a great part of the year with snow, seeing that the leafless state of such trees during even a long and severe Siberian winter, would not necessarily unfit their branches for yielding sustenance to the well-clothed mammoth."

Gigantic as the Siberian mammoth was, there is evidence to prove that the species was developed to still greater proportions. We have seen a mammoth's tusk that measured ten feet two inches along the curve, and a comparison of the cast of the third ór middle metacarpal bone of one found in the brick earth at Grays in Essex (which may be seen in the museum of the English College of Surgeons) with the corresponding bone in the skeleton of Chunee in the same noble collection, will give some idea of the huge bulk of the extinct species.

The old bull mammoth was at least one-third larger in all his dimensions than the largest existing elephant; but no human eye beheld him as he stalked silently along in his might over desolate tracts where corn now grows, and the busy hum of civilization is heard,

"Lord of his presence and the land besides."

DRAGONS.

"The Dragon of Wantley churches ate
(He us❜d to come of a Sunday),

Whole congregations were to him
A dish of Salmagundi.

Parsons were his black-puddings, and

Fat aldermen his capons,

And his tit-bit the collection plate

Brimful of Birmingham halfpence.

The corporation worshipful

He valued not an ace :

But swallow'd the mayor, asleep in his chair,

And pick'd his teeth with the mace!"

HEROICK BALLAD.

GREAT as has been the progress made in the wide field of natural history within the last thirty years, in no direction has the advance been more decided or more satisfactory, than in that hitherto obscure part of it which sepulchres the remains of animals that lorded it over sea and land when this earth was young.

And although there is nothing among the earliest known organized forms fashioned by the hand which weigheth all things,

that is not pregnant with proof of the same care and design and harmony in the construction of the animal, as shines forth in the being born into the world yesterday, let no one picture unto him or herself the youth of our planet as lovely to any but the grosser natures then placed upon it to breathe an atmosphere which no human lungs, nay, no lungs of any vertebrate of a high grade could have long breathed as the breath of life. It was a place of dragons fit only for Saurians, Batrachians, and the like. "Dragons?"

Yes, dragons: not such as the small, living winged reptiles, that skim from place to place in search of their insect food, relying on their natural parachutes, constructed upon a somewhat safer principle than that of poor Mr. Cocking, and rejoicing in the generic name of Draco: but downright enormous dragons with bellies as big as tuns and bigger; creatures that would have cared little for Bevis's sword Morglaye," nor that of the Rhodian Draconicide, nor St. George's "Askalon," no, nor the " nothingat-all" of More of More Hall, even if those worthies could have existed in the pestiferous region in which the said dragons revelled. For in a slough where Calamites and other gigantic marshplants, now extinct also, rooted themselves at ease, and reared themselves into a damp jungle; in a dreary bog, to which the undrained Pontine marshes would have been the land of health, was their lair. In such a nauseous quag, wholesome to them, these monsters roared and wallowed: there they growled their horrid loves, and there they made war upon each other-the strong devouring the weak, and the carnivorous "chawing-up" the herbivorous in the midst of the wildest convulsions of a nascent world.

While this was going on upon what then passed for dry land, great sea-dragons rushed through the waves, or sported on the surface of an ocean not unlike, as far as the waters were concerned, our own, while flying dragons hovered, like Shakspeare's Witches, through the fog and the filthy air. These last ancient Saurian forms have left no living representative upon the earth.

Just one hundred years ago, Scheuchzer published his "Physica Sacra," and favoured the world with an engraving of the remains of the "Homo diluvii testis." Those were, indeed, the days of confident assertion, when the blind led the blind; but it is difficult to believe how a physician, for such was Scheuchzer in every sense of the word, writing M.D. after his name, could mistake the fossil bones of a salamander, or rather of a newt, for those of a human being. "Homo diluvii testis," what a comprehensive form of words-Poussin's picture rises before us as we read them -and yet 'twas neither man, woman, nor child, but a squab extinct reptile, that never witnessed the deluge at all.

As the Zurich physician had figured the man, he gave his draughtsman directions to portray man's eternal enemy, and the accomplished artist has with some invention and in his best manner represented the fiend. The usual diabolical head and shoulders of the time are placed upon the body of a huge polypod caterpillar.

Now, we do not feel disposed to go so far as the charitable preacher, who, after exhausting his benevolent prayers for all earthly beings, proposed to his congregation to pray for "the puir deil." No, let justice be done; but this is more than summum jus and beyond summa injuria. The doom was deserved; but adegradation of the old dragon below any thing vertebrate, to the base condition of an annulose animal, to a vile grub, was not in the sentence, and if the Prince of Darkness be a gentleman, Scheuchzer has not treated him like one.

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"There are more ways than one of looking at a subject," says Mr. Serjeant Rebutter, retained in defence of the author of Physica Sacra;" "there are, I say, more ways than one of looking at a subject; permit me to suggest that Beelzebub was the lord of flies, and a caterpillar may be a butterfly.

"Then, sir, the moral is as bad as the design; but the truth is that degradation was meant, and the notion is clumsily conveyed. Scheuchzer seems to have shone in the one case as brightly as in the other, and has treated his subjects very. scurvily in both."But to return to our mortal dragons.

