DRAGONS OF OLD TIME 125 
discovered in various parts of Europe and America. Some un- 
reasonable persons will have it that certain monstrous reptiles 
of the Mesozoic era, about to be described, must have somehow 
managed to survive into the human period, and so have suggested 
to early races of men the dragons to which we have alluded. 
But there is no need for this untenable supposition. By a free 
blending together of ideas culled from living types of animals it 
would be very easy to construct no small variety of dragons; and 
so we may believe this is what the ancients did. 
The announcement by Baron Cuvier—the illustrious founder 
of Paleeontology—that there was a period when our planet was 
inhabited by reptiles of appalling magnitude, with many of the 
features of modern quadrupeds, was of so novel and startling a 
character as to require the prestige of even his name to obtain 
for it any degree of credence. But subsequent discoveries have 
fully confirmed the truth of his belief, and the “age of reptiles” 
is no longer considered fabulous. This expression was first 
used by Dr. G. Mantell as the title of a paper published in the 
Edinburgh Philosophical Journal in 1831, and serves to remind 
us that reptilian forms of life were once the ruling class among 
animals, 
The Dinosaurs are an extinct order comprising the largest 
terrestrial and semi-aquatic reptiles that ever lived; and while 
some of them in a general way resembled crocodiles, others show 
in the bony structures they have left behind a very remarkable 
and interesting resemblance to birds of the ostrich tribe. This 
resemblance shows itself in the pelvis, or bony arch with which 
the hind limbs are connected in vertebrate or back-boned animals, 
and in the limbs themselves. This curious fact, first brought 
into notice by Professor Huxley, has been variously interpreted 
by anatomists; some concluding, with Professor Huxley, that 
