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216 and the snowhouse, as a more or less permanent winter dwelling prevails east of Point Barrow. Intrusive traits are also present: basketry of coil and twine is common in Alaska; pottery also extended eastward to Cape Parry; the Asiatic pipe occurs in Alaska and the Indian pipe on the west side of Hudson Bay; likewise, some costumes beaded in general Indian style have been noted west of Hudson Bay. All Eskimo are rather ingenious workers with tools, in. this respect strikingly like the tribes of the North Pacific Coast. In Alaska, where wood is available, the Eskimo carve masks, small boxes, and bowls with great cleverness.

These variants all tend to disappear between Point Barrow and Hudson Bay, and it may be noted that they are at the same time traits that occur in Asia, the North Pacific Coast, or the Mackenzie Area (6). Hence, we seem justified in looking toward the east for the typical material culture. From our limited knowledge it appears that the great central group from Banks Island on the west to Smith Sound in North Greenland is the home of the purest traits; here are snowhouses; dogs harnessed with single traces; rectangular stone kettles; and the almost entire absence of wooden utensils; a simple order of social and political life in which the unit is the family; a political chief, in the sense known in Indian culture, not recognized; shamanism rather prominent and comparable to that found in Siberia; great elaboration of taboos and a corresponding requirement of confession; almost no ritualistic ceremonies, but at least one yearly gathering in which masked men impersonate gods; temporary exchange of wives at the preceding; mythology simple and centering around the goddess of the sea animals. Between Greenland and Labrador the differences are small, and apparently due more to modern European influences than to prehistoric causes. The limited study of archaeological specimens by Dall, Solberg, and Boas suggests much greater cultural uniformity in the prehistoric period, a conclusion apparently borne out by the collections made by Stefánsson on the north coast. While this is far from conclusive, it is quite consistent with the view that the chief intrusive elements in

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Rh Eskimo culture are to be found west of the Mackenzie River.

6. Mackenzie Area. Skirting the Eskimo area from east to west is a great interior belt of semi-arctic lands, including the greater part of the interior of Canada. Hudson Bay almost cuts it into two parts, the western or larger part occupied by the Déné tribes, the eastern by Algonkins, the Saulteaux, Cree, Montagnais, and Naskapi. The fauna, flora, and climate are quite uniform for corresponding latitudes and are reflected to some extent in material culture, so that we should be justified in considering it one great area, if the less material traits did not show definite distinctions. As noted in our first chapter, the chief cultural bond through the region is the use of the caribou. The caribou ranged from Maine to Alaska and throughout all this area furnished the greater part of the clothing and tents and a considerable portion of the food. They could not be taken easily in summer, but in winter were killed in drives, on the ice, or after a thaw, in the water. They were also snared. All of these methods were known from Alaska to Newfoundland. Between the Mackenzie and Hudson Bay ranged the barren ground variety, whose habits were somewhat like those of the buffalo on the plains, and the tribes in reach of their range lived upon them almost as completely as did the Indians of the Plains upon the buffalo. Along with these widely distributed caribou traits go the great use of spruce and birchbark for canoes and vessels, babiche and bark fiber, toboggans and skin or bark covered tents, and the use of snares and nets. Notwithstanding these similarities, the other aspects of culture for eastern Canada appear intermediate to the Eastern Woodland area (7) of the United States. Hence, the great Dene country of the Canadian Northwest is usually considered as a distinct culture area, taking its name from its largest river.

Our knowledge of the Déné is rather fragmentary, for scarcely a single tribe has been seriously studied. Aside from the work of Father Morice we have only the random observations of explorers and fur-traders. It is believed that the Dene tribes fall into three culture groups. The eastern group:

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text: Author:Hugh Capet

title: Author:Hugh Capet


text: Author:Robert le Fort

title: Author:Robert le Fort


text:
Author:Hieronymus Carl Friedrich von Münchhausen

About Fictional Character: Baron Münchhausen

 * The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1781)
 * The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1802)


text: Author:George Bryan Brummell

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Rh although the officials who introduced them doubtless knew they could do so with impunity. As times goes on the Christian emblems become more popular; on a coin of Constantius II. we find Victory crowning the emperor, who holds the standard of the cross; the inscription is HOC SIGNO VICTOR ERIS. Another type of the same reign is the Christian monogram flanked by alpha and omega. Under Julian there is a temporary recrudescence of pagan types; with the revival of Christianity monotony of type sets in.

The period of the medieval and later coins of Europe must be considered to begin about the time of the fall of the Western empire, so that its length to the present day is about 1400 years. It is impossible to separate the medieval and later coins, either in the entire class, because the time of change varies, or in each group, since there are usually pieces indicative of transition which display characteristics of both periods. The clearest division of the subject is to place the Byzantine coinage first, then to notice the characteristics of its descendants, and lastly to sketch the monetary history of each country. The coinage of the present day, however, having certain definite characteristics, may be dealt with separately.

