THE DRAGONS OF OLD TIME—DINOSAURS.
“What we know is but little; what we do not know is immense.”—La Place.
Was there ever an age of dragons? Tradition says there was; but there is every reason to believe that the fierce and blood-thirsty creatures, of which such a variety present themselves, are but creations of the imagination,—useful in their way, no doubt, as pointing a moral or adorning a tale, but, nevertheless, wholly without foundation in fact. The dragon figures in the earliest traditions of the human race, and crops up again in full force in European mediæval or even late romance.
In ancient Egyptian mythology, Horus, the son of Isis, slays the evil dragon. In Greece, the infant Hercules, while yet in his cradle, strangles deadly snakes; and Perseus, after engaging in fierce struggle with the sea-monster, slays it, and rescues Andromeda from a cruel death. In England, we have the heroic legend of St. George and the Dragon depicted on our sovereigns. But it is easy to see a common purpose running through these legends. They are considered by many to be solar myths, and have a moral purpose. The dragons or snakes are emblems of darkness and evil; the heroes emblems of light, and so of good. The triumph of good over evil is the theme they were intended to illustrate. The dragons, then, are clearly products of the imagination, based, no doubt, on the huge and uncouth reptiles of the present human era, such as crocodiles, pythons, and such creatures.
Amidst much diversity there is yet a strange similarity in the dragons that figure in the folk-lore of Eastern and Western peoples. Probably our European traditions were brought by the tribes which, wave after wave, poured in from Central Asia.
They are, for the most part, unnatural beasts, breathing out fire, and often endowed with wings, while at the same time possessing limbs ending in cruel claws, fitted for clutching their unfortunate victims. The wings seem, to say the least, very much in the way. Poisonous fangs, claws, scaly armour, and a long pointed tail were all very well,—but wings are hardly wanted, unless to add one more element of mystery or terror. Some, however, are devoid of wings: the Imperial Japanese dragons showing no sign of such appendages. The Temple Bar griffin is a grim example of a winged monster. Nevertheless, in spite of all the manifest absurdities of the dragons of various nations and times, geology reveals to us that there once lived upon this earth reptiles so great and uncouth that we can think of no other but the time-honoured word “dragon” to convey briefly the slightest idea of their monstrous forms and characters.