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AMPHIP?ROSTYLE, in architecture, said of a structure having the form of an ancient Greek or Roman oblong rectangular temple, with a prostyle or portico on each of its ends or fronts, but with no columns on its sides or flanks.

AMPHISBAE?NA , a genus of serpentiform, limbless, lacertilian reptiles; body cylindrical, destitute of scales, and divided into numerous annular segments; the tail obtuse, and scarcely to be distinguished from the head, whence the belief that it moved equally well with either end foremost. There are several species, found in tropical America. They feed on ants and earthworms, and were formerly, but erroneously, deemed poisonous. In Greek mythology the amphisbaena was a serpent believed to possess two heads.

AMPHIS?CII , a term sometimes applied to the inhabitants of the intertropical regions, whose shadows at noon in one part of the year are cast to the north and in the other to the south, according as the sun is in the southern or northern signs.

AMPHITHE?ATRE, an ancient Roman building of an oval form without a roof, having a central area encompassed with rows of seats, rising higher as they receded from the centre, on which people used to sit to view the combats of gladiators and of wild beasts, and other sports. The first amphitheatre at Rome was that constructed by C. Scribonius Curio, 59 B.C. The Colosseum at Rome is the largest of all the ancient amphitheatres, being capable of containing 100,000 persons, 87,000 of whom occupied numbered and reserved seats. That at Verona is one of the best examples remaining. Its dimensions are 502 feet by 401, and it is 98 feet high. The name means 'both-ways theatre', or 'theatre all round', the theatre forming only a semicircular building.

AMPHITRI?T, in Greek mythology, daughter of Ocenus and Tethys, or of Nereus and Doris, and wife of Poseidon , represented as drawn in a chariot of shells by Tritons, with a trident in her hand. In the Homeric poems she is the personification of the Sea, and her marriage to Poseidon is alluded to in a number of scenes depicted on ancient monuments. Such are a bas-relief in the glyptothek at Munich and a mosaic in the museum at Naples.

AMPHIT?RYON, in Greek legend, King of Thebes, son of Alcaeus, and husband of Alcmena. Plautus, and after him Moli?re, have made an amour of Jupiter with Alcmena the subject of amusing comedies.

AMPHIU?MA, a genus of amphibians which frequent the lakes and stagnant waters of North America. The adults retain the clefts at which the gills of the tadpole projected.

AMPLEX?ICAUL, in botany, said of a leaf that embraces and nearly surrounds the stem.

AM?PLITUDE, in astronomy, the distance of any celestial body from the east or west points.

AMPTHILL, a market-town of England, Bedfordshire, about 7 miles south-west of Bedford. Pop. , 2269.

AMPUL?LA, the Latin name for a vessel bellying out like a jug, which contained unguents for the bath; also a vessel for drinking at table. The ampulla has also been employed for ceremonial purposes, such as holding the oil or chrism used in various Church rites and for anointing monarchs at their coronation. The ampulla of the English sovereigns now in use is an eagle, weighing about 10 oz., of the purest chased gold, which passed through various hands to the Black Prince. The ampulla of the French kings, kept at Rheims in the tomb of St. Remy, was destroyed in 1793.

AMPUTA?TION, in surgery, that operation by which a member is separated from the body.

AMRA?OTI, a town of British India in Ber?r; it is celebrated for its cotton, and is a place of good trade. Pop. 35,000. The district has an area of 4733 sq. miles. Pop. 876,000.

AM?RITSIR, or AMRITSAR , a flourishing commercial town of India, capital of a district of the same name, in the Punjab, the centre of the Sikh religion since the end of the sixteenth century. It has considerable manufactures of shawls and silks; and receives its name from the sacred pond constructed by Ram Das, the apostle of the Sikhs, in which the Sikhs and other Hindus immerse themselves that they may be purified from all sin. Pop. 152,756.--The district of Amritsir has an area of 1601 sq. miles. Pop. 900,000.

AM?RU, originally an opponent, and subsequently a zealous supporter of Mahomet, and one of the ablest of the Mahommedan warriors. He brought Egypt under the power of the Caliph Omar in 638, and governed it wisely till his death in 663. The burning of the famous Alexandrian Library has been generally attributed to him, though only on the authority of a writer who lived six centuries later.

