1876.] B. Maclagan— On Early Asiatic Fire Weapons. 51 



the apparent description by Ctesias of the crocodile, and with reference to 

 the question whether oil is obtained from that animal, Sir Henry Elliot, 

 in the note before referred to, mentions the result of an investigation on 

 the subject in which Prof. H. H. Wilson took part. But there is no 

 mistake about Crocodile oil. Not only, as Sir H. Elliot observed, is it 

 mentioned in native works on Materia Medica, but at the present day it is 

 one of the recognised commercial products of this country, and will be 

 found duly recorded No. 8282 in Dr. Forbes Watson's comprehensive list, 

 prepared in connection with the scheme for an Industrial Survey of India. 

 If we accept the crocodile, the story takes a tolerably compact form and 

 admits of easy and plausible explanation. Here was an inflammable oil, of 

 remarkable properties, believed to be of animal origin, and obtained from 

 the surface of waters on both sides of the Indus. Here was a big water 

 animal, of frightsome appearance and character, residing in the Indus, and 

 from which oil was obtained. It is a very natural supposition that Ctesias, 

 having some version of these facts before him, put this and that together, 

 and like Mr. Pickwick's friend who wrote on Chinese Metaphysics, " com- 

 bined his information."* 



in great part the product of animal decomposition. {Prof. Archer, in Art Journal of 

 August, 1864. Prof Draper of New York, in Quarterly Journal of Science, (London) 

 Vol. PI, 1865, p. 49. Prof Ansted, Qu. Journal of Science, IP. 755). The substances of 

 this class which., according to popular belief, are most directly of animal origin, are 

 ambergris, and the dark bitumen known as mumim, highly esteemed in India and 

 Persia as a medicine. With regard to ambergris, believed to be a kind of petroleum 

 issuing from rocks and hardened in the sea, modern opinion is coming round to the 

 belief that whether or not it comes into the sea in this way, and is then swallowed by 

 the monsters of the deep, it is actually obtained from the whale. {Bennett's Whaling 

 Voyage round the Globe, quoted in Yule's Marco Polo, IP, 400. The animal is the Physater 

 macrocephalus, according to Linnaeus {Gmelin, XIV, 495). See also Sindbad's Fifth 

 Voyage, Lane's Thousand and One Nights, III, 66, and note, p. 108. Le Qentil, Voyages 

 dans les Mers de V Inde, II, 84. D' Ilerbelot, Bibl. Or., s. v. Ghiammbar. Al-Mas'udi, 

 Meadows of Gold, ch. XVL Renandofs Ancient Accounts of India and China by two 

 Muhammadan Travellers, p. 94. The precious mumiai is understood a little more 

 exactly. But at the present day it is popularly believed to be obtained from land 

 animals {sotto voce human) by a process exactly similar to that described by Ctesias for 

 extracting from the big beast of the waters the inflammable oil used in sieges in India. 

 (See Vigne's Ghuzni, p. 61, — " the asphaltum so well known in India by the name of 

 negro's fat".) Two years ago there was much alarm among the native servants and 

 others at some of our hill stations in the Panjab, occasioned by a rumour that a demon 

 who practised the horrible manufacture was prowling about nightly, seizing unwary 

 and unprotected people, to furnish material for the preparation of the first-class 

 mumiai. 



* It is only by a poetical coincidence, and not with any reference to the combusti- 

 ble product supposed to be obtained from it, that the crocodile itself is described in the 

 book of Job as breathing fire. " Out of his mouth go burning lamps [or blazing torches, 









