IN a celebrated lecture on ‘Snakes,’ given by Mr. Ruskin at the London Institution in March 1880, he introduced his subject with the three considerations: ‘What has been thought about them?’ ‘What is truly known about them?’—extremely little, as he suggested;—and, ‘What is wisely asked about them, and what is desirable to know?’ The three questions exactly agree with the object of my work, this chapter especially; and I will invite my readers to seek in their own minds the answer to the first question, which will also furnish a solution to the second, and, I trust, incite some interest in the third. The learned lecturer carried us through the realms of fancy, to conjure up all the grotesque creatures which, under the name of ‘serpents,’ have figured in heraldry and mythology. By these, and by the light of the poets of old, and in later times through the naturalists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we learn what a ‘serpent’ was to them, and what it included. In remote antiquity it was an embodiment of the hideous and the terrible; and in spite of Aristotle (a comparatively recent authority), dragons and such-like chimærical creatures have pervaded the mind both of the erudite and the ignorant, in association with serpents, till within three hundred years, and are not even yet altogether discarded. Nor am I inclined to believe that the terror-inspiring representations of classic days are so unreal as might be supposed. Palæontology is continually bringing to light new evidences of the presence of man on the earth in ages far remote; and we do not know for certain what strange forms of animal life were his contemporaries, or when the faculty of speech was so far developed in him as to enable him to learn about his predecessors, which were still more terrible. We do know that fossils of mammoth creatures, passing strange, are coeval with fossil human remains, and to those early types of humanity a knowledge of still stranger creatures of reptilian forms may have been handed down from mouth to mouth; for there is generally a germ of truth at the root of a myth. Fossil remains tell us of the gigantic forms of ancient reptiles, or compound reptile-fish or reptile-birds, and quadrupeds which have gradually diminished in size or become altogether extinct as our own period has been approached. Said Professor Huxley, at the British Association in 1878, ‘Within the last twenty years we have an astonishing accumulation of evidence of the existence of man in ages antecedent to those of which we have any historical record. Beyond all question, man, and what is more to the purpose, intelligent man, existed at a time when the whole physical conformation of the country was totally different from that which now characterizes it.’ Did these intelligent beings know anything of the _Dinotherium_ (dreadful beast), or the _Dinornis_ (dreadful bird), or any other of those fearful forms which have furnished historic ages with a dragon?