DRAGONS OF THE AIR.
Dragons of the Atr: an Account of Extinct Flying Reptiles. By H. G. Seeley, F.R.S. With 80 Illustrations. (Methuen and Co. Gs.)—Since the time when, as Professor Seeley tells us in his preface, Sir Richard Ow en's lectures on Extinct Fossil Reptiles led him to abandon law for paleontology, as holding out " a better return in new knowledge for reasonable study," he has devoted himself to palmontology, making a specialty of the pterodactyles, on which he in his turn delivered a series of lectures at the Royal Institution. He has now completed his task, as far as possible, by an examination of all the specimens at present existing in European museums, and has given us the results of his studies in the present compendium of his lectures, rewritten and revised, and brought up to date. Much of the book is more or less technical, but the greater part may be read with pleasure by any intelligent reader ; and the relations of pterodactyles to other animals, and the differences of arrangement between the flying apparatus of bats, birds, pterodactyles, and other animals more or less capable of flight, are well brought out. Incidentally, the old traditions respecting dragons are briefly noted ; and when Professor Seeley remarks, "In the luxuriant imaginations of ancient Eastern peoples, dating back to prehistoric ages, perhaps 5000 B.C., the dragons present an astonishing constancy of form," we notice, on the one hand, the suggestion that dragons may originally have had a genuine traditional origin ; and on the other hand, extreme caution about assigning any great antiquity to civilised records. In conclusion, we may remark that Professor Seeley was not the first man to abandon law for science ; Professor Westwood had done so before him; but he devoted his attention to entomology.
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