real:

That there never were giants upon this earth, because gigantic
footprints are more gigantic than prints made by men who are not giants.

We think of giants as occasional visitors to this earth. Of
course--Stonehenge, for instance. It may be that, as time goes on, we
shall have to admit that there are remains of many tremendous
habitations of giants upon this earth, and that their appearances here
were more than casual--but their bones--or the absence of their bones--

Except--that, no matter how cheerful and unsuspicious my disposition may
be, when I go to the American Museum of Natural History, dark cynicisms
arise the moment I come to the fossils--or old bones that have been
found upon this earth--gigantic things--that have been reconstructed
into terrifying but "proper" dinosaurs--but my uncheerfulness--

The dodo did it.

On one of the floors below the fossils, they have a reconstructed dodo.
It's frankly a fiction: it's labeled as such--but it's been
reconstructed so cleverly and so convincingly--

Fairies.

"Fairy crosses."

_Harper's Weekly_, 50-715:

That, near the point where the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains
unite, north of Patrick County, Virginia, many little stone crosses have
been found.

A race of tiny beings.

They crucified cockroaches.

Exquisite beings--but the cruelty of the exquisite. In their diminutive
way they were human beings. They crucified.

The "fairy crosses," we are told in _Harper's Weekly_, range in weight
from one-quarter of an ounce to an ounce: but it is said, in the
_Scientific American_, 79-395, that some of them are no larger than the
head of a pin.

They have been found in two other states, but all in Virginia are
strictly localized on and along Bull Mountain.

We are reminded of the Chinese seals in Ireland.

I suppose they fell there.

Some are Roman crosses, some St. Andrew's, some Maltese. This time we
are spared contact with the anthropologists and have geologists instead,
but I am afraid that the relief to our finer, or more nearly real,
sensibilities will not be very great. The geologists were called upon to
explain the "fairy crosses." Their response was the usual scientific
tropism--"Geologists say that they are crystals." The writer in
_Harper's Weekly_ points out that this "hold up," or this anaesthetic, if
theoretic science be little but attempt to assuage pangs of the
unexplained, fails to account for the localized distributions