DRAGONS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5430, 29 May 1929, Page 3

DRAGONS.

CREATURES OF IMAGINATION. ’MONSTERS OLD AND NEW. An automobile, speeding along a highway 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 imaginations. Dragons, to-day, exist only in the story-books of children. There, moving amidst the darker scenes of past ages, they are surprising mementos of the credulity of people who lived centuries ago. For no one ever saw a dragon ; no one, save in legend, ever slew a dragon. Possibly 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 blazing eyes did not exist until the twentieth century invented it. So times change, and ideas change. Even the giant planes which zoom through the sky are now accepted as established facts. Though the conquest of the air still captures popular imagination, already the wonder is going out of our attitude towards airplanes and dirigibles. The Word “Dragon.” •The word “dragon” goes back to ancient Latin and Greek; it is traceable to the Latin “draco,” and ultimately comes from a Greek word meaning to look, “so called from its terrible eyes.” The exact nature of a dragon, as it was supposed to be, was as follows : “A fabulous animal, generally represented as a monstrous winged and scaly serpent or lizard or saurian, with a crested head and enormous claws, and regarded as very powerful and ferocious.” In emblazoning arms on shields, to indicate ancestry, titles, etc., the dragon was represented as having a griffin’s head, wings, a scaly body, four legs with claws, barbed tail and tongue. The wivern, in heraldry, was a two-legged dragon, having wings and a head like a dragon’s, but without spurs. It was 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 cock’s egg. The suggestion of a "rooster’s egg” was probably. due to confusion with the French word “coq,” a cock. The word has also been confused with the French work for crocodile. The basilisk was another fabulous serpent, lizard, or dragon “whose hissing would drive away all other serpents, 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, there 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. “Dragoon,” as a name for the soldier who served both mounted and on foot, is a modification of the 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.