eding lecture
was set up in type. For these reasons there is a good deal of
repetition, and in successive lectures a wider interpretation of
evidence mentioned in the preceding addresses. Had it been possible to
revise the whole book at one time, and if the pressure of other duties
had permitted me to devote more time to the work, these blemishes might
have been eliminated and a coherent story made out of what is little
more than a collection of data and tags of comment. No one is more
conscious than the writer of the inadequacy of this method of presenting
an argument of such inherent complexity as the dragon story: but my
obligation to the Rylands Library gave me no option in the matter: I had
to attempt the difficult task in spite of all the unpropitious
circumstances. This book must be regarded, then, not as a coherent
argument, but merely as some of the raw material for the study of the
dragon's history. In my lecture (13 November, 1918) on "The Meaning of
Myths," which will be published in the _Bulletin of the John Rylands
Library_, I have expounded the general conclusions that emerge from the
studies embodied in these three lectures; and in my forthcoming book,
"The Story of the Flood," I have submitted the whole mass of evidence to
examination in detail, and attempted to extract from it the real story
of mankind's age-long search for the elixir of life.

In the earliest records from Egypt and Babylonia it is customary to
portray a king's beneficence by representing him initiating irrigation
works. In course of time he came to be regarded, not merely as the giver
of the water which made the desert fertile, but as himself the
personification and the giver of the vital powers of water. The
fertility of the land and the welfare of the people thus came to be
regarded as dependent upon the king's vitality. Hence it was not
illogical to kill him when his virility showed signs of failing and so
imperilled the country's prosperity. But when the view developed that
the dead king acquired a new grant of vitality in the other world he
became the god Osiris, who was able to confer even greater boons of
life-giving to the land and people than was the case before. He was the
Nile, and he fertilized the land. The original dragon was a beneficent
creature, the personification of water, and was identified with kings
and gods.

But the enemy of Osiris became an evil dragon, and was identified with
Set.

The dragon-myth, howeve