te and
knowledge of chemistry. The less perfect ideas of the ancients may be
found in Strabo (Geograph. l. xvi. p. 1078) and Pliny, (Hist. Natur.
ii. 108, 109.) Huic (Naphthae) magna cognatio est ignium, transiliuntque
protinus in eam undecunque visam. Of our travellers I am best pleased
with Otter, (tom. i. p. 153, 158.)]

[Footnote 20: Anna Comnena has partly drawn aside the curtain. (Alexiad.
l. xiii. p. 383.) Elsewhere (l. xi. p. 336) she mentions the property of
burning. Leo, in the xixth chapter of his Tactics, (Opera Meursii, tom.
vi. p. 843, edit. Lami, Florent. 1745,) speaks of the new invention.
These are genuine and Imperial testimonies.]

[Footnote 21: Constantin. Porphyrogenit. de Administrat. Imperii, c.
xiii. p. 64, 65.]

[Footnote 22: Histoire de St. Louis, p. 39. Paris, 1668, p. 44. Paris,
de l'Imprimerie Royale, 1761. The former of these editions is precious
for the observations of Ducange; the latter for the pure and original
text of Joinville. We must have recourse to that text to discover, that
the feu Gregeois was shot with a pile or javelin, from an engine that
acted like a sling.]

[Footnote 23: The vanity, or envy, of shaking the established property
of Fame, has tempted some moderns to carry gunpowder above the xivth,
(see Sir William Temple, Dutens, &c.,) and the Greek fire above the
viith century, (see the Saluste du President des Brosses, tom. ii.
p. 381.) But their evidence, which precedes the vulgar aera of the
invention, is seldom clear or satisfactory, and subsequent writers
may be suspected of fraud or credulity. In the earliest sieges, some
combustibles of oil and sulphur have been used, and the Greek fire has
some affinities with gunpowder both in its nature and effects: for the
antiquity of the first, a passage of Procopius, (de Bell. Goth. l. iv.
c. 11,) for that of the second, some facts in the Arabic history of
Spain, (A.D. 1249, 1312, 1332. Bibliot. Arab. Hisp. tom. ii. p. 6, 7,
8,) are the most difficult to elude.]

[Footnote 24: That extraordinary man, Friar Bacon, reveals two of the
ingredients, saltpetre and sulphur, and conceals the third in a sentence
of mysterious gibberish, as if he dreaded the consequences of his own
discovery, (Biog. Brit. vol. i. p. 430, new edition.)]

Chapter LII: More Conquests By The Arabs.--Part II.

Constantinople and the Greek fire might exclude the Arabs from the
eastern entrance of Europe; but in the West, on the side of the
Pyr