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Title: The Evolution of the Dragon

Author: G. Elliot Smith

Release Date: July 10, 2007 [EBook #22038]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE EVOLUTION OF THE DRAGON

BY G. ELLIOT SMITH, M.A., M.D., F.R.S.

PROFESSOR OF ANATOMY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

_ILLUSTRATED_

Manchester: AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONGMANS, GREEN & COMPANY

London, New York, Chicago, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras

1919

PREFACE.

Some explanation is due to the reader of the form and scope of these
elaborations of the lectures which I have given at the John Rylands
Library during the last three winters.

They deal with a wide range of topics, and the thread which binds them
more or less intimately into one connected story is only imperfectly
expressed in the title "The Evolution of the Dragon".

The book has been written in rare moments of leisure snatched from a
variety of arduous war-time occupations; and it reveals only too plainly
the traces of this disjointed process of composition. On 23 February,
1915, I presented to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society
an essay on the spread of certain customs and beliefs in ancient times
under the title "On the Significance of the Geographical Distribution of
the Practice of Mummification," and in my Rylands Lecture two weeks
later I summed up the general conclusions.[1] In view of the lively
controversies that followed the publication of the former of these
addresses, I devoted my next Rylands Lecture (9 February, 1916) to the
discussion of "The Relationship of the Egyptian Practice of
Mummification to the Development of Civilization". In preparing this
address for publication in the _Bulletin_ some months later so much
stress was laid upon the problems of "Incense and Libations" that I
adopted this more concise title for the elaboration of