328 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
which cannot be put out, but with insatiable fury burn the enemy, 
arms and all. The only way to smother and extinguish this fire 
is to cast rubbish into it. This account is given by Ktesias the 
Knidan.” 
_ As regards the Skolex, I think we need not hesitate to identify it 
with the crocodile—the nature of the bait, a kid, used in its capture 
sufficiently proves that—in spite of the incorrect description of the 
animal itself; but although the oil of crocodiles is sometimes extracted 
and applied to various medicinal and other purposes by native fisher- 
men, the substance here described, and to which this origin was 
ascribed, was probably petroleum, the true source of which was not 
well understood, although Ktesias elsewhere refers to a lake upon the 
surface of which oil floated. 
As is pointed out on p. 833, the supposed product of the dikairon 
was probably Churrus (Indian hemp), so I would suggest that the 
Skolex oil was petroleum from the Punjab® oil springs, where it ap- 
pears to have been well known and held in high esteem for its various 
properties since the earliest times. Ktesias’s account confers upon it 
characteristics which were probably somewhat exaggerated. They may 
be compared with those of substances not unknown at the present day 
to persons of the Nihilist and similar fraternities. We have it on re- 
cord, however, that fire-balls, prepared with Punjab petroleum, were 
employed as missiles to frighten the war elephants of a Hindu king by 
a Mahomedan invader eight hundred years ago. In their accounts 
the Mahomedan historians make use.of a word signifying naphtha, so 
that gunpowder was not intended, as has sometimes been supposed.” 
When carried as far as Persia, away from its source, it probably 
acquired the mythical origin described by Ktesias; and the account of 
the animal itself was so distorted that the Greeks did not recognize 
the same animal as the crocodile of the Nile, which was of course 
known to them. At the same time it should be remembered that the 
Garial (not Gavial, as it is incorrectly called) occurs in the Indus, and 
would, no doubt, seem a strange animal even to people well acquainted 
with the crocodile of the Nile. 
Another mention of Indian crocodiles is to be found in the Peri- 
plus, where it is said that, when approaching the Sinthus (7. e. Indus) 
river, ‘‘the sign by which voyagers, before sighting land, know that 
it is near, is their meeting with serpents (sea snakes) floating on the 
water; but higher up, and on the coasts of Persia the first sign of land 
is seeing them of a different kind, called graav’’ (Sansk., graha, a 
crocodile). 
82 Of, Economic Geol. of India, p. 126. 
63 See Jour. Soc. Arts, April 28, 1882, p. 595. 
64 Of. Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, by J. W. M‘Crindle, p. 107. 
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