TRANSACTfONS OF THE SECTIONS. 183 



and used since au early period *, is now being worked. The chief purpose for 

 which it is directly requu-ed is the manufacture of gas for one of our large military 

 stations (Rawid-Pindee). 



The great vigour and vitality of the flame of petroleum gave it a special value as 

 a material for igneous missiles before the invention of gunpftwder. It is only 

 necessary here to notice this application of the mineral oils as indicative of the 

 localities from which the material was probably obtained f. The Levant, the 

 coast of Asia Minor, the Grecian islands, bicily, and the Caspian, would furnish 

 abundance of this material in some of its fomis for the destructive engines and 

 fire-balls used in the Eastern wars and sieges. There is good reason to believe 

 that the Punjab petroleum was applied to a similar purpose by Mahmiid, of Ghazni, 

 in one of his engagements near the Indus with the Indian prince Anandpal in the 

 beginning of the 11th century. This question has been discussed in a most inter- 

 esting note ou the early use of gunpowder in India by the late Sir Henry Elliot, 

 in the fii-st volume of his ' Bibliographical Index to the Mohammedan Historians 

 of India' J. 



The substance called nuimia, or miimiai, is held in great estimation as a medi- 

 cine for both internal and external use. The other substances of the same class 

 are also used for medicinal as well as for other purposes § ; but what is called 

 niiimia is used for this only. The cun-ent belief in the East is that nuimia is of 

 animal origin. It is worthy of note that recent researches have led to the con- 

 clusion that this is the case with respect to some, at least, of the great deposits 

 of the mineral oils discovered within late years ; but the animal origin of nuimia 

 is, in Persia and India, believed to be more immediate. That obtained in the 

 shops at Lahore is said to come from Cabid, that is, in a general way it is ob- 

 tained from or through Afghanistan. Dr. Fryer tells of a place in Persia where it 

 was obtained in his time {|. Petroleum is abundant in the same quarter now. 

 Another of the substances of this class, ambergris, has at all times been believed 

 to belong, mediately or immediatelj^, to some big animal of the salt water ; but 

 the conclusions regarding it are not even now very satisfactory ^. 



The geographical positions in which these various products in some of their 

 forms are foimd, and in wliich indications of their existence, or the frequent ac- 

 companiments of them, are met with, appear to be sufficiently varied. They occur 

 in great river-basins, in those of the Euphrates, the Indus and its tributaries, the 

 Brahmaputra, the Irawadi ; of the St. Lawrence in Upper and Lower Canada, the 

 Ohio and Mississippi in the States of Ohio, Tennessee, and Arkansas, the Rio 

 Colorado and other minor rivers in California and New Mexico. Next, we observe 

 them very abundant in the two remarkable depressed lakes, the Caspian and the 

 Dead Sea. In islands, Ceylon, Sicily, Zante, and other of the Greek islands, in 

 Sumatra, and in a special manner in Trinidad near the mouths of the Orinoco. 

 Along the skirts of great mountain-ranges and between mountain-ranges and the 

 sea ; thus in Pennsylvania and Virginia, in the country on eitlier side of the 

 Alleglianies ; in Tennessee, intersected by the Cumberland mountains ; in Texas, 

 with its broken ranges of mountains parallel to the coast, and large rivers running 

 from them and througb them into the Gulf of Mexico ; between the moimtains 

 and the sea in the south of Asia Minor, of Persia, and Belochistan. 



* Notices of it are given in the works of Eljphinstone, Burnes, Vigne, Edwardes, and 

 others. 



t Accounts of the nature and effects of such missiles are given in De Joinville's ' Life 

 of St. Louis,' and in the pages of Gibbon, Niebuhr, Hallam, &c., and more particularly in 

 Messrs. Keinaud and Fave's Treatise on the ' Feu Qregeois.' Sec also Amniian. Marcell. ; 

 Vcgetius, ' De Re Militari ;' Tasso, ' Jer. Del.' xii. 42-14. 



:J: The fii-c-2}cio mentioned by Polo, the agni-aster of the ancient Hindoo poems, and the 

 fire-darts referred to by Menu, have possibly been of the same kind. 



§ Hanway'; Abbe Hue, 'Chinese Empire,' cb. xi. ; ' Indian Annals of Medical Science,' 

 no. iii. 250; Ainslie, 'Materia Indica,' i. 41 ; Honigberger, 'Thirty Years in the East,'&c. 



II New Account of East India and Persia, nine years' travels, 1672-1681, by J. Fryer, 

 M.D., p. 318. 



^ Lane's ' Thousand and One Nights,' iii. (i6 ; Yule's ' Marco Polo,' vol. ii. p. 342 ; 

 Eenaudot, ' Ancient Accounts of India and China,' p. 94, 



