The Nuttall Encyclopaedia
by
Edited by Rev. James Wood

Part 19 out of 53



inhabitants live a life of passive blessedness, which, however, is to
such a man as Achilles a place of woe rather and unrest, where he would
fain exchange places with the meanest hind that breathes in the upper
world.


ELZE, FREDERICK CARL, a German Shakespearian scholar, born at
Dessau; early devoted himself to the study of English literature; lived
some time in England and Scotland; in 1875 became professor of English
Literature at Halle; his various publications on Shakespeare and the
Elizabethan dramatists are full of excellent criticisms; also wrote Lives
of Scott and Byron (1821-1889).


ELZEVIR, the name of an eminent family of printers residing in
Amsterdam and Leyden, Louis the first of them, who started in Leyden;
their publications date from 1594 to 1680.


ELZEVIR EDITIONS, editions of the classics printed at Amsterdam and
Leyden during the 16th and 17th centuries by a family of the Elzevirs,
and considered to be immaculate.


EMANATION, THE DOCTRINE OF, a doctrine of Eastern origin, which
derives everything that exists from the divine nature by necessary
process of emanation, as light from the sun, and ascribes all evil and
the degrees of it to a greater and greater distance from the pure ether
of this parent source, or to the extent in consequence to which the being
gets immersed in and clogged with matter.


EMANCIPATION, originally a term in Roman law and name given to the
process of the manumission of a son by his father; the son was sold to a
third party and after the sale became _sui juris_; it is now applied to
the remission of old laws in the interest of freedom, which Carlyle
regards in his "Shooting Niagara," as the sum of nearly all modern recent
attempts at Reform.


EMANUEL I., king of Portugal from 1495 to 1521; his reign
inaugurated the golden period of Portuguese history, during which
Portugal became the first maritime and commercial power in Europe; was
the patron of Vasco da Gama and Albuquerque; issued an edict for the
expulsion of the Jews from his kingdom, and wrote to the Elector of
Saxony begging him to get rid of Luther (1469-1521).


EMBALMING, the art of preserving dead bodies from decay by means of
antiseptic agents applied both externally and internally; although known
to other people, e. g. the Peruvians, the art was chiefly practised
among the Egyptians, and the practice of it dates back to 4000 B.C.; the
thoroughness of the process depended on the money expended, but it
usually involved the removal of the viscera, save the heart and kidneys,
the extraction of the brain, the introduction of drugs to the cavities,
and the pickling of the body in native carbonate of soda, and the
wrapping of it in linen; experiments in embalming, more or less
successful, have been made in recent times, and even still are.


EMBER DAYS, four annually recurring periods of three days each,
appointed by the Romish and English Churches to be devoted to fasting and
praying; they are the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after the first
Sunday in Lent, after Pentecost, after the 14th September, and after the
13th December.


EMBRYO, the scientific term for the young of an animal while yet in
the initial stage of development in the womb; also applied to the plant
in its rudimentary stage within the seed.


EMBRYOLOGY, the section of biology which treats of the development
of the embryo.


EMDEN (14), the chief part of the province of Hanover, in Prussia,
situated at the outlet of the river Ems; is intersected by canals;
shipbuilding and brewing are the chief industries.


EMERALD, a precious stone of great value, allied in composition to
the beryl; is of a beautiful transparent green colour; the finest
specimens are found in Colombia and Venezuela.


EMERALD ISLE, Ireland, from the fresh verdure of its herbage.


EMERSON, RALPH WALDO, an American philosophic thinker and poet, of
English Puritan descent, born at Boston, where he started in life as a
Unitarian preacher and pastor, an office he resigned in 1832 for
literature, in which he found he would have freer and fuller scope to
carry out his purpose as a spiritual teacher; in 1833 he paid a visit to
England, and in particular a notable one to CRAIGENPUTTOCK (q. v.),
with the inmates of which he formed a lifelong friendship; on his
return the year after, he married, a second time as it happened, and,
settling down in Concord, began his career as a lecturer and man of
letters; by his "Essays," of which he published two series, one in 1841
and a second in 1844, he commended himself to the regard of all thinking
men in both hemispheres, and began to exercise an influence for good on
all the ingenuous youth of the generation; they were recognised by
Carlyle, and commended as "the voice of a man"; these embraced subjects
one and all of spiritual interest, and revealed transcendent intellectual
power; they were followed by "Representative Men," lectures delivered in
Manchester on a second visit to England in 1847, and thereafter, at
successive periods, by "Society and Solitude," "English Traits," "The
Conduct of Life," "Letters and Social Aims," besides a long array of
poems, as well as sundry remarkable Addresses and Lectures, which he
published; he was a man of exceptional endowment and great speculative
power, and is to this day the acknowledged head of the literary men of
America; speculatively, Carlyle and he were of the same school, but while
Carlyle had "descended" from the first "into the angry, noisy Forum with
an argument that could not but exasperate and divide," he continued
pretty much all his days engaged in little more than in a quiet survey
and criticism of the strife; Carlyle tried hard to persuade him to
"descend," but it would appear Emerson never to his dying day understood
what Carlyle meant by the appeal, an appeal to take the devil by the
throat and cease to merely speculate and dream (1803-1882).


EMERSON TENNENT, SIR JAMES, bred for the bar; was from 1845 to 1852
colonial secretary and lieutenant-governor of Ceylon, and became on his
return joint-secretary to the Board of Trade; wrote "Christianity in
Ceylon" and "Ceylon: an Account of the Island" (1804-1869).


EMERY, a dull, blue-black mineral, allied in composition to the
sapphire, but containing a varying quantity of iron oxide; is found in
large masses; is exceedingly hard, and largely used in polishing metals,
plate-glass, and precious stones.


EMIGRANTS, THE (_Les Emigres_), the members of the French
aristocracy and of the partisans of the ancient regime who at the time of
the Revolution, after the fall of the Bastille, fled for safety to
foreign lands, congregating particularly in Coblenz, where they plotted
for its overthrow, to the extent of leaguing with the foreigner against
their country, with the issue of confiscation of their lands and
properties by the republic that was set up.


EMILE, the hero of a philosophic romance by Rousseau of the same
name, in which the author expounds his views on education, and presents
his reasons, with his ideal of what, according to him, a good education
is, a theory practically adopted by many would-be educationists with
indifferent fruit.


EMIR, a title bestowed on the descendants of Mahomet's daughter
Fatima, the word denoting a "prince" or "ruler"; has lost this its
primary meaning; the emirs, of whom there are large numbers in Turkey,
enjoying no privileges save the sole right to wear a green turban, the
supposed favourite colour of Mahomet, though they hold a high social
position; the title is also given to chieftains of N. Africa.


EMMET, ROBERT, a patriotic Irishman, born in Dublin; bred for the
bar; took part in the Irish rebellion; was hanged for his share in
attempting to seize Dublin Castle (1778-1803).


EMPE`DOCLES, a philosopher of Agrigentum, in Sicily; "extolled in
antiquity as a statesman and orator, as physicist, physician, and poet,
and even as prophet and worker of miracles," who flourished about the
year 440 B.C.; he conceived the universe as made up of "four eternal,
self-subsistent, mutually underivative, but divisible, primal material
bodies, mingled and moulded by two moving forces, the uniting one of
friendship and the disuniting one of strife"; of him it is fabled that,
to persuade his fellow-citizens, with whom he had been in high favour as
their deliverer from the tyranny of the aristocracy, of his bodily
translation from earth to heaven, he threw himself unseen into the crater
of Etna, but that at the next eruption of the mountain his slipper was
cast up and revealed the fraud.


EMPIRES: the ROMAN, capital Rome, dates from the reign of
Augustus, 25 B.C., to that of Theodosius, A.D. 395; OF THE EAST,
or Low Empire, capital Constantinople, being part of the Roman empire,
dates from 295 to 1453; OF THE WEST, capital Rome, dates from 295 to
476; the HOLY, or Second Empire of the West, founded by Charlemagne,
dates from 800 to 911; the LATIN, capital Constantinople, founded by
the Crusaders, dates from 1204 to 1261; the GERMAN, founded by Otho
the Great in 962, ended by abdication of Francis II. of Austria in 1806,
and restored under William I. in 1870; the FRENCH, founded by
Napoleon I., dates from 1804 to 1815, and as established by Napoleon III.
dates from 1852 to 1870; OF THE INDIES, founded in 1876 under the
crown of England.


EMPIRIC, the name given to any who practises an art from the mere
experience of results, apart from all reference to or knowledge of the
scientific explanation.


EMPIRICISM, a philosophical term applied to the theory that all
knowledge is derived from the senses and experience alone, to the
rejection of the theory of innate ideas; Locke, in modern times, is the
great representative of the school that advocates this doctrine supported
by Aristotle.


EMPSON, SIR RICHARD, a lawyer in the reign of Henry VII.; was
Speaker of the House of Commons; incurred the hatred of the populace by
acting as the king's agent in forcing payment of taxes and penalties; was
convicted of tyranny and treason, and beheaded in 1510.


EMPYEMA, a medical term signifying a diseased condition of the
chest, in which pus accumulates in the pleura, cures of which are
sometimes effected by drawing off the pus by means of tubes.


EMPYREAN, the highest heaven, or region of pure elemental fire,
whence everything of the nature of fire has been conceived to emanate,
whether in the phenomena of nature or the life of man.


EMS, 1, a river of NW. Germany, rises in Westphalia, and after a
course of 205 m. discharges into Dollart Bay, an inlet of the North Sea;
is navigable, and is joined to the Lippe by means of a canal, and also
similarly to Dortmund. 2, A celebrated German watering-place, on the
Lahn, near Coblenz; its mineral springs, known to the Romans, vary in
warmth from 80 deg. to 135 deg. F.


ENAMEL, a vitreous compound, easily fusible, and coloured in various
tints by the admixture of different metallic oxides; is fused to the
surface of metals for utility and ornament; was known to the European and
Asiatic ancients, and has maintained its popularity to the present day.
Various schools have been formed, of which the Byzantine, Rhenish, and
Limoges are the most noted.


ENCAUSTIC PAINTING, an ancient style of decorative art somewhat
similar to enamelling, which consisted in overlaying the surface (e. g.
of walls) with wax, then inlaying a coloured design, the whole being
subsequently polished.


ENCELADUS, one of the chief giants that revolted against Zeus, and
who, as he fled and took refuge in Sicily, was transfixed by a
thunderbolt, and buried under Etna. The fiery eruptions of the mountain
are his breath, and the shaking of it ascribed to his shifting from one
side to another. In the latter regard he serves in literature as the
symbol of a blind, often impotent, struggle to throw off some oppressive
incubus.


