September 11, 1896.] 



SGIENGE. 



331 



the Academy of Cortona this union of the 

 destroying and preserving attributes is rep- 

 resented by the united forms of the lion 

 and the serpent crowned with rays, the 

 emblems of the cause from which both pro- 

 ceed. This composition forms the Chnoubis 

 of the Egyptians." * 



And thus the matter rested until, in the 

 end of the last century, Admiral Beaufort,f 

 while anchored off Lycia on hydrographic 

 work, saw each night a strong flame on the 

 peak of a mountain a few miles back from 

 the coast, and was told by the inhabitants 

 that it had always burned there. 



He visited the place, and found flames of 

 natural gas issuing from a crevice on a 

 mountain of serpentine and limestone. 



In 1842 Spratt and Forbes % report as fol- 

 lows on the locality : Near Ardrachan, not 

 far from the ruins of Olympus, a number of 

 serpentine hills rise among the limestones, 

 and some of them bear up masses of that 

 rock. At the junction of one of these 

 masses of scaglia with the serpentine is the 

 Yanar (or Yanardagh), famous as the 

 Chimsera of the ancients, rediscovered in 

 modern times by Captain Beaufort. It is 

 nothing more than a stream of inflammable 

 gas issuing from a crevice, such as is seen 

 in several places among the Apennines. 

 The serpentine immediately around the 

 flame is burned and ashy, but this is only 

 for a foot or two ; the immediate neighbor- 

 hood of the Yanar presenting the same 

 aspect it wore in the days of Seneca, who 

 writes " Lseta itaque regio est et herbida, nil 

 flammis adurentibus." 



Such is the Chimsera, ' flammisque armata 

 Chimsera,' § deprived of all its terrors. It 

 is still, however, visited as a lion by both 

 Greeks and Turks, who make use of its 



* Eichard Payne Knight. Discourse on the Wor- 

 ship of Prapus, p. 73. 



t Beaufort's Karamania, 35, 52, 85. 

 X Travels in Lycia, II., 181, 1847. 

 I Virgil, ^neid, VI., 288. 



classic flames to cook kabobs for their 

 dinner. 



In 1854 it was visited by the Prussian 

 painter. Berg, who has reproduced the 

 scene in a fine painting now in Berlin. * 

 The flame which he says, gives the odor of 

 iodine, is three or four feet high. Several 

 extinct openings were found in a pool of 

 sulphurous water. 



The Austrian geologist, Tietze,f found 

 the flame two feet across, and a smaller one 

 adjacent. The ruins of an ancient temple 

 of Vulcan, near by and of a late Byzantine 

 church, show how strongly it has impressed 

 the inhabitants in all ages.j; 



The natural phenomenon of a spring 

 which is found by historic documents to 

 have been burning for nearly three thous- 

 and years is sufficiently striking, although 

 the slow escape of such gas from Tertiary 

 limestones is not uncommon. The men- 

 tion of sulphurous waters in the neighbor- 

 hood may justify us in going back to the 

 same antiquity and drawing from the re- 

 mark of Theophrastus {nep\ zw^^ XiO<ov) on 

 the oxidation of pyrite in contact with bitu- 

 men, an explanation of the constant ignition 

 of the gas. 



Theophrastus says : " That, also, which 

 is called Epinus (or Spelus) is found in 

 mines. This stone cut in pieces and thrown 

 together in a heap exposed to the sun, 

 burns, and that the more if moistened or 

 sprinkled with water." 



"We may of course assume the more pro- 

 saic spontaneous combustion of the volatile 

 hydrocarbons to explain the constant re- 

 kindling of the sacred fires. 



It remains to consider how the myth and 

 its name arose. The mountain is still called 

 Yanar-dagh, the burning mountain, and in 

 a learned work on coins of Sicyon, which 



* Zeitschrift, All. Erdkunde, III., 307. 

 tBeitrage, zur Geologie Lykien. Jahrbuch d. K. 

 K. Geol. Eeichsanstalt, XXXV., 353. 

 tC. Eitter, Erdkunde, Theil. 19, 751. 



