Many have written, and most persons at this day believe the Patagonians to be giants, perhaps the progeny of the Cyclops Polyphemus; but believe me when I say that the first are deceivers, and the latter their dupes. In the narrative of the voyage of the Dutch commander, Oliver Von Nord, who, in the year 1598, passed the Straits of Magellan, the Patagonians are asserted to be ten or eleven feet high. The English, who passed these straits in 1764, gave them eight feet of height. The good men must have looked at those savages through a magnifying-glass, or measured them with a pole. For in the year 1766, Captains Wallis and Carteret measured the Patagonians, and declared them to be only six feet, or six feet six inches high. They were again measured in 1764, by the famous Bourgainville, who found them to be of the same height as Wallis had done. Father Thomas Falconer, many years Missionary in the Magellanic region, laughs at the idea entertained by Europeans of the gigantic stature of the Patagonians, instancing Kangapol chief Cacique of that land, who exceeded all the other Patagonians in stature, and yet did not appear to him to be above seven feet high. Soon after my arrival, I saw a great number of these savages in the city of Buenos-Ayres. I did not, indeed, measure them, but spoke to some of them by an interpreter, and though most of them were remarkably tall, yet they by no means deserved the name of giants. CHAPTER III. OF THE PERSONS OF THE ABIPONES, AND THE CONFORMATION OF THEIR BODIES. The Abipones are well formed, and have handsome faces, much like those of Europeans, except in point of colour, which, though not entirely white, has nothing of the blackness of Negroes and Mulattoes. For that natural whiteness which they have in infancy is somewhat destroyed as they grow up, by the sun, and by the smoke: as nearly the whole of their lives is passed in riding about plains exposed to the beams of the sun, and the short time that they spend in their tents, they keep up a fire on the ground day and night, by the heat and smoke of which they are unavoidably somewhat darkened. Whenever the cold south wind blows, they move the fire to the bed, or place it underneath the hanging net in which they lie, and are thus gradually smoke-dried, like a gammon of bacon in a chimney. The women, when they ride out into the country, shield their faces from the sun's rays with an umbrella, and are, in consequence, generally fairer than the men, who, more ambitious to be dreaded by their enemies than to be loved, to terrify than attract beholders, think the more they are scarred and sun-burnt, the handsomer they are.