13, Waterloo Place. S.W.
January, 1886.
CONTENTS.
| PAGE | |
| Introduction | [1] |
| List of Authors cited | [27] |
| [CHAPTER I.]—On some remarkable Animal Forms | [31] |
| [CHAPTER II.]—Extinction of Species | [42] |
| [CHAPTER III.]—Antiquity of Man | [78] |
| [CHAPTER IV.]—The Deluge not a Myth | [101] |
| [CHAPTER V.]—On the Translation of Myths between the Old and the New World | [137] |
| [CHAPTER VI.]—The Dragon | [159] |
| [CHAPTER VII.]—The Chinese Dragon | [212] |
| [CHAPTER VIII.]—The Japanese Dragon | [248] |
| [CHAPTER IX.]—The Sea-Serpent | [260] |
| [CHAPTER X.]—The Unicorn | [338] |
| [CHAPTER XI.]—The Chinese Phœnix | [366] |
| Appendices | [375] |
MYTHICAL MONSTERS.
INTRODUCTION.
It would have been a bold step indeed for anyone, some thirty years ago, to have thought of treating the public to a collection of stories ordinarily reputed fabulous, and of claiming for them the consideration due to genuine realities, or to have advocated tales, time-honoured as fictions, as actual facts; and those of the nursery as being, in many instances, legends, more or less distorted, descriptive of real beings or events.
Now-a-days it is a less hazardous proceeding. The great era of advanced opinion, initiated by Darwin, which has seen, in the course of a few years, a larger progress in knowledge in all departments of science than decades of centuries preceding it, has, among other changes, worked a complete revolution in the estimation of the value of folk-lore; and speculations on it, which in the days of our boyhood would have been considered as puerile, are now admitted to be not merely interesting but necessary to those who endeavour to gather up the skeins of unwritten history, and to trace the antecedents and early migrations from parent sources of nations long since alienated from each other by customs, speech, and space.