similar preparations have been advocated in recent times. The ingredients and relative proportions of the composition are not exactly known, the secret having been very successfully preserved. The Syrian historian Michael applies the name naphtha to the "newly invented" Greek fire; and this probably was the destructive agent of the Assyrians, Persians, and other Eastern nations, springs of naphtha abounding in their territories. According to the author of L'Espirit des Croissades, Greek fire was compounded of the gum of the pine and other resinous trees reduced to powder, with the addition of brimstone, naphtha, and other bitumens. Fanciful substances were included, such as the water of a particular fountain in the East, duck's grease, &c. Friar Bacon mentions two of the ingredients, saltpetre and sulphur, but conceals the rest. Giambattista Porta states that Greek fire is made by boiling together willow charcoal, salt, ardent aqua vitæ, sulphur, pitch, frankincense, threads of soft Ethiopian wool, and camphor. In a Spanish MS. of the 13th century in the Bodleian library a different receipt is given; and others will be found in the Liber ignium a Marco Greco præscriptus, &c., Sloane MS. (Brit. Mus.) 323; in the Sloane MS. 7, Modus faciendi ignem græcum, &c. From all that has been said it appears that naphtha—otherwise petroleum, rock oil, or Rangoon tar—and sulphur, and sometimes nitre, were the principal constituents; and the use of these, or two of them, in varying quantities, with the charcoal mentioned by Porta, no doubt gave birth to gunpowder. An invention by Niepce comprised benzol and potassium, in the proportion of 600 to 1, placed in a glass vessel; and Disney's is believed to have included a solution of phosphorus in sulphide of carbon or chloride of sulphur. But of all the spontaneously combustible liquids, Bunsen's kakodyl, As2(CH3)4, is probably the most deadly, while it is far in advance of the old Greek fire as a destroyer of life. A combustible used at the siege of Charleston, U.S., in 1863 consisted of (1) saltpetre, sulphur, and lampblack, pressed into small tubes, and (2) coal tar naphtha, placed in shells or pumped through hose. The best military authorities appear now to agree that Greek fire is unsuitable for purposes of war, and comparatively little use has been made of it in recent times.
For further details see Recepta varia de præparatione ignis Græci, Sloane MS. 232; also Arundel MS. 164; Beckmann, Gesch. der Erfindungen; Dufresne L'Esprit des Croissades, Amsterdam, 1780; Gibbon; Grose, Mil. Antiq.; Hoefer, Hist. de la Chimie; Joinville, Memoirs, 1807; Libri, Hist. des sciences math. en Italie; Mechanics' Magazine, 18th August 1844; Napoleon III., Études sur . . . . l'Artillerie; Poggendorff, Gesch. d. Physik, 1879; Roy. Instit. Quart. Journ., xiv.; Scoffern, Projectile Weapons, 1858; and the writings of the Byzantine historians.
Copyright, 1879, by Charles Scribner's Sons.
HORACE GREELEY, an eminent American editor, was born at Amherst, New Hampshire, February 3, 1811. His parents were of Scotch-Irish descent, but the ancestors of both had been in New England for several generations. He was the third of seven children. His father, Zaccheus Greeley, owned a farm of 50 acres of stony, sterile land, from which a bare support was wrung. Horace was a feeble and precocious lad, taking little interest in the ordinary sports of childhood, learning to read before he was able to talk plainly, and being the prodigy of the neighbourhood for accurate spelling. Before he was ten years old his father, through bad management and endorsing for his neighbours, became bankrupt, and his home was sold by the sheriff, while Zaccheus Greeley himself fled the State to escape arrest for debt. The family soon removed to West Haven, Vermont, where, all working together, they made a scanty living as day labourers. Horace Greeley from childhood desired to be a printer, and, when barely eleven years old, tried to be taken as an apprentice in a village office, but was rejected on account of his youth. After three years more with the family as a day labourer at West Haven, he succeeded, with his father's consent, in being apprenticed in the office of The Northern Spectator, at East Poultney, Vermont. Here he soon became a good workman, developed a passion for politics, and especially for political statistics, came to be depended upon for more or less of the editing of the paper, and was a figure in the village debating society. He received only $40 a year, but he spent almost nothing himself, and sent most of his money to his father. In his twentieth year The Northern Spectator was suspended. Meantime his father had removed to a small tract of wild laud in the dense forests of Western Pennsylvania, 30 miles from Erie. The released apprentice now visited his parents, and worked for a little time with them on the farm, meanwhile seeking employment in various printing offices, and, when he got it, giving nearly his whole earnings to his father. At last, with no further prospect of work nearer home, he started for New York. He travelled on foot and by canal-boat, entering New York in August 1831, with all his clothes in a bundle carried over his back with a stick, and with but $10 in his pocket. More than half of this sum was exhausted while he made vain efforts to find employment. Many refused, in the belief that he was a runaway apprentice, and his poor, ill-fitting apparel and rustic look were everywhere greatly against him. At last he found work on a 32mo New Testament, set in agate, double columns, with a middle column of notes in pearl. It was so difficult and so poorly paid that other printers had all abandoned it. He barely succeeded in making enough to pay his board bill, but he finished the task, and thus found subsequent employment easier to get.
In January 1833 Greeley formed a partnership with Francis V. Story, a fellow-workman. Their combined capital amounted to $150. Procuring their type on credit, they opened a small office, and undertook the printing of the first cheap paper published in New York. Its projector, Dr H. D. Sheppard, meant to sell it for one cent, but under the arguments of Greeley he was persuaded to fix the price at two cents. The paper failed in three weeks, the printers only losing $50 or $60 by the experiment. They still had a "Bank Note Reporter" to print, and soon got some lottery printing. Within six months Story was drowned, but his brother-in-law, James Winchester, took his place in the firm. Greeley was now asked by James Gordon Bennett to go into partnership with him in starting The Herald. He declined the venture, but recommended the partner whom Bennett subsequently took. On the 22d of March 1834, Greeley and Winchester issued the first number of The New Yorker, a weekly literary and news paper, the firm then supposing itself to be worth about $3000. Of the first number they sold about 100 copies; of the second, nearly 200. There was an average increase for the next month of about 100 copies per week. The second volume began with a circulation of about 4550 copies, and with a loss on the first year's publication of $3000. The second year ended with 7000 subscribers, and a further loss of $2000. By the end of the third year The New Yorker had reached a circulation of 9500 copies, and a total loss of $7000. It was published nearly seven years and was never profitable, but it was widely popular, and it gave Greeley, who was its sole editor, much prominence. On the 5th of July 1836 Greeley married Miss Mary Y. Cheney, a Connecticut school teacher, whom he had met in a Grahamite (vegetarian) boarding-house in New York.
During the publication of The New Yorker he added to the scanty income which the job printing brought him by supplying editorials to The Daily Whig and various other publications. In 1838 he had gained such standing as a writer that he was selected by Thurlow Weed, William H. Seward, and other leaders of the Whig party, for the editorship of a campaign paper entitled The Jeffersonian, published at Albany. He continued The New Yorker, and travelled between Albany and New York each week to edit the two papers. The Jeffersonian was a quiet and instructive rather than a vehement campaign sheet, and the Whigs believed that it had a great effect upon the elections of the next year. When, on the 2d of May 1840, some time after the nomination by the Whig party of William Henry Harrison for the Presidency, Greeley began
