astronomy. See Draco.

Dragon's Head and Tail (caput & cauda draconis), are the nodes of the planets; or the two points where, in the ecliptic is intersected by the orbits of the planets, and particularly that of the moon; making with it angles of five degrees and eighteen minutes. One of these points looks northward; the moon beginning then to have northward latitude, and the other southward, where she commences south. Thus her deviation from the ecliptic seems (according to the fancy of some) to make a figure like to that of a dragon, whose belly is where she has the greatest latitude; the inter- section representing the head and tail, from which resemblance the denomination arises.

But note, that these points abide not always in one place, but have a motion of their own in the zodiac, and retrograde-wise 3 minutes 11 seconds per day; completing their circle in 13 years 225 days: so that the moon can be but twice in the ecliptic during her monthly period, but at all other times she will have a latitude or declination from the ecliptic.

It is about these points of intersection that all eclipses happen. They are usually denoted by these characters ♀ dragon's head, and ♀ dragon's tail.

**Dragon**, in zoology. See **Draco**.

**Dragon's Blood**, a gummi-resinous substance brought from the East Indies, either in oval drops wrapped up in flag leaves, or in large masses composed of smaller tears. It is said to be obtained from the palmijuncus draco, the calamus rotang, the dracena draco, the pterocarpus draco, and several other vegetables.

The writers on the materia medica in general give the preference to the former, though the others are not unfrequently of equal goodhefs. The true dragon's blood of either sort breaks smooth, free from any visible impurities, of a dark red colour, which changes upon being powdered into an elegant bright crimson. Several artificial compositions, coloured with the true dragon's blood, or Brazil wood, are sometimes sold in the room of this commodity. Some of these dissolve like gums in water; others crackle in the fire without proving inflammable; whilst the genuine sanguis draconis readily melts and catches flame, and is not acted on by watery liquors. It totally dissolves in pure spirit, and tinges a large quantity of the menstruum of a deep red colour. It is likewise soluble in expressed oils, and gives them a red hue, less beautiful than that communicated by anchusa. This drug in substance has no sensible smell or taste; when dissolved, it discovers some degree of warmth and pungency. It is usually, but without foundation, looked upon as a gentle astringent; and sometimes directed as such in extemporaneous prescription against seminal gleets, the fluor albus, and other fluxes. In these cases, it is supposed to produce the general effects of resinous bodies, lightly incrusting the fluids, and somewhat strengthening the solids. But in the present practice it is very little used either externally or internally.

A solution of dragon's blood in spirit of wine is used for staining marble, to which it gives a red tinge, which penetrates more or less deeply according to the heat of the marble during the time of application. But as it spreads at the same time that it sinks deep, for fine designs the marble should be cold. Mr du Fay says, that by adding pitch to this solution the colour may be rendered deeper.

**Dragon-Fly**, or **Dragonet**, in ichthyology. See **Callionymus**.

**Dragon-Fly**. See **Libellula**.

**Dragon-Shell**, in natural history, a name given by people curious in shells to a species of concamerated patella or limpet. This has a top very much bent; and is of an ash-colour on the outside, but of an elegant and bright flesh-colour within. This has been found sticking on the back of a tortoise, as the common limpets do on the sides of rocks; and some have been found affixed to large shells of the pinna marina brought from the East Indies at different times.

**Dragons**, in botany. See **Dracontium**.

**Dragonet**, or **Dragon-Fly**, in ichthyology. See **Callionymus**.

**Dragonée**, in heraldry. A lion dragonnée is where the upper half resembles a lion, the other half going off like the hinder part of a dragon. The same may be said of any other beast as well as a lion.

**Dragoon**, in military affairs, a musketeer mounted on horseback, who sometimes fights or marches on foot, as occasion requires.

Menage derives the word dragoon from the Latin draconarius, which in Vegetius is used to signify soldier. But it is more probably derived from the German tragen or dragen, which signifies to carry; as being infantry carried on horseback.

Dragoons are divided into brigades as the cavalry; and each regiment into troops; each troop having a captain, lieutenant, cornet, quarter-master, two sergeants, three corporals, and two drums. Some regiments have hautboys. They are very useful on any expedition that requires dispatch; for they can keep pace with the cavalry, and do the duty of infantry: they encamp generally on the wings of the army, or at the passes leading to the camp; and sometimes they are brought to cover the general's quarters: they march in the front and rear of the army.

The first regiment of dragoons raised in England was in 1681, and called the regiment of dragoons of North Britain. In battle or attacks they generally fight sword in hand after the first fire. Their arms are, a sword, firelock, and bayonet. In the French service, when the dragoons march on foot, their officers bear the pike and the sergeants the halbert, neither of which are used in the English service.

**Dragooning**, one of the methods used by Papists for converting refractory heretics, and bringing them within the pale of the true church.

The following method of dragooning the French Protestants, after the revocation of the edict of Nantes, under Louis XIV. is taken from a French piece, translated in 1686.

The troopers, soldiers, and dragoons went into the Protestant houses, where they marred and defaced their household stuff, broke their looking-glasses, and other utensils and ornaments, let their wine run about their cellars, and threw about their corn and spoiled it. And as to those things which they could not destroy in this manner, such as furniture of beds, linen, wearing apparel, plate, &c., they carried them to the market-place, and sold them to the Jesuits and other Roman catholics. By these means the Protestants in Montauban alone were, in four or five days, stripped of above a million of money. But this was not the worst.

