Like the Mammoth and the Mastodon, its contemporaries, the Woolly Rhinoceros has given rise to some curious legends. In the city of Klagenfurt, in Carinthia, is a fountain on which is sculptured the head of a monstrous dragon with six feet, and a head surmounted by a stout horn. According to popular tradition, still prevalent at Klagenfurt, this dragon lived in a cave, whence it issued from time to time to frighten and ravage the country. A bold cavalier killed the dragon, paying with his life for this proof of courage. The same kind of legend seems to be current in every country, such as that of the valiant St. George and the dragon, and of St. Martha, who about the same time conquered the famous _Tarasque_ of the city of Languedoc, which bears the name of Tarascon.
But at Klagenfurt the popular legend has happily found a mouthpiece; the head of the pretended dragon killed by the valorous knight is preserved in the Hôtel de Ville, and this head has furnished the sculptor of the fountain with a model for the head of his statue. Herr Unger, of Vienna, recognised at a glance the cranium of the fossil rhinoceros; its discovery in some cave had probably originated the fable of the knight and the dragon. It is always interesting to discover a scientific basis for fables which otherwise it would be difficult to account for.
The same rhinoceros was once a denizen of our country, and its remains are met with in caves and river-gravels. Specimens of its skull have also been dredged up by fishermen from the "Dogger Bank" in the North Sea.
"To discover order and intelligence in scenes of apparent wildness and confusion is the pleasing task of the geological inquirer."--Dr. Paris.
Of all the monsters that ever lived on the face of the earth, the giant birds were perhaps the most grotesque. An emu or a cassowary of the present day looks sufficiently strange by the side of ordinary birds; but "running birds" much larger than these flourished not so very long ago in New Zealand and Madagascar, and must at one time have inhabited areas now sunk below the ocean waves.
The history of the discovery of these remarkable and truly gigantic birds in New Zealand, and the famous researches of Professor Owen, by which their structures have been made known, must now engage our attention.