The dragon is not one beast but many stitched together. In the Chinese record gathered here, it is "chief of the three hundred and sixty scaly reptiles" and yet belongs to none of them wholly: most often it wears "the head of a horse and the tail of a" snake, with wings along its sides, and "It has four legs." The witness is Myths & Legends of China (a compilation published in 1922), which sets down the creature's parts with an anatomist's patience. Rank shows in the feet — the imperial dragon carries "five claws on each foot," lesser dragons only four.

The form is famously a catalogue of borrowings. The record lists the dragon's nine 'resemblances', the composite that gives the shape its uncanny familiarity: "its horns resemble those of a deer, its head that of a camel, its eyes those of a devil, its neck that of a snake, its abdomen that of a large cockle, its scales those of a carp, its claws those of an eagle, the soles of its feet those of a tiger, its ears those of an ox" — a body assembled from the whole animal kingdom at once. It is a being "whose miraculous changes are inscrutable", spirit of the waters, essence of the male principle, sometimes wingless yet rising "into the air by their own inherent power."

The same dragon-shape surfaces far out in the Pacific. In a Hawaiian witness the water-monsters called moo (river-dragons) lie in the Wailuku as logs until challenged; when the demigoddess Hiiaka forces the fight, one great dragon-god "fought her in his dragon form", struck with his tail, and "coiled and twisted" to knock her down before she turned his body to stone. Two coasts, one silhouette: the long scaled body, the lashing tail, the coil. Thompson's apparatus files a fuller dragon-lore under Smith that waits unread here. When a single creature borrows the horns of one animal, the claws of another, the ears of a third, is it a beast at all, or the idea of beast-hood wearing every hide at once?