About the book
Charles Gould believed that dragons were real animals: large reptiles that lived alongside early humans, were accurately described by them, and became extinct within historical memory. He was wrong.
He was also the first Government Geologist of Tasmania, trained at the Royal School of Mines, a veteran of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, and the son of John Gould the ornithologist. This is not a crank's book. It is a trained scientist applying a real method to a false hypothesis, and in 1886 nobody could yet tell him that the gap he needed to close was sixty-six million years wide.
Three chapters are printed complete and unaltered — the dragon, the Chinese dragon, the Japanese dragon — which together are Gould's whole treatment of one creature. The Chinese chapter is the reason the book survives its own thesis: he reads the Shan Hai King, the Yih King and the 'Rh Ya as sources with dates and reliability, which almost no English writer on myth was doing then, and he reports — against his own case — that in the older and more credible layer, dragons are infrequent.
Around the text, original to this edition: a Register of Claims setting six of his assertions beside what is actually established, with an editorial reading of each; a graded list of his sources, from the Chinese classics down to the Victorian newspapers he treats as comparable testimony; a glossary of eighteen dragon terms with chapter references produced by searching the text; a chronology whose first two rows are the whole answer to his thesis; and an index.
None of the 1886 figures is reproduced: the book names no illustrator, so they cannot be cleared. 74 pages, 6 × 9 in.