ENCELADUS, MANUEL BLANCO, a distinguished Chilian statesman and
soldier, born in Buenos Ayres; trained for the navy in Spain, but joined
the Chilian revolutionaries; served with distinction under Lord Cochrane,
and rose to high rank both in the army and navy; was commander of the
Chilian forces in 1825, and for two months in the following year
President of the Republic; was subsequently Governor of Valparaiso, and
minister to France (1790-1876).


ENCHIRIDION OF EPICTETUS. See EPICTETUS.


ENCINA or ENZINA, JUAN DE LA, a Spanish dramatist, whose works
mark the rise of the Spanish drama, born at Salamanca; was at one time
secretary to the Duke of Alva, and afterwards conductor of music in the
chapel of Leo X. at Rome (1469-1534).


ENCKE, JOHANN FRANZ, a celebrated German astronomer, born at
Hamburg; determined the sun's distance, and the orbit of the comet of
1680; calculated the time of the revolution of the comet which now bears
his name, and which appeared in 1818; determined also the distance of the
sun by the two transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769 (1791-1865).


ENCYCLICAL LETTER, a letter addressed by the Pope to the bishops of
the Church, condemnatory of prevailing errors or counselling them how to
act in connection with public questions of the day.


ENCYCLOPAEDIA, a name of Greek derivation, given to works which
embrace within their pages a more or less complete account, in
alphabetical order, of the whole round of human knowledge, or of some
particular section of it. Attempts in this direction were made as far
back as Aristotle's day, and various others have since been made from
time to time, according as the circle of knowledge widened. Amongst
famous encyclopaedias which have appeared, mention may be made of the
French "ENCYCLOPEDIE" (q. v.); the "Encyclopaedia Britannica,"
Edinburgh (1708-1771), now in its ninth edition (1889); the German
"Encyclopedie," begun in 1818 by Ersch and Gruber, and not yet completed,
although 170 volumes have appeared; while the largest of all is the
Chinese encyclopaedia, in 5020 vols., printed in Pekin in 1726.


ENCYCLOPEDIE, a French encyclopaedia consisting of 28 vols., to which
a supplement of 5 vols. was added; edited by D'Alembert and Diderot;
contributed to by a number of the eminent savants of France, and issued
in 1751-1777, and which contributed to feed, but did nothing to allay, or
even moderate, the fire of the Revolution.


ENCYCLOPEDIST, generally a man of encyclopedic knowledge, or who
conducts or contributes to an encyclopaedia; specially one who has, as the
French encyclopedists, an overweening, false, and illusory estimate of
the moral worth and civilising power of such knowledge. See CARLYLE'S
"SARTOR," BK. I. CHAP. 10, ON THE "ENCYCLOPEDIC HEAD."


ENDEMIC, a term applied to diseases which affect the inhabitants of
certain countries and localities, and which arise from strictly local
causes, _e. g_. neighbouring swamps, bad sanitation, impure water,
climate, &c.


ENDOGENS, those plants in which the new fibrous matter is developed
in the centre of the stem, and which is pushed outward by the formation
of new tissue within, thus developing the stem outwards from the inside.
See EXOGENS.


ENDOR, a place on the S. of Mount Tabor, in Palestine, where the
sorceress lived who was consulted by Saul before the battle of Gilboa,
and who professed communication with the ghost of Samuel (1 Sam, xxviii.
7).


ENDOSMOSE, a word used in physics to describe the intermingling of
two liquids of different densities, in close juxtaposition, but separated
by a thin membranous tissue. The liquid of lesser density passes more
rapidly through the dividing tissue, and raises the level of the liquid
in the other vessel, this action is named endosmose; while the flowing of
the liquid of greater density into the vessel whose level is falling, is
called exosmose.


ENDYMION, a beautiful shepherd, son of Zeus, whom SELENE (q. v.)
carried off to Mount Lemnos, in Caria, where, as she kissed him, he
sank into eternal sleep. This is one version of the story.


ENEID, an epic poem of Virgil, the hero of which is AEneas of Troy.


ENERGY, CONSERVATION OF, the doctrine that, however it may change in
form and character, or be dissipated, no smallest quantity of force in
the universe is ever lost.


ENFANTIN, BARTHELEMY PROSPER, a Socialist and journalist, born in
Paris, adopted the views of SAINT-SIMON (q. v.); held subversive
views on the marriage laws, which involved him in some trouble; wrote a
useful and sensible book on Algerian colonisation, and several works,
mainly interpretative of the theories of Saint-Simon (1796-1864).


ENFIELD (32), a town in Middlesex, 10 m. NE. of London, has a
celebrated Government rifle factory; was for six years the dwelling-place
of Charles Lamb.


ENGADINE, a noted Swiss valley in the canton of the Grisons,
stretches about 65 m. between the Lepontine or Rhaetian Alps; is divided
into the Lower Engadine, wild and desolate, and the Upper Engadine,
fertile and populous, and a favourite health resort; the river Inn flows
through it, its waters collected here and there into lakes.


ENGEDI, an oasis, a spot of rare beauty, once a place of palm-trees,
23 m. W. of the N. end of the Dead Sea.


ENGHIEN, LOUIS DE BOURBON, DUC D', an ill-fated French Royalist,
born at Chantilly; joined the Royalists under his grandfather, Prince of
Conde, and took part in the Rhine campaign against the Republicans; was
suspected of being concerned in a Bourbon plot to assassinate the Emperor
Napoleon; was seized in the neutral territory of Baden, brought to
Vincennes, and, after an inconclusive and illegal trial, shot by
Napoleon's orders, a proceeding which gave rise to Fouche's remark, "It
is worse than a crime--it is a blunder" (1772-1804).


ENGINEERS, ROYAL NAVAL, since 1848 have ranked as commissioned
officers; salaries vary from L110 to L639 a year; admission is by
examination; duties include the entire oversight and management of the
ship-machinery; there are three ranks--inspectors of machinery, chief
engineers, and assistants, the latter being of three grades; in 1888
engineer studentships were created.


ENGINEERS, THE CORPS OF ROYAL, in the British army, instituted in
1763, consists of about 900 officers and 5000 non-commissioned officers
and men, usually recruited from skilled artisans; their duties comprise
the undertaking of all engineering operations necessary in the conduct of
war, e. g. bridging and mining, road and railway and telegraph
construction, building of fortifications, &c.; their term of service is 7
years in the active army and 5 in the reserve, or maybe 3 in the former
and 9 in the latter.


ENGLAND (27,000), the "predominant partner" of the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Ireland, comprises along with Wales the southern, and
by far the greater, portion of Great Britain, the largest of the European
islands; it is separated from the Continent on the E. and S. by the North
Sea and English Channel, and from Ireland on the W. by St. George's
Channel, while Scotland forms its N. boundary; its greatest length N. and
S. is 430 m., and greatest breadth (including Wales) 370. It is of an
irregular triangular shape; has a long and highly-developed coast-line
(1800 m.); is divided into 40 counties (with Wales 52); has numerous
rivers with navigable estuaries, while transit is facilitated by a
network of railways and canals; save the highlands in the N., and the
Pennine Range running into Derby, England is composed (if we except the
mountainland of Wales) of undulating plains, 80 per cent, of which is
arable; while coal and iron are found in abundance, and copper, lead,
zinc, and tin in lesser quantities; in the extent and variety of its
textile factories, and in the production of machinery and other hardware
goods, England is without an equal; the climate is mild and moist, and
affected by draughts; but for the Gulf Stream, whose waters wash its
western shores, it would probably resemble that of Labrador. Under a
limited monarchy and a widely embracing franchise, the people of England
enjoy an unrivalled political freedom. Since Henry VIII.'s time, the
national religion has been an established Protestantism, but all forms
are tolerated. In 1896 education was made free. The name England is
derived from Engle-land, or land of the Angles, a Teutonic people who,
with kindred Saxons and Jutes, came over from the mainland in the 5th
century, and took possession of the island, driving Britons and Celts
before them. Admixtures to the stock took place during the 11th century
through the Danish and Norman conquests. E. annexed Wales in 1284, and
was united with Scotland under one crown in 1603, and under one
Parliament in 1707.


ENGLAND, THE WANT OF, "England needs," says Ruskin, "examples of
people who, leaving Heaven to decide whether they are to rise in the
world, decide for themselves that they will be happy in it, and have
resolved to seek, not greater wealth, but simpler pleasures; not higher
fortune, but deeper felicity; making the first of possessions
self-possession, and honouring themselves in the harmless pride and calm
pursuits of peace."


ENGLES, FRIEDRICH, a Socialist, the friend of Karl Marx; an active
propagandist of socialistic theories; author of several works on
Socialism (1820-1895).


ENID, the daughter of Yniol and the wife of Geraint; one of the
ladies of the court of King Arthur; celebrated for her steadfast conjugal
affection, the story regarding whom is given in Tennyson's "Idylls of the
King."


ENNISKILLEN (5), the county town of Fermanagh, Ireland, on an isle
in the river which joins Lower and Upper Loughs Erne; the scene of the
defeat of James II.'s troops by those of William of Orange; gives its
name to a well-known dragoon regiment.


ENNIUS, an early Roman poet, the father of Roman epic poetry, born
in Rudiae, Calabria; promoted the study of Greek literature in Rome; of
his poems, dramatic and epic, only a few fragments are extant
(239-169 B.C.).


ENOCH, a godly man, who lived in antediluvian times among a race
gone godless, and whom the Lord in judgment removed from the earth to
return Himself by-and-by with a flood in order to clear the world of the
ungodly.


ENOCH, THE BOOK OF, an apocryphal book, quoted from by Jude,
discovered over a century ago, composed presumably about the 2nd century,
though subsequently enlarged and ascribed to Enoch; it professes to be a
series of revelations made to the patriarch bearing upon the secrets of
the material and spiritual universe and the course of Providence, and
written down by him for the benefit of posterity.


ENOCH ARDEN, a poem of Tennyson, and one of his happiest efforts to
translate an incident of common life into the domain of poetry; the story
is: A sailor, presumed to be lost, and whose wife marries another,
returns, finds her happily wedded, and bears the sorrow rather than
disturb her felicity by revealing himself.


