CH 8 (4/4) - The Real Dragons of Nature

Presented here as part of a COMPLETE audiobook, this is the very final segment of Frederick William Hackwood's comprehensive study of dragons and dragonlore.

FULL ILLUSTRATED TEXT
http://www.justgenealogy.plus.com/fwhdd08.htm

It is very evident that in olden times the people felt there was some tangible connection between the fabled dragon and the living creatures of the earth. In churches at Marseilles, Lyons, Ragusa, and Cimiers, skins of stuffed crocodiles are exhibited as the remains of dragons.

There is exhibited in one Continental church an excellent old painting of St. George and the Dragon in which the dragon is evidently an Iguanodon, a colossal fossilised lizard, extinct ages before history began.

At Rhodes was long preserved what purported to be the head of a terrible dragon killed by Diuedonné, of Gozo a knight of Rhodes, and afterwards Grand Master of the Order, in the fourteenth century. When the knights were driven out of Rhodes by the Turks, they, respecting bravery even in a Christian, preserved the relic with equal care ; it was seen by the French traveller Thevenot as late as the middle of the seventeenth century, and from his account there can be no doubt that it was the head of a hippopotomus.

Again, at Klagenfurt, in Carinthia, is a public fountain on the stone-work of which is carved a huge dragon with six feet and a monstrous head surmounted by a stout horn. Local legend has it that this dragon lived in a cave near by, from which it periodically sallied forth to devour the people and ravage the country.

At length was forthcoming a knightly champion to essay the town's deliverance ; he sought out the evil beast, attacked, and fought it to the death, but not without paying the forfeit of his own life. In the adjacent Hôtel de Ville is preserved the preserved the pretended head of the vanquished dragon, a relic which furnished the model for the sculptor of the well ; but, alas ! modern science has identified the precious memento as the cranium of a fossil rhinoceros !

Here, then, we have acquainted ourselves with the views and speculations of those who have been inclined to adopt a naturalistic solution to the problem of deriving the many and persistent dragon superstitions from the existence of the huge and Saurian reptiles of the dim Geologic Ages.

But the theory fails on further reflection to satisfy the mind, when we take into consideration the nature of geologic time. The immense lizards of the Oolitic period had become extinct countless ages before man appeared on the earth, and even the huge Dinotherium found in the Upper Miocene formation. The survival of any oral tradition concerning the primaeval monsters was impossible.

As to the creatures themselves, it is doubtful whether the huge reptilian denizens of the steaming earth could possibly have existed under the natural conditions which prevailed at a later period of the world's history.

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