Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/774

754 still sometimes found untainted. There they have lain hermetically sealed for many a long century, and now, when the rivers from time to time wash away fragments of the great ice-cliffs, they reveal the strange treasures of that wondrous storehouse—sometimes a huge unwieldy hippopotamus, or a rhinoceros, or it may be a great woolly elephant with a mane like a lion and curly tusks; and the hungry Siberian bears and wolves fight and snarl over these dainty morsels, which are still as fresh as though they had fallen but an hour ago.

Here, in these marvelous ice-fields, lie inexhaustible stores of finest ivory, and this it is which the learned professors of the Celestial medical hall value so highly. So these precious tusks are dragged forth after thousands of years, to be ground down and boiled to a jelly for the cure of vulgar Chinese diseases of the nineteenth century! Alas, poor mammoth!

Nor are these the only antediluvian relics which are thus turned to account. Professor H. N. Moseley tells us of the "dragon's teeth and bones" which he bought from the druggists of Canton, where they are sold by weight as a regular medicine, and are highly prized in the materia medica both of China and Japan as specifics in certain diseases. They proved on examination to be the fossil teeth and bones of various extinct mammalia of the Tertiary period, including those of the rhinoceros, elephant, horse, mastodon, stag, hippotherium, and the teeth of another carnivorous animal unknown.

He obtained a translation of the passage in the medical works of Li She Chan which specially refers to the use of this medicine. It states that "dragons' bones come from the southern parts of Shansi, and are found in the mountains." Dr. To Wang King says that if they are genuine they will adhere to the tongue. "This medicine is sweet and is not poison. Dr. Koon certainly says that it is a little poisonous. Care must be taken not to let it come in contact with fish or iron. It cures heart-ache, stomach-ache, drives away ghosts, cures colds and dysentery, irregularities of the digestive organs, paralysis, etc., and increases the general health."

Another medical authority, "The Chinese Repository," published in Canton A.D. 1832, states that the bones of dragons are found on banks of rivers and in caves of the earth, places where the dragon died. Those of the back and brain are highly prized, being variegated with different streaks on a white ground. The best are known by slipping the tongue lightly over them. The teeth are of little firmness. The horns are hard and strong; but if these are taken from damp places, or by women, they are worthless.

From his examination of these so-called relics of the dragon (which prove to belong to so many different animals, which in successive ages have crept to the same cave to die), Mr. Moseley points out how some imaginative person probably first devised a fanciful picture of the mythical animal, combining the body of the vast lizard with the wings