52 REMARKS CONCERNING THE GREEK FIRE. 
ART. IX. — HISTORICAL REMARKS CONCERNING THE 
GREEK FIRE. By J. J. Virey. 
Entrusted by the Historical Committee, established by 
the Minister of Public Instruction, with the examination of 
the unpublished documents of the fourteenth and fifteenth cen- 
turies, relative to the Greek fire, we have ascertained that it 
consists of pyrotechnical compounds, such as resins, camphor, 
volatile oil of turpentine associated with sulphur, or bitumen, 
or naptha, and mixed up with nitre to facilitate their combus- 
tion ; this matter is disposed in the form of a rocket, and en- 
veloped with hide, and projected by artillery. Such are the 
formulae for the pretended Greek fire, divulged as secrets by 
P. Cataneo and other ingenious artificers of the sixteenth and 
later centuries. 
It is obvious that such mixtures do not constitute the true 
Greek fire, which inflamed under water, and was likewise in- 
extinguishable, according to the reports of the Byzantine his- 
torians, Tonarus and Nicetas. Theophanes and Cedrenus at- 
tribute its discovery to the Syrian engineer, Callinicus, or to 
a more ancient author, Marcus Gracchus. 
If it be true that the Emperor Constantine burnt, by these 
means, the fleet of the Saracens in the Hellespont, if he caused 
this state secret to be kept concealed from other nations up to 
the tenth century, and, finally, if Vreeahardouin, the lord de 
Joinville, and other historians of the crusades speak with 
affright of the terrible explosions of this fire, projected from 
mortars at the siege of Damietta, in red hot globes of the size 
of a cask, the compositions before cited cannot be correct. 
But we find other curious notices in some ancient writings 
of the alchymists or Rosicrucians of the middle ages. These 
are no other than inflammable matters well known, but chemi- 
cal combinations imperfectly studied, or concealed by design, 
and capable of dangerous explosion. Julius Ca3sar Scaliger 
