GREEK FIRE : ITS ANCIENT AND MODERN 
HISTORY. 
BY B. W. RICHARDSON, M.A., M.D. 
W HAT is Greek Fire ? The question is not one of to-day, 
but of ages. Friar Bacon was asked the question, or, 
at all events, he, in a sentence or two as difficult to understand 
as obscurest alchemist could wish, essayed to answer it. His 
friend, Friar Bungay, who was neither so imaginary a man 
nor so gross a quack as Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton has 
depicted him, and who, in his day, did many marvels, made a 
guess at it ; the Princess Anna Comnena supplied a formula 
for it ; Charles du Fresne, the Byzantine historian, cultivated 
many and curious researches in respect to it; Sir William 
Temple took it under his literary protection, and gave its 
introduction to the world, within a century; the historical 
commentators on the History of St. Louis — Ducange and 
Joinville — were each particular in their inquiries and descrip- 
tions ; Gibbon, as we shall see, was careful, to a nicety, to dig 
out every fact ; Chambers advanced at least three speculations 
on it ; the learned Beckman of course looked and looked, and 
said all he could, which was not much but good ; and, in fine, 
from the thirteenth century to this, the nineteenth, somebody 
has always been speculating and nobody has been satisfied. 
At last, when the Dryasdust fraternity were getting into 
that state of obscurity as to affirm, with all profundity and 
good faith, that there never was such a thing as Greek fire, 
that the whole story was a myth of the middle ages, that 
Greek fire ranked with flexible glass and the elixir vitas, — 
General Gilmore, Federal general before Charleston, in 
Southern America, startled the learned by pitching a shell of 
so-called Greek fire a distance of four miles at least, and into 
a town. What is Greek fire ? At once the question went up 
again, and everybody asked everybody, and everybody, or 
nearly so, said they did not know ; or made a guess like the 
Princess Anna Comnena, or divined obscurely, like Roger 
Bacon, as if they did know, but did not like to tell. And still 
the question is on the tapis . Let us try to answer it. 
