in the year 1772, a Dutchman named Roggewein discovered Easter Island.  His expedition had cost the government a good deal, and he had to bring home his money’s worth of discoveries.  Accordingly, his islanders were all giants,—­twice as tall, he said, as the tallest of the Europeans; “they measured, one with another, the height of twelve feet; so that we could easily,—­who will not wonder at it?—­without stooping, have passed between the legs of these sons of Goliath.  According to their height, so is their thickness.”  Moreover, he “puts down nothing but the real truth, and upon the nicest inspection,” and, to exhibit this caution, warns us that it would be wrong to rate the women of those regions as high as the men, they being, as he pityingly owns, “commonly not above ten or eleven feet.”  Sweet young creatures they must have appeared, belle and steeple in one.  And it was certainly a great disappointment to Captain Cook, when, on visiting the same Island, fifty years later, he could not find man or woman more than six feet tall.  Thus ended the tale of this Flying Dutchman.

Thus lamentably have the inhabitants of Patagonia been also dwindling, though, there, if anywhere, still lies the Cape of Bad Hope for the apostles of human degeneracy.  Pigafetta originally estimated them at twelve feet.  In the time of Commodore Byron, they had already grown downward; yet he said of them that they were “enormous goblins,” seven feet high, every one of them.  One of his officers, however, writing an independent narrative, seemed to think this a needless concession; he admits, indeed, that the women were not, perhaps, more than seven feet, or seven and a half, or, it might be, eight, “but the men were, for the most part, about nine feet high, and very often more.”  Lieutenant Cumming, he said, being but six feet two, appeared a mere pigmy among them.  But it seems, that, in after-times, on some one’s questioning this diminutive lieutenant as to the actual size of these enormous goblins, the veteran frankly confessed, that, “had it been anywhere else but in Patagonia, he should have called them good sturdy savages and thought no more on’t.”