ENTABLATURE, a term in classic architecture applied to the
ornamented portion of a building which rests in horizontal position upon
supporting columns; is subdivided into three parts, the lower portion
being called the _architrave_, the middle portion the _frieze_, and the
uppermost the _cornice_; the depth assigned to these parts varies in the
different schools, but the whole entablature generally measures twice the
diameter of the column.


ENTAIL, a term in law which came to be used in connection with the
practice of limiting the inheritance of estates to a certain restricted
line of heirs. Attempts of the kind, which arise naturally out of the
deeply-seated desire which men have to preserve property--especially
landed estates--in their own families, are of ancient date; but the
system as understood now, involving the principle of primogeniture, owes
its origin to the feudal system. Sometimes the succession was limited to
the male issue, but this was by no means an invariable practice; in
modern times the system has been, by a succession of Acts of Parliaments
(notably the Cairns Act of 1882), greatly modified, and greater powers
given to the actual owner of alienating the estates to which he has
succeeded, a process which is called "breaking the entail."


ENTSAGEN, the renunciation with which, according to Goethe, life,
strictly speaking, begins, briefly explained by Froude as "a resolution,
fixedly and clearly made, to do without pleasant things--wealth,
promotion, fame, honour, and the other rewards with which the world
recompenses the services it appreciates," or, still more briefly, the
renunciation of the flesh symbolised in the Christian baptism by water.


ENVIRONMENT, a term of extensive use in biological science,
especially employed to denote the external conditions which go to
determine modifications in the development of organic life to the extent
often of producing new species.


EOLUS. See AEOLUS.


EON. See AEON.


EON DE BEAUMONT, CHARLES D', the "Chevalier d'Eon," a noted French
diplomatist, born at Tonnerre, Burgundy; notorious as having, while on
secret missions, adopted a woman's dress for purposes of disguise; was
ambassador at the English Court, but degraded and recalled by Louis XVI.,
and condemned to wear feminine garb till the close of his life; died in
destitution, when the popular doubt as to his real sex was set at rest
(1728-1810).


EOS, the goddess of the dawn, the daughter of Hyperion, and the
sister of Helios and Selene. See AURORA.


EOeTVOeS, JOZSEF, Hungarian statesman and author, born at Buda;
adopted law as a profession, but devoted himself to literature, and
eventually politics; Minister of Public Instruction, and then of Worship
and Education; published some powerful dramas and novels, notably "The
Village Notary," a work pronounced equal in many respects to the best of
Scott's novels; also vigorous political essays (1813-1871).


EPACT, a name given to the excess of the solar month over the lunar,
amounting to 1 day 11 hours 11 minutes and 57 seconds, and of the solar
year over the lunar amounting to 11 days.


EPAMINONDAS, a famous Theban statesman and soldier, defeated Sparta
in the great victory of Leuctra, and during his lifetime raised Thebes to
a position of dominant power; was slain in the battle of Mantinea when
again successfully engaging the Spartans; blameless in his private life
as he was heroic in the field, he figures as the great hero of Theban
history; born about the close of the 5th century B.C.


EPEE, CHARLES MICHEL, ABBE DE L', a noted philanthropist, born at
Versailles; took holy orders, but was divested of them on account of
Jansenist views; devoted his life to the instruction of deaf-mutes, for
whom he founded an institute, and invented a language of signs
(1712-1789).


EPEIUS, the contriver of the wooden horse, by means of which the
Greeks entered and took possession of Troy, and who was assisted by
Athena in the building of it.


EPERNAY (18), a French town on the Marne, 20 m. NW. of Chalons; the
chief emporium of the champagne district.


EPHESIANS, THE EPISTLE TO, a presumably circular letter of St. Paul
to the Church at Ephesus, among other Churches in the East, written to
show that the Gentile had a standing in Christ as well as the Jew, and
that it was agreeable to the eternal purpose of God that the two should
form one body in Him; it contains Paul's doctrine of the Church, and
appears to have been written during his first imprisonment in Rome
(61-63); it appears from the spirit that breathes in it and the similar
thoughts and exhortations, contained to have been written at the same
time as the Epistle to the Colossians.


EPHIALTES, one of the giants who revolted against Zeus and
threatened to storm heaven; he appears to have been maimed by Apollo and
Hercules.


EPHIALTES, a Malian Greek who led the Persians across a pass in the
mountains, whereby they were able to surround and overcome Leonidas and
his Spartans at Thermopylae.


EPHOD, a richly and emblematically embroidered vestment worn by the
high-priest of the Jews, and consisting of two parts, one covering the
breast and supporting the breastplate, and the other covering the back,
these being clasped to the shoulders by two onyx stones, with names
inscribed on them, six on each, of the 12 tribes, and the whole bound
round the waist with a girdle of gold, blue, purple, scarlet, and
fine-twined linen.


EPH`ORI (i. e. overseers), the name of five magistrates annually
elected in ancient Sparta from among the people as a countercheck to the
authority of the kings and the senate; had originally to see to the
execution of justice and the education of youth; their authority, which
resembled that of the tribunes in Rome, was at last destroyed in 225 B.C.


EPHRAEM SYRUS, the most famous of the Church Fathers in Syria, and
called "prophet of the Syrians," also "Pillar of the Church" and "Help of
the Holy Ghost," born at Nisibis, Mesopotamia; lived a hermit's life in a
cave near Edessa; left exegetical writings, homilies, and poems, and so
great was his piety and self-denial, that he was looked upon as a saint,
and is still so reverenced in several Churches (320-370).


EPHRAIM, one of the 12 tribes of Israel, the one to which Joshua
belonged, located in the centre of the land; powerful in the days of the
Judges, the chief of the 10 tribes that revolted under Jeroboam after the
death of Solomon, and is found often to give name to the whole body of
them.


EPIC, a poem that treats of the events in the life of a nation or a
race or the founder of one, agreeably to the passion inspiring it and in
such form as to kindle and keep alive the heroism thereof in the
generations thereafter; or a poem in celebration of the thoughts,
feelings, and feats of a whole nation or race; its proper function is to
_disimprison_ the soul of the related facts and give a noble rendering of
them; of compositions of this kind the "Iliad" of Homer, the "AEneid" of
Virgil, and the "Divine Comedy" of Dante take the lead.


EPIC MELODY, melody in accord with the feeling of the whole race or
the subject as a whole.


EPICHARIS, a Roman lady who conspired against Nero and strangled
herself rather than reveal her accomplices after undergoing the cruellest
tortures.


EPICHARMUS, a Greek philosopher and poet in the island of Cos;
studied philosophy under Pythagoras; conceived a taste for comedy; gave
himself up to that branch of the drama, and received the name of the
"Father of Comedy"; lived eventually at the court of Hiero of Syracuse
(540-430 B.C.).


EPICTETUS, a celebrated Stoic philosopher of the 1st century,
originally a slave; lived and taught at Rome, but after the expulsion of
the philosophers retired to Nicopolis, in Epirus; was lame, and lived in
poverty; his conversations were collected by Arrian, and his philosophy
in a short manual under the Greek name of "Enchiridion of Epictetus,"
written, as is alleged, in utter obliviousness of the fact that "the end
of man is an action, not a thought."


EPICUREANS, a sect of philosophers who derived their name from
Epicurus, and who divided the empire of philosophy with the STOICS
(q. v.), at the birth of Christ; they held that the chief end of man
was happiness, that the business of philosophy was to guide him in the
pursuit of it, and that it was only by experience that one could learn
what would lead to it and what would not; they scouted the idea of reason
as regulative of thought, and conscience as regulative of conduct, and
maintained that our senses were our only guides in both; in a word, they
denied that God had implanted in man an absolute rational and moral
principle, and maintained that he had no other clue to the goal of his
being but his experience in life, while the distinction of right and
wrong was only a distinction of what was found conducive to happiness and
what was not; they had no faith in or fear of a divine Being above man
any more than of a divine principle within man, and they scorned the idea
of another world with its awards, and concerned themselves only with
this, which, however, in their hands was no longer a cosmos but a chaos,
out of which the quickening and ordinative spirit had fled.


EPICURUS, a Greek philosopher, born at Samos, of Athenian origin;
settled at Athens in his thirty-sixth year, and founded a philosophical
school there, where he taught a philosophy in opposition to that of the
Stoics; philosophy he defined as "an activity which realises a happy life
through ideas and arguments," summing itself up "in ethics, which are to
teach us how to attain a life of felicity"; his system comprised "the
three branches included in philosophy, viz., logic, physics, and ethics,"
but he arranges them in reverse order, logic and physics being regarded
only as the handmaids of ethics; for he "limited logic to the
investigation of the criterion of truth," and physics he valued as
disillusioning the mind of "the superstitious fear that went to disturb
happiness"; he was a man of a temperate and blameless life, and it is a
foul calumny on him to charge him with summing up happiness as mere
self-indulgence, though it is true he regarded "virtue as having no value
in itself, but only in so far as it offered us something--an agreeable
life."


EPICYCLE, an expression used in the PTOLEMAIC (q. v.)
system of astronomy; the old belief that the celestial bodies moved in
perfect circles round the earth was found to be inadequate to explain the
varying position of the planets, a difficulty which led Ptolemy to invent
his theory of epicycles, which was to the effect that each planet
revolved round a centre of its own, greater or less, but that all these
centres themselves moved in procession round the earth, a theory which
fell to pieces before the investigations of Kepler and Newton.


EPIDAURUS, a town of ancient Greece, in Argolis, on the eastern
shore of the Peloponnesus; was at one time an independent State and an
active centre of trade, but was chiefly noted for its famous temple of
AEsculapius, to which people flocked to be cured of their diseases, and
which bore the inscription "Open only to pure souls"; ruins of a
magnificent theatre are still extant here.


EPIDEMIC, a name given to contagious diseases which, arising
suddenly in a community, rapidly spread through its members, often
travelling from district to district, until often a whole country is
affected; the theory of the transmission of disease by microbes has
largely explained the spread of such scourges, but the part which
atmospheric and other physical, and perhaps psychic, causes play in these
disorders is still matter of debate, especially as regards epidemic
mental diseases. See ENDEMIC.


EPIGONI (the Descendants), the name given to the sons of the Seven
who perished before Thebes; they avenged the death of their fathers by
razing Thebes to the ground; the war first and last has been made the
subject of epic and tragic poems.


EPIGRAM, in modern usage, is a neat, witty, and pointed utterance
briefly couched in verse form, usually satiric, and reserving its sting
to the last line; sometimes made the vehicle of a quaintly-turned
compliment, as, for example, in Pope's couplet to Chesterfield, when
asked to write something with that nobleman's pencil;--

"Accept a miracle; instead of wit,
See two dull lines by Stanhope's pencil writ."

