ke thunder; they burn like a brazier; they reduce all
to cinders."

This passage is important, as showing the connexion of nitre or
_baraud_--a word, as we have before stated, applied to nitre and nitre
compositions--with a class of effects analogous to those attributed to
the Greek fire.

The passage of incendiary compositions into gunpowder is still involved
in much obscurity. Messrs Reinaud and Fave consider that a treatise,
printed at Paris A.D. 1561, entitled _Livre de Cannonerie_, throws much
light on the subject--"_vient de l'eclairer d'une lumiere nouvelle_;"
but we cannot at all agree with them in this view, and for the simple
reason, that neither the names of the authors of the receipts contained
in it, nor the dates, nor the countries, are given. Without either of
these data, our readers, we think, will find it difficult to conceive
that much new light can be thrown on the subject. The treatise contains
a number of receipts for mixtures of oils, bitumens, sulphur, and nitre;
and, as appears to us, all the aid given by this work towards
elucidating the subject is, that these receipts are analogous to those
of Marcus and of the Arabs, and have some internal evidence of having
been written or copied from writings of an early date, though probably
subsequent to Marcus; and, secondly the term Greek fire (_feu Gregeois_)
being employed, and receipts for it given, would lead to the inference
that the compositions here used under the same title were analogous to
those which originally constituted the Greek fire. It is, however,
certainly open to the remark, that Greek fire having become, in a great
measure, a generic name for violent incendiary compositions, the term
may have been applied to compositions analogous in their effects, though
of more recent discovery. When, however, we find, in various distinct
quarters, similar receipts; when we find these appearing at different
epochs, and having different degrees of approximation to the explosive
compounds which a more matured experience has rendered certain in their
composition, the discovery of such a book as this becomes certainly a
corroborative circumstance in favour of that view which regards the
Greek fire as never having become extinct, and as having, by progressive
but unequal gradations, changed into gunpowder.

In discussing the treatise above mentioned, there is a naive expression
of our authors, who, in remarking the necessary slow combustion of these