We can account for their possession of accurate delineations of the dragon, which would form an important decoration of the standards and robes of ceremony which were companions of their flight, while their descriptions of the animal and its qualities would have already entered into the realms of fanciful exaggeration and myth. The dragon of Yao and Shun's time, and of Yu's time was, in my opinion, an aquatic creature, an alligator; but the dragon of their ancestors was a land lizard, which may even have existed down to the time of the great cataclysm which we call the Deluge, and the memory of which is best preserved in the Chinese drawings which have been handed down from remote antiquity, and have travelled from the great Central Asian centre, which was once alike its habitat and that of their ancestors. Its history may perhaps become evolved when the great store of book knowledge contained in the cuneiform tablets, representing the culture of the other branch of their great ethnological family, has been more extensively explored. Geologists of the present day have a great objection to the bringing in of cataclysms to account for any considerable natural changes, but this one I conceive to have been of so stupendous a nature as to have been quite capable of both extinguishing a species and confusing the recollection of it. The mere fact of the story of the dragon having survived such a period argues greatly, in my mind, for the reality of its previous existence. Extending our consideration, we are brought face to face with another very important fact, namely, that a large proportion of the human race content themselves with ephemeral structures. Thus, for example, the Chinese neither have now, nor at any time have had, any great architectural works. "The finest building in China is a reproduction, on a large scale, of the tent; and the wooden construction is always imitated where the materials are stone or marble. The supports, often magnificent logs, brought, at great expense, specially from the Straits, represent tent-poles; and the roof has always the peaked ends and the curves that recall the drooping canvas of the marquee. Architecture evidently died early; it never had life enough to assimilate the new material which it found when it migrated into China Proper. The yamen is a slightly glorified cottage; the temple is an improved yamen. Sculpture is equally neglected in this (æsthetically) benighted country. The human form is as dignified and sightly, to Chinese eyes at least, in China as in the West; but it never seems to have occurred, throughout so many hundreds of years, to any Chinaman to perpetuate it in marble or bronze, or to beautify a city with statues of its deities or great men."[112]