The Latin epigrammatists, especially Martial and Catullus, were the first
to give a satirical turn to the epigram, their predecessors the Greeks
having employed it merely for purposes of epitaph and monumental
inscriptions of a laudatory nature.


EPILEPSY, a violent nervous affection, manifesting itself usually in
sudden convulsive seizures and unconsciousness, followed by temporary
stoppage of the breath and rigidity of the body, popularly known as
"falling sickness"; origin as yet undecided; attributed by the ancients
to demoniacal possession.


EPIMENIDES, a philosopher of Crete of the 7th century B.C., of whom
it is fabled that he fell asleep in a cave when a boy, and that he did
not awake for 57 years, but it was to find himself endowed with all
knowledge and wisdom. He was invited to Athens during a plague to purify
the city, on which occasion he performed certain mysterious rites with
the effect that the plague ceased. The story afforded Goethe a subject
for a drama entitled "Das Epimenides Erwachen," "in which he symbolises
his own aloofness from the great cause of the Fatherland, the result of
want of faith in the miraculous power that resides in an enthusiastic
outbreak of patriotic feeling."


EPIMETHEUS (i. e. Afterthought), the brother of Prometheus
(Forethought), who in spite of the warnings of the latter opened
Pandora's box, and let loose a flood of evils on the earth, which oppress
it to this day.


EPINAL (21), the capital of the dep. of Vosges, in France,
charmingly situated at the foot of the Vosges Mountains, on the Moselle;
is elegantly built, and has ruins of an old castle, surrounded by fine
gardens, a 10th-century church, and a fine library, &c.; a suspension
bridge spans the Moselle; there is industry in cotton, paper, &c.


EPINAY, MADAME D', a French writer, unhappily married in her youth;
became notorious for her illicit intimacy with Rousseau and Grimm; her
"Memoires et Correspondence" give a lively picture of her times
(1725-1783).


EPIPHANIUS, ST., one of the Fathers of the Greek Church; of Jewish
descent; flourished in the 4th century; led a monastic life, and founded
a monastery in Eleutheropolis; was bishop of Constantia in 367; bigoted
and tyrannical, he became notorious for his ecclesiastical zeal, and for
his indictments of Origen and St. Chrysostom; left writings that show
great but indiscriminate learning (330-402).


EPIPHANY, as observed in the Christian Church, is a festival held on
the 12th day after Christmas, in commemoration of the manifestation of
Christ to the Magi of the East; but up to the close of the 4th century
the festival also commemorated the incarnation of Christ as well as the
divine manifestation at His baptism.


EPI`RUS, was the NW. portion of ancient Hellas, Dodona its capital,
and Acheron one of its rivers; in 1466 became part of the Ottoman empire,
but in 1881 a portion was ceded to Greece.


EPISCOPACY, the name given to the form of Church government in which
there are superior and inferior orders among the clergy, as between that
of bishop and that of a presbyter; called also Prelacy.


EPISCOPIUS, SIMON, a Dutch theologian, born at Amsterdam; the head
of the Arminian party after the death of Arminius; was unjustly
misrepresented, and tyrannically, even cruelly, treated by the opposite
party; he was a man of great ability, enlightened views, and admirable
temper, and set more store by integrity and purity of character than
orthodoxy of belief (1583-1643).


EPISTOLAE OBSCURORUM VIRORUM (i. e. letters of obscure men), a
celebrated collection of Latin letters which appeared in the 16th century
in Germany, attacking with merciless severity the doctrines and modes of
living of the scholastics and monks, credited with hastening the
Reformation.


EPITAPH, an inscription placed on a tombstone in commemoration of
the dead interred below. The natural feeling which prompts such
inscriptions has manifested itself among all civilised peoples, and not a
little of a nation's character may be read in them. The Greeks reserved
epitaphs for their heroes, but amongst the Romans grew up the modern
custom of marking the tombs of relatives with some simple inscription,
many of their sepulchres being placed on the side of the public roads, a
circumstance which explains the phrase, _Siste, viator_--Stay,
traveller--found in old graveyards.


EPITHALAMIUM, a nuptial song, sung before the bridal chamber in
honour of the newly-wedded couple, particularly among the Greeks and
Romans, of whom Theocritus and Catullus have left notable examples; but
the epithalamium of Edmund Spenser is probably the finest specimen extant
of this poetic form.


EPPING FOREST, as it now exists in the SE. of Essex, is a
remnant--5600 acres--of the famous Epping or Waltham Forest, which once
extended over all Essex, and which then served as a royal hunting-ground,
is now a favourite pleasure-ground and valuable field for explorations of
botanical and entomological collectors.


EPSOM, a market-town in Surrey, skirting Banstead Downs, 15 m. SW.
of London; formerly noted for its mineral springs, now associated with
the famous Derby races.


EQUINOCTIAL POINTS are the two points at which the celestial equator
intersects the ECLIPTIC (q. v.), so called because the days and
nights are of equal duration when the sun is at these points.


EQUINOXES, the two annually recurring times at which the sun arrives
at the EQUINOCTIAL POINTS (q. v.), viz., 21st March and 22nd
September, called respectively the vernal and the autumnal equinoxes in
the northern hemisphere, but vice versa in the southern; at these times
the sun is directly over the equator, and day and night is then of equal
length over the whole globe.


EQUITES, THE, a celebrated equestrian order in ancient Rome,
supposed to have been instituted by Romulus; at first purely military, it
was at length invested with the judicial functions of the Senate, and the
power of farming out the public revenues; gradually lost these privileges
and became defunct.


ERASMUS, DESIDERIUS, a famous scholar and man of letters, born at
Rotterdam; illegitimate son of one Gerhard; conceived a disgust for
monkish life during six years' residence in a monastery at Steyn;
wandered through Europe and amassed stores of learning at various
universities; visited Oxford in 1489, and formed a lifelong friendship
with Sir Thomas More; was for some years professor of Divinity and Greek
at Cambridge; edited the first Greek Testament; settled finally at Basel,
whence he exercised a remarkable influence over European thought by the
wit and tone of his writings, notably the "Praise of Folly," the
"Colloquia" and "Adagia"; he has been regarded as the precursor of the
Reformation; is said to have laid the egg which Luther hatched; aided the
Reformation by his scholarship, though he kept aloof as a scholar from
the popular movement of Luther (1467-1536).


ERASTIANISM, the right of the State to override and overrule the
decisions of the Church that happen to involve civil penalties. See
ERASTUS.


ERASTUS, an eminent physician, born at Baden, in Switzerland, whose
fame rests mainly on the attitude he assumed in the theological and
ecclesiastical questions of the day; he defended Zwingli's view of the
Eucharist as a merely symbolical ordinance, and denied the right of the
Church to inflict civil penalties, or to exercise discipline--the power
of the keys--that belonging, he maintained, to the province of the civil
magistrate and not to the Church (1534-1583).


ERATO (i. e. the Lovely), the muse of erotic poetry and elegy,
represented with a lyre in her left hand.


ERATOSTHENES, surnamed the Philologist, a philosopher of Alexandria,
born at Cyrene, 276 B.C.; becoming blind and tired of life, he starved
himself to death at the age of 80; he ranks high among ancient
astronomers; measured the obliquity of the ecliptic, and estimated the
size of the earth (276-194 B.C.).


ERCILLA Y ZUNIGA, a Spanish poet, born at Madrid; took part in the
war of the Spaniards with the Araucos in Chile, which he celebrated in an
epic of no small merit called "La Araucana"; he ended his days in poverty
(1553-1595).


ERDGEIST, the Spirit of the Earth, represented in Goethe's "Faust"
as assiduously weaving, at the Time-Loom, night and day, in death as well
as life, the earthly vesture of the Eternal, and thereby revealing the
Invisible to mortal eyes.


ERDMANN, a German philosopher, born at Wolmar, professor at Halle;
was of the school of Hegel, an authority on the history of philosophy
(1805-1892).


EREBUS, a region of utter darkness in the depths of Hades, into
which no mortal ever penetrated, the proper abode of Pluto and his Queen
with their train of attendants, such as the Erinnyes, through which the
spirits of the dead must pass on their way to Hades; equivalent to the
valley of the shadow of death.


ERECTHEUS or ERICHTHONIUS, the mythical first king of Athens;
favoured and protected from infancy by Athena, to whom accordingly he
dedicated the city; he was buried in the temple of Athena, and worshipped
afterwards as a god; it is fabled of him that when an infant he was
committed by Athena in a chest to the care of Agraulos and Herse, under a
strict charge not to pry into it; they could not restrain their
curiosity, opened the chest, saw the child entwined with serpents, were
seized with madness, and threw themselves down from the height of the
Acropolis to perish at the foot.


ERFURT (72), a town in Saxony, on the Gera, 14 m. W. of Weimar,
formerly capital of Thueringia, and has many interesting buildings,
amongst the number the 14th-century Gothic cathedral with its great bell,
weighing 131/2 tons, and cast in 1497; the monastery of St. Augustine
(changed into an orphanage in 1819), in which Luther was a monk; the
Academy of Sciences, and the library with 60,000 vols. and 1000 MSS.;
various textile factories flourish.


ERGOT, a diseased state of grasses, &c., but a disease chiefly
attacking rye, produced by a fungus developing on the seeds; the drug
"ergot of rye" is obtained from a species of this fungus.


ERIC, the name of several of the kings of Denmark, and Sweden, and
Norway, the most notorious being the son of the noble Swedish king
GUSTAVUS VASA (q. v.), who aspired to the hand of Elizabeth of
England and challenged his rival Leicester to a duel; afterwards sought
Mary of Scotland, but eventually married a peasant girl who had nursed
him out of madness brought on by dissipation; was deposed after a State
trial instigated by his own brothers, and ultimately poisoned himself in
prison eight years later (1533-1577).


ERIC THE RED, a Norwegian chief who discovered Greenland in the 10th
century, and sent out expeditions to the coast of North America.


ERICSSON, JOHN, a distinguished Swedish engineer, born at
Langbanshyttan; went to England in 1826 and to United States of America
in 1839, where he died; invented the screw propeller of steamships; built
warships for the American navy, and amongst them the famous _Monitor_;
his numerous inventions mark a new era in naval and steamship
construction (1802-1889).


ERIE, LAKE, the fourth in size among the giant lakes of North
America, lies between Lakes Huron and Ontario, on the Canadian border, is
240 m. long and varies from 30 to 60 m. in breadth; is very shallow, and
difficult to navigate; ice-bound from December till about April.


