quite vel!' and he ran out of the shop from the gaze of the aged man, scarcely able to restrain his merriment till he got out of hearing. He then told Mr. Mathews, during his convulsions of laughter, that the person they had just seen was the grantor of his annuity. Ha! ha ha! O Mathew, I cannot help! O poor body, poor hold body! It macks me laffing, poor hold hanimal! O he say prayer for me die, often when he slip! O you may depend-ha! ha! ha! but Boruwlaski never die ! He calcoolated dat dwarf not live it long, et I live it forty years to plag him. O he is in a hobbel! I tellee dat! He fifty year yonger den Boruwlaski; mintime

he dead as soon as me. O yes, you may be sure dat-dat is my opinnon. Boruwlaski never die,' playfully nodding his little head, you may depend.' Mr. Mathews asked him if the old man had any family, (feeling some compassion for his hard case,) to which the count cried out, O he have it shildren twenty, like a pig, poor body! mintime he riche body! O he have it goold et wast many bank nott. Bote he have it greet prepencity to keep him fast hold, poor idiot! It macks me laffing!"

We have little more to record of this singular being, who lived to the extraordinary age of ninety-eight; a great age for an ordinary man, and quite without example in the history of dwarfs. He died at Bank's Cottage, near Durham, on the 5th of September, 1837, and his remains were placed near those of Stephen Kemble, in the nine altars of Durham Cathedral. It is stated in the Gentleman's Magazine, (October, 1837,) that the cottage was a gift of some of the prebend- | aries of Durham, who also allowed him a handsome income. They may have given him the cottage, but the income came, as Boruwlaski himself informs us, from the Misses Metcalfe. If the reader attentively considers the story we have narrated, he will perceive that the count, although an anomaly in respect of size, was in all other respects a perfectly formed man, and is distinguished from most other dwarfs by longevity, paternity, and intelligence. The anomaly, therefore, could not have been deeply-seated. He was a perfect copy of nature's finest work, printed in duodecimo.

In the Philosophical Transactions (1751-52) we have the case of a dwarf named Hopkins, who at fifteen years of age stood only two feet seven, and weighed between twelve and thirteen pounds. He had all the signs of old age. He was bent, deformed, and troubled with a dry cough. His hearing and sight were bad; his teeth almost all decayed. He was very thin, and so weak as scarcely to be

able to stand. Till the age of seven he had been gay, healthy, and active; nor at that age did he show any indications of arrested growth. He was well formed, and weighed nineteen pounds, that is, six pounds more than he weighed at fifteen. From that period his health declined, He came from and his body wasted.

healthy parents of ordinary stature, and was the second of six children, another of whom was also a dwarf. This case, which is by no means without parallel, is curiously contrasted with those of Jeffrey Hudson and Boruwlaski, and shows how much more aberrant the And still anomaly of structure was. more aberrant is that of Dantlow, the Russian dwarf, who was only thirty inches high; he was without arms, and had only four toes on each foot. With his feet he made pen-and-ink sketches, rivaling etchings, and knitted stockings with needles made of wood. He ate with his left foot, learned with great facility, and was eager to learn.

We will only mention two other examples, which belong to our own day, and which are in important respects typical.

One of these was a German girl, exhibited in Paris in 1816; she was of parents above the average height, who had, however, previously produced a male dwarf. At eight years old she weighed no more than an ordinary new-born infant; her height was eighteen inches. In temper she was gay, restless, and excitable. Her pulse normally was at ninety-four.

The second example is Thérèse Souvray, a compatriote of Bébé, and destined to be the bride of that dwarf, to whom she was solemnly affianced in the year 1761; but death snatched the bridegroom from her, and as the fiancée of this celebrated man, she was exhibited in Paris during the year 1821. She was then seventythree years of age; gay, healthy, lively, and danced the dance of her country, in company with her sister, two years her senior, and measuring only three feet and a half.

Leaving this part of our subject, we must dwell a few minutes on its counterpart. The Bible tells us of days in which there were giants, but the literature of giantology is more ample than instructive, writers having been somewhat too diligent with the fables of antiquity, and too negligent of investigated facts. There can be no necessity for our pausing

here to examine the once much-mooted question of a race of giants supposed to have existed in ancient times. The same reasons which forbade the belief in a race of dwarfs forbid the belief in a race of giants a race of anomalies being a much greater physiological than verbal contradiction; and in reference to giants it has this further difficulty, that they are, without known exception, always sterile. Many persons, however, will present the question in another and more plausible form, asking whether the normal standard has not been gradually degenerating, so that by mounting sufficiently high in the records of antiquity, we should meet with a standard so enormously surpassing our own as to constitute a race of giants. That a race can be degenerated we see in the Spanish nobility, not to mention various animals; but even if the question were affirmatively established, there would be no race of giants for us to believe in, but simply a race of men whose stature enormously exceeded our own, who were not anomalies at all, any more than the mastiff is an anomaly compared with the terrier. Nor is this a verbal distinction only; the scientific idea of a giant is something rigorously precise, which altogether excludes identification with a larger race. It will presently be seen what constitutes a giant in scientific language; meanwhile, the reader will perhaps be obliging enough to accept our affirmation. Yet even that is needless, for although we have admitted that there is no intrinsic improbability in the supposition of a larger race having formerly existed, we are forced at the same time to admit that there is not a tittle of evidence in its favor. Our evidence respecting past races is scanty indeed, but we have absolutely none in favor of the degeneracy of the human form.

