2io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ing, "Inhabitants, abandon the worship of Nardoun and of fire, and 

 worship the only true God, who showeth mercy ! " This voice was 

 heard three years successively, but no one regarded it. At the end of 

 the last year all the inhabitants were in an instant turned to stone. I 

 alone was preserved.' " 



In the foregoing tale we doubtless have reference to the destruc- 

 tion of Baku, on the Caspian (though to sail from Balsora to Baku is 

 impossible), and the driving away into India, by the Arabs under Caliph 

 Omar, of all who refused to renounce fire-worship and adopt the creed 

 of the Koran. The turning of the refractory inhabitants into stone is 

 probably the Arabian story-teller's figurative manner of referring to 

 the finding of dead bodies in a mummified condition. 



It is known that the Egyptians made use of bitumen, in some form, 

 in the preservation of their dead, a fact with which the Arabians were 

 familiar. As the Magi held the four elements of earth, air, fire, and 

 water to be sacred, they feared to either bury, burn, sink, or expose to 

 air the corrupting bodies of their deceased. Therefore, it was their 

 practice to envelop the corpse in a coating of wax or bitumen, so as to 

 hermetically seal it from immediate contact with either of the four 

 sacred elements. Hence the idea of all the bodies of the Magi left at 

 Baku being turned to stone, while only the true believer in Mohammed 

 remained in the flesh. 



Marco Polo, the famous traveler of the thirteenth century, makes 

 reference to the burning jets of the Caucasus, and those fires are known 

 to the Russians as continuing in existence since the army of Peter the 

 Great wrested the regions about the Caspian from the modern Per- 

 sians. The record of those flaming jets of natural gas is thus brought 

 down in an unbroken chain of evidence from remote antiquity to the 

 present day, and they are still burning. 



Numerous Greek and Latin writers testify to the known existence 

 of petroleum about the shores of the Mediterranean two thousand 

 years ago. More modern citations may, however, be read with equal 

 interest. In the " Journal of Sir Philip Skippon's Travels in France," 

 in 16G3, we find the following curious entries : 



" We stayed in Grenoble till August 1st, and one day rode out, and, 

 after twice fording the river Drac (which makes a great wash) at a 

 league's distance, went over to Pont de Clef, a large arch across that 

 river, where we paid one sol a man ; a league further we passed 

 through a large village called Vif, and about a league thence by S. 

 Bathomew, another village, and Chasteau Bernard, where we saw a 

 flame breaking out of the side of a bank, which is vulgarly called La 

 Fountaine qui Brule / it is by a small rivulet, and sometimes breaks 

 out in other places ; just before our coming some other strangers had 

 fried eggs here. The soil hereabouts is full of a black stone, like our 

 coal, which, perhaps, is the continual fuel of the fire. . . . Near Peroul, 

 about a league from Montpelier, we saw a boiling fountain (as they 