ERIGENA, JOHANNES SCOTUS, a rationalistic mystic, the most
distinguished scholar and thinker of the 9th century, of Irish birth;
taught at the court of Charles the Bald in France, and was summoned by
Alfred to Oxford in 877; died abbot of Malmesbury; held that "damnation
was simply the consciousness of having failed to fulfil the divine
purpose"; he derived all authority from reason, and not reason from
authority, maintaining that authority unfounded on reason was of no
value; _d_. 882.


ERIN, the ancient Celtic name of Ireland, used still in poetry.


ERINNA, a Greek poetess, the friend of Sappho, died at 19; wrote
epic poetry, all but a few lines of which has perished; born about
612 B.C.


ERINNYES, THE (i. e. the roused-to-anger, in Latin, the Furies),
the Greek goddesses of vengeance, were the daughters of Gaia, begotten of
the blood of the wounded Uranus, and at length reckoned three in number,
Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megara; they were conceived of as haunting the
wicked on earth and scourging them in hell; they were of the court of
Pluto, and the executioners of his wrath.


ERIS, the Greek goddess of strife or discord, sowing the seeds
thereof among the gods to begin with, which she has since continued to do
among men.


ERIVAN (15), a fortified town in Transcaucasia, situated 30 m. NE.
of Mount Ararat on an elevated plateau; was ceded to Russia in 1828 by
Persia.


ERLANGEN (13), a Bavarian town on the Regnitz, has a celebrated
Protestant university, founded by Wilhelmina, sister of Frederick the
Great, who was the Electress; was a place of refuge for the Huguenots in
1685; manufactures in gloves, mirrors, and tobacco are carried on, and
brewing.


ERLAU (22), an ecclesiastical city of Hungary, on the Erlau, 89 m.
NE. of Pesth; is the seat of an archbishop; has a fine cruciform
cathedral, built since 1837, several monasteries, a lyceum with a large
library and an observatory; is noted for its red wine.


ERL-KING, a Norse impersonation of the spirit of superstitious fear
which haunts and kills us even in the guardian embrace of paternal
affection.


ERMINIA, a Syrian, the heroine of Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered," in
love with the Christian prince Tancred.


ERNESTI, JOHANN AUGUST, a celebrated German classicist and
theologian, called the "German Cicero," born at Tennstaedt, Thueringia;
professor of Philology in Leipzig, and afterwards of Theology; edited
various classical works, his edition of Cicero specially noted; was the
first to apply impartial textual criticism to the Bible, and to him, in
consequence, we owe the application of a more correct exegesis to the
biblical writings (1707-1781).


ERNST, ELECTOR OF SAXONY, founder of the Ernestine line of Saxon
princes, ancestor of Prince Consort, born at Altenburg; was kidnapped
along with his brother Albert in 1455, an episode famous in German
history as the "Prinzenraub" (i. e. the stealing of the prince);
succeeded his father in 1464; annexed Thueringia in 1482, and three years
later shared his territory with his brother Albert (1441-1486).


ERNST I., Duke of Saxe-Gotha and Altenburg; served in the Thirty
Years' War under Gustavus Adolphus, and shared in the victory of Luetzen;
was an able and wise ruler, and gained for himself the surname of "the
Pious" (1601-1675).


EROS (in Latin, Cupido), the Greek god of love, the son of
Aphrodite, and the youngest of the gods, though he figures in the
cosmogony as one of the oldest of the gods, and as the uniting power in
the life of the gods and the life of the universe, was represented at
last as a wanton boy from whose wiles neither gods nor men were safe.


EROSTRATUS, an obscure Ephesian, who, to immortalise his name, set
fire to the temple of Ephesus on the night, as it happened, when
Alexander the Great was born; the Ephesians thought to defeat his purpose
by making it death to any one who named his name, but in vain, the decree
itself giving wider and wider publicity to the act.


ERPENIUS (Thomas van Erpen), Arabic scholar, born at Gorkum, in
Holland; after completing his studies at Leyden and Paris, became
professor of Oriental Languages there; famed for his Arabic grammar and
rudiments, which served as text-books for upwards of 200 years
(1585-1624).


ERSCH, JOHANN SAMUEL, a bibliographer, born at Grossglogau; after a
college career at Halle devoted himself to journalism, and in 1800 became
librarian of the University of Jena; subsequently filled the chair of
Geography and Statistics at Halle; his "Handbook of German Literature"
marks the beginning of German bibliography; began in 1818, along with
Gruber, the publication of an encyclopaedia which is still unfinished
(1766-1828).


ERSKINE, EBENEZER, founder of the Secession Church of Scotland, born
at Chirnside, Berwickshire; minister at Portmoak for 28 years; took part
in the patronage dispute, and was deposed (1733), when he formed a church
at Gairney Bridge, near Kinross, the nucleus of the Secession Church
(1703-1754).


ERSKINE, HENRY, a famous Scotch lawyer, second son of the Earl of
Buchan, born at Edinburgh; called to the bar and became Lord Advocate; a
Whig in politics; brought about useful legal reforms; noted as a
brilliant wit and orator (1746-1817).


ERSKINE, JOHN, a Scottish jurist; called to the bar in 1719; became
professor of Scots Law in Edinburgh University in 1837, resigned 1763;
author of two important works on Scots Law, "The Institutes" and
"Principles" (1695-1768).


ERSKINE, JOHN, D.D., son of the preceding; a celebrated Scotch
preacher and author of various essays and pamphlets; a prominent leader
on the Evangelical side in the General Assemblies; was minister of the
Old Greyfriars, Edinburgh, and the colleague of Principal Robertson; is
remembered for a retort in the pulpit and for another in the General
Assembly; the former was to a remark of his colleague, Principal
Robertson, "If perfect virtue were to appear on earth we would adore
it." ... "Perfect virtue did appear on earth and we crucified it"; and that
other in the General Assembly was "Rax (reach) me that Bible," as certain
Moderates in the court began derisively to scoff at the proposal to send
missions to the heathen (1721-1803).


ERSKINE, JOHN, OF DUN, a Scotch Reformer, supported Knox and
Wishart; was several times Moderator of the General Assembly, and
assisted in the formation of "The Second Book of Discipline" (1509-1591).


ERSKINE, RALPH, a Scotch divine, brother of EBENEZER (q. v.),
with whom he co-operated in founding the Secession Church; his
sermons and religious poems, called "Gospel Sonnets," were widely read;
one of the first of the Scotch seceders, strange to contemplate, "a long,
soft, poke-shaped face, with busy anxious black eyes, looking as if he
could not help it; and then such a character and form of human existence,
conscience living to the finger ends of him, in a strange, venerable,
though highly questionable manner ... his formulas casing him all round
like the shell of a beetle"; his fame rests chiefly on his "Gospel
Sonnets," much appreciated at one time (1685-1752).


ERSKINE, THOMAS, LORD, a famous lawyer, youngest son of the Earl of
Buchan, born in Edinburgh; spent his early years in the navy, and
afterwards joined the army; resigned in 1775 to enter upon the study of
law; called to the bar in 1778; a king's counsel in 1783; created a baron
and Lord Chancellor in 1806; was engaged in all the famous trials of his
time; an unrivalled orator in the law courts; his speeches rank as
masterpieces of forensic eloquence (1750-1823).


ERSKINE, THOMAS, OF LINLATHEN, member of the Scottish bar, but
devoted in an intensely human spirit to theological interests, "one of
the gentlest, kindliest, best bred of men," says Carlyle, who was greatly
attached to him; "I like him," he says, "as one would do a draught of
sweet rustic mead served in cut glasses and a silver tray ... talks
greatly of symbols, seems not disinclined to let the Christian religion
pass for a kind of mythus, provided one can retain the spirit of it"; he
wrote a book, much prized at one time, on the "Internal Evidences of
Revealed Religion," also on Faith; besides being the constant friend of
Carlyle, he corresponded on intimate terms with such men as Maurice and
Dean Stanley (1788-1870).


ERWIN, a German architect, born at Steinbach, Baden; the builder of
the western facade of the cathedral of Strasburg (1240-1318).


ERYMANTHUS, a mountain in Arcadia that was the haunt of the boar
killed by Hercules.


ERYSIPELAS, known popularly as St. Anthony's Fire and Rose, a
febrile disease, manifesting itself in acute inflammation of the skin,
which becomes vividly scarlet and ultimately peels; confined chiefly to
the head; is contagious, and recurrent.


ERYTHEMA, a medical term used loosely to designate a diseased
condition of the skin; characterised by a scarlet or dark-red rash or
eruption, distinct from erysipelas.


ERYTHREA (220), a colony belonging to Italy, extending from Cape
Kasar 670 m. along the western shore of the Red Sea to a point in the
Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb; Massowah the capital.


ERYTHREAN SEA, a name of the Red Sea.


ERZERUM (60), a city in Turkish Armenia, capital of the province of
the same name, 125 m. SE. of Trebizond; situated on a fertile plain 6300
ft. above sea-level; is an important entrepot for commerce between Europe
and Asia; is irregularly built, but contains imposing ruins; has a
fortress, and in the suburbs a number of mosques and bazaars; is famed
for its iron and copper ware; fell into the hands of the Turks in 1517;
figured as a military centre in many Turkish wars; was reduced by the
Russians in 1878; was a scene of Armenian massacres by the Turks in 1895.


ERZGEBIRGE, a range of mountains lying between Saxony and Bohemia;
the highest peak is the Keilberg, 4052 ft.; is rich in various metallic
ores, especially silver and lead.


ERYX, an ancient town in the NW. of Sicily, at the foot of a
mountain of the same name, with a temple to Venus, who was hence called
Erycina.


ESAU, the eldest son of Isaac, who sold his birthright to Jacob for
a mess of lentils; led a predatory life, and was the forefather of the
Edomites.


ESCHATOLOGY, the department of theology which treats of the
so-called last things, such as death, the intermediate state, the
millennium, the return of Christ, the resurrection, the judgment, and the
end of the world.


ESCHENBACH, WOLFRAM VON, a famous minnesinger, born at Eschenbach,
in Bavaria, at about the close of the 12th century; was of good birth,
and lived some time at the Thuringian Court; enjoyed a wide reputation in
his time as a poet; of his poems the epic "Parzival" is the most
celebrated, and records the history of the "Grail."


