THE DRAGON. 27 



would be all but identical, had they been purely the work 

 of imagination and not drawn from a living model. All 

 accounts unite in describing the dragon as a creature 

 clothed with scales, possessing a flexible neck like that of 

 the plesiosaurus, a large head, with jaws well furnished with 

 pointed teeth like the crocodile's, a flexible tail like the 

 lizard's, and wings like a pterodactyl's. The flying apparatus 

 of these extinct creatures, indeed, closely resembled that of 

 a bat, being a membrane from the vastly extended finger 

 of the fore leg to that of the hind leg. This does not agree 

 with the popular idea of the dragon, but the ancients were 

 not close observers, and it was quite enough for them to 

 know that their gigantic enemy was furnished with wings, 

 without inquiring closely into their arrangement. It does 

 not appear that the dragon was able to fly, but it would 

 rather seem that when he ran to attack an enemy he aided 

 himself by flapping his wings, as a swan often travels along 

 the surface of the water before it fairly takes to flight. 

 Some of the dragons are depicted as altogether devoid of 

 wings, the Imperial Japanese dragon showing no signs of 

 such appendages. Thus both the Chinese and Japanese 

 legends go far to prove that several species of saurians 

 survived for some time the general disappearance of their 

 prehistoric congeners. The legendary dragons differ but 

 slightly from some of the prehistoric reptiles, and as the 

 Orientals were entirely in ignorance of the former existence 

 or appearance of these creatures, it is difficult in the 

 extreme to believe that they could have coined from their 

 own imagination a creature so closely resembling them. 



In one respect only we must admit an error, and a 

 serious one. Most of the legendary dragons possessed 



