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same time points out by its acridity the defect of his temper.

Sometimes again the name of the plant, though equally epigrammatic, is kinder than in the instances just mentioned. Thus Linnæus gave the name of Bauhinia to a plant which has its leaves in pairs in honour of two brotherbotanists, John and Gaspard Bauhins; and bestowed the name on Banisteria or a climbing-plant, in memory of M. Banister, who lost his life by falling from a rock while herborising.

In the name of Salix Babylonica, there is an elegant allusion to a well-known passage in the Psalms.

XLIII. LATIN DISTICHS.

MANY old writers have passed their lives in making combinations of words, which did more honour to their patience than to their wit. The combinations were generally formed of Latin words, and put into a barbarous distich. One of these solemn and indefatigable triflers calculated that the following verses might be changed in their order, and recombined, in thirty-nine million nine hundred and sixteen thousand eight hundred different ways; and that to complete the writing out of this series of combinations would occupy a man ninety-one years and forty-nine days, if he wrote at the rate of twelve hundred verses daily.

This is the wonderful distich :

Lex, grex, rex, spes, res, jus, thus, sal, sol bona lux, laus!

Mars, mors, sors, fraus, fæx, Styx, nox, crux, pus, mala vis, lis!

Which barbarism in poetry may be thus translated :— "Law, flocks, kings, hopes, riches, right, incense, salt, sun good torch, praise to you!

"Mars, death, destiny, fraud, impurity, Styx, night, the cross, bad humours, and evil power, may you be condemned.

The monks were great performers in this line; and the subjoined verse, in praise of the Virgin Mary, and which is calculated to admit of twelve hundred changes, without suffering in its sense, grammar, or quantity, probably proceeded from the dreamy solitude of a cell :

Tot tibi sunt dotes, virgo, quot sidera cæli:—

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Or, Virgin, thy virtues are as numerous as the stars of the heavens."

XLIV. HOW TALL WAS ADAM?

THIS important question has been debated with as much earnestness as if the salvation of the world depended upon it, by many very learned men of different ages and countries, who, however they may have differed in their computation, all agreed in one thing, that the stature of our first father was prodigious.

In the foremost rank of these speculators we must place the Jewish Rabbins and the mystical writers of the Talmud: some of the latter assert that when Adam was first created, his head lay at one end of the world, while his toes touched the other end; but that his figure was much shortened after his transgression, at the request of the angels, who were afraid of such a giant. These Talmudists, however, left him the height of nine hundred cubits; and others pretend that on being expelled from Paradise, he walked straight through the ocean, which, so enormous was the length of his limbs even after they had been shortened by sin, he found everywhere fordable. Other Rabbins reject as fabulous the account of Adam's stature equalling the length of the world; they fix it at one thousand cubits at his creation, and say that God deprived him of exactly one hundred cubits when he had eaten of the forbidden fruit. These extravagant notions prevailed among the Turks, Arabs, and many

*The Hebrews had several cubits, the most common of which was equal to about half an English yard.

people who certainly never read the old Jewish writers, but who all agree in attributing to Adam a most superhuman size. The stature of Eve, his wife, was of course proportionate; and in the neighbourhood of Mecca they show a hill which served as Eve's pillow, and afar off, in the plain, the spots where her legs rested, the distance from one of her knees to the other being computed at two musket-shots.

We should hardly have expected to see these dreams revived in France in the eighteenth century, and among a society of learned men; yet, the fact is, that in the year 1718, Henrion presented to the Academy of Belles Lettres a chronological scale of the human stature, wherein he soberly insisted that Adam was exactly one hundred and twenty-three feet nine inches high, and Eve, one hundred and eighteen feet, nine inches, and threequarters; being precisely four feet, eleven inches, and a quarter shorter than her husband.

