Science from an Easy Chair

by Sir E. Ray Lankester

Without looking further into the strange and fantastic catalogue of imaginary monsters, one must recognise that it is a matter of great interest to trace the origin of these marvellous creations of human fancy, and the way in which they have first of all been brought into pictorial existence, and then variously modified and finally stereotyped and maintained by tradition and art. It has not infrequently been suggested, since geologists made us acquainted with the bones of huge and strange-looking fossil reptiles dug from ancient rocks, that the tradition of “the dragon” is really a survival of the actual knowledge and experience of these extinct monsters on the part of “long-ago races of men.” It is a curious fact, mentioned by a well-known writer, Mrs. Jameson, that the bones of a great fossil reptile were preserved and exhibited at Aix in France as the bones of the dragon slain by St. Michael, just as the bones of a whale are shown as those of the mythical Dun-cow of Warwick in that city.

There are three very good reasons for not entertaining the suggestion that the tradition of the dragon and similar beasts is due to human co-existence with the great reptiles of the past. The first is that the age of the rocks known as cretaceous and jurassic (or oölitic), in which are found the more or less complete skeletons of the great saurians—many bigger in the body than elephants, and with huge tails in addition, iguanodon, megalosaurus, diplodocus, as well as the winged pterodactyles (see [Plate II.], where a representation is given of what we know as to the form and bearing of two species of pterodactyle) and a vast series of such creatures—is so enormously remote that not only man but all the hairy warm-blooded animals like him, did not come into existence until many millions of years after these rocks had been deposited by water and the great reptiles buried in them had become extinct. The cave-men of the Pleistocene period are modern, even close to us, as compared with the age when the great saurians flourished. That was just before the time when our chalk-cliffs were being formed as a slowly growing sediment on the floor of a deep sea. No accurate measure of the time which has elapsed since then is possible, but we find that about 200 ft. thickness of deposit has been accumulated since the date of the earliest human remains known to us—whilst over 5000 ft. have accumulated since the chalk began to be deposited, and the great saurians ceased to exist. If we reckon, in accordance with the most moderate estimate, a quarter of a million years for the upper 200 ft. of deposit or human period (Pleistocene), we must suppose that twenty or thirty times as long a period has elapsed to allow time for the deposit of the 5000 ft. of sand and rock since the great saurians ceased to exist. This would be some six or seven million years—a long while for tradition to run, even supposing man existed all that time, which he did not. And the probability is that this estimate of the time is far too small: a hundred million years is nearer the truth.

PLATE II

REAL DRAGONS
THE EXTINCT FLYING REPTILES KNOWN AS PTERODACTYLES. THEIR BONES AND WING MEMBRANES ARE PRESERVED IN THE OOLITIC ROCKS. SOME MEASURED EIGHTEEN FEET ACROSS THE EXPANDED WINGS.
From “Extinct Animals,” by Sir Ray Lankester. (Constable & Co.)

Suppose that man came into existence as an intelligent creature, capable of handing on a tradition, as much as half a million or even a million years before the date of the remains of the earliest cave-men discovered in Europe, we yet get no long way down the avenue of past time. Man would still be separated by millions of years and long ages of change and development of the forms of animal life on the earth’s surface, from the period of the great reptiles or saurians who flourished before the chalk was deposited. And there is good evidence that none of those great saurians survived the date of the chalk. They died out and their place was taken by the earliest ancestors of elephants, rhinoceroses, horses, cattle, lions, and monkeys, from which in the course of ages the animals we know by those names were developed, whilst very late in the history man was produced. The reptiles continued as small, furtive creatures—the lizards and a few biggish snakes and crocodiles—but no descendants of “the great Dinosaurs” survived.

Another reason against the supposed survival of a real tradition of dragons is that, even in regard to much later—immensely later—creatures, such as the mammoth or hairy elephant, which we know was contemporary with man, there is no real tradition. The natives of the sub-arctic regions in which the skeletons and whole carcases of the mammoth are found in a frozen state, and from whence many hundreds of tusks of the mammoth have been since the earliest times yearly exported and used in Europe as ivory, have no “tradition” of these creatures. They have fanciful stories about the ghosts of the mammoths, but they call their tusks “horns,” and have no legends of the monster as a living thing. The use of mammoth’s ivory in Northern Europe dates back for a thousand years historically, and probably has never ceased since the days of the cave-men. Three years ago I examined the richly carved drinking horn of a Scandinavian hero, dating from the tenth century, and preserved amongst the treasures of York Minster, and I have little doubt that it is fashioned from the tusk of a mammoth.

A third reason for rejecting any connection of the dragon with a real reminiscence of the great extinct saurians is that its origin and its gradual building up in human fancy can be traced in the same way as that of many other fanciful and legendary creatures by reference to the regular operation of the imagination in successive ages of mankind. All races of men have imagined monsters by combining into one several parts of different animals. The centaur of the Greeks is a blend of man and horse, the great “divine” chimera of the Greeks was a two-headed blend of lion and goat, and any such mixed creature is technically called nowadays “a chimera”. The dragon is classed by heralds as a chimera. Sometimes one of these imaginary beasts has its origin in a terrible or weird animal, which really exists in some distant land, and is celebrated or even worshipped by the inhabitants of that distant land, whose descriptions of it are carried in a distorted and exaggerated form to regions where it does not exist.