“Why not? Only a couple of years before, Stanley rescued Livingstone in the first great exploration across Africa. The region that Aldrovandus wrote about, north of the Victoria Nyassa, in my day was still an absolutely unexplored territory. Anything might be there, even dragons.”
“I should think you’d have known there weren’t any real dragons,” protested Perry, with the cocksureness of a boy.
“I had sense enough to know that I didn’t know it all,” said his father with a snort, emphasizing the personal pronoun. “Why even in your lifetime, boy, scientists have found an animal that no one had ever heard of before, still living in the African forests.”
“What was that, Father?”
“The okapi, a sort of giraffe with daggershaped horns and striped on the legs something like a zebra. And that discovery is a good example of the sort of thing I mean.
“Naturalists once used to laugh at some of the old pictures on the Egyptian temples which showed a beast like a cross between an antelope and a zebra, with stripes. One of the heads of the god Set, too, was unlike any animal known in the world. But when, in 1901, the first okapi was caught by Sir H. H. Johnstone in the Semliki forest in Uganda, it was found that the old Egyptians of three thousand years ago were right, and that the modern naturalists were wrong in their disbelief. So you see, Perry, lots of things are possible that one would never expect.”
“But a dragon, Father! It’s such a made-up sort of beast—wings, teeth, snake’s tail and all that sort of thing!”
“Don’t trouble yourself about that,” his father answered, “there are plenty of dragons with wings, teeth and a snake’s tail, and, what’s more, Science calls them dragons. Draco volans, the flying dragon, that’s their real name, my boy. But they are all small, none of them more than ten inches in length, including the tail.”
“Never heard of them,” said Perry, incredulously.
“If you don’t want me to think you a born idiot,” his father answered sharply, “don’t let me catch you taking that tone, suggesting that a thing doesn’t exist because you don’t know about it. There are a few million things that you don’t know now, and when you get older and have more sense, you’ll find a few million more things that you don’t know.”