that pursued him, and who so lived until he
was met by an enchanter who could tread the
water like himself, and who engaged in
combat with him far away upon the waves.
Then Oddo's power was snatched from him,
and he went down at last to feed the fishes.

Stories like these are well enough to us
who while away our time over them as over
other sports of fancy. But who would wish
to have them back again in sober earnestness,
together with the fairies, of whom we regret
sometimes that they are not so real to us as
they were to our forefathers. The fancy of
man is not dead or dwarfed, but it is occupied
now surely on better work than this of
peopling a dark day with terrors. I have
said nothing here of the faith in Satan's
direct agencies, of demons, monsters and
magicians, of wax images, the evil eye, witches,
dragons, basilisks, warnings of death; for
the whole body of the superstition of our
ancestors is much too large to be summed
up in half a dozen pages, and the darkest
shades of it are those which have not here
been represented.

OIL UPON THE WAVES.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN—printer, ambassador,
electrician, kite-flyer, republican, and
philosopher in general—made some curious
experiments on this subject; but it will be
easy to collect numerous observations bearing
on the matter in other quarters, before noticing
Franklin's researches.

Pliny, in his Natural History, propounded
a bit of wisdom, which was a standing joke
for many centuries. As given in Philemon
Holland's translation, it runs thus:—"All
seas are made calme and still with oyle; and
therefore the dyvers under the water doe
spurt and sprinkle it abroad with their
mouths, because it dulceth and allayeth the
unpleasant nature thereof, and carryeth a
light with it." But, by the eighteenth
century, men had begun to believe much of this
statement, if not the whole. It became
known that the fishermen of Bermuda were
wont to pour a little oil on the water of the
sea, to facilitate that striking of a fish which
is rendered difficult when ripples disturb the
clearness of view. It became known, or at
least reported, that the fishermen of Lisbon,
when about to return into the Tagus, and
when the surf on the bar was more than
usually rough, occasionally adopted the plan
of emptying a bottle or two of oil into the
sea; thereby suppressing the breakers
sufficiently, to allow a boat to pass in safety. It
became known that in certain parts of the
Mediterranean, divers (probably sponge, or
coral, or pearl fishers), did the very thing
which Pliny had described, not for the sake
of a stillness of the waves, but for the clearness
of light beneath the surface of the
water which results from that stillness. It
became known that in the harbour of
Newport in Rhode Island, the sea was always
smooth while any whaling vessels were in it;
whence the inference, that the leakage from
the barrels had mixed with the water which
was from time to time pumped up from the
holds of the ships; and that this modicum
of oil, spreading over the surface of the
harbour, stilled the waves.

Besides these general reports—rumours
which were more trustworthy than it is
always the good fortune of rumours to be—
there were many facts mentioned more
precisely by travellers, and naturalists, and
others. Pennant said, that "seals eat their
prey beneath the water; and, in case they
are devouring any very oily fish, the place is
known by a certain smoothness of the waters
immediately above; a fact which the seal-
fishers are very glad to store up among their
items of knowledge." Sir Gilfred Lawson,
who served long in the army at Gibraltar,
ascertained that the fishermen in that place
were accustomed to pour a little oil on the
sea, in order to still its motion, that they
might be enabled to see the oysters lying
beneath; which were large and valuable, and
were fished up with more facility by this aid.
Sir John Pringle—one of the lights of the
Royal Society in the last century—found that
the herring-fishers on the coast of Scotland,
could, at a distance, see where the shoals of
herrings were, by the smoothness of the
water over them; attributable, as he believed,
to the oiliness of the fish. Count Bentinck,
the Dutch Envoy at St. James's, we believe,
showed Dr. Franklin a letter curiously
illustrative of this subject; it was from a M.
Teuguagel, narrating the events of a voyage
in a Dutch ship in seventeen hundred and
seventy, in the eastern seas. Near the islands
Paul and Amsterdam, the ship encountered
a storm; whereupon, the captain, for greater
safety in wearing the ship, poured some oil
into the sea. M. Teuguagel was upon deck
at the time, and he states that the plan
succeeded in preventing the waves from breaking
over the vessel. He adds, "As the captain
overturned no more than a small quantity at
at a time, the salvation of their ship, was
due perhaps, to four quarts of olive oil;"
and he very naturally thought it worthy of
inquiry whether other vessels might not
be aided in a similar way by a similarly small
quantity of olive oil.

Dr. Franklin took up this subject as he did
many others of a useful character, and in
the best of all ways:—by actual experiments.
In the year seventeen hundred and
fifty-seven, being at sea in a large fleet bound
for Louisburg, he observed the wakes of two
of the ships to be remarkably smooth, while
all the others were ruffled by a fresh-blowing
wind. The captain on being appealed to for
an assignable cause, expressed a supposition
that "the cooks had been just emptying their
greasy water through the scuppers, which
had greased the sides of those two ships a