Dragons Bones, Teeth and Early Man

From at least as far back as the Han dynasties (206 B.C. to A.D. 220) dragons' bones have been prescribed as a sedative, a styptic and for employment in surgery, gynaecology and pediatrics. In the sixth century of our era the physician Tao Hungching described how and where the precious bones might be discovered. In the eleventh century a learned man called Shan Kuo offered an explanation for the fossilization of animal bones, while Li Shihchen (1518-1593) set forth in his classical work Pen Ts'ao Kang Mu (The Compendium of Materia Medica) their nature and action.

'Dragons' bones', we may read in an apothecary's vade-mecum published during the reign of the Ch'ienlung Emperor (1735-1798), 'are efficacious in heart affections and in those of the intestines and liver. The bones are also recommended to those who are nervous and suffer from high blood pressure. The bones are specific in cases of constipation, nightmare, epilepsy, disorders of the bladder, fevers, dysentery, piles, consumption, ulcers and difficulty in breathing. . . .'

Compared with such powerful and mysterious remedies, our European cure-alls seem commonplace enough. 'Lignum vitae . . . healeth the French Pockes and also helpeth the gout in the feete, the stoone, the palsey, lepree, dropsy, fallynge euyll and other diseases' as is stated in an English translation of a German treatise (1519).

To this day, even in the New China, dragons' bones and teeth form a part of the regular stock-in-trade of the druggists and not only are such things specific for many ills and ailments, but the bones of the dragon enter into the manufacture of the complicated, traditional, Chinese aphrodisiacs.

'Dragons' bones', as a matter of fact, are not those of any sort of reptile but are the fossilized remains of mammals often enough of mammals now extinct in China, such as antelope (for China was once, as Africa is now, a great antelope 'province'), sabre-toothed felines, hyena, elephant (which lingered on in central China until at least Shang times, say 1300 B.C.), rhinoceros (which survived even longer than elephant and were much sought after for their horns) and Hipparion the three-toed horse which also flourished in the New World as in other parts of the Old. So abundant are Hipparion remains in China that the words 'Hipparion fauna' are generally used to designate an assemblage made up of various other fossil remains as well as Hipparion.

Hipparion teeth have for long been popular and the 'prime quality' dragons' bones consist very largely of the dark-coloured fossil teeth of this ancient type of horse. Then, in descending scale of popularity, come the teeth of porcupine, those of tapir and Malayan bear, together with those of the so-called 'bamboo-bear', better known to us as the 'Giant Panda'.

It was among a collection of dragons' bones bought in Peking that Max Schlosser found a tooth he attributed to a 'manlike ape' or an 'ape-like man'.

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