It may be fairly asked by the uninitiated why the philosophers of 1943 should not smile at the Cuviers, and at the Conybeares, the Bucklands, and the Owens of 1843, as complacently as we of the present day curl our lip at old Scheuchzer?

Because his work was almost all guess because he and those of his time jumped to conclusions instead of painfully making them out, and the authority of a learned name was sufficient with the multitude to insure without further inquiry the reception of any dictum, however absurd on the face of it, as Scheuchzer's assertion, coupled with his imposing plate, undoubtedly was. No man who had the knowledge of a diligent medical student in the first half year of his anatomical studies could, if he had looked attentively on that plate, much less on the fossil itself, have come to the conclusion that it was an anthropolite. But Scheuchzer was blinded by theory; he would not apply what knowledge he hal: he pronounced the humanity of the fossil, to be without a shadow of doubt; he appealed to it as "a relic of the accursed race which had been buried under the great waters;" and he was for a time implicitly believed. It was not till 1758 that Gesner, apparently for the first time since Scheuchzer's announcement, threw doubt on his declaration, and stated his own belief that the specimen was a fish (Silurus).

Cuvier, before whose eye all false fossil pretensions vanished, and every bone told its true story, came to Haarlem in 1811, and begged permission to work on the stone with a view to the further development of concealed parts. The figure of a salamander's skeleton was placed beside the fossil, and as the operation proceeded Cuvier had the pleasure of seeing the chisel bring to light the very bones which he had expected and which were portrayed in the figure.

A finer specimen than Scheuchzer's that which belonged to Dr. Ammann of Zurich-is in the British Museum, and this gigantic fossil newt is now named Andrias Scheuchzeri.

Nothing in palæontology is, at present, taken on trust. Every statement and every opinion relating to the science undergoes the strictest scrutiny by acute and accurate critics.

The bony framework of the old bygone-world dragon is now as satisfactorily demonstrated as that of the human skeleton which hangs beside the lecturer of the Royal Academy.

That is a striking scene. There stands the professor in all the pride of intellect surrounded by the rising and risen pictorial talent of the day. He has to illustrate a proposition in his discourse and turns to a tall, shrouded figure behind him. The mantle is dropped, and a naked, living man, in the bloom of health and strength starts forward, throwing his muscular and well proportioned body and limbs into the required attitude. Every being in the room is alive and attentive, all is in suppressed activity but the ghastly pendant form, and as the lecturer raises the dry bones to explain the action of the living model, and they drop from his warm hand like wooden cylinders, we almost fancy that the grim feature smiles as who should say

To this complexion, you must come at last.

Nor is the osseous system of the bygone dragons the only portion of their history clearly unfolded. Their muscular development, their organs of sense and of motion, their respiratory and circulating systems, the colour and quality of their blood, their digestive organs, their food, their integument, and, for the most part, their habits, are now as well known as the organization and natural history of the little agile lizard, that basks on the sandy heath in the neighbourhood of Poole.

With all due respect for the learned who usually monopolize that title, your geologist is the true antiquary. He deals with the relics of a former world; his statues and coins are the shells and bones stored up, in many cases before the creation of man'; and with these he deciphers the annals of the earth. A thousand -years in the history of man and his institutions present an accu mulation of facts and doubts sufficient to daunt the stoutest Fellow

of the Society of Antiquaries; but what are a million of years in the sight of the geologist?

Before we enter upon the zoological, anatomical, and geological history of these fossil reptiles, the only real dragons on a grand scale, and which we shall endeavour to give in future chapters in a popular manner, encumbered with as few learned terms as possible, it will be necessary for us, in this, to feel our way for awhile in the mists of antiquity, and point out to those who may be interested in the inquiry, as well as the twilight of the time will permit, some of the traditions relating to dragons handed down to us.

1

If the infant Hercules, in his eighth month, as some say, but according to the exquisite twenty-fourth Idyll of Theocritus, in his tenth, strangled the two dragons sent by Juno for his destruction, Apollo, as soon as he was born, seized his bow and slew with his arrows the Python which the same jealous goddessshe had, in truth, some cause for jealousy-had sent to persecute his mother. And here let us pause for a moment, to pick up what information we can concerning this Python. The monster was said to have sprung from the mud and stagnant water that blotted the earth's surface after Deucalion's deluge, and although another legend states that it was produced from the earth, and sent upon the persecuting errand above alluded to, we pray our readers to bear in mind the first of these traditions.

Old stories tell how Hercules

A dragon slew at Lerna,

With seven heads and fourteen eyes,

To see and well discern-a.

Now what was this Lerna ? It was said to be the lake into which the daughters of Danaus threw the heads of their slaughtered bridegrooms: here, according to many, harboured the hydra; and although some held with Hesiod that this hydra was the daughter of Echidna and Typhon, its origin was attributed by most to the putrescent contents of the lake. The ballad above quoted has been very sparing in the number of heads which it bestows on the Lernæan hydra. Alcæus gave that renowned dragon nine, Simonides fifty, and Diodorus one hundred. Sharp work for Hercules with his arrows and club, and his assistant, Iolas, with his actual cautery, if Diodorus be correct in his numbers.

The Megalauna of Pausanias, dragons or serpents thirty cubits long, inhabiting India and Africa, were Pythons of the modern nomenclature, probably, but none of your true crested dragons, which appear to have been divisible into five classes:

1st. Those without either wings or legs, οι πολλοί.