They turned the dining-rooms of gentlemen into stables for their horses: and treated the owners of the houses where they quartered with the highest indignity and cruelty, lasting them about from one to another, day and night, without intermission, not suffering them to eat or drink; and when they began to sink under the fatigue and pains they had undergone, they laid them on a bed, and when they thought them... somewhat recovered, made them rise, and repeated the same tortures. When they saw the blood and sweat run down their faces and other parts of their bodies, they sluiced them with water, and putting over their heads kettle-drums, turned upside down, they made a continual din upon them till these unhappy creatures lost their senses. When one party of these tormentors were weary, they were relieved by another, who practised the same cruelties with fresh vigour.

At Négreliéfe, a town near Montauban, they hung up Isaac Favin, a Protestant citizen of that place, by his arm-pits, and tormented him a whole night, by pinching and tearing off his flesh with pincers. They made a great fire round a boy of about 12 years old, who, with hands and eyes lifted up to heaven, cried out, "My God, help me!" And when they found the youth resolved to die rather than renounce his religion, they snatched him from the fire just as he was on the point of being burnt.

In several places the soldiers applied red-hot irons to the hands and feet of men and breasts of women. At Nantes they hung up several women and maids by their feet, and others by their arm-pits, and thus exposed them to public view stark naked. They bound to posts mothers that gave suck, and let their sucking infants lie languishing in their sight for several days and nights, crying, mourning, and gasping for life. Some they bound before a great fire, and being half roasted, let them go; a punishment worse than death. Amidst a thousand hideous cries and a thousand blasphemies, they hung up men and women by the hair, and some by their feet, on hooks in chimneys, and smothered them with wisps of wet hay till they were suffocated. They tied some under the arms with ropes, and plunged them again and again into wells; they bound others like criminals, put them to the torture, and with a funnel filled them with wine till the fumes of it took away their reason, when they made them say, they consented to be catholics. They stripped them naked, and after a thousand indignities, stuck them with pins and needles from head to foot. They cut and slashed them with knives; and sometimes with red-hot pincers took hold of them by the nose and other parts of the body, and dragged them about the rooms till they made them promise to be catholics, or till the cries of these miserable wretches, calling upon God for help, forced them to let them go. They beat them with flaves, and thus bruised, and with broken bones, dragged them to church, where their forced presence was taken for an abjuration. In some places they tied fathers and husbands to their bed-posts, and before their eyes ravished their wives and daughters with impunity. They blew up men and women with bellows till they burst them. If any to escape these barbarities endeavoured to save themselves by flight, they pursued them into the fields and woods, where they shot at them like wild beasts, and prohibited them from departing the kingdom (a cruelty never practised by Nero or Diocletian) upon pain of confiscation of effects, the galleys, the lash, and perpetual imprisonment; info much that the prisons of the sea-port towns were crammed with men, women, and children, who endeavoured to save themselves by flight from their dreadful persecution. With these scenes of desolation and horror, the popish clergy feasted their eyes, and made them only a matter of laughter and sport.

Though my heart akes (says the writer of the piece from which we are transcribing) whilst I am relating these barbarities, yet for a perpetual memorial of the infernal cruelty practised by these monsters, I beg the reader's patience to lay before him two other instances, which, if he hath a heart like mine, he will not be able to read without watering these sheets with his tears.

"The first is of a young woman, who being brought before the council, upon refusing to abjure her religion, was ordered to prison. There they shaved her head, singed off the hair from other parts of her body; and having stripped her stark naked, led her through the streets of the city, where many a blow was given her, and stones flung at her: then they set her up to the neck in a tub full of water, where, after she had been for a while, they took her out, and put on her a shift dipt in wine, which, as it dried and stuck to her sore and bruised body, they snatched off again, and then had another ready dipped in wine to clap on her. This they repeated five times, thereby making her body exceeding raw and sore. When all these cruelties could not shake her constancy, they fastened her by her feet in a kind of gibbet, and let her hang in that posture, with her head downward, till she expired.

"The other is of a man in whose house were quartered some of these missionary dragoons. One day, having drank plentifully of his wine, and broken their glasses at every health, they filled the floor with the fragments, and by often walking over them reduced them to very small pieces. This done, in the infelicity of their mirth, they resolved on a dance, and told their Protestant host that he must be one of their company; but as he would not be of their religion, he must dance quite barefoot; and thus barefoot they drove him about the room, treading on the sharp points of the broken glasses. When he was no longer able to stand, they laid him on a bed, and, in a short time, stripped him stark naked, and rolled him from one end of the room to the other, till every part of his body was full of the fragments of glass. After this they dragged him to his bed, and having sent for a surgeon, obliged him to cut out the pieces of glass with his instruments, thereby putting him to the most exquisite and horrible pains that can possibly be conceived.

"These, fellow Protestants, were the methods used by the most Christian king's apostolic dragoons to convert his heretical subjects to the Roman catholic faith! These, and many other of the like nature, were the torments to which Louis XIV delivered them over to bring them to his own church! and as popery is unchangeably the same, these are the tortures prepared for you, if ever that religion should be permitted to become settled amongst you; the consideration of which made Luther say of it, what every man that knows anything of Christianity must agree with him in, 'If you had no other reason to go out of the Roman church, this alone would suffice, that you see and hear, how, contrary to the law of God, they shed innocent blood. This single circumstance shall, God willing, ever separate me from the papacy. And if I was now subject to it, and could blame nothing in any of their doctrines; yet for this crime of cruelty, I would fly from her communion, as from a den of thieves and murderers."