A subject so calculated to fire the imagination has of course not
been neglected by the poets. Claudian's verses are well known:


Pyrenaeisque sub antris
Ignea flumineae legere ceraunia nymphae.


Marbodius, Bishop of Rennes, in the eleventh century, sang of the
thunder-stones in some Latin verses which have come down to us,
and an old poet of the sixteenth century in his turn exclaimed,
on seeing the strange bones around him


Le roc de Tarascon hebergea quelquefois
Les geants qui couroyent les montagnes de Foix,
Dont tant d'os successifs rendent le temoignage.


With these stones, in fact, were found numerous bones of great size,
which had belonged to unknown creatures. Latin authors speak of similar
bones found in Asia Minor, which they took to be those of giants of an
extinct race. This belief was long maintained; in 1547 and again in
1667 fossil remains were found in the cave of San Ciro near Palermo;
and Italian savants decided that they had belonged to men eighteen feet
high. Guicciadunus speaks of the bones of huge elephants carefully
preserved in the Hotel de Ville at Antwerp as the bones of a giant
named Donon, who lived 1300 years before the Christian era.