ESCHER, JOHANN HEINRICH ALFRED. Swiss statesman, born at Zurich;
bred for the law, and lectured for a while in his native town; became
President of the Council of Zurich; co-operated with Farrer in expelling
the Jesuits; became member of the Diet; supported Federal union, and did
much to promote and establish State education in Switzerland; _b_. 1819.


ESCHINES. See AESCHINES; as also ESCULAPIUS,
ESCHYLUS, ESOP, &c., under AE.


ESCOBAR, MENDOZA ANTONIO, a Spanish Jesuit and casuist, born at
Valladolid, a preacher and voluminous writer (1589-1669).


ESCURIAL, a huge granite pile, built in the form of a gridiron, 30
m. NW. from Madrid, and deemed at one time the eighth wonder of the
world; was built in 1563-1584; was originally dedicated as a monastery to
St. Lorenzo in recognition of the services which the Saint had rendered
to Philip II. at the battle of St. Quentin, and used at length as a
palace and burial-place of kings. It is a mere shadow of what it was, and
is preserved from ruin by occasional grants of money to keep it in
repair.


ESDRAELON, a flat and fertile valley in Galilee, called also the
valley of Jezreel, which, with a maximum breadth of 9 m., extends in a
NW. direction from the Jordan at Bathshean to the Bay of Acre.


ESDRAS, the name of two books of the Apocrypha, the first, written
2nd century B.C., containing the history of the rebuilding of the Temple
and the restoration of its cultus, with a discussion on the strangest of
all things, ending in assigning the palm to truth; and the second,
written between 97 and 81 B.C., a forecast of the deliverance of the
Jews from oppression and the establishment of the Messianic kingdom.


ESK, the name of several Scottish streams: (1) in Dumfriesshire, the
Esk of young Lochinvar, has a course of 31 m. after its formation by the
junction of the North and South Esks, and flows into the Solway; (2) in
Edinburgh, formed by the junction of the North and South Esks, joins the
Firth of Forth at Musselburgh; (3) in Forfarshire, the South Esk
discharges into the North Sea at Montrose, and the North Esk also flows
into the North Sea 4 m. N. of Montrose.


ESKIMO or ESQUIMAUX, an aboriginal people of the Mongolian or
American Indian stock, in all not amounting to 40,000, thinly scattered
along the northern seaboard of America and Asia and in many of the Arctic
islands; their physique, mode of living, religion, and language are of
peculiar ethnological interest; they are divided into tribes, each having
its own territory, and these tribes in turn are subdivided into small
communities, over each of which a chief presides; the social organisation
is a simple tribal communism; Christianity has been introduced amongst
the Eskimo of South Alaska and in the greater part of Labrador; in other
parts the old religion still obtains, called Shamanism, a kind of fetish
worship; much of their folk-lore has been gathered and printed; fishing
and seal-hunting are their chief employments; they are of good physique,
but deplorably unclean in their habits; their name is supposed to be an
Indian derivative signifying "eaters of raw meat."


ESKIMO DOG, a dog found among the Eskimo, about the size of a
pointer, hair thick, and of a dark grey or black and white; half tamed,
but strong and sagacious; invaluable for sledging.


ESMOND, HENRY, the title of one of Thackeray's novels, deemed by the
most competent critics his best, and the name of its hero, a chivalrous
cavalier of the time of Queen Anne. "Esmond" is pronounced by Prof.
Saintsbury to be "among the very summits of English prose fiction,
exquisitely written in a marvellous resurrection of eighteenth-century
style, touched somehow with a strange modernity and life which make it no
_pastiche_, containing the most brilliant passages of mere incident, and,
above all, enshrining such studies of character ... as not four other
makers of English prose and verse can show."


ESNE, a town in Upper Egypt, on the left bank of the Nile, and 25 m.
S. of Thebes; famous for the ruins of a temple.


ESOTERIC, a term used to denote teaching intended only for the
initiated, and intelligible only to them.


ESPARTERO, a celebrated Spanish general and statesman, born at
Granatula; supported, against the Carlist faction, the claims of Isabella
to the throne of Spain; was for his services made Duke of Vittoria, and
in 1841 elected regent; compelled to abdicate, he fled to England, but
afterwards returned for a time to the head of affairs; an able man, but
wanting in the requisite astuteness and tact for such a post (1793-1879).


ESPINASSE, CLARE FRANCOISE, a wit and beauty, born at Lyons,
illegitimate child of the Countess d'Albon; went to Paris as companion to
Madame du Deffand, with whom she quarrelled; set up a salon of her own,
and became celebrated for her many attractions; D'Alembert was devoted to
her; many of her letters to her lovers, the Marquis de Mora and M. de
Guilbert in particular, have been published, and display a charming
personality (1732-1776).


ESPINEL, VINCENT DE, a Spanish poet and musician, born at Ronda,
Granada; first a soldier and then a priest, the friend of Lope de Vega,
and author of a work which Le Sage made free use of in writing "Gil
Blas"; was an expert musician; played on the guitar, and added a fifth
string (1551-1634).


ESPIRITU SANTO, (1) a small and swampy maritime province of Brazil
(121), lying on the N. border of Rio de Janeiro; does some trade in
timber, cotton, coffee, and sugar; Victoria is the capital; (2) a town
(32) in central Cuba; (3) the largest of the NEW HEBRIDES (q. v.)
(20); the climate is unhealthy, but the soil fertile.


ESPRIT DES LOIS (i. e. the Spirit of Laws), the title of
Montesquieu's great work, at once speculative and historical, published
in 1748, characterised in "Sartor" as the work, like many others, of "a
clever infant spelling letters from a hieroglyphic book the lexicon of
which lies in Eternity, in Heaven."


ESPY, JAMES POLLARD, a meteorologist, born in Pennsylvania; did
notable work in investigating the causes of storms, and in 1841 published
"The Philosophy of Storms"; was appointed to the Washington observatory,
where he carried on experiments in the cooling of gases and atmospheric
expansion (1785-1860).


ESQUIRE, originally meant a shield-bearer, and was bestowed upon the
two attendants of a knight, who were distinguished by silver spurs, and
whose especial duty it was to look after their master's armour; now used
widely as a courtesy title.


ESQUIROS, HENRY ALPHONSE, poet and physician, born at Paris; his
early writings, poems and romances, are socialistic in bias; member of
the Legislative Assembly in 1848; retired to England after the _coup
d'etat_; returned to France and rose to be a member of the Senate (1875);
wrote three works descriptive of the social and religious life of England
(1814-1876).


ESSEN (79), a town in the Rhine province of Prussia, 20 m. NE. of
Duesseldorf, the seat of the famous "Krupp" steel-works.


ESSENES, a religious communistic fraternity, never very numerous,
that grew up on the soil of Judea about the time of the Maccabees, and
had establishments in Judea when Christ was on earth, as well as
afterwards in the time of Josephus; they led an ascetic life, practised
the utmost ceremonial cleanness, were rigorous in their observance of the
Jewish law, and differed from the Pharisees in that they gave to the
Pharisaic spirit a monastic expression; they represented Judaism in its
purest essence, and in the spirit of their teaching came nearer
Christianity than any other sect of the time; "Essenism," says Schuerer,
"is first and mainly of Jewish formation, and in its non-Jewish features
it had most affinity with the Pythagorean tendency of the Greeks."


ESSEQUIBO, an important river in British Guiana, 620 m. long, rises
in the Sierra Acaray, navigable for 50 m. to small craft, flows northward
into the Atlantic.


ESSEX (785), a county in the SE. of England, between Suffolk on the
N. and Kent in the S., faces the German Ocean on the E.; is well watered
with streams; has an undulating surface; is chiefly agricultural; brewing
is an important industry, and the oyster fisheries of the Colne are
noted; Chelmsford is the county town.


ESSEX, ROBERT DEVEREUX, EARL OF, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth,
born at Netherwood, Hereford; served in the Netherlands under Leicester,
his stepfather; won the capricious fancy of Elizabeth; lost favour by
marrying clandestinely the widow of Sir Philip Sidney, but was restored,
and led a life of varying fortune, filling various important offices,
till his final quarrel with the Queen and execution (1567-1601).


ESSEX, ROBERT DEVEREUX, EARL OF, son of preceding; commander of the
Parliamentary forces against Charles I.; the title died with him, but was
conferred again upon the present family in 1661 (1591-1646).


ESSLING, a village near Vienna, where the French gained a bloody
victory over the Austrians in 1809, and which gave the title of prince to
Massena.


ESSLINGEN (22), an old historic and important manufacturing town in
Wuertemberg, on the Neckar, 9 m. SE. of Stuttgart; has a citadel and the
Liebfrauen Church, which is a fine Gothic structure with a spire 246 ft.;
is a noted hardware centre, and celebrated for its machinery; a good
trade is done in textiles, fruit, and sparkling champagne.


ESTAING, COMTE D', a French admiral, "one of the bravest of men,"
fought against the English in the Indies and in America; winced as a
Royalist at the outbreak of the French Revolution; his loyalty to royalty
outweighed, it was thought, his loyalty to his country, and he was
guillotined (1729-1794).


ESTE, an ancient and illustrious Italian family from which, by an
offshoot founded by Welf IV., who became Duke of Bavaria in the 11th
century, the Guelph Houses of Brunswick and Hanover, also called the
Este-Guelphs, trace their descent. Of the Italian branch the most noted
descendant was Alphonso I., a distinguished soldier and statesman and
patron of art, whose second wife was the famous Lucrezia Borgia. His son,
Alphonso II., is remembered for his cruel treatment of Tasso, placing him
in prison for seven years as a madman who dared to make love to one of
the princesses.


ESTE (6), an Italian town, 18 m. SW. of Padua, on the S. side of the
Euganean Hills; has a castle and church with a leaning campanile.


ESTERHAZY, the town of a noble Austrian family of ancient date, and
that gave birth to a number of illustrious men.


ESTERHAZY DE GALANTHA, the name of a powerful and famous Hungarian
family holding the rank of Princes of the Empire since the 17th century.
Their estates include upwards of 4000 villages, 60 market-towns, many
castles and lordships, but they are heavily mortgaged.


ESTHER, THE BOOK OF, a book of the Old Testament, which takes its
name from the chief figure in the story related, an orphan Jewess and
ward of her cousin Mordecai, who, from her beauty, was chosen into the
royal harem and raised to be consort to the king. It is read through in
the Jewish synagogues at the feast of PURIM (q. v.). It is
observed that the name of God does not occur once in the book, but the
story implies the presence of an overruling Providence, responding to the
cry of His oppressed ones for help.