The Byzantine money is usually held to begin in the reign of Anastasius ( 491–518, Pl. III. fig. 6). The coinage is always in the three metals, but the silver money is rare, and was probably struck in small quantities. At first both the gold and the silver are fine, but towards the close of the empire they are much alloyed. The gold coin

is the solidus of Constantine, with its half and its third, the so-called semissis and tremissis. The Byzantine solidus (besant) had an enormous vogue throughout the middle ages, being the chief gold coin until the introduction of the Italian gold in the 13th century. The chief silver coin was the miliarision, and a smaller coin, the siliqua or keration. Under Heraclius (610–641) the hexagram or double miliarision was first coined. The silver money of the restored Greek empire is obscure. In 498 Anastasius introduced a new copper coinage, bearing on the reverse, at his time, the following indexes of value as the main type: M, K, I and E, 40 nummi, 20, 10 and 5. These coins bear beneath the indexes the abbreviated name of the place of issue. Justinian I. added the regnal year in 538, his twelfth year. The money of this class presents extraordinary variations of weight, which indicate the condition of the imperial finances. The Alexandrian coins of this class begin under Anastasius and end with the capture of the city by the Arabs. They have two denominations, IB and S, and  or 12, 6 and 3 denarii, and there is an isolated variety of Justinian with (33). The Alexandrian bronze never lost its weight, while that of the empire generally fell, and thus some of the pieces of Heraclius, while associated with his sons Heraclius Constantinus and Heraclonas, have the double index IB and M. Under Basil I. the bronze money

appears to have been reformed, but the absence of indexes of value makes the whole later history of the coinage in this metal very difficult. There was one curious change in the aspect of the money. Early in the 11th century the solidus begins to assume a cup-shaped form, and this subsequently became the shape of the whole coinage except the smaller bronze pieces. These novel coins are called nummi scyphati. The types, except when they refer simply to the sovereign, are of a religious and consequently of a Christian character. This feeling increases to the last. Thus, on the obverse of the earlier coins the emperors are represented alone, but from about the 10th century they are generally portrayed as aided or supported by some sacred personage or saint. On the reverses of the oldest coins we have such types as a Victory holding a cross (other personifications all but disappear), but on those of later ones a representation of Our Saviour or of the Virgin Mary. Christ first appears on a coin of about 450, where He is represented marrying Pulcheria to Marcian. He does not appear again until the end of the 7th century, when His bust is introduced by Justinian II. It was perhaps this type, so offensive to Mahommedan feeling, that caused the Caliph Abdalmalik to initiate the Mussulman coinage. From the 9th century Christ appears in various forms on the coins; about 900 we find the Virgin; a few years later saints begin to appear. A remarkable type was introduced by Michael VIII., Palaeologus, who recovered Constantinople from the Latins in 1261, and issued coins with the Virgin standing in the midst of the walls of the city. The principal inscriptions for a long period almost invariably relate to the sovereign, and express his name and titles. The secondary inscriptions of the earlier coins indicate the town at which the piece was struck, and, in the case of the larger bronze pieces, the year of the emperor’s reign is also given. From about the 10th century there are generally two principal inscriptions, the one relating to the emperor and the other to the sacred figure of the reverse, in the form of a prayer. The secondary inscriptions at the same time are descriptive, and are merely abbreviations of the names or titles of the sacred personages near the representations of whom they are placed. From the time of Alexius I. (Comnenus) the principal inscriptions are almost disused, and descriptive ones alone given. These are nearly always abbreviations, like the secondary ones of the earlier period. The language of the inscriptions was at first Latin with a partial use of Greek; about the time of Heraclius Greek began to take its place on a rude class of coins, probably local; by the 9th century Greek inscriptions occur in the regular coinage; and at the time of Alexius I. Latin wholly disappears. The Greek inscriptions are remarkable for their orthography, which indicates the changes of the language. In the 11th century we notice a few metrical inscriptions, the forerunners of verse-mottoes on later coins. Of the art of these coins little need be said. It has its importance in illustrating contemporary ecclesiastical art, but is generally inferior to it both in design and in execution. It is noticeable that from the beginning of the Byzantine period the facing representation of the bust begins to be popular, and that from the time of Justinian (6th century) onwards the profile practically disappears from the coinage. The last Byzantine gold coin (a piece of John V., 1341–1391) shows a figure of John the Baptist imitated from the Florentine coinage.

Besides the regular series of the Byzantine empire, in which we include the money assigned to the Latin emperors of Constantinople, there are several cognate groups connected with it, either because of their similarity, or because the sovereigns were of the imperial houses. There are the coinages of the barbarians to be next noticed, and the money

of the emperors of Nicaea, of Thessalonica and of Trebizond. The last group consists of small silver pieces, which were prized for their purity; they were called Comnenian white-money ( ), the princes of Trebizond having sprung from the illustrious family of the Comneni.

