In this case the agency of the oil was sufficiently evident. In June, 1781, a similar occurrence happened at a wool-combers in a manufacturing town in Germany, where a heap of wool-combings, piled up in a close warehouse seldom aired, took fire spontaneously; this wool had been, by little and little, brought into the warehouse, and from want of room, been piled up very high and trodden down; that this combed wool, to which rape oil mixed with butter had been added in the combing, burnt of itself, was sworn to by many witnesses; one of whom affirmed that ten years preceding a similar fire had happened among the flocks of wool at a clothiers, who had put them into a cask, where they were rammed down hard for facility of carriage, and that this wool burnt from within outwards, and became quite a cinder. Cotton goods, in which linseed oil had been spilt, have burnt in a similar manner, and there is reason to attribute to an accident of this kind the recent loss of a merchant-vessel homeward bound from the East Indies. Many years since, several fires broke out at very short intervals, in a rope-walk, and in some wooden houses in St. Petersburgh; in none of which instances could the slightest suspicion of wilful firing be entertained; there was lying in the rope-walk, where the cables for the navy are made, a great quantity of hemp, amongst which a considerable portion of oil had been carelessly spilt, and the article was accordingly declared to have been spoilt; in consequence of which it was purchased at a low price, and being heaped up together, it had given rise to the conflagration; the inferior inhabitants had also purchased parcels of this spoilt hemp, for closing the chinks, and caulking the windows of their houses, a fact which offered an easy explanation of the origin of the fires that occurred amongst the houses. It was moreover reported that at the above-mentioned rope-walk coils of cable had been frequently discovered so hot, that the people were obliged to separate them to prevent farther danger. In the year 1757, as _Montet_ reports, sail-cloth, _smeared with oil and ochre_, took fire in a magazine at Brest. In the spring of 1780, a fire was discovered on board a frigate lying in the road off Cronstadt, which, had it not been timely extinguished, would have endangered the whole fleet. After the most severe scrutiny no cause of the fire was to be found, and strong surmises existed that some wicked incendiary had occasioned it. In the month of August in the same year, a fire broke out at the hemp magazine in St. Petersburgh, by which several hundred thousand _poods_[606] of hemp and flax were consumed; the walls of this magazine are of brick, the floors of stone, and the rafters and covering of iron; it moreover stands alone on an island in the Neva, on which, as well as on board the ships lying in the river, no fire is permitted. In the same year a fire was discovered in a vaulted shop of a