DRAGON

(Gr. Sja**!-.) In Fabulous History, one of the most famous mythological creations of antiquity and the middle ages. The position which this being occupies in fabulous history presents one of the most singular phenomena of the human mind, as its existence was firmly accredited among the ancients of almost every nation, both in the eastern and western regions of the earth. It occurs in the sacred allegories of the Jews, and in the legends of the Chinese and Japanese; and the pages of the cla ic poets of Greece and Rome teem with representations of the dragon. Thus the dark retreats of their gods and their sacred groves were defended by dragons; the chariot of €eres was drawn by them; and a dragon kept the garden of the Hesperides. In Scand in avian mysteries, the dragon was the minister of vengeance under their vindictive gotls (see Grimm's Deutsche My tho logie); and the ancient Britons, enslaved in the trammels of Druidic superstition, entertained a similar notion of its nature. (Rees's Cyclopaedia.) The allegory of the Dragon has even found a place among many nations who have embraced Christianity. In the the Book of Revelations (chap. 20.), the angel is represented as laying " hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the devil; " and hence in painting and statuary the triumph of Christianity over infidelity and heathenism is sometimes represented by a dragon pierced or trampled under foot. This representation ix)rms also the attribute of different saints in the legends of Christianity, more especially of St. Michael, St. George, and St. Margaret the Martyr. The dragon of antiquity was a species of monstrous serpent with wings and feet; and he seems to have po e ed many qualities in common with the most famed terrors of ancient Greece, such as the GorgoDs and hydras and chimeras dire, with which he was in all probability intimately allied. Dragon. In Zoology, this term is applied to a genus of small Saurian reptifps, characterized by two lateral aliform productions of the skin supported upon the first [s. 373]