CHAPTER VIII. 



FLYING-DRAGONS. 



SURELY no phase in the story of Reptile-life is 

 more pregnant with interest than that which 

 concerns the creatures which form the subject of 

 the present chapter. 



Relics of an ancient past, appearing and dis- 

 appearing with a mysterious suddenness, much 

 of their history is hid in mist that can never be 

 penetrated. They are a contradiction in them- 

 selves, for a flying reptile is an anomaly. The 

 raison d'etre of their existence seems to have been 

 to point a moral and adorn a tale, the moral 

 being the unwisdom of dogmatising as to what 

 Nature can or cannot do. Inasmuch as, but for 

 the fortunate accident of the preservation of 

 their remains, the existence of creatures so 

 strangely made, and from a stock so proverbially 

 earth-bound, would have been deemed, by those 

 who affect the gift of prophesy, an impossibility. 



If, familiarly, we may speak of them as 

 "flying-dragons," thereby in vesting ' them with 

 a species of eerieness to which they may well be 

 entitled, we must, when recalling their peculiar 

 features, do so in more severe language, using 

 the Christian and surname, so to speak, whereby 

 they have been made members of the kingdom 

 of animals. 



The Pterodactyles, then, are so called on 

 account of the structure of the fore-limb, which 

 had become modified, by the extraordinary elon- 



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