Another Chinese has related that a business partner of his, while on a journey up the Yangtze River, saw three dragons crossing a mountain range near the shore. Every person on board was spellbound as they watched the three monsters—one yellow, another white, and the third blue—as they majestically made their way with great undulating strides up the mountain side. The dragons passed by so near the boat that the observers saw every detail of their heads and the lacelike scales of their bodies. The boat was respectfully stopped in mid-river, and only when the dragons had disappeared over the ridge did the boatmen resume their task at the oars. Various stories have come to the writer, of dragons which have been seen either riding upon banks of fog or dangling from passing clouds during great windstorms or rainstorms. Invariably these have been described as having scale-covered bodies. One reasonable explanation for the suspended dragons may be found in insipient tornadoes and water spouts which never reach the ground. There seems, however, to be no explanation for the dragon visits described by the five observers, unless it be that strange monsters of the deep either crawled up out of the river and lay on the bank, in a dormant state, or were sucked up by ocean- or river-water spouts, and when the columns of water broke over the land the creatures were dropped far from their natural habitat. Two difficulties at once present themselves to combat this hypothesis. The first of these is the improbability that there are such creatures in existence, and the second difficulty lies in the strangeness of their disappearance after coming to the earth. As a possible explanation of the first difficulty, we wish to ask whether it is not possible that there are still existing in the depths of the sea and in great rivers curious reptiles and strange monsters such as no human beings now living have ever seen, the descendants of the mighty saurians which lived upon the earth long ages ago, and which geologists tell us later entered the sea, making that their more secretive habitat? As an explanation for the disappearance of the dragon in these three instances the writer notes two facts. The dragons in each case were seen on the banks of great rivers and in each case disappeared after a heavy rain. Might it not have been that the monsters were in reality not dead but only unconscious, and that the heavy flood washed the creatures back into the river whence they were carried out to sea? CHAPTER SIX THE DRAGON IN WESTERN MYTHOLOGY The dragon is not a conception of the Chinese mind alone. It also occupies a prominent place in the legends and literature of most of the countries of Europe. Cicero in his “de Divinatione” (Book II, line 30), Euripides in his “Philostratus” (Book I, line 2), and Homer in the “Iliad” (Book II, line 309) all mention a dragon.