i dicided to take a break from "girls and dragons" so inioy this post about dr. Ernest Drake


Born in 1822, St. Leonard's Forest, Sussex, England. Ernest Drake is fascinated by dragons, and wrote dragonology. He believes that the few dragons that still remain should be very well protected, and has no doubt that there is no such thing. His books were lately found and published, and became the great books we read today.Dr. Ernest Drake was born in 1822 in St. Leonard's Forest in Sussex, England, in the very same year as Weasel, the knucker of St. Leonard's Forest. As a boy he was fascinated by palaeontology, thanks to the fossil mania that had been sparked off by Gideon Mantell's discovery of the Iguanodon tooth near Cuckfield in Sussex. However, when he was eight years old, he had his first encounter with the knucker, thinking it must be some kind of dinosaur remnant. Nobody believed his story until he was fourteen when he met Dragon Master Ebenezer Crook at a meeting of the Sussex Archeological Society. Ebenezer and his wife followed young Drake into the forest, where their dragon-tracking skills led to a second encounter. Ebenezer then explained to Drake the differences between dragons and dinosaurs, and convinced him to study the former. But Drake's parents did not allow him to travel to Bodmin to study with Ebenezer, and he was only able to do so when he graduated from university in 1843. In Bodmin, Drake studied dragonology under Ebenezer Crook for four years before beginning his first round-the-world trip to investigate both dragons and dragonological societies. He finally became a Dragonologist First Class in 1852, enabling him to assume the title of "Doctor of Dragonology" after completing ground-breaking scientific work on the migratory habits of Frost Dragons. Travellling to London, he set up a shop called Dr. Drake's Dragonalia, where he taught dragonology to a few select pupils. His magnum opus was a book called Dragonology, which was initially published on a print run of only 100 copies in 1896, but he also produced several other works related to dragons. All of these books have the recurring themes that dragons ought to become objects of scientific study, and that as they are scarce it is the responsibility of dragonologists to conserve and protect them wherever they may be found. (Dugald A. Steer)