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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
shell was crossing a given spot; it should burst in the air, and 
rain down fire on the place beneath. There is as yet great 
expense in the manufacture of the perfect shells and fusees ; a 
circumstance which fully accounts for the present limited 
application of the principle, in the great American contest for 
the freedom of the slave. 
For my own part, I am somewhat in doubt whether a 
shell, as the projectile of Greek fire, will be retained in use. 
It is more probable that a catapult worked by a steam-engine 
will be found the best means of throwing the combustible. If 
this plan were adopted, the liquid would merely require to be 
enclosed in earthenware or glass jars, that would break on 
contact with solid matter, in falling. With a properly con- 
structed engine, so contrived as to throw liquid fire in earthen- 
ware or glass globes of six inches diameter, ten thousand 
gallons of the combustible could easily be thrown, per hour, 
upon any given point within range. 
I have now placed before the reader the facts practically 
known in respect to Greek fire, and its applications in war. 
But it must not be inferred that all that has thus been done is 
all that science can do. I feel it a duty to state openly and 
boldly, that if science were to be allowed her full swing, if 
society would really allow that “ all is fair in war,” war might 
be banished at once from the earth as a game which neither 
subject nor king dare play at. Globes that could distribute 
liquid fire could distribute also lethal agents, within the breath 
of which no man, however puissant, could stand and live. 
From the summit of Primrose Hill, a few hundred engineers, 
properly prepared, could render Regent's Park, in an incre- 
dibly short space of time, utterly uninhabitable ; or could make 
an army of men, that should even fill that space, fall with their 
arms in their hands, prostrate and helpless as the host of 
Sennacherib. 
The question is, shall these things be ? I do not see that 
humanity should revolt ; for would it not be better to destroy 
a host in Regent's Park by making the men fall as in a mystical 
sleep, than to let down on them another host to break their 
bones, tear their limbs asunder, and gouge out their entrails 
with three-cornered pikes ; — leaving a vast majority undead, 
and writhing for hours in torments of the damned ? I conceive, 
for one, that science would be blessed in spreading her wings 
on the blast, and breathing into the face of a desperate horde 
of men a prolonged sleep — for it need not necessarily be a 
death — which they could not grapple with, and which would 
yield them up with their implements of murder to an enemy 
that in the immensity of its power could afford to be as 
merciful as Heaven. 