As far as the evidence of monuments, armor, implements, tombs, &c., enables us to form any opinion, we are forced to declare that the men who lived before Agamemnon, strong though they were, were not of nobler stature than the men who now speculate about them. The geologist has not found a single bone belonging to those pretended giants; not even a single portion of bone, from which some great constructive intellect could show us the probable structure of these ancestral giants. True it is that, for

many years, the bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, mastodons, whales, &c., were exhibited as proofs of human degeneracy, and as remains of the pre-historic giants; but who now believes in these proofs? We need not read Cuvier's Ossemens Fossiles to know what credit such evidence deserves. A mere glance at one or two of the most illustrative examples would suffice.

Very well known to fame is the Sicilian giant, whose skeleton was found at Trapani, in the fourteenth century, which was at once pronounced to be the skeleton of Polyphemus, dear to all readers of Theocritus. It was calculated that his height must have been three hundred feet, a moderate allowance for a Cyclop. But the erudite believers who thus established the proportions of the giant, seem never to have been puzzled by the fact that only thirty feet was the height of the cave in which he was said to have been found seated, with a "mast of some high ammiral" for a walking-stick. Some skeptics, indeed, pointed out that the bones were very different in form from human bones; but this objection was set aside as frivolously flippant. Why should Polyphemus, who differed so enormously in stature, not also differ in form from our puny race? He was sixty times as high as the skeptics; why should he closely resemble them in other respects? Did not St. Augustine find the tooth of a giant, in Utica, large enough to make a hundred miserable modern molars?

Still more celebrated was King Teutobochus, whose remains were discovered in the Dauphiné, not far from the Rhone, in 1613. A surgeon, named Mazurier, brought them to Paris, declaring them to have been found in a tomb thirty feet long, bearing this inscription, “Teutobochus Rex." Now, then, might all Paris, in exchange for a trifle of silver, behold the veritable remains of the Cimbrian warrior slain by Marius; and, to prove his identity, fifty coins bearing the effigy of Marius were found inside the tomb. No one ever saw these coins; but some people are so curious! Paris paid its money liberally, and gaped in wide-mouthed wonderment. A few skeptical physicians, especially the great Riolan, wrote fiercely against the imposture, but others as fiercely espoused the giant's cause, and this paper war stimulated public curiosity.

The bones were the bones of a mastodon. In a word, all the fossils hitherto discovered, and supposed to belong to giants, have, on inspection, been proved to belong to brutes. All the evidence by which a colossal race of men was once accredited disappears; and no one scientifically educated now believes that giants ever existed as a race, although individual giants have been far from rare. Men of seven feet are not so rare but that many readers must have seen such.

Among the osteological curiosities of the collection made by the London College of Surgeons stands the skeleton of the Irish giant, O'Byrne, eight feet high; and beside it stands the skeleton of Mademoiselle Crachami, only twenty-three inches high: two striking types of the giant and dwarf, not belonging to fable, not liable to the skepticism which must ever hang over the reports of travelers, but standing there in naked reality, measurable by a prosaic foot-rule. We read, indeed, of eight feet and a half, and even of nine feet, having been attained; but here, at any rate, is O'Byrne, a solid, measurable fact, admitting of no doubt. That one must generally doubt all reported measurements of wondrous types, is illustrated, even in the case of O'Byrne. The Annual Register, in its obituary for June, 1783, vol. xxvi., p. 209, gives this account of him:

"In Cockspur-street, Charing-cross, aged only twenty-two, Mr. Charles Byrne, the famous Irish giant, whose death is said to have been precipitated by excessive drinking, to which he was always addicted, but more particularly since his late loss of almost all his property, which he had simply invested in a single bank

note of £700.

"Our philosophical readers may not be displeased to know, on the credit of an ingenious correspondent who had opportunity of informing himself, that Mr. Byrne, in August, 1780, measured eight feet; that in 1782 he had gained two inches; and after he was dead he measured eight feet four inches.

"Neither his father, mother, brother, nor any other person of his family, was of an extraordinary size."

