120 SCIENCE EROM AN EASY CHAIR 



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 "fradition" 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. Some- 

 times 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 