ESTHONIA (393), one of the Russian Baltic provinces, has a northern
foreshore on the Gulf of Finland, and on the W. abuts on the Baltic; what
of the country that is free from forest and marsh is chiefly
agricultural, but fishing is also an important industry; the people are a
composite of Finns and immigrant Germans, with latterly Russians
superimposed.


ESTIENNE, the name of a family of French painters. See
STEPHENS.


EST-IL-POSSIBLE? the name given by James II. to Prince George of
Denmark, the husband of Princess Anne, from his invariable exclamation on
hearing how one after another had deserted the Stuart cause; he ended
with deserting it himself.


ESTRADES, COUNT D', a French diplomatist (1579-1680).


ESTREMADURA (1,111), a coast province of Portugal, between Beira and
Alemtejo, watered by the Tagus; richly fertile in many parts, but sparely
cultivated; silk is an important industry, and an increasing; Lisbon is
the chief city, and with Setubal monopolises the trade; salt, fruits,
wine, and oil are exported; also name of a district in Spain between
Portugal and New Castile, now divided into the provinces of Badajoz and
Caceres.


ETEOCLES, a son of Oedipus, king of Thebes, agreed on the banishment
of his father to govern the state alternately with his brother Polynices,
but failing to keep his engagement, the latter appealed to his guardian,
out of which there arose the War of the Seven against Thebes, which ended
in the slaughter of the whole seven, upon which the brothers thought to
end the strife in single combat, when each fell by the sword of the
other.


ETERNAL CITY, ancient Rome in the esteem of its inhabitants, in
accordance with the promise, as Virgil feigns, of Jupiter to Venus, the
goddess-mother of the race.


ETERNITIES, THE CONFLUX OF, Carlyle's expressive phrase for Time, as
in every moment of it a centre in which all the forces to and from
Eternity meet and unite, so that by no past and no future can we be
brought nearer to Eternity than where we at any moment of Time are; the
Present Time, the youngest born of Eternity, being the child and heir of
all the Past times with their good and evil, and the parent of all the
Future, the import of which (see Matt. xvi. 27) it is accordingly the
first and most sacred duty of every successive age, and especially the
leaders of it, to know and lay to heart as the only link by which
Eternity lays hold of it and it of Eternity.


ETHELBERT, a king of Kent, in whose reign Christianity was
introduced by St. Augustin and a band of missionaries in 597; drew up the
first Saxon law code (552-616).


ETHELDREDA, a Saxon princess, whose name, shortened into St. Audrey,
was given to a certain kind of lace, whence "tawdry"; she took refuge
from the married state in the monastery of St. Abb's Head, and afterwards
founded a monastery in the Isle of Ely (630-679).


ETHELRED I., king of Saxon England (866-871), predecessor and
brother of Alfred; his reign was a long and unsuccessful struggle with
the Danes.


ETHELRED II., the Unready, a worthless king of Saxon England
(979-1016), married Emma, daughter of Richard, Duke of Normandy, a step
which led in the end to the claim which issued in the Norman Conquest
(968-1016).


ETHER, a volatic liquid prepared from the distillation of alcohol
and sulphuric acid at high temperature; is colourless, and emits a sweet,
penetrating odour; is highly combustible; a useful solvent, and an
important anaesthetic.


ETHER, a subtle element presumed to pervade all interstellar space,
vibrations in which are assumed to account for the transmission of light
and all radiant energy.


ETHEREDGE, SIR GEORGE, the originator of the kind of comedy
"containing a vein of lively humour and witty dialogue which were
afterwards displayed by Congreve and Farquhar"; has been called the
"founder of the comedy of intrigue"; he was the author of three clever
plays, entitled "Love in a Tub," "She Would if She Could," and "Sir
Fopling Flutter" (1636-1694).


ETHICS, the science which treats of the distinction between right
and wrong and of the moral sense by which they are discriminated.


ETHICS OF DUST, THE, "a book by Ruskin about crystallography, but it
twists symbolically in the strangest way all its geology into morality,
theology, Egyptian mythology, with fiery cuts at political economy,
pretending not to know whether the forces and destinies and behaviour of
crystals are not very like those of a man."


ETHIOPIA, a term loosely used in ancient times to indicate the
territory inhabited by black or dark-coloured people; latterly applied to
an undefined tract of land stretching S. of Egypt to the Gulf of Aden,
which constituted the kingdom of the Ethiopians, a people of Semitic
origin and speaking a Semitic language called Ge'ez, who were
successively conquered by the Egyptians, Persians, and Romans; are known
in the Bible; their first king is supposed to have been Menilehek, son of
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba; their literature consists mostly of
translations and collections of saws and riddles; the language is no
longer spoken.


ETHNOLOGY, a science which treats of the human race as grouped in
tribes or nations, but limits itself to tracing the origin and
distribution of races, and investigating the physical and mental
peculiarities and differences exhibited by men over all parts of the
globe; the chief problem of the science is to decide between the
monogenous and polygenous theories of the origin of the race, and
investigation inclines to favour the former view. The polygenous
argument, based on the diversity of languages, has been discarded, as, if
valid, necessitating about a thousand different origins, while the
monogenous position is strengthened by the ascertained facts that the
different racial groups are fruitful amongst themselves, and present
points of mental and physical similarity which accord well with this
theory. Ethnologists now divide the human race into three main groups:
the _Ethiopian or negro_, the _Mongolic or yellow_, and the _Caucasic or
white_.


ETIENNE, ST., (133), an important French town, capital of the dep.
of the Loire, on the Furens, 35 m. SW. of Lyons; chief seat of the
iron-works of France; also has noted ribbon factories.


ETIVE, a sea-loch in Argyllshire, Scotland, is an inland extension
of the Firth of Lorne, about 20 m. in length, and varying in breadth from
2 to 1/4 m.; the mountain scenery along the shores grandly picturesque; the
river which bears the same name rises in Rannoch Moor, and joins the loch
after a SW. course of 15 m.; both loch and river afford salmon-fishing.


ETNA, a volcanic mountain on the E. coast of Sicily, 10,840 ft.
high; a striking feature is the immense ravine, the Val del Bove,
splitting the eastern side of the mountain, and about 5 m. in diameter;
on the flanks are many smaller cones. Etna is celebrated for its many and
destructive eruptions; was active in 1892; its observatory, built in
1880, at an elevation of 9075 ft. above sea-level, is the highest
inhabited dwelling in Europe.


ETON, a town in Buckinghamshire, on the Thames, 22 m. SW. of London;
celebrated for its public school, Eton College, founded in 1440 by Henry
VI., which has now upwards of 1000 scholars.


ETRE SUPREME, the Supreme Being agreeably to the hollow and vacant
conception of the boasted, beggarly 18th-century Enlightenment of
Revolutionary France.


ETRURIA, the ancient Roman name of a region in Italy, W. of the
Apennines from the Tiber to the Macra in the N.; inhabited by the
Etruscans, a primitive people of Italy; at one time united in a
confederation of twelve States; gradually absorbed by the growing Roman
power, and who were famous for their artistic work in iron and bronze.
Many of the Etruscan cities contain interesting remains of their early
civilised state; but their entire literature, supposed to have been
extensive, has perished, and their language is only known through
monumental inscriptions. Their religion was polytheistic, but embraced a
belief in a future life. There is abundant evidence that they had
attained to a high degree of civilisation; the status of women was high,
the wife ranking with the husband; their buildings still extant attest
their skill as engineers and builders; vases, mirrors, and coins of fine
workmanship have been found in their tombs, and jewellery which is
scarcely rivalled; while the tombs themselves are remarkable for their
furnishings of chairs, ornaments, decorations, &c., showing that they
regarded these sanctuaries more as dwellings of departed spirits than as
sepulchres of the dead.


ETTMUeLLER, ERNST MORITZ LUDWIG, a German philologist, born at
Gerfsdorf, Saxony, professor of German literature in Zurich in 1863; did
notable work in connection with Anglo-Saxon and in Middle German dialects
(1802-1877).


ETTRICK, a Scottish river that rises in Selkirkshire and joins the
Tweed, 3 m. below Selkirk; the Yarrow is its chief tributary; a forest of
the same name once spread over all Selkirkshire and into the adjoining
counties; the district is associated with some of the finest ballad and
pastoral poetry of Scotland.


ETTRICK SHEPHERD, JAMES HOGG (q. v.).


ETTY, WILLIAM, a celebrated painter, born at York; rose from being a
printer's apprentice to the position of a Royal Academician; considered
by Ruskin to have wasted his great powers as a colourist on inadequate
and hackneyed subjects (1787-1849).


EUBOEA (82), the largest of the Grecian Isles, skirts the mainland
on the SE., to which it is connected by a bridge spanning the Talanta
Channel, 40 yards broad; it is about 100 m. in length; has fine quarries
of marble, and mines of iron and copper are found in the mountains;
Chalcis is the chief town.


EUCLID OF ALEXANDRIA, a famous geometrican, whose book of
"Elements," revised and improved, still holds its place as an English
school-book, although superseded as such in America and the Continent;
founded a school of Mathematics in Alexandria; flourished about 300 B.C.


EUCLID OF MEGARA, a Greek philosopher, a disciple of Socrates, was
influenced by the ELEATICS (q. v.); founded the Megaric school
of Philosophy, whose chief tenet is that the "good," or that which is one
with itself, alone is the only real existence.


EUDAEMONISM, the doctrine that the production of happiness is the aim
and measure of virtue.


EUDOCIA, the ill-fated daughter of an Athenian Sophist, wife of
Theodosius II., embraced Christianity, her name Athenais previously; was
banished by her husband on an ill-founded charge of infidelity, and spent
the closing years of her life in Jerusalem, where she became a convert to
the views of EUTYCHES (q. v.) (394-400).


EUDOXUS OF CNIDUS, a Grecian astronomer, was a pupil of Plato, and
afterwards studied in Egypt; said to have introduced a 3651/2 day year into
Greece; flourished in the 4th century B.C.


EUGENE, FRANCOIS, PRINCE OF SAVOY, a renowned general, born at
Paris, and related by his mother to Cardinal Mazarin; he renounced his
native land, and entered the service of the Austrian Emperor Leopold;
first gained distinction against the Turks, whose power in Hungary he
crushed in the great victory of Pieterwardein (1697); co-operated with
Marlborough in the war of the Spanish Succession, and shared the glories
of his great victories, and again opposed the French in the cause of
Poland (1663-1736).


