The first part of the final chapter of Frederick William Hackwood's study of dragonlore.
FULL ILLUSTRATED TEXT
http://www.justgenealogy.plus.com/fwhdd08.htm
LONG, long before the earth was fitted for man to live upon, there was an Age of Reptiles, when crawling scaly monsters, some of them of enormous size, lurked in the immense swampy forests with which a vast portion of the surface of the earth was then covered, while innumerable dragon-flies swept and flashed through the air.
Man had not yet appeared on the earth, and it is difficult to imagine the strange appearance the world presented when these nondescript monsters occupied the earth and sea and sky with undisputed sway.
These strange and formidable-looking beasts have one and all disappeared ages ago, and are now extinct - indeed, the disappearance and extinction of animals is a process we know to be still going on in the history of the earth.
Of the existence of these gigantic monsters which once inhabited the earth, abundant evidence is to be seen in the larger geological museums of the world which are capable of finding room for their fossil remains. They were the dominant animals of the earth millions of years ago, when numerous species were evolved, some adapting themselves as land animals, others being able to live on the land or in the water, and others again being able to rise into the air like birds.
Yet all of them were different from the mammals and birds of the present day, in that their limb-joints were connected with a gristly cap and not with a ball-and-socket arrangement ; consequently they progressed on land in a creeping manner, their cartilage-capped joints being apparently incapable of supporting and properly balancing their bodies. A visit to the Natural History Museum at Kensington, where many of their fossil remains are mounted, will give a better idea of their size, shape, and structure than can be conveyed by any verbal description possible.
The bones of these long-departed creatures, having been buried and lain in the earth for countless ages, have themselves turned to stone, or as we say, have become fossilised. But geologists and other learned men who have dug them out can not only put these fossil parts together correctly and reconstruct the entire skeleton, but from their scientific knowledge can tell us their actual appearance, the kind of food they ate, and in fact all about their habits of life. They were unlike any reptile now living.
Their immensely thick hides were rough and tough, with an excess of wartiness ; they are known as Saurians, because they belonged to the scaly reptiles of the lizard-kind. A reconstruction of their frames show that they were huge and frightfully hideous creatures, whose terrible aspect would certainly not be lessened by their methods of approach - an ungainly, rolling crawl ; or in the case of water-dwelling monsters such as the Plesiosaurus, with the flashings of awkward paddling flappers. The sea-lizards of that far-away time were numerous and varied in form. The Icthyosaurus was a shark-like reptile. The Plesiosaurus had a tremendously long neck which carried a small and easily supported head ; if, in swimming, it held its head and immense snake-like neck out of the water, it must have given an impression of what the sea-serpent is said to assume in all sailor's yarns. Then there was the vast Cetiosaurus, so called because of its whale-like proportions, though it little resembled a whale in aught else.
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Ch 7 (5/5) - The Dragon in Literatureby HackwoodHistory636 views
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