poison-bearing threads which they discharge from their skin. These are
used to paralyse their prey, and, in a few kinds only, are sufficiently
powerful to cause a “stinging” effect when they come into contact with a
bather’s skin. Sea-anemones are also armed with these minute threads,
and their poison has been extracted and studied. The spines of
star-fishes and sea-urchins have a very deadly poison associated with
them, which has recently been examined. Among insects we have the bees,
wasps, and ants, with their terminal stings; caterpillars, with
poisonous hairs; gnats, with poisonous mouth glands. Residents in
mosquito-infested countries become “immune” to the poison of gnat-bite,
but not to the deadly germs of malaria and yellow fever carried by the
gnats. The centipedes have powerful jaws, provided with poison-sacs; the
spiders have stabbing claws, fitted with poison-glands. Shell-fish, such
as crabs and lobsters, do not possess stings or poison-sacs, but some of
the whelk-like sea-snails have poison-glands, which secrete a fluid
deadly to other shell-fish. We have already spoken of the poison-spines
of fishes; among reptiles it is only some of the snakes which are
poisonous, and are known to have poison-glands connected with grooved
fangs. Only one kind of lizard—the Heloderm of North America, already
mentioned—has poison-glands in its mouth, but it has no special
poison-fangs, only small teeth. There is a most persistent and curious
popular error to the effect that the rapidly moving bifid tongue of
snakes and lizards is a “sting.” It is really quite innocuous. No sting
is known among birds, although some have fighting “spurs” on the leg,
and “claws” on the wing.
Only the lowest of the mammals or warm-blooded hairy quadrupeds—namely,
the Australian duck-mole (_Ornithorhynchus_) and the spiny ant-eater
(_Echidna_)—have poison-glands and related “spurs,” or stings. They
have on the hind-leg a “spur” of great size and strength, which is
perforated and connected with a gland which produces a poisonous milky
fluid. Recent observations, however, as to the poisonous character of
this fluid are wanting. Many mammals have large sac-like glands, which
open by definite apertures, in some cases between the toes, in others
upon the legs, at the side or back of the head (the elephant), in the
middle of the back or about the tail. The fluid secreted by these glands
is not poisonous nor acrid, but odoriferous, and seems to serve to
attract the individuals of a species to one another. They resemble in
structure and often in position the poison-glands of the spurs of the
duck-mole and spiny ant-eater.
Many insects produce a good deal of irritation, and even dangerous
sores, by biting and burrowing in the human skin, without secreting any
active poison. Often they introduce microscopic germs of disease in this
way from one animal to another, as, for instance, do gnats,
tsetze-flies, and horse-flies, and as do some small kinds of tics. The
bites of the flea, of midges, gnats, and bugs are comparatively harmless
unless germs of disease are introduced by them, an occurrence which,
though exceptional, is yet a great and terrible danger. We now know that
it is in this way, and this way only, that malaria or ague, yellow
fever, plague, sleeping-sickness, and some other diseases are carried
from infected to healthy men. Various diseases of horses and cattle are
propagated in the same way. The mere bites of insects may be treated
with an application of carbolic acid dissolved in camphor. The pain
caused by the acid stings of bees, wasps, ants, and nettles can be
alleviated by dabbing the wound with weak ammonia (hartshorn). Insects
which bury themselves in the skin, such as the jigger-flea of the West
Indies and tropical Africa, should be dug out with a needle or fine
blade. The minute creature, like a cheese-mite, which burrows and breeds
in the skin of man and causes the affliction known as the itch must be
poisoned by sulphurous acid—a result achieved by rubbing the skin
freely with sulphur ointment on two or three successive days. A serious
pest in the summer in many parts of England is a little animal known
as the harvest-man. These are the young of a small red spider-like
creature, called _Trombidium_. They get on to the feet of persons
walking in the grass, and crawl up the legs and burrow into the tender
skin. Benzine will keep them away if applied to the ankles or stockings
when they are about, and will also destroy them once they have effected
a lodgment.
