126 SCIENCE FROM AN EASY CHAIR 



made it to be only symbolic of a combination of qualities. 

 Just as the Latins and mediaeval people credulously 

 accepted Greek symbolic monsters as real, and trans- 

 muted Greek heroes into Christian saints, so were the 

 Greeks themselves deluded by strange carvings and 

 blood-curdling legends which reached them at various 

 dates from mysterious Asia into a belief in the actual 

 existence of a variety of fantastic monsters. " The 

 Greeks," says M. E. Pettier, a distinguished French 

 writer on Greek mythology, " often copied Oriental 

 representations without understanding them." The con- 

 ventional dragon probably came from Indian sources 

 through Persia to China, on the one hand, spreading 

 eastwards, and to the Latins of the early Roman Empire, 

 on the other hand, spreading westwards ; but at what 

 date exactly it is difficult to make out. 



In mediaeval, as well as in earlier times, marvellous 

 beasts were brought into imaginary existence by the 

 somewhat unscrupulous enterprise of an artist in giving 

 pictorial expression to the actual words by which some 

 traveller described a strange beast seen by him in a 

 foreign land. Thus the " unicorn," which was really the 

 rhinoceros, was seen by travellers in the earliest times, 

 and was described as an animal like a horse, but with a 

 single horn growing from its forehead. The heraldic 

 draughtsman accordingly takes the spirally twisted 

 narwhal's tusk, brought from the northern seas by 

 adventurous mariners (the narwhal being called " the 

 unicorn fish ") as his unicorn's horn, and plants it on the 

 forehead of a horse, and says, " Behold ! the unicorn." 

 Meanwhile the real " unicorn," the rhinoceros, became 

 properly known as navigation and Eastern travel ex- 

 tended, and true unicorns' horns, the horns of the 

 rhinoceros, richly carved and made into drinking cups, 

 not at all like the narwhal's tusk, were brought to 



