THE DRAGON: A FANCY OR A FACT 119 



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. 



Suppose that man came into existence as an in- 

 telligent 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 dis- 

 covered 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 develop- 

 ment 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 



