(M117) According to one legend Typhon was a monster, half man and half brute, begotten in Cilicia by Tartarus upon the goddess Earth. The upper part of him was human, but from the loins downward he was an enormous snake. In the battle of the gods and giants, which was fought out in Egypt, Typhon hugged Zeus in his snaky coils, wrested from him his crooked sword, and with the blade cut the sinews of the god’s hands and feet. Then taking him on his back he conveyed the mutilated deity across the sea to Cilicia, and deposited him in the Corycian cave. Here, too, he hid the severed sinews, wrapt in a bear’s skin. But Hermes and Aegipan contrived to steal the missing thews and restore them to their divine owner. Thus made whole and strong again, Zeus pelted his beaten adversary with thunderbolts, drove him from place to place, and at last overwhelmed him under Mount Etna. And the spots where the hissing bolts fell are still marked by jets of flame.(458) (M118) It is possible that the discovery of fossil bones of large extinct animals may have helped to localize the story of the giant at the Corycian cave. Such bones, as we have seen, are often found in limestone caverns, and the limestone gorges of Cilicia are in fact rich in fossils. The Arcadians laid the scene of the battle of the gods and the giants in the plain of Megalopolis, where many bones of mammoths have come to light, and where, moreover, flames have been seen to burst from the earth and even to burn for years.(459) These natural conditions would easily suggest a fable of giants who had fought the gods and had been slain by thunderbolts; the smouldering earth or jets of flame would be regarded as the spots where the divine lightnings had struck the ground. Hence the Arcadians sacrificed to thunder and lightning.(460) In Sicily, too, great quantities of bones of mammoths, elephants, hippopotamuses, and other animals long extinct in the island have been found, and have been appealed to with confidence by patriotic Sicilians as conclusive evidence of the gigantic stature of their ancestors or predecessors.(461) These remains of huge unwieldy creatures which once trampled through the jungle or splashed in the rivers of Sicily may have contributed with the fires of Etna to build up the story of giants imprisoned under the volcano and vomiting smoke and flame from its crater. “Tales of giants and monsters, which stand in direct connexion with the finding of great fossil bones, are scattered broadcast over the mythology of the world. Huge bones, found at Punto Santa Elena, in the north of Guayaquil, have served as a foundation for the story of a colony of giants who dwelt there. The whole area of the Pampas is a great sepulchre of enormous extinct animals; no wonder that one great plain should be called the ‘Field of the giants,’ and that such names as ‘the hill of the giant,’ ‘the stream of the animal,’ should be guides to the geologist in his search for fossil bones.”(462)