io8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the name of the old king. Everything that can suggest anarchy, and 

 lend support to the old custom, is carefully set aside. Neither the 

 election of a new ruler, which is always attended' with contentions 

 and excitement, nor the death of the old one, is recognized. If anar- 

 chy still survives there, where every measure is taken to prevent it, it 

 is only as a shadow of the past. — Translated for the Popular Science 

 Monthly from Das Ausland. 



THE OIL-SUPPLY OF THE WOKLD.* 



IT may be, that if the sages of prehistoric China, or the Magi of 

 Chaldea and other ancient civilizations, could return to enlighten 

 our ignorance, they might prove to have possessed far more scientific 

 knowledge than we give them credit for, with some points of practical 

 application which we marvel to think could ever have been forgotten. 



Among many such subjects which from time to time call forth our 

 wonder, one of deep interest at the present moment is that old, old 

 subject of pouring oil on rough waves — a subject which (save by a 

 very few practical seamen who happen to have tested the matter for 

 their own preservation) has only within the last three or four years 

 been recognized as a real thing, of most serious importance to all sea- 

 faring folk. Hitherto it has been generally deemed merely a poetic 

 metaphor, with no practical foundation. Isolated facts concerning its 

 use were known, as were also allusions to its properties by such sages 

 as Aristotle, Plutarch, Pliny, and, in later days, Erasmus of Rotterdam, 

 Linnaeus, or Benjamin Franklin. 



When saintly men such as St. Cuthbert or Adamnanus soothed the 

 angry waves by the outpouring of a little oil, this natural result was 

 of course attributed to their own holiness, and the miraculous efficacy 

 of consecrated oil. And even when in a. d. 177G Lelyveld, a practical 

 Dutchman, published at Amsterdam his "Essay upon the Means of 

 diminishing the Dangers of the Sea hy pouring out Tar- Oil or other 

 Floating Matter," an essay followed in a. d. 1798 by a more elaborate 

 statement of "Evidence on the Oil Question," published by Otto at 

 Weimar, the interest temporarily awakened soon subsided, and gener- 

 ation after generation of seafaring men have continued wholly to neg- 

 lect the use of this simple precaution ; and lamentable indeed is it to 

 peruse the appalling record of each winter's wrecks on our own shores, 

 and to note in how many instances life might probably have been 

 saved, had the strong, brave men, so ready to hazard their lives in 

 order to succor others, bethought them of lightening their task by the 

 use of a few gallons of oil. 



* Abridged from " Blackwood's Magazine." 



