rquette. On the picture
is inscribed the following in ink: "Made by Wm. Dennis, April 3rd,
1825". The date is in both letters and figures. On the top of the
picture in large letters are the two words, "FLYING DRAGON". This
picture, which has been kept in the old Gilham family of Madison county
and bears the evidence of its age, is reproduced as Fig. 3.

[Illustration: Fig. 3.--Wm. Dennis's Drawing of the "Flying Dragon"
Depicted on the Rocks at Piasa, Illinois.]

He also publishes another representation with the following remarks:--

"One of the most satisfactory pictures of the Piasa we have ever seen is
in an old German publication entitled 'The Valley of the Mississippi
Illustrated. Eighty illustrations from Nature, by H. Lewis, from the
Falls of St. Anthony to the Gulf of Mexico,' published about the year
1839 by Arenz & Co., Dusseldorf, Germany. One of the large full-page
plates in this work gives a fine view of the bluff at Alton, with the
figure of the Piasa on the face of the rock. It is represented to have
been taken on the spot by artists from Germany.... In the German picture
there is shown just behind the rather dim outlines of the second face a
ragged crevice, as though of a fracture. Part of the bluff's face might
have fallen and thus nearly destroyed one of the monsters, for in later
years writers speak of but one figure. The whole face of the bluff was
quarried away in 1846-47."

The close agreement of this account with that of the Chinese and
Japanese dragon at once arrests attention. The anatomical peculiarities
are so extraordinary that if Pere Marquette's account is trustworthy
there is no longer any room for doubt of the Chinese or Japanese
derivation of this composite creature. If the account is not accepted we
will be driven, not only to attribute to the pious seventeenth-century
missionary serious dishonesty or culpable gullibility, but also to
credit him with a remarkably precise knowledge of Mongolian archaeology.
When Algonkin legends are recalled, however, I think we are bound to
accept the missionary's account as substantially accurate.

Minns claims that representations of the dragon are unknown in China
before the Han dynasty. But the legend of the dragon is much more
ancient. The evidence has been given in full by de Visser.[160]

He tells us that the earliest reference is found in the _Yih King_, and
shows that the dragon was "a water animal akin to the snake, which
[used] to sleep