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NOVEMBER, 1885.]
pounce upon, horse, cow, or ass, they drag down to the bottom of the river, where they devour it limb by limb, all except the entrails. Should they be pressed by hunger they come ashore even in the daytime; and should a camel then, or a cow, come to the brink of the river to quench its thirst, they creep stealthily up to it, and with a violent spring, having secured their victim by fastening their fangs in its upper lip, they drag it by sheer force into the water, where they make a sumptuous repast of it. The hide of the skolea is two finger-breadths thick. The natives have devised the following methods for catching it: To a hook of great strength and thickness they attach an iron chain, which they bind with a rope made of a broad piece of cotton. Then they wrap wool round the hook and the rope, to prevent them being gnawed through by the worm, and having baited the hook with a kid, the line is thereupon lowered into the stream. As many as thirty men, each of whom is equipped with a sword, and a spear (harpoon), fitted with a thong, hold on to the rope, having also stout cudgels lying ready to hand, in case it should be necessary to kill the monster with blows. As soon as it is hooked and swallows the bait, it is hauled ashore, and despatched by the fishermen, who suspend its carcass till it has been exposed to the heat of the sun for thirty days. An oil all this time oozes out from it, and falls by drops into earthen vessels. A single worm yields ten kotylai (about five pints). The vessels having been sealed up, the oil is despatched to the king of the Indians, for no one else is allowed to have so much as one drop of it. The rest of the carcass is useless. Now, this oil possesses this singular virtue, that if you wish to burn to ashes a pile of any kind of wood, you have only to pour upon it half a pint of the oil, and it ignites without your applying a spark of fire to kindle it; while if it is a man or a beast you want to burn, you pour out the oil, and in an instant the victim is consumed. By means of this oil also the king of the Indians, it is said, captures hostile cities without the help of rams or testudos, or other siege apparatus, for he has merely to set them on fire with the oil and they fall into
ANIMALS AND PLANTS OF INDIA.
63 [Charas is a preparation made from the resinous exudation of the flowers of the Indian hemp (cannabis sativa) and is used as an intoxicant.-ED.]
307
his hands. How he proceeds is this: having filled with the oil a certain number of earthen vessels, which hold each about half a pint, he closes up their mouths and aims them at the uppermost parts of the gates, and if they strike them and break, the oil runs down the woodwork, wrapping it in flames which cannot be put out, but with insatiable fury burn the enemy, arms and all. The only way to smother and extinguish this fire is to cast rubbish into it. This account is given by Ktêsias the Knidian,"
As regards the skolex, I think we need not hesitate to identify it with the crocodile-the nature of the bait, a kid, used in its capture sufficiently proves that-in spite of the incorrect description of the animal itself; but although the oil of crocodiles is sometimes extracted and applied to various medicinal and other purposes by native fishermen, the substance here described, and to which this origin was ascribed, was probably petroleum, the true source of which was not well understood, although Ktêsias elsewhere refers to a lake upon the surface of which oil floated.
As is pointed out on a subsequent page the supposed product of the dikairon was probably charas, so I would suggest that the skôlée oil was petroleum from the Pañjabs oil springs, where it appears to have been well known and held in high esteem for its various properties since the earliest times. Ktêsias's account confers upon it characteristics which were probably somewhat exaggerated. They may be compared with those of substances not unknown at the present day to persons of the Nihilist and similar fraternities. We have it on record, however, that fire-balls, prepared with Pañjab petroleum, were employed as missiles to frighten the war elephants of a Hindû king by a Muhammadan invader eight hundred years ago. In their accounts the Muhammadan historians make use of a word signifying naphtha, so that gunpowder was not intended, as has sometimes been supposed,"
When carried as far as Persia, away from its source, it probably acquired the mythical origin described by Ktêsias; and the account of the animal itself was so distorted that the Greeks
Cf. Economic Geol. of India, p. 126. 65 See Jour. Soc. Arts, April 28, 1882, p. 595.
