Its hind limbs are those of a bird, except that they have more flesh upon the lowest joints and are covered with this soft down.

Its front limbs, my father says, seem as if nature had hesitated between wings and arms.

They have attached to them several long, sharp, featherless quills starting from a shrivelled membrane, which make them very powerful and formidable weapons, so that no animal likes to attack it; while the foot has four fingers or claws with, which it clasps fish or small dragons, especially those electric dragons of which you have seen a tame and very much enlarged specimen, and so holds them that they cannot find a chance of delivering their electric shock.

But for the _Thernee_ these dragons, winged as they are, would make those lands hardly habitable either for man, or other beasts.

All our furs are obtained from those countries, and the creatures from which they are derived are carefully preserved for that purpose, it being forbidden to kill more than a certain number of each every year, which makes these skins by far the costliest articles we use." By this time we had reached the utmost point to which the carriages could take us, about a furlong from the platform on which I had rested during my descent.