Printed By W H Allen and Co., 13 Waterloo Place, Pall Mall S.W. PREFACE. The Author has to express his great obligations to many gentlemen who have assisted him in the preparation of this volume, either by affording access to their libraries, or by furnishing or revising translations from the Chinese, &c.; and he must especially tender them to J. Haas, Esq., the Austro-Hungarian Vice-Consul at Shanghai, to Mr. Thomas Kingsmill and the Rev. W. Holt of Shanghai, to Mr. Falconer of Hong-Kong, and to Dr. N. B. Dennys of Singapore. For the sake of uniformity, the author has endeavoured to reduce all the romanised representations of Chinese sounds to the system adopted by S. W. Williams, whose invaluable dictionary is the most available one for students. No alteration, however, has been made when quotations from eminent sinologues like Legge have been inserted. Should the present volume prove sufficiently interesting to attract readers, a second one will be issued at a future date, in continuation of the subject. _June, 1884._ NOTE BY THE PUBLISHERS. The Publishers think it right to state that, owing to the Author's absence in China, the work has not had the advantage of his supervision in its passage through the press. It is also proper to mention that the MS. left the Author's hands eighteen months ago. 13, WATERLOO PLACE. S.W. _January, 1886._ CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTION 1 LIST OF AUTHORS CITED 27 CHAPTER I.--ON SOME REMARKABLE ANIMAL FORMS 31 CHAPTER II.--EXTINCTION OF SPECIES 42 CHAPTER III.--ANTIQUITY OF MAN 78 CHAPTER IV.--THE DELUGE NOT A MYTH 101 CHAPTER V.--ON THE TRANSLATION OF MYTHS BETWEEN THE OLD AND THE NEW WORLD 137 CHAPTER VI.--THE DRAGON 159 CHAPTER VII.--THE CHINESE DRAGON 212 CHAPTER VIII.--THE JAPANESE DRAGON 248 CHAPTER IX.--THE SEA-SERPENT 260 CHAPTER X.--THE UNICORN 338 CHAPTER XI.--THE CHINESE PHŒNIX 366 APPENDICES 375 MYTHICAL MONSTERS. INTRODUCTION. It would have been a bold step indeed for anyone, some thirty years ago, to have thought of treating the public to a collection of stories ordinarily reputed fabulous, and of claiming for them the consideration due to genuine realities, or to have advocated tales, time-honoured as fictions, as actual facts; and those of the nursery as being, in many instances, legends, more or less distorted, descriptive of real beings or events. Now-a-days it is a less hazardous proceeding. The great era of advanced opinion, initiated by Darwin, which has seen, in the course of a few years, a larger progress in knowledge in all departments of science than decades of centuries preceding it, has, among other changes, worked a complete revolution in the estimation of the value of folk-lore; and speculations on it, which in the days of our boyhood would have been considered as puerile, are now admitted to be not merely interesting but necessary to those who endeavour to gather up the skeins of unwritten history, and to trace the antecedents and early migrations from parent sources of nations long since alienated from each other by customs, speech, and space. I have, therefore, but little hesitation in gravely proposing to submit that many of the so-called mythical animals, which throughout long ages and in all nations have been the fertile subjects of fiction and fable, come legitimately within the scope of plain matter-of-fact Natural History, and that they may be considered, not as the outcome of exuberant fancy, but as creatures which really once existed, and of which, unfortunately, only imperfect and inaccurate descriptions have filtered down to us, probably very much refracted, through the mists of time. I propose to follow, for a certain distance only, the path which has...