EUGENIE, EX-EMPRESS OF THE FRENCH, born at Granada, second daughter
of Count Manuel Fernandez of Montigos and Marie Manuela Kirkpatrick of
Closeburn, Dumfriesshire; married to Napoleon III. in 1853; had to leave
France in 1870, and has since January 1873 lived as his widow at
Chiselhurst, Kent; _b_. 1826.


EUGENIUS, the name of four Popes. E., St., I., Pope from 654 to 658
(festival, August 27); E. II., Pope from 824 to 827; E. III., Pope from
1145 to 1153; E. IV., Pope from 1431 to 1447.


EUGENIUS IV., Pope, born at Venice; his pontificate was marked by a
schism created by proceedings in the Council of Basel towards the reform
of the Church and the limitation of the papal authority, the issue of
which was that he excommunicated the Council and the Council deposed him;
he had an unhappy time of it, and in his old age regretted he had ever
left his monastery to assume the papal crown.


EUGUBINE TABLES, seven bronze tablets discovered in 1441 near
Eugubium, in Italy, containing inscriptions which supply a key to the
original tongues of Italy prior to Latin.


EUHEMERISM, the theory that the gods of antiquity are merely deified
men, so called from Euhemeros, the Greek who first propounded the theory,
and who lived 316 B.C.


EULENSPIEGEL (i. e. Owl-glass), the hero of a popular German tale,
which relates no end of pranks, fortunes, and misfortunes of a wandering
mechanic born in a village in Brunswick; buried in 1350 at Moelln, in
Lauenburg, where they still show his tombstone sculptured with an owl
and a glass.


EULER, LEONHARD, a celebrated mathematician, born at Basel;
professor in St. Petersburg successively of Physics and Mathematics; came
to reside in Berlin in 1741 at the express invitation of Frederick the
Great; returned to St. Petersburg in 1746, where he died; besides many
works issued in his lifetime, he left 200 MSS., which were published
after his death (1707-1783).


EUMENIDES (i. e. the Well-meaning), a name given to the
ERINNYES (q. v.) or Furies, from a wholesome and prudent dread
of calling them by their true name.


EUMOLPUS, the founder of the Eleusinian Mysteries, alleged to have
been a priest of Demeter or Ceres.


EUNOMIANS, an ultra-Arian sect of the 4th century, which soon
dwindled away after breaking from the orthodox Church; called after
EUNOMIUS (q. v.).


EUNOMIUS, an Arian divine, born in Cappadocia; head of a sect who
maintained that the Father alone was God, that the Son was generated from
Him, and the Spirit from the Son; was bishop of Cyzicum, a post he
by-and-by resigned; _d_. 394.


EUPATORIA (13), a Russian town on the Crimean coast, in the
government of Taurida, 40 m. NW. of Simferopol; has a fine Tartar mosque,
and does a large export trade in hides and cereals; during the Crimean
War was an important military centre of the Allies.


EUPHEMISM, is in speech or writing the avoiding of an unpleasant or
indelicate word or expression by the use of one which is less direct, and
which calls up a less disagreeable image in the mind. Thus for "he died"
is substituted "he fell asleep," or "he is gathered to his fathers"; thus
the Greeks called the "Furies" the "Eumenides," "the benign goddesses,"
just as country people used to call elves and fairies "the good folk
neighbours."


EUPHRATES, a river in West Asia, formed by the junction of two
Armenian streams; flows SE. to Kurnah, where it is joined by the Tigris.
The combined waters--named the Shat-el-Arab--flow into the Persian Gulf;
is 1700 m. long, and navigable for 1100 m.


EUPHROSYNE, the cheerful one, or life in the exuberance of joy, one
of the three Graces. See GRACES.


EUPHUISM, an affected bombastic style of language, so called from
"Euphues," a work of Sir John Lyly's written in that style.


EURE (349), a dep. of France, in Normandy, so called from the river
Eure which traverses it.


EURE-ET-LOIR (285), a dep. of France lying directly S. of the
preceding; chief rivers the Eure in the N. and the Loir in the S.


EUREKA (i. e. I have found it), the exclamation of Archimedes on
discovering how to test the purity of the gold in the crown of
HIERO (q. v.); he discovered it, tradition says, when taking a
bath.


EURIPIDES, a famous Greek tragic dramatist, born at Salamis, of
wealthy parents; first trained as an athlete, and then devoted himself to
painting, and eventually to poetry; he brought out his first play at the
age of 25, and is reported to have written 80 plays, of which only 18 are
extant, besides fragment of others; of these plays the "Alcestes,"
"Bacchae," "Iphigenia at Aulis," "Electra," and "Medea" may be mentioned;
he won the tragic prize five times; tinged with pessimism, he is
nevertheless less severe than his great predecessors Sophocles and
AEschylus, surpassing them in tenderness and artistic expression, but
falling short of them in strength and loftiness of dramatic conception;
Sophocles, it is said, represented men as they ought to be, and Euripides
as they are; he has been called the Sophist of tragic poets
(480-406 B.C.).


EUROPA, a maiden, daughter of Agenor, king of Phoenicia, whom Zeus,
disguised as a white bull, carried off to Crete, where she became by him
the mother of MINOS, RHADAMANTHUS, and SARPEDON (q. v.).


EUROPE (361,000), the most important, although the second smallest,
of the five great land divisions of the globe; is, from a geographical
point of view, a peninsula of Asia; the Caspian Sea, Ural River and
mountains, form its Asiatic boundary, while on the other three sides it
is washed by the Mediterranean on the S., Atlantic on the W., and Arctic
Ocean on the N.; its coast-line is so highly developed that to every 190
sq. m. of surface there is 1 m. of coast; this advantage, combined with
the varied adaptability of its land, rivers, and inland seas, and its
central position, has made it the centre of civilisation and the theatre
of the main events of the world's history. Its greatest length is 3370 m.
from Cape St. Vincent to the Urals, and its greatest breadth 2400 m. from
Cape Matapan to Nordkyn, while its area is about 3,800,000 sq. m.; it is
singularly free from wild animals, has a fruitful soil richly cultivated,
and possesses in supreme abundance the more useful metals. Its peoples
belong to the two great ethnological divisions, the Caucasian and
Mongolian groups; to the former belong the Germanic, Romanic, Slavonic,
and Celtic races, and to the latter the Finns, Magyars, and Turks.
Christianity is professed throughout, except amongst the Jews, of whom
there are about six millions, and in Turkey, where Mohammedanism claims
about seven millions; of Catholics there are about 155 millions, of
Protestants 85, and of the Greek Church 80. Amongst the 18 countries the
form of government most prevailing is the hereditary monarchy, resting
more and more on a wide representation of the people.


EUROTAS, the classic name of the Iri, a river of Greece, which flows
past Sparta and discharges into the Gulf of Laconia, 30 m. long.


EURUS, the god of the withering east wind.


EURYDICE. See ORPHEUS.


EURYSTHEUS, the king of Mycenae, at whose command, as subject to him
by fate, Hercules was required to perform his 12 labours, on the
achievement of which depended his admission to the rank of an immortal.


EUSEBIUS PAMPHILI, a distinguished early Christian writer, born in
Palestine, bishop of Caesarea in 313; headed the moderate Arians at the
Council of Nice, who shrank from disputing about a subject so sacred as
the nature of the Trinity; wrote a history of the world to A.D. 328; his
"Ecclesiastical History" is the first record of the Christian Church up
to 324; also wrote a Life of Constantine, who held him in high favour;
many extracts of ancient writers no longer extant are found in the works
of Eusebius (about 264-340).


EUSTACHIO, BARTOLOMMEO, an Italian physician of the 16th century;
settled at Rome, made several anatomical discoveries, among others those
of the _tube_ from the middle ear to the mouth, and a _valve_ on the wall
of the right auricle of the heart, both called _Eustachian_ after him.


EUSTATHIUS, archbishop of Thessalonica, a Greek commentator of
Homer, born in Constantinople; a man of wide classical learning, and his
work on Homer of value for the extracts of writings that no longer exist;
_d_. 1198.


EUTERPE, the Muse of lyric poetry, represented in ancient works of
art with a flute in her hand.


EUTROPIUS, FLAVIUS, a Roman historian, secretary to the Emperor
Constantine; wrote an epitome of Roman history, which from its simplicity
and accuracy still retains its position as a school-book; _d_. about 370.


EUTYCHES, a Byzantine heresiarch, who, in combating
NESTORIANISM (q. v.), fell into the opposite extreme, and
maintained that in the incarnation the human nature of Christ was
absorbed in the divine, a doctrine which was condemned by the Council of
Chalcedon in 448 (378-454).


EUTYCHIANISM. See SUPRA.


EUXINE, a Greek name for the BLACK SEA (q. v.).


EVANDER, an Arcadian, who is said to have come from Greece with a
colony to Latium and settled in it 60 years before the Trojan war, and
with whom AEneas formed an alliance when he landed in Italy; he is
credited with having introduced the civilising arts of Greece.


EVANGELICAL, a term applied to all those forms of Christianity which
regard the atonement of Christ, or His sacrifice on the Cross for sin, as
the ground and central principle of the Christian faith.


EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE, an alliance of Christians of all countries and
denominations holding what are called evangelical principles, and founded
in 1845.


EVANGELICAL UNION, a religious body in Scotland which originated in
1843 under the leadership of James Morison of Kilmarnock, and professed a
creed which allowed them greater freedom as preachers of the gospel of
Christ. See MORISONIANISM.


EVANGELINE, the heroine of a poem by Longfellow of the same name,
founded on an incident connected with the expulsion of the natives of
Acadia from their homes by order of George II.


EVANGELIST, a name given in the early Church to one whose office it
was to persuade the ignorant and unbelieving into the fold of the Church.


EVANS, SIR DE LACY, an English general, born at Moeg, Ireland;
served in the Peninsular war; was present at Quatre-Bras and Waterloo;
commanded the British Legion sent to assist Queen Isabella in Spain, and
the second division of the army in the Crimea and the East; was for many
years a member of Parliament (1787-1870).


EVANS, MARY ANN, the real name of GEORGE ELIOT (q. v.).


EVELYN, JOHN, an English writer, born at Wotton, Surrey; travelled
in France and Italy during the Civil War, where he devoted much time to
gardening and the study of trees; was author of a celebrated work,
entitled "Sylva; or, A Discourse of Forest Trees," &c.; did much to
improve horticulture and introduce exotics into this country; his
"Memoirs," written as a diary, are full of interest, "is justly famous
for the fulness, variety, and fidelity of its records" (1620-1706).




 


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