h
you will fasten strongly to it. You may give it whatever form you
please. Arrange on the sides three 'tubulures,' and at the bottom
also three for the 'roses,' (one class of the compositions,) then
make the usual compositions. When you wish to set fire to them,
arrange them in the form of a segment, set fire to the club, and
break it, for the love of God."

The termination of this receipt is a very usual one, and applied to
several other receipts--instruments of destruction being then, as now,
considered a most appropriate method of serving God.

Another ingenious weapon was called "the egg which moves itself and
burns;" and this consisted of two long fuses, which seemed to give force
and direction to the firework, and a shorter one, which was directed
forwards, the object of which was to burn the enemy. This projectile was
cast by the hand, and then, to use the quaint language of the receipt,
"it walks, it starts, and it burns extremely well."

Many other compositions were known to the Arabs, as appears from the two
curious MSS. above mentioned; such as compositions for covering the body
to protect from fire, others to emit a suffocating smoke.

The performances of these instruments were, doubtless, what we should
now consider very insignificant; but they must have produced upon the
excited imagination of the warrior of those days an effect which it is
very difficult to conceive in the present day.

Nothing, probably, has occasioned more frequent historical errors, than
forming deductions as to real effects from the exaggerated descriptions
of ancient writers.

When Musschenbroek (not a superstitious soldier, but an inductive
philosopher) first discovered the Leyden Phial, he declared he would not
take a second shock for the kingdom of France; and yet we well know that
a schoolboy would not now be frightened at a much more powerful shock
than he then experienced. Want of familiarity with a phenomenon, and
ignorance of its proximate cause, will ever make it terrible. We cannot
see any thing terrible in a sky-rocket, because we have been early
influenced by those on whom we rely to regard it as an amusement; but
had they brought us up in fear of it--had they magnified these accounts,
having some foundation in fact, as to its destructive power, we may well
understand what effects of terror it would produce.

Thus regarded, the _ignotum pro magnifico_ appears quite sufficient to
expl