The coinage of the other states of the West falls into well-defined periods, which have been distinguished as (1) transitional period, from Roman to true medieval coinage, from the fall

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 attack Athens to avenge the murder of his son Androgeus, for which Aegeus was directly or indirectly responsible, he laid siege to Megara. He finally gained possession of the city through the treachery of the king’s daughter Scylla, who, enamoured of Minos, pulled out the golden (or purple) lock from her father’s head, on which his life and the safety of the city depended (for similar stories, see Frazer, Golden Bough, iii. 1900, p. 358). Megara was captured, and Nisus, who died fighting (or slew himself), was changed into a sea-eagle. Minos, disgusted at Scylla’s treachery, tied her to the rudder of his ship, and afterwards cast her body ashore on the promontory called after her Scyllaeum; or she threw herself into the sea and swam after Minos, constantly pursued by her father, until at last she was changed into a ciris (a bird or a fish). In Virgil, Scylla, the daughter of Nisus, is confused with the sea-monster, the daughter of Phorcys. Nisus was the eponymous hero of the harbour of Nisaea, and local tradition makes no mention of his betrayal by his daughter. According to Roscher (in his Lexikon der Mythologie), who identifies the ciris with the heron, the story of Nisus and Scylla (like these of Aëdon, Procne, Philomela and Tereus) was invented to give an aetiological explanation of the characteristics of certain birds. The birds were regarded as originally human beings, whose acts and characters were supposed to account for certain habits of the birds into which they had been changed. E. Siecke, De Niso et Scylla in aves mutatis (progr. Berlin, 1884), holds that the purple or golden hair of Nisus is the sun, and Scylla the moon, and that the origin of the legend is to be looked for in a very ancient myth of the relations between the two, which he endeavours to explain with the aid of Indian and German parallels.

NITHARD (d. 844), Frankish historian, was the illegitimate son of Angilbert, the friend of Charlemagne, by Bertha, a daughter of the great emperor. He was educated at the imperial court and became abbot of St Riquier in commendam, never taking the vows. Little else is known about his life, but he appears to have served his cousin, Charles the Bald, on peaceful errands and also on the field of battle. He fought for Charles at Fontenoy in June 841, and died as the result of wounds received whilst fighting for him against the Northmen near Angouléme. The date of his death was probably the 14th of June 844. In the 11th century his body, with the fatal wound still visible, was found in the grave of his father, Angilbert. Nithard’s historical work consists of four books on the history of the Carolingian empire under the turbulent sons of the emperor Louis I., especially during the troubled period between 840 and 843. This Historiae or De dissensionibus filiorum Ludovici pii is valuable for the light which it throws upon the causes which led to the disintegration of the Carolingian empire. Although rough in style, partisan in character and sometimes incorrect in detail, the books are the work of a man who had an intimate knowledge of the events which he relates, who possessed a clear and virile mind, and who above all was not a recluse but a man of action. They are dedicated to Charles the Bald, at whose request they were written.

The Historiae has been printed several times. Perhaps the best edition is in Band ii. of the ''Monumenta Germaniae historica. Scriptores''; it has also been edited by A. Holder (Freiburg, 1882). It has been translated into German by J. von Jasmund (Berlin, 1851; new edition by W. Wattenbach, Leipzig, 1889); and into French in tome iii. of Guizot’s Collection des mémoires (Paris, 1824).

See O. Kuntzemüller, Nithafd und sein Geschichtswerk (Jena, 1873); G. Meyer von Knonau, Über Nithards vier Bücher Geschichten (Leipzig, 1866); and W. Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen, Band i. (Berlin, 1904).

NITHSDALE, WILLIAM MAXWELL, (1676–1744), Jacobite leader, was a member of the family of (q.v.), being a son of Robert the 4th earl (d. 1696) and a collateral relation of Robert Maxwell (d. 1646) who was created earl of Nithsdale in 1620. He became famous by his loyalty to the royalist tradition of his family, and by the heroism of his wife Winifred, daughter of William Herbert, 1st marquess of Powis. After becoming earl in 1698 he served the exiled house of Stuart in secret, was suspected as a Jacobite conspirator, and was much molested on that account. In 1712 he resigned his estate to his son William (d. 1776), reserving a life rent to himself. When the Jacobite rising took place in 1715 he joined his friends in the north of England and was taken prisoner at Preston, being sent to London for trial. The countess of Nithsdale, who was at Terregles when she heard of the capture of her husband, followed him to London, making part of the journey on horseback in bitter winter weather. The earl and the other Jacobites were brought to trial in Westminster Hall on the 19th of January 1716, and condemned to death on the 9th of February. The execution was fixed for the 24th. The countess presented a petition to George I. which he refused to receive, and when she knelt before him and took hold of the skirts of his coat he dragged her half across the room before he could break away. Finding that no pardon could be obtained the countess laid a plan to rescue her husband from the Tower of London. With the help of two Jacobite ladies, Mrs Morgan and Mrs Mills, she very cleverly extricated her husband from his cell on the night before the day fixed for the execution by disguising him as a woman. The earl escaped from England and was followed by the countess, but not till she had gone back to Scotland to rescue important legal papers which proved the transfer of the estate to their son. The earl and countess went to Rome after a short stay in France. In Rome they were attached to the court of the Pretender and lived in poverty and obscurity. The earl died on the 20th of March 1744, and the countess in 1749. Their son, William Maxwell, regained the possession of the family property after his father’s death in 1744, since the government could only confiscate his father’s life-interest; but the title was forfeited, and he died childless.