[Illustration: FIG. 15 _bis_.—A. Highly magnified drawing of a stinging
hair of the common nettle. The hair is seen to be a single cell or
capsule of large size, tapering to its extremity, but ending in a little
knob. The hard case _e_ is filled with liquid _a_, and is lined with
slimy granular “protoplasm” _b_, which extends in threads across the
cavity to the “nucleus” _c_. The ordinary small cells of the nettle leaf
are marked _d_. B shows the knobbed end of the stinging hair, and the
way in which, owing to the thinness of its walls, it breaks off along
the line _xy_ when pressed, leaving a sharp projecting edge, which
penetrates the skin of an animal, whilst the protoplasm _p_, distended
with poisonous liquid, is shown in C, issuing from the broken end. It
would escape in this way when the sharp, freshly broken end had
penetrated some animal’s skin.]
FOOTNOTES
[2] Since the above was written, I have seen the account by an American
physician—in a recently issued volume of Osler’s _Treatise on
Medicine_—of his recent discovery of the grass which produces in its
pollen the poison of hay fever, and of the preparation by him of an
anti-toxin which appears to give relief to those who suffer from hay
fever.
XIII
THE DRAGON: A FANCY OR A FACT
I am about to write of loathly dragons, “gorgons and hydras and chimæras
dire.” Every one knows what a dragon looks like, though probably most
people could not give a minute description of the beast. A number of
quite distinct creatures, some living on land, some in sea, are spoken
of in the Bible by a word which is translated as “dragon.” The ancient
Welsh chieftains, like many fighting princes of old days, bore a
“dragon” on their banners, and were themselves called “dragons”
(Pen-dragon), and when a knight slew such a chieftain fabulous stories
grew up as to his combat with and slaughter of a “dragon.”
The complete, legitimate dragon of the present day is the dragon of
heraldry, which is maintained in proper form and with authorised
attributes by the Heralds’ College. I have a drawing of this “official”
beast before me (Fig. 16). He is represented as of large size, but
whether theoretically the heralds of to-day consider him to be as large
as a lion or ten times as long and tall I do not know. His body is
lizard-like, and covered with scales resembling those of some lizards
(unlike a crocodile in this respect). His head is not unlike that of a
crocodile, excepting that he has a short, sharp horn on his nose, and a
beard on his chin, and also a pair of large pointed ears which no
living reptile possesses. His mouth is open, showing teeth like those of
a crocodile, and from it issues a remarkable tongue, terminating in an
arrow-head-shaped weapon (presumably a “sting”) unlike anything known in
any living animal. His tail is very long and snake-like (an important
fact when we come to consider his ancestry), and is thrown into coils.
It terminates in an arrow-head-shaped structure like that of the tongue,
quite unlike anything known in any real animal. He has four powerful
limbs, which are not like those of a lizard or a crocodile. They
resemble those of an eagle, and have grasping toes and claws, three
directed forward and one backward. In addition, he has a pair of wings,
which are leathery, and supported by several parallel bars, a structure
which gives the wings a remote resemblance to those of a bat. The wing
is quite unlike that of a pterodactyle (the great extinct flying
lizard), and has no resemblance whatever to that of a bird, which is, of
course, formed by separate quill feathers set in a row on the bones of
the fore-arm and hand. The wings are always represented (even in
illegitimate and Oriental dragons) as much too small to carry the dragon
in flight. The dragon has, further, a crest of separate triangular
plates set in a row along the mid-line of his back, extending from his
head to the end of his tail. Some lizards (but not crocodiles) have such
a crest. The most like it is that of the New Zealand lizard, called the
_Sphenodon_.
[Illustration: FIG. 16.—The heraldic dragon: observe the bat-like
wings, the ears, the horned nose, the beard, the arrow-like tongue and
tail-piece, the scaly body, the dorsal crest, the snake-like tail with
its unnatural arrow-like termination.]
[Illustration: FIG. 17.—The heraldic griffin. It alone of the
dragon-like monsters has feathery wings.]
[Illustration: FIG. 18.—Hercules destroying the hydra (copied from an
ancient Greek vase).]