According to Henrion's scale, the size of man rapidly diminished from his first fall down to his redemption; and, but for the advent of our Saviour, the human form divine would, in the same process of diminution, have been reduced, long ere our time, to that of a miserable homunculus, not so high as my Uncle Toby's knee. The learned author says that Noah was twenty feet shorter than Adam; that Abraham was only twenty-seven or twenty-eight feet high; but that as for Moses, (poor puny creature!) he measured no more than thirteen feet from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. Henrion, like a true theorist, wedded heart and brain to his system, is by no means discouraged or put out when he gets among the facts of tolerably well authenticated history. In contempt of all authority, he says Alexander the Great, who was remarked among his contemporaries as being rather a small man, was six feet high, but that Julius Cæsar only measured five feet.

Under Augustus our Saviour was born, and then the stature of mankind ceased to dwindle, and began even to shoot up a little: but there Henrion's Echelle Chronologique stops, he having proved to his entire satisfaction

that in the course of three thousand years man had diminished and lost one hundred and eighteen feet nine inches of his stature.

The Siamese and other Asiatic people have a religious belief that corresponds with the ingenious Frenchman's hard-laboured scale; they say that since the loss of his primitive innocence man has gradually become less and less, and that in the end he will not be higher than a magpie. But all people, all religions, all superstitions have acknowledged the existence in former times of a gigantic race, and have delighted to dwell upon the visionary picture of days when we were purer in heart, stronger in frame and mind, "more blest, more wise," than we now are. Some of the gods and heroes of the Hindu mythology are of the most prodigious dimensions; and the Greeks and Romans had their Titans, their Orion, their Polyphemus, their Theseus, and Hercules Virgil takes care to indicate the diminution of human strength, by telling us that it would take twelve such men as lived in his days, and these twelve chosen from among the strongest, to lift the rock which Turnus threw at Æneas' head. The ancient romance of Antar shows the notions that prevailed on this subject in the burning deserts of Arabia. In the frozen regions of the North, the Runic or Scandinavian mythology had Thor, with his mighty hammer, and a long progeny of demigods, heroes, and horses, all immeasurably surpassing the dimensions and vigour of modern nature. We need not multiply instances; but the same dream about the gigantic stature of the human race at some former period is found among the aboriginal red men of America.

Until a comparatively very recent date, the sciences of geology and comparative anatomy were so very little cultivated, that all the huge bones of the largest of living creatures and of those monstrous animals that have so long disappeared from the face of the earth, were taken for human bones. People seem to have forgotten that the world had ever had any other than human inhabitants. The scattered bones of whales, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, elephants, nay, even the fossile remains of the

iguanadon, the ichthyosaurus, the mastodon, and the megatherium, were picked up and shown as fractional parts of the bodies of ancient races of men; and when ribs were found three feet in circumference, and thighbones six feet long, no wonder they believed there had been enormous giants in the land. These remains strongly confirmed the vulgar error; for when men can say of anything wonderful that they have seen it with their own eyes, there is no hope of convincing them. The evidence of human skeletons found entire, of mummies, three thousand years old, no ways larger, or differing in proportion from living men and women, had no weight on these large believers in the marvellous, who could swallow an ante-diluvian monster for a man.

La Bibliotheca Rabbinica del Padre Bartolocci, tom. i. Histoire de l'Academie des Belles Lettres, t. i. p. 125, and t. iii. p. 16.

XLV. HOW TO SQUARE THE CIRCLE.

THE learned and laborious Pasquier remarks, in one of his books, that the fashion of wearing bonnets quarrés, or caps with square tops or crowns, was introduced shortly before his time, or about the year 1500; and he adds facetiously, that they thus found out what mathematicians had been so long looking for; namely, the quadrature of the circle.

XLVI. TURKISH PROVERBS.

THE Turks, in common with all the Eastern nations we are acquainted with, are wonderfully addicted to proverb, both in their writings and their common conversation. The Spaniards, who are fonder of proverbs than any other European people, derived the use of such citations, and an immense number of their proverbs, from the Moors

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