Mythical Monsters

Charles Gould, geological surveyor of Tasmania, spent 400 pages and 93 engravings arguing that dragons, sea-serpents and unicorns are not inventions but memories — real animals, seen, feared, and distorted by time.

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Antiquity of Man: Geikie

The correctness of these inferences has been objected to by Mr. James Geikie and Dr. Croll, who doubt whether the northward currents of air would act as successful carriers of heat to the polar regions, or whether they would not rather dissipate it into space upon the road. On the other hand, Mr. Geikie, though admitting that the temperature of a large unbroken arctic continent would be low, suggests that, as the winds would be stripped of all moisture on its fringes, the interior would therefore be without accumulations of snow and ice; and in the more probable event of its being deeply indented by fjords and bays, warm sea-currents (the representatives of our present Gulf and Japan streams, but possessing a higher temperature than either, from the greater extent of equatorial sea-surface originating them, and exposed to the sun's influence) would flow northward, and, ramifying, carry with them warm and heated atmospheres far into its interior, though even these, he thinks, would be insufficient in their effects under any circumstances to produce the sub-tropical climates which are known to have existed in high latitudes.

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