Such is the creature called “the” dragon. But heraldry recognises some
other terrible beasts allied to the dragon; in fact, what zoologists
would call “allied species.” The griffin, for instance (Fig. 17), is a
four-legged beast like the dragon, but has the beak and wings and
forefeet of an eagle, and the hind-legs and tail of a lion. The heraldic
hydra is a dragon, such as I have above described, but with seven heads
and necks. The ancient Greek representation of the hydra destroyed by
Hercules (as painted on vases) was, on the contrary, based upon the
octopus, or eight-armed cuttle-fish, each arm carrying a snake-like head
(Fig. 18). The wyvern is an important variety of the dragon tribe, well
known to heralds, but not to be seen every day. It so far conforms to
natural laws that it has only two legs, the fore-limbs being the wings
(Fig. 19). The true dragon and the griffin, like the angel of
ecclesiastical art, have actually six limbs—namely, a pair of fore-legs
or arms, a pair of hind-legs, and, in addition, a pair of wings.
Occasionally an artist (even in ancient Egyptian works of art) has
attempted to avoid this redundance of limbs by representing an angel as
having the arms themselves provided with an expanse of quill feathers.
This is certainly a less extraordinary arrangement than the outgrowth of
wings (which in birds, bats, and pterodactyles actually are the
modified arms or fore-limbs), as an extra pair of limbs rooted in the
back. The wyvern and the cockatrice and the basilisk (Fig. 20) (which,
like the Gorgon Medusa, can strike a man dead by the mere glance of the
eye) are remarkable for conforming to the invariable vertebrate standard
of no more than two pairs of limbs, whether legs, wings, or fins. The
name “lind-worm” is given to a wyvern without wings (hence the Linton
Worm and the Laidley Worm of Lambton), and appears in various heraldic
devices and in legendary art; whilst in the arms of the Visconti of
Milan we climb down to a quite simple serpent-like creature without legs
or wings, known as the “guivre.”
[Illustration: FIG. 19.—The heraldic wyvern.]
[Illustration: FIG. 20.—The heraldic basilisk, also called the
Amphysian Cockatrice. Observe the second head at the end of its tail—a
feature due to perversion of the observation that there are some
snake-like creatures (Amphisbena) with so simple a head that it is at
first sight difficult to say which end of the creature is the head and
which is the tail.]
Without looking further into the strange and fantastic catalogue of
imaginary monsters, one must recognise that it is a matter of great
interest to trace the origin of these marvellous creations of human
fancy, and the way in which they have first of all been brought into
pictorial existence, and then variously modified and finally stereotyped
and maintained by tradition and art. It has not infrequently been
suggested, since geologists made us acquainted with the bones of huge
and strange-looking fossil reptiles dug from ancient rocks, that the
tradition of “the dragon” is really a survival of the actual knowledge
and experience of these extinct monsters on the part of “long-ago races
of men.” It is a curious fact, mentioned by a well-known writer, Mrs.
Jameson, that the bones of a great fossil reptile were preserved and
exhibited at Aix in France as the bones of the dragon slain by St.
Michael, just as the bones of a whale are shown as those of the mythical
Dun-cow of Warwick in that city.
There are three very good reasons for not entertaining the suggestion
that the tradition of the dragon and similar beasts is due to human
co-existence with the great reptiles of the past. The first is that the
age of the rocks known as cretaceous and jurassic (or oölitic), in which
are found the more or less complete skeletons of the great
saurians—many bigger in the body than elephants, and with huge tails in
addition, iguanodon, megalosaurus, diplodocus, as well as the winged
pterodactyles (see Plate II., where a representation is given of what we
know as to the form and bearing of two species of pterodactyle) and a
vast series of such creatures—is so enormously remote that not only man
but all the hairy warm-blooded animals like him, did not come into
existence until many millions of years after these rocks had been
deposited by water and the great reptiles buried in them had become
extinct. The cave-men of the Pleistocene period are modern, even close
to us, as compared with the age when the great saurians flourished. That
was just before the time when our chalk-cliffs were being formed as a
slowly growing sediment on the floor of a deep sea. No accurate measure
of the time which has elapsed since then is possible, but we find that
about 200 ft. thickness of deposit has been accumulated since the date
of the earliest human remains known to us—whilst over 5000 ft. have
accumulated since the chalk began to be deposited, and the great
saurians ceased to exist. If we reckon, in accordance with the most
moderate estimate, a quarter of a million years for the upper 200 ft. of
deposit or human period (Pleistocene), we must suppose that twenty or
thirty times as long a period has elapsed to allow time for the deposit
of the 5000 ft. of sand and rock since the great saurians ceased to
exist. This would be some six or seven million years—a long while for
tradition to run, even supposing man existed all that time, which he did
not. And the probability is that this estimate of the time is far too
small: a hundred million years is nearer the truth.
