Aristotle says that, as a matter of common report in his time, there were winged serpents in Africa. Herodotus, on the contrary, says there were none except in Arabia, and he went across the Red Sea from the city of Bats in order to see them. He did not, however, succeed in doing so, though he says he saw their dead bodies and bones. He says that they hang about the trees in vast numbers, are of small size and varied colour, and that they are kept in check by the bird known as the Ibis, which on that account is held sacred, since they increase so rapidly that unless devoured they would render it impossible for man to maintain himself on the earth. They invade Egypt in swarms, flying across the Red Sea. All this agrees with my suggestion that the winged “serpents” heard of by Herodotus were really locusts; and the creature drawn in Fig. 27 may well be a locust transformed by fancy into a winged snake. [Illustration: FIG. 26.—Egyptian four-winged serpent—as drawn on ancient Egyptian temples.] [Illustration: FIG. 27.—Two-winged serpent, symbolic of the goddess Eileithya, from a drawing on an Egyptian temple.] It would be a very interesting but a lengthy task to trace out the origin and history of the various traditional monsters, such as the basilisk, the gorgon, the cockatrice, the salamander, and the epimacus, which have come into European legend and belief, and to give some account of the special deadly qualities of each. St. Michael and St. George slaughtering each his dragon and rescuing a lovely maiden from its clutches are only appropriations by the new religion of the similar deeds ascribed to Greek heroes, such as Hercules, Bellerophon, and Perseus. Often a belief in the existence of a monster has arisen by a misunderstanding, on the part of a credulous people, of a drawing or carving showing a strange mixture of the leading characteristics of different animals, which was meant by the man who made it to be only symbolic of a combination of qualities. Just as the Latins and mediæval people credulously accepted Greek symbolic monsters as real, and transmuted Greek heroes into Christian saints, so were the Greeks themselves deluded by strange carvings and blood-curdling legends which reached them at various dates from mysterious Asia into a belief in the actual existence of a variety of fantastic monsters. “The Greeks,” says M. E. Pottier, a distinguished French writer on Greek mythology, “often copied Oriental representations without understanding them.” The conventional dragon probably came from Indian sources through Persia to China, on the one hand, spreading eastwards, and to the Latins of the early Roman Empire, on the other hand, spreading westwards; but at what date exactly it is difficult to make out.