Fig. 49.—Mantis (a very characteristic figure).
(From the ’Rh Ya.)
An historian of these later times might well have described such things as realities, and we should not be disposed, on account of his having done so, to question the validity of his description of other objects or creatures existing at the period, presuming them to be more consistent with our present notions of possibility.
No one, now-a-days, would discredit the veracity of Marco Polo because he speaks of enormous serpents in Carajan, possessing two feet, each armed with a single claw. That there was a solid foundation for his story is admitted, and commentators are only at variance as to whether the basis was a large species of python, such as still exists in Southern China, or a gigantic alligator, of which he might have seen a mutilated specimen.
It must also be borne in mind that the existence of some gigantic saurian, now extinct, possessing two limbs only, in place of four, is not an impossibility; as the small lizard, Chirotes, is in that condition, and also the North American genus Siren, belonging to the Newts.
Fig. 50.—Tools of Husbandry. (From the ’Rh Ya.)
I notice that Retzoch, in his designs to illustrate Schiller’s poem, “The Fight with the Dragon,” makes the monster have only two fore-legs, and this appears to have been a common mediæval conception of it. Aldrovandus and Gesner both give figures of biped dragons. There is also a curious drawing in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1749—which is transferred into the pages of the Encyclopædia of Philadelphia, apparently a piracy of an English Cyclopædia, of what is styled a sea-dragon, four feet long, which stands bolt upright on two legs, and, like Barnum’s mermaid, was probably a triumph of art.