26 THOSE OTHER ANIMALS. 



of China and Japan. St. George, as we know, was a warlike 

 saint of Cappadocia ; although his feats and adventures 

 are somewhat doubtful and misty as to locality, it may be 

 assumed that the dragon who succumbed to his prowess 

 was a native of Asia. 



The dragon is, in fact, an exceedingly interesting problem, 

 and the balance of probability appears to be wholly in 

 favour of his existence. We know that great winged 

 saurians inhabited the earth in prehistoric times, and such 

 a creature would be likely to survive cataclysms which 

 overwhelmed the greater portion of his contemporaries. 

 Water would not seriously inconvenience him. His habits 

 would on the whole be retiring, and until man multiplied 

 and became thick over the world, there would be but 

 small inclination to interfere with him. The saurians 

 attain to extreme longevity, and if only a few specimens 

 escaped at the time of the flood, their descendants of a 

 very few generations would have existed in comparatively 

 modern times. The Chinese legends point to the preser- 

 vation of the dragon in this manner. They say that at a 

 time which closely approximates to that generally assigned 

 to Noah's deluge, great floods extended almost to the 

 boundaries of China, and that it was at that time that the 

 dragons first made their appearance and became a serious 

 scourge in some of the frontier provinces. Doubtless the 

 European traditions connected with the dragons were 

 brought by the tribes which wave after wave poured in from 

 Central Asia, and it must be assumed that there, if any- 

 where, the survivors from the flood for some time flourished. 



It is certainly difficult to assume that the descriptions of 

 these creatures by so many peoples and such diverse sources 



