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.