The Cabinet of Real Monsters

From a book that argued dragons were animals, not myths.

Charles Gould was a government geologist, and he meant every word of this: that dragons, sea-serpents and unicorns were real creatures, remembered badly. Here are the strangest things he put in evidence — each linking to the page it sits on.

1. The book's actual thesis, stated flatly: that dragons, winged snakes, sea-serpents, unicorns “and other so-called fabulous monsters” really existed, at dates coeval with man. Gould was a trained geologist, and he is not being whimsical.Read it: On Some Remarkable Animal Forms
2. Onesicritus recorded two dragons kept in India by a dancer — one of forty-six cubits, one of eighty — and Alexander the Great earnestly tried to get a look at them.Read it: Appendix I: Book
3. Egyptian books claim that under Ptolemy Philadelphus two dragons were brought alive from Æthiopia into Philadelphia, forty cubits and thirty cubits in magnitude.Read it: Appendix I: Book
4. In China the five-clawed dragon was imperial property. The Emperor appropriated it to himself; everyone else's dragons had to make do with fewer claws.Read it: Appendix I: Chinese
5. Great carp that ascend the Dragon Gate become dragons. The ones that fail, the record notes, merely prick the forehead and strike the cheek — the oldest known description of falling just short.Read it: Appendix I: Hence
6. A dragon once received divine honours in a tower at Melita in Egypt — not feared, not slain, but worshipped, with the sacred animal kept on the premises.Read it: Appendix I: Chians
7. On Chios a dragon was said to have grown to extreme size in a dark wooded valley of Mount Pelienæus, and its hissing alone struck the islanders with horror.Read it: Appendix I: Chians
8. Chinese natural history is unnervingly specific about dragon husbandry: the dragon lays three eggs, hibernates in deep pools through the autumn, and a lesser sort called the Tiao-sheh is appointed to guard decayed timber.Read it: Appendix I: Chuh-Lung
9. The crocodile enters the record as “the Earth Dragon,” with its length given as one ch'ang — which Gould converts, deadpan, to 141 English inches.Read it: Appendix I: Chan
10. Ælian tells of a dragon that loved the Thessalian Alevus, and of another that heard robbers attacking the boy it had been raised with, hissed once, scattered them in terror, then dressed its old friend's wounds and escorted him through the snake-infested country home.Read it: Appendix I (Assistance cried out)
11. The Chinese phœnix is assembled from spare parts: a cock's head, a snake's neck, a swallow's beak, a tortoise's back, five colours, and a height of more than six feet.Read it: The Phenix of the East
12. Phœnix chicks are born plain. The markings of the five colours only appear at three years of age.Read it: The Chinese Phenix
13. The Bamboo Books date a phœnix sighting precisely: male and female arrived in the seventh month of the fiftieth year of the reign of Hwang Ti, 2647 B.C.Read it: The Chinese Phenix: Hwang
14. The phœnix was a political barometer. When heaven disapproved of the people — drought, locusts, famine, pestilence — the Fung Hwang withdrew from civilised country into the deserts and forests.Read it: The Chinese Phenix: Hwang
15. As late as A.D. 668 the general Sieh Jan Kwéi, having conquered Corea, is said to have climbed Fung Hwang mountain there and seen the bird himself.Read it: The Chinese Phenix: Hwang
16. Gould's strongest card was the fossil record: Mososaurs of at least sixty feet, and Professor Mudge riding through the Colorado badlands past the bleached bones of ten of them at once, jaws still armed with teeth.Read it: On Some Remarkable Animal Forms: Saurian
17. The Babylonian flood king Xisuthros is credited with a reign of eighteen sares — 64,800 years.Read it: Appendix I (DELUGE TRADITION ACCORDING)
18. The Chaldean ark comes with a bill of materials: three times 3,600 measures of asphalte on the outside, the same again within, and three times 3,600 porters carrying the provisions aboard.Read it: The Deluge Not a Myth: Egyptian
19. To argue that flood legends record real events, Gould reached for the news: a tornado at Canton on 11 April 1878 destroyed two thousand houses and ten thousand lives in a few minutes.Read it: The Deluge Not a Myth: Canton
20. And a Bengal cyclone on 31 October 1876 put 3,093 square miles under water and killed two hundred and fifteen thousand people. His point: a catastrophe big enough to become scripture need not be mythical.Read it: The Deluge Not a Myth: Egyptian
21. Chinese records place their great inundation in the sixty-first year of Yao, 2297 B.C. Ussher's Biblical date is 2349–2348 B.C. Gould notes the two are within fifty-one years of each other and thinks that means something.Read it: The Deluge Not a Myth: China
22. When Greeks boasted to Egyptian priests about the Deluge of Deucalion, the priests called them childish for making so much of it — there had been several such local catastrophes, and Egypt had survived the lot.Read it: The Deluge Not a Myth: Egyptian
23. Gould inspects a “sea-dragon” four feet long, standing bolt upright on two legs, engraved in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1749 — and concludes it was, like Barnum's mermaid, “probably a triumph of art.”Read it: The Chinese Dragon: Aldrovandus
24. Ignatius Donelly's Atlantis (1882) argued the island was real, that its kings became the gods of Greek mythology, and that its destruction is the source of every Deluge story on earth. Gould takes the argument seriously enough to answer it at length.Read it: On the Translation of Myths Between the Old And: Donelly