[Illustration: _PLATE II_
REAL DRAGONS
THE EXTINCT FLYING REPTILES KNOWN AS PTERODACTYLES. THEIR BONES AND WING
MEMBRANES ARE PRESERVED IN THE OOLITIC ROCKS. SOME MEASURED EIGHTEEN
FEET ACROSS THE EXPANDED WINGS.
_From “Extinct Animals,” by Sir Ray Lankester. (Constable & Co.)_]
Suppose that man came into existence as an intelligent creature, capable
of handing on a tradition, as much as half a million or even a million
years before the date of the remains of the earliest cave-men discovered
in Europe, we yet get no long way down the avenue of past time. Man
would still be separated by millions of years and long ages of change
and development of the forms of animal life on the earth’s surface, from
the period of the great reptiles or saurians who flourished before the
chalk was deposited. And there is good evidence that none of those great
saurians survived the date of the chalk. They died out and their place
was taken by the earliest ancestors of elephants, rhinoceroses, horses,
cattle, lions, and monkeys, from which in the course of ages the animals
we know by those names were developed, whilst very late in the history
man was produced. The reptiles continued as small, furtive
creatures—the lizards and a few biggish snakes and crocodiles—but no
descendants of “the great Dinosaurs” survived.
Another reason against the supposed survival of a real tradition of
dragons is that, even in regard to much later—immensely
later—creatures, such as the mammoth or hairy elephant, which we know
was contemporary with man, there is no real tradition. The natives of
the sub-arctic regions in which the skeletons and whole carcases of the
mammoth are found in a frozen state, and from whence many hundreds of
tusks of the mammoth have been since the earliest times yearly exported
and used in Europe as ivory, have no “tradition” of these creatures.
They have fanciful stories about the ghosts of the mammoths, but they
call their tusks “horns,” and have no legends of the monster as a living
thing. The use of mammoth’s ivory in Northern Europe dates back for a
thousand years historically, and probably has never ceased since the
days of the cave-men. Three years ago I examined the richly carved
drinking horn of a Scandinavian hero, dating from the tenth century, and
preserved amongst the treasures of York Minster, and I have little doubt
that it is fashioned from the tusk of a mammoth.
A third reason for rejecting any connection of the dragon with a real
reminiscence of the great extinct saurians is that its origin and its
gradual building up in human fancy can be traced in the same way as that
of many other fanciful and legendary creatures by reference to the
regular operation of the imagination in successive ages of mankind. All
races of men have imagined monsters by combining into one several parts
of different animals. The centaur of the Greeks is a blend of man and
horse, the great “divine” chimera of the Greeks was a two-headed blend
of lion and goat, and any such mixed creature is technically called
nowadays “a chimera”. The dragon is classed by heralds as a chimera.
Sometimes one of these imaginary beasts has its origin in a terrible or
weird animal, which really exists in some distant land, and is
celebrated or even worshipped by the inhabitants of that distant land,
whose descriptions of it are carried in a distorted and exaggerated
form to regions where it does not exist.
[Illustration: FIG. 21.—The Chinese Imperial Dragon, from a drawing on
a tile of the old Imperial Palace of Nankin. It has five claws. No one
outside the Imperial service may use it, under penalty of death.
Ordinary people have to be content with a four-clawed dragon. Compare
this with the European heraldic dragon, Fig. 16.]
[Illustration: FIG. 22.—A flying snake with two pairs of wings—a
“fabulous” creature thus drawn in an ancient Chinese work, the “Shan Hai
King.” This book dates from about 350 A.D., but probably is based on
records of a thousand years’ earlier date.]