AM?STERDAM , one of the chief commercial cities of Europe, capital of Holland , situated at the confluence of the Amstel with the Y or Ij, an arm of the Zuider-Zee. On account of the lowness of the site of the city the greater part of it is built on piles. It is divided by numerous canals into about 90 islands, which are connected by nearly 300 bridges. Many of the streets have a canal in the middle with broad brick-paved quays on either side, planted with rows of trees; the houses are generally of brick, many of them six or seven stories high, with pointed gables turned to the streets. Among the public buildings are the old stadthouse, the work of Jacob van Kempen, commenced in 1648 and finished in 1655, which is now a royal palace, the interior being decorated by the Dutch painters and sculptors of the seventeenth century with their masterpieces; the justiciary hall, an imitation of a Greek temple; the town hall ; the exchange, a handsome building, constructed in 1836 on the site of the old bourse built in 1608; the Palace of National Industry; the national museum; and the central railway station. The old church is a structure of the fourteenth century with stained-glass windows painted by Digman in the fifteenth century. The chief educational institutions of the kingdom are here, including the city university, a free university, gymnasiums and other secondary schools, the national picture gallery or museum, containing many masterpieces of Dutch artists, &c. Among its numerous industries may be mentioned as a speciality the cutting and polishing of diamonds. It has also factories and workshops dealing with wool, cotton, silk, tobacco, leather, machinery, and metal goods, glass, liqueurs, cocoa, &c. The harbour, formed by the Y, lies along the whole of the north side of the city, and is surrounded by various docks and basins. The trade is very great, being much facilitated by the great ship-canal connecting the Y directly with the North Sea at Y-Muiden, where the entrance is between two long piers projecting into the sea. Another canal of much less importance, the North Holland Canal , connects Amsterdam with the Helder. Between the harbour and the Zuider Zee the Y is now crossed by a great dam in which are locks to admit vessels and regulate the amount of water in the North Sea Canal. The oversea trade of Amsterdam has immensely increased since the opening of the great canal, and the foreign trade of the kingdom practically centres in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. There is also a large trade with the interior by railway, river, and canal. In the beginning of the thirteenth century Amsterdam was but a fishing village. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it had attained some importance, especially through the Baltic trade. The ruin of Antwerp through the troubles with Spain was greatly to its advantage, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Amsterdam was one of the wealthiest and most flourishing cities in the world. Its forced alliance with France ruined its trade, but since 1813 its commerce has revived. Amsterdam is the birthplace of Spinoza and of the painters van de Velde and van der Neer. Pop. , 647,120.

AMSTERDAM, a town of New York State, United States, on the Mohawk River and the Erie Canal, 33 miles N.W. of Albany; a busy manufacturing town. Pop. , 33,524.

AMSTERDAM, New, a town in British Guiana, on the east side of the River Berbice, near the sea, with some trade as a seaport. Pop. 8903.

AMSTERDAM ISLAND, a small and almost inaccessible island in the Indian Ocean, about halfway in a direct line between the Cape of Good Hope and Tasmania. It is sparsely provided with vegetation, and inhabited only by sea-birds, but it was taken possession of by France in 1893, along with the neighbouring St. Paul. It was discovered by the Dutch in 1633.

AMSTETTEN, a town in Lower Austria, on the Ybbs, and on the railway from Vienna to Linz. In 1805 a victory was gained here by the French under Murat over the Russians under Bagration. Pop. 3760.

AMUCK?, or AMUK, to run, a phrase applied to natives of the Eastern Archipelago, who are occasionally seen to rush out in a frantic state of temporary mental derangement, making indiscriminate and murderous assaults on all that come in their way.

AMYCLAE , a town of ancient Greece, the chief seat of the Achaeans in Laconia, a short distance from Sparta, by which it was conquered about 800 B.C.

AMYG?DALOID , meaning 'almond-shaped', a term used in anatomy and geology.

AMYG?DALUS, the genus to which the almond belongs.

AM?YLENE , an ethereal liquid with an aromatic odour, prepared from fusel-oil. It possesses anaesthetic properties, and has been tried as a substitute for chloroform, but is very dangerous.

AMYL?IC ALCOHOL, one of the products of the fermentation of grain, &c., commonly known by the name of fusel-oil .

ANAB?ASIS , the title of Xenophon's celebrated account of the expedition of Cyrus the Younger against his brother Artaxerxes, King of Persia. The title is also given to Arrian's work which records the campaigns of Alexander the Great.

AN?ABLEPS, a genus of fishes of the perch family, found in the rivers of Guiana, consisting of but one species, remarkable for a peculiar structure of the eyes, in which there is a division of the iris and cornea, by transverse ligaments forming two pupils, and making the whole eye appear double. The young are brought forth alive.

ANABOLISM , a biological term suggested by Michael Foster, and used by Gaskell in 1886, and meaning the building-up of organic life, or the process by which a substance is transformed into another which is more complex. Anabolism is the constructive phase of metabolism .

ANACANTHI?NI , an order of osseous fishes, including the cod, plaice, &c., with spineless fins, cycloid or ctenoid scales, the ventral fins either absent or below the pectorals, and ductless swim-bladder.

ANACARDIA?CEAE, a nat. ord. of plants, consisting of tropical trees and shrubs which secrete an acrid resinous juice, which is often used as a varnish. Mastic, Japan lacquer, and Martaban varnish are some of their products. The cashoo or cashew , the pistacia, sumach, mango, &c., are members of the order.

