JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
[Detail of below]
The wonderful and occasionally problematic Fr. Athanasius Kircher (addressed numerous times in this blog, just check out a search under his name in the Google box at left) inferred by “anthropomorphic calculus” (so says Jan Bondesman, in A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, pg 82) the size a human/giant must have been to accommodate (for example) an elephant tooth. So instead of dinosaurs you’d get these enormous creatures many time larger than a “Homo ordinarius”–as you can see in the scale, we have the enormous creature flanked by “homo ordinarius”, then Goliath (still puny), “Helvetius Gygas”, and “Gygas Mauritanius”, all quite tiny compared to the big boy, who stood 200 cubits. (A cubit was a measure from he elbow to the fingertips, so depending on where you were, the cubit could be 17-20 inches or so; in any event the giant would have been 300-400 feet tall.) This image appears in Kircher’s great Mundus subterraneus, quo universaw denique naturae divitae, published in 1668.
- This original image is available for purchase via the blog’s bookstore, here.
{This is a detail from the full image, following]