by treading it out with cattle.  We might, indeed, refer all to one root, by deriving dross (a provincial form of which is drass) through the O. Fr. drache, (as in O. Fr. treche, Fr. tresse, E. tress,) but we have A. S. dresten, which is better accounted for by therscan.  The other forms, such as drabbe, dregg, and dragan, the b and v being analogous to E. draggle, drabble, draught, draft, all equally from dragan.  We have a suspicion that dragon is to be referred to the same root.  Mr. Wedgwood follows Richardson, who follows Vossius in a fanciful etymology from the Greek [Greek:  derkomai = blepein] to see.  Sharpness of sight, it is true, was attributed to the mythologized reptile, but the primitive draco was nothing but a large serpent, supposed to be the boa.  This sense must accordingly be comparatively modern.  The eagle is the universal type of keenness of vision.  The reptile’s way of moving himself without legs is his most striking peculiarity; and if we derive dragon from the root meaning to drag, to draw, (because he draws himself along,) we find it analogous to serpent, reptile, snake.[b] The relation between [Greek:  trechein] and dragan may be seen in G. ziehen, meaning both to draw and to go.  Mr. Wedgwood says that he finds it hard to conceive any relation between the notion of treachery, betrayal, (truegen, betruegen,) and that of drawing.  It would seem that to draw into an ambush, the drawing of a fowler’s net, and the more sublimated drawing a man on to his destruction, supplied analogies enough.  The contempt we feel for treachery (for it is only in this metaphysical way that Mr. Wedgwood can connect the word with his radical rac[c]) is a purely subsidiary, derivative, and comparatively modern notion.  Many, perhaps most, kinds of treachery were looked upon as praiseworthy in early times, and are still so regarded among savages.  Does Mr. Wedgwood believe that Romulus lost caste by the way in which he made so many respectable Sabines fathers-in-law against their will, or that the wise Odysseus was a perfectly admirable gentleman in our sense of the word?  Even in the sixteenth century, in the then most civilized country of the world, the grave irony with which Macchiavelli commends the frightful treacheries of Caesar Borgia would have had no point, if he had not taken it for granted that almost all who read his treatise would suppose him to be in earnest.  In the same way dregs is explained simply as the sediment left after drawing off liquids. Dredge also is certainly, in one of its meanings, a derivative of dragan; so, too, trick in whist, and perhaps trudge.  Indeed, all the words above-cited are more like each other than Fr. toit and E. deck, both from one root, or the Neapol. sciu and the Lat. flos, from which it is corrupted.