The dragon appears to be nothing more nor less in its origin than one of
the great snakes (pythons), often 25 ft. in length, which inhabit
tropical India and Africa. Its dangerous character and terrible
appearance and movement impressed primitive mankind, and traditions of
it have passed with migrating races both to the East and to the West, so
that we find the mythical dragon in ancient China and in Japan, no less
than in Egypt and in Greece. It retains its snake-like body and tail,
especially in the Chinese and Japanese representations (Figs. 21 and
22); but in both East and West, legs and wings have been gradually added
to it for the purpose of making it more terrible and expressing some of
its direful qualities. Chinese traditions indicate the mountains of
Central Asia as the home of the dragon, whilst the ancient Greeks
considered it to have come from the East. As a matter of fact, the
Greek word “drakon” actually meant plainly and simply a large snake, and
is so used by Aristotle and other writers. There is a beautiful Greek
vase-painting (Fig. 23) showing the dragon which guarded the golden
apples of the Hesperides as nothing more than a gigantic snake (without
legs or wings), coiled round the trunk of the tree on which the apples
are growing (like the later pictures of the serpent on the apple tree in
the Garden of Eden), whilst the ladylike Hesperides are politely
welcoming the robust Hercules to their garden.
[Illustration: FIG. 23.—The dragon guarding the tree in the garden of
the Hesperides on which grew the golden apples, in quest of which,
according to Greek legend, the hero Hercules went. The drawing is copied
from an ancient Greek vase, and the original includes figures of the
Hesperides and of Hercules, not reproduced here.]
The worship and propitiation of the serpent is an immensely old form of
religion (antecedent to Judaism), and exists, or has existed, in both
the old world and the new. The Egyptians revered a great serpent-god
called “Ha-her,” or “great Lord of fear and terror”; to him the wicked
were handed over after death to be bitten and tortured. The evil spirit
in the Scandinavian mythology was a huge snake—and the connection, not
to say confusion, of the terrible snake with the dragon on the part of
the early Christians is shown by the words in Revelation xx. 1, 2, “the
dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan.” The mediæval
devil with goat’s feet retained the dragon’s tail with its curious
triangular termination.
To the Greeks and Romans snakes were not such very terrible creatures,
since the kinds found in South Europe are small and harmless—only the
viper being poisonous—and they regarded the serpent as a beneficent
creature, the familiar of Esculapius the god of medicine, companion of
the household gods (the Lares), and guardian of sacred places, tombs,
and concealed treasure (Fig. 27). The snake was the special earth-god,
subterranean in habit, cunning, subtle, and gifted with powers of
divination. The conception of the serpent as an avenging monster kept
continually thrusting itself from the East into the popular mythology of
the Greeks, and finally led to the building up of the dragon as a winged
and clawed creature distinct from the harmless but cunning snake
familiar to them. Even in India there arose a sort of double attitude
towards the snake (as is not uncommon in regard to deities). On the one
hand he was regarded as all that was terrible, destructive, and evil,
and on the other as amiable, kindly, and wise. The services of the
beautiful rat-snake in destroying house rats rendered him and his kind
welcome and valued guests. In Egypt we find representations of small
winged snakes without legs, and the ancient traveller, Herodotus,
believed that they represented real creatures, as did the Roman
naturalist, Pliny. Very probably the belief in winged snakes is due to
the similarity of the snake and the eel in general form, since the
paired fins of the eel close to the head (see Figs. 24 and 25)
correspond in position with the wings shown in the Egyptian drawings of
winged serpents. The particular form of winged snake pictured on
Egyptian monuments (see Figs. 26, 27) appears to me to be a realisation
of stories and fancies based on real experience of the locust. It was
the terrible and destructive locust of which Herodotus tells—calling it
“a winged serpent.” The Egyptian pictures of winged serpents have wings
resembling those of an insect (see Figs. 26 and 27), and sometimes they
are represented with one and sometimes with two pairs.
[Illustration: FIG. 24.—A votive tablet (ancient Rome) showing what is
meant for a snake, but has been “improved” by the addition of fins like
those of the eel.]
[Illustration: FIG. 25.—Ancient Roman painting of a so-called marine
serpent—really an eel-like fish—inaccurately represented. The fins
show how, from such pictures, the belief in winged serpents might take
its origin.]