The Athletes and Athletic Sports of Scotland

i8 ATHLETIC SPORTS OF SCOTLAND. the Pancratium at Olympia. He is said to have stopped a chariot with the horsesgoing atfull speed, by seizing itwith his hands, andto have held it against all their efforts to proceed. On another occasion he seized abull by a foot, which escaped only by leaving the foot in the athlete's hands. The Roman Emperor, MAXIMINUS, who reigned from 235 to 328 A.D ., was over 8"feet in height, and used to wear one ofhis wife's bracelets as a ring for his thumb. His feats were drawing a loaded waggon, knocking the grinders off a horse's jaw with his fist, breaking a horse's legwith a kick, splitting young trees with his hands, and squeezing to powder the hardest stones with his fingers. His stone - squeezing, we suspect, did not include Aberdeen granite. The others may have been great or trifling feats according to circumstances. Like Milo, he had a fine healthy appetite,and could put himself outside 40 lbs. of meat and 5 gallons 6pints ofwine in a day. Taking the foregoing as the leading examples of the strong men of ancient times, itis sufficient tosay in brief that fartherthan that theywere regarded as the strongestmen of their time, theyhave not left on record a single feat by which their strengthmay be compared with that of modern strongmen. Coming to more recent times, we find that in the beginning of the eighteenth century a man named JOYCE, a native ofKent, went about the country for several years as a champion strong man, and was called the secondSamson. After him ECKEBERG, a native of Anhalt, in Germany, travelled through Europe under the title of Samson. The remarkable thing abouthim was that he was neither ofexceptional size nor strength. This led, as recorded in Brewster's " Natural Magic," to a Dr. Desaguliers, Dr. A. Stuart,Dr. Pringle, and the Marquis of Tullibardine taking accurate observations of the methods by which he performed feats apparently requiring great strength. The resultof their observations was that they were able to per­ form most ofhis feats the same evening. He maybe said to be the originator of the pretended feat of pulling against horses. This hedid by sitting on an inclined plane, his feet sloping up-