32 Dr. Wilson on Linton and its Legends. 



whom lie could naturally associate ; we have stated all that is 

 requisite to show, that it is neither to the times of William the 

 Lion, nor to the family of Somerville, that the legend of the Worm 

 of Wormington can bear any true reference. 



There could be little profit in unravelling the tangled skein of 

 an old legend, were it not for the glimpses it brings before us 

 of the modes of thinking and states of existence of ages long past. 

 And yet, to own an interest in the particular legend of the dra- 

 gon, for its own sake merely, is nothing more than to confess 

 the influence of that fascination which has long rendered it a 

 special favourite of the most diversified and widely separated 

 nations. Transferred by the Greeks from the garden of the Hes- 

 perides to shine as a constellation in the heavens, and occupy- 

 ing a prominent place in our own sacred writings, it reappears 

 among the myths of the Romans, and performs a conspicuous 

 part in the early tales of chivalry ; while China, in the far East, 

 is equally renowned for its dragons and its porcelain. This 

 universality of the tradition, like that of the deluge, seems to 

 denote its origin in fact : and nature had indeed its prodigies in 

 the primeval world equal to those that romancers have fabled. 

 It is true that we have not the slightest grounds for believing 

 that the existence of man was coetaneous with that of the mon- 

 sters of the early world ; but if the later Mammoth (Elephas 

 primigenius), in even our own day, has been found with its skin 

 and flesh and eyeballs entire, amid the ice blocks of Siberia, 

 does it not come within the limits of possibility, that some acci- 

 dental denudation of the strata, or some extraordinary circum- 

 stances of preservation, may have presented to man, in his first 

 stages of being, the vast outline of the Megalosaurus, in the per- 

 fection and fulness of its giant proportions, such as can never be 

 witnessed in our times ? Once seen by the naked savage, feebly 

 armed with his hatchet of stone, the appalling image would 

 never afterwards forsake his memory, nor the tradition that of 

 his descendants ; mingling itself, undoubtedly, like all other tra- 

 ditions, with extraneous matters, and confusing itself gradually 

 more and more, as well through the influence of really existing 

 analogies, as through the rudely fanciful creations belonging to 

 a poetry and mythology looming through the twilight of a far- 

 distant period. Thus the tradition would slowly diffuse itself, 

 and be transmitted to us darkly, yet as an actual memory of the 

 prodigies of a former system of creation ; till at length the newer 

 investigations of the geologist might seem to entitle us fairly to 

 assume, that the fossil Saurian which he has reconstructed from 

 a few of its fragments, and the dragon of the fabulist, are one and 

 the same being. 



As the dominant race in the south of Scotland, at the time 



