[A quote from David Marsh’s English translation of Chapter 3 of the Prolegomena of Book 2 of the NEW SCIENCE of Giambattista Vico:]
The founders of pagan antiquity must have descended from the races of Ham, Japheth, and Shem, who one by one gradually renounced the true religion of their common father Noah. This religion was the only bond which kept them within human society, both in the union of marriage and hence in their family groups. When they renounced it and began to couple promiscuously, they dissolved their marriages and dispersed their families. In this way, they began to wander like brutes though the earth’s great forest. [ . . . ] They were scattered widely as they fled from the wild beasts which abounded in the great forest, and as they pursued women who in that state were wild, timid, and intractable. And they were further separated as they sought pasture and water.
Since mothers abandoned their children, they grew up without hearing any human speech, or learning any human behavior, and sank to an utterly bestial and brutish state. In this state, mothers merely nursed their infants and let them wallow naked in their own faeces, abandoning them for ever once they were weaned. Wallowing in their faeces (whose nitrous salts wondrously enriched the soil), these children struggled to make their way through the great forest, now grown dense after the recent flood. And as their muscles expanded and contracted in this struggle, the children absorbed more and more nitrous salts. At the same time, these children lacked that fear of the gods, fathers, and teachers which tempers the most exuberant phase of childhood. As a result, their flesh and bones must have grown inordinately large, and they became so vigorous and robust that they turned out to be giants.