Nothing can be more precise than the measurements here given: eight feet four he is said to have been, and such Boruwlaski reports him to have been, in the passage formerly quoted; yet there stands his skeleton, measuring eight feet in a straight line from the vertex to the sole. This is, of course, only the height of the skeleton; and we must allow about two

the mountain-height

As the golden-tress'd Day-giver, from his everfilling quiver,

Pours them flashing all around him, in the glory of his might.

From the lake the breeze is sweeping o'er the waters silent sleeping

Sweeping through the broad-leaved lilies

sweeping through the tangled reeds; Then across the wide plain speeding, in the distance dim receding, Perfume-laden from the blossoms, freighted with the ripen'd seeds.

Leaps the wild roe on the mountain; bursts the brooklet from its fountain;

From the forest comes the murmur of a million waving leaves;

Down the rocks the goat is springing; all the woods break forth in singing; In the furrows lies the promise of a thousand golden sheaves;

And the honey-bees are humming, for the fair

hair'd spring is coming

With the sound of plashing waters, and the light of sunny skies—

With the dew of fitful showers on her crown of starry flowers,

And the warmth of summer glowing in her

deep and violet eyes.

A RUSSIAN INHERITANCE.

is not many years since, that among

felt the cold air as they were drawn over the snow with almost railroad speed by their high-bred English horses; while on

as

burgh, no name was mentioned with more respect than that of Andreas Diebitsch, a good man, an honest trader, and an energetic man of business; combined qualities that had not only filled his warehouses with goods, but also his coffers with gold, and made him the owner of bonds and securities, and many other valuable properties. Still he relaxed not in his efforts, but went on adding and still adding, as if he feared want might overtake him before the death that his white hairs might have whispered was drawing very near.

And to inherit all this wealth he had but two grand-children, the orphan daughters of his only son; two sweet, gentle, soft-eyed girls, whose hearts were bound closely together in the concentrated affection there were so few to share; wearing their costly robes, and dwelling in their luxurious home, with the simple unconsciousness of those who have never known aught else; and, unthinking of the large dowries their grandfather was so diligently increasing, living happily among the flowers in their summer garden, and the birds by their winter stove.

Without other companionship, Petrowna and Mata Diebitsch had grown to womanhood; for they had from their childhood been motherless, and their grandfather had never introduced them to the amusements that brightened the youth of others of their sex. In their simplicity they never missed them; but within the high walls that shut them out from the world, they lived lives as calm and beautiful as their flowers, and their hearts were light as their birds when they poured forth their morning song. Beyond those walls they never went, except to mass, or sometimes for a summer sail on the moon-lit Neva, or in winter for a drive over the snow in their sledge.

In this tranquil life years had passed on, and already Petrowna was twenty-two. It was her birthday, and in honor of the occasion the sisters were to drive twelve miles out of St. Petersburgh, to visit Petrowna's nurse, carrying with them a whole sledge full of gifts. It was a beautiful morning, and the sun shone almost as brightly as he was wont to do on their annual summer excursion to visit Mata's nurse. Wrapped in warm furs, they hardly

musical chimes of the bells which decorated their horses' harness, and were the only tokens of their otherwise silent approach.

On they went with their merry music over the firm snowy roads, between the lofty snow-banks; through the villages, with their snow-covered cottages, and snow-incrusted trees; and across frozen rivers whose very existence was hidden in snow, until they arrived at the cottage of nurse Nichola, with its rugged wooden walls, gay with bright-colored pictures painted on bark, and its abundant sheepskins, that were more comfortable than sightly; while in holiday costume beside the stone, sat the rosy-cheeked old dame, awaiting this annual visit. But it must needs be a brief one, for already the sun was stooping over the pine forests to the southwest, and the short day would soon be ended; and leaving behind them the gifts that hardly consoled Nichola for their departure, they sprang into their sledge, and were whirled off with all the speed of three horses, scarce conscious of the light, well-poised vehicle behind them.

Onward the horses dashed, as if rejoicing that each step brought them nearer home; over the snowy hills, and down the icy declivities they bounded with the same fleetness; while the sisters laughed gayly, as the trees and cottages seemed flashing past them, and the driver's eyes sparkled with the excitement of their race-like speed. At length, in descending a steeper hill than ordinary, the sledge gave an unexpected slant, lost its balance, and fell over, burying the whole party in the snow, while the horses, entangled among the traces, kicked violently.

An overturn among the snow is generally more ludicrous than a distressing accident; but they had fallen from some height, and that tells, even though the resting place be snow, and not only was the driver's arm broken by a kick from a horse, but Petrowna lay insensible, from a blow received from some projection of the sledge. Mata, and the maid who had accompanied them, knelt by her, almost in despair, while the uninjured man-servant was fruitlessly endeavoring to catch the head of the foremost horse, when the distant tinkle of sledge-bells came floating