DRAGONS OLD AND NEW

Hokitika Guardian, 24 June 1929, Page 8

DRAGONS OLD AND NEW

An automobile, speeding along a high way at night, with its blazing eyes and its discharge of gases from the exhaust pipe, would have been regarded by our ancestors as a fiery dragon. Such a monster did not exist even in their fertile imagination. Yet to us this “dragon” is commonplace.

So 'times change, and ideas change. Even the giant planes which zoom through the sky are now accepted as established factsi. -Though ’the conquest of the air still captures popular imagination, already the wonder is going out of our-attitude towards airplanes and dirigibles. Dragons, to-day, exist only in the story books of children. There, moving amidst the darker scenes o* past ages, they are surpising mementoes of the credulity of people who lived centuries ago. For no one ever saw a dragon ; no one, save a legend, ever slew a dragon. Possibily a few intrepid adventurers met with strange beasts in far regions of the earth, which they may have regarded as dragons. But the fire-breathing monster with dazing eyes did not exist until the twentieth century invented it.

The word “dragon” goes back to ancient Latin and Greek; according to Webster’s New International Dictionary, it is traceable to the Latin • draco,” and intimately comes from, a Greek word meaning to look, “so called from its terrible eyes.” The exact nature of a dragon, as it was supposed iO be, was as follows: • “A fabulous animal, generally represented was a monstrous winged and scaly serpent or lizard or sauVian, with a crested head and enormous claws, and regarded as very powerful and ferocious.”

Jii emblazoning arms on shields, to indicate ancestry, titles, etc., the dragon was represented as having a gniiin’s head, wings, a scaly body, iour legs with claws, barbed tail and tongue. The wivern, in heraldry, was a two-legged dagon, having wings and a head like a dragon’s but without spurs, it Yvas similar to the cockatrice, which had the head, legs, and wings of a cock, and a serpent’s, tail. In legend, the cockatrice was a fabulous serpent with eyes which could glare fatally; it was supposed to be hatched from a cocks egg. The suggestion of a “rooster’s egg” was probably Sue to confusion with the French word “coif,” a cock. The word had also been confused with the French word for crocodile. The basilisic was another fabulous serpent, lizard or dragon “whose hissing would drive away all other serpents,” says Webster's New International, “and whose breath, and even look, was fatal.” The nearest approach to dragons in nature to-day are probably the crocodiles and alligators; next to them, various other 'lizards. If snakes and serpents are counted among the dragons, mere are such monsters as the python and the boa. In the insect world there is the dragon fly, quite harmless to human beings, but a terror to the smaller insects, which it captures on the wing and devours. “Dragon,” as a name for the soldier, who served both mounted and on foot, is a modification of uiie word “dragon.” Association with the dragon may have been early, from the name of a military standard with a dragon on it, or perhaps from the dragon, a short musket.