ANACOLU?THON, a want of grammatical and logical sequence in the structure of a sentence.

ANACONDA, a town of the United States, Montana, with the largest copper-smelting works in the world. Pop. , 11,668.

ANAC?REON, an amatory lyric Greek poet of the sixth century B.C., native of Teos, in Ionia. Only a few fragments of his works have come down to us; the collection of odes that usually passes under the name of Anacreon is mostly the production of a later time, the poetry of the real Anacreon being much less frivolous.

ANADYOM?N , a name given to Aphrodit when she was represented as rising from the sea, as in the celebrated painting by Apelles, painted for the temple of AEsculapius at Cos, and afterwards in the temple of Julius Caesar at Rome.

ANADYR , the most easterly of the larger rivers of Siberia and of all Asia; rises in the Stanovoi Mountains, and falls into the Gulf of Anadyr; length, 600 miles.

ANAE?MIA , a medical term applied to an unhealthy condition of the body, in which there is a diminution of the red corpuscles which the blood should contain. The principal symptoms are paleness and general want of colour in the skin, languor, emaciation, want of appetite, fainting, palpitation, &c.

ANAESTHE?SIA, or ANAESTHE?SIS, a state of insensibility to pain, produced by inhaling chloroform, or by the application of other anaesthetic agents.

ANAGNI , a town of Italy, province of Rome; the seat of a bishopric erected in 487. Pop. 10,400.

ANAHUAC , an old Mexican name applied to the plateau of the city of Mexico, from the lakes situated there, generally elevated from 6000 to 9000 feet above the sea.

AN?AKIM, the posterity of Anak, the son of Arba, noted in sacred history for their fierceness and loftiness of stature. Their stronghold was Kirjath-arba or Hebron, which was taken and destroyed by Caleb and the tribe of Judah.

ANALEP?TIC, a restorative or invigorating medicine or diet.

ANAL?OGY is the mode of reasoning from resemblance to resemblance. When we find on attentive examination resemblances in objects apparently diverse, and in which at first no such resemblances were discovered, a presumption arises that other resemblances may be found by further examination in these or other objects likewise apparently diverse. It is on the belief in a unity in nature that all inferences from analogy rest. The general inference from analogy is always perfectly valid. Wherever there is resemblance, similarity or identity of cause somewhere may be justly inferred; but to infer the particular cause without particular proof is always to reason falsely. Analogy is of great use and constant application in science, in philosophy, and in the common business of life.

Analysis, in mathematics, is, in the widest sense, the expression and development of the functions of quantities by calculation; in a narrower sense the resolving of problems by algebraic equations. The analysis of the ancients was exhibited only in geometry, and made use only of geometrical assistance, whereby it is distinguished from the analysis of the moderns, which extends to all measurable objects, and expresses in equations the mutual dependence of magnitudes. Analysis is divided into lower and higher, the lower comprising, besides arithmetic and algebra, the doctrines of functions, of series, combinations, logarithms, and curves, the higher comprising the differential and integral calculus, and the calculus of variations.

In chemistry, analysis is the process of decomposing a compound substance with a view to determine either what elements it contains , or how much of each element is present . Thus by the first process we learn that water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, and by the second that it consists of one part of hydrogen by weight to eight parts of oxygen. As a means of testing soils and feeding-stuffs, analysis has given important results; it has enabled Liebig to solve the problem of plant-nutrition.

ANAMOR?PHOSIS, a term denoting a drawing executed in such a manner as to present a distorted image of the object represented, but which, when viewed from a certain point, or reflected by a curved mirror or through a polyhedron, shows the object in its true proportions.

ANAPA?, a seaport of Russia in province Kuban, on the Black Sea, 50 miles south-east of Kertsh, constructed by the Turks in 1781, and formerly fortified. Pop. about 7000.

AN?APAEST, in prosody, a foot consisting of two short and one long syllable, or two unaccented and one accented syllable, e.g.

AN?APLASTY, a surgical operation to repair superficial lesions, or make up for lost parts, by the employment of adjacent healthy structure or tissue. Artificial noses, &c., are thus made.

ANARAJAPOO?RA, or ANURADHAPURA, a ruined city, the ancient capital of Ceylon, built about 540 B.C., and said to have covered an area of 300 sq. miles, doubtless a great exaggeration. There are still several dagobas in tolerable preservation, but the great object of interest is the sacred Bo-tree planted over 2000 years, and probably the oldest historical tree in the world, but shattered by a storm in 1887.

ANARTHROP?ODA, one of the two great divisions of the Annulosa, or ringed animals, in which there are no articulated appendages. It includes the leeches, earth-worms, tube-worms, &c.

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