  Dissipationless (gas-free or "dry") mergers have been suggested to play a
major role in the formation and evolution of early-type galaxies, particularly
in growing their mass and size without altering their stellar populations. We
perform a new test of the dry merger hypothesis by comparing N-body simulations
of realistic systems to empirical constraints provided by recent studies of
lens early-type galaxies. We find that major and minor dry mergers: i) preserve
the nearly isothermal structure of early-type galaxies within the observed
scatter; ii) do not change more than the observed scatter the ratio between
total mass M and "virial" mass R_e*sigma/2G (where R_e is the half-light radius
and sigma the projected velocity dispersion); iii) increase strongly galaxy
sizes [as M^(0.85+/-0.17)] and weakly velocity dispersions [as M^(0.06+/-0.08)]
with mass, thus moving galaxies away from the local observed M-R_e and M-sigma
relations; iv) introduce substantial scatter in the M-R_e and M-sigma
relations. Our findings imply that, unless there is a high degree of fine
tuning of the mix of progenitors and types of interactions, present-day massive
early-type galaxies cannot have assembled more than ~50% of their mass, and
increased their size by more than a factor ~1.8, via dry merging.
