Saltpetre, 10--Sulphur, 2-1/4--Charcoal, 1/4. Add 4 parts of Lead or Black Ointment. These instances will be sufficient to show the general character of the Arabic receipts. Saltpetre is used in all of them--in most of them sulphur or charcoal; while arsenic, incense, camphor, iron and bronze filings, are occasionally used to vary the colour and character of the light produced. The Arabs were also in possession at this period of a vast number of instruments of war in which similar combustible matters were employed, such as lances and clubs, with fires at the extremity, girdles for the waist with fires attached. We translate the description of one of them:-- _War Club._ "Get the glass-maker to make a club, which shall be pierced at its extremity like an iron club. Get the turner to turn a stick, which you will fasten strongly to it. You may give it whatever form you please. Arrange on the sides three 'tubulures,' and at the bottom also three for the 'roses,' (one class of the compositions,) then make the usual compositions. When you wish to set fire to them, arrange them in the form of a segment, set fire to the club, and break it, for the love of God." The termination of this receipt is a very usual one, and applied to several other receipts--instruments of destruction being then, as now, considered a most appropriate method of serving God. Another ingenious weapon was called "the egg which moves itself and burns;" and this consisted of two long fuses, which seemed to give force and direction to the firework, and a shorter one, which was directed forwards, the object of which was to burn the enemy. This projectile was cast by the hand, and then, to use the quaint language of the receipt, "it walks, it starts, and it burns extremely well." Many other compositions were known to the Arabs, as appears from the two curious MSS. above mentioned; such as compositions for covering the body to protect from fire, others to emit a suffocating smoke. The performances of these instruments were, doubtless, what we should now consider very insignificant; but they must have produced upon the excited imagination of the warrior of those days an effect which it is very difficult to conceive in the present day. Nothing, probably, has occasioned more frequent historical errors, than forming deductions as to real effects from the exaggerated descriptions of ancient writers.