NITRE, the name given to naturally occurring potassium nitrate; “cubic nitre” is sodium nitrate. The word is adapted from Lat. nitrum, which is itself adapted from Gr. . These words were originally applied to the naturally occurring sodium carbonate; the connexion with potassium nitrate (sal petrae or sal petrosum) may be traced to Raimon Lull’s name sal nitri, which substance, however, he distinguished from nitrum. In the 16th century the ancient nitrum became altered to natron, a term still used for native sodium carbonate, while nitrum, and its adaptation nitre, were retained for potassium nitrate or (q.v.).

NITRIC ACID (aqua fortis), HNO3, an important mineral acid. It is mentioned in the De inventione veritatis ascribed to Geber, wherein it is obtained by calcining a mixture of nitre, alum and blue vitriol. It was again described by Albert le Grand in the 13th century and by Raimon Lull, who prepared it by heating nitre and clay and called it “eau forte.” Glauber devised the process in common use to-day, viz. by heating nitre with strong sulphuric acid. Its true nature was not determined until the 18th century, when A. L. Lavoisier (1776) showed that it contained oxygen, whilst in 1785 H. Cavendish determined its constitution and showed that it could be synthesized by passing a stream of electric sparks through moist air. The acid is found to exist to a slight extent in the free condition in some waters but chiefly occurs in combination with various metals, as nitrates, principally as nitre or saltpetre, KNO3, and Chile saltpetre, NaNO3. It is formed when a stream of electric sparks is passed through moist air, and in the oxidation of nitrogenous matter in the presence of water.

For experimental purposes it is usually obtained by distilling potassium or sodium nitrate with concentrated sulphuric acid. The acid so obtained usually contains more or less water and some dissolved nitrogen peroxide which gives it a yellowish red colour. It may be purified by redistillation over barium and silver nitrates, followed by treatment of the distillate with a stream of ozonized air. The product so obtained is then redistilled under diminished pressure and finally distilled again from a sealed and evacuated apparatus (V. Veley and Manley, Phil. Trans., 1898, A. 291, p. 365). On the large scale it is obtained by distilling Chile saltpetre with concentrated sulphuric acid in horizontal cast iron stills, the vapours being condensed in a series of

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 Population.—The resident population of Norway in 1900 was 2,221,477. The Table shows the area and population of each of the administrative divisions (amt, commonly translated “county”). Norway is, as a whole, the most thinly populated of the political divisions of Europe. It may be noted for the sake of comparison that the density of population in the most sparsely populated English county, Westmorland, is about equalled by that in Smaalenene amt (85 per sq. m.), and considerably exceeded in Jarlsberg and Laurvik amt (112·7 per sq. m.), but is not nearly approached in any other Norwegian county. The two counties named are small and lie almost wholly within the coastal strip along the Skagerrack, which, with the coast-lands about Stavanger, Haugesund, Bergen and Trondhjem, the outer Lofoten Islands and the land about Lake Mjösen, are the most thickly populated portions of the country, the density exceeding 50 persons per sq. m. A vast area practically uninhabited, save in the N. by nomadic Lapps, reaches from the northmost point of the Norwegian frontier as far S. as the middle of Hedemarken, excepting a markedly more populous belt across the Trondhjem depression. Thus of the counties, Finmarken is the least thickly populated (1·8 per sq. m.). In such highland regions as Jotunheim and Hardanger Vidda habitations are hardly less scanty than in the N. About two-thirds of the population, then, dwell by the coast and fjords, and about one-quarter in the inland lowlands, leaving a very small upland population. The rural and urban populations form respectively about 76 and 24% of the whole. Of the chief towns of Norway, Christiania, the capital, had a population in 1900 of 229,101, Bergen of 72,179, Trondhjem of 38,156, Stavanger of 30,541, Drammen of 23,093. The towns with populations between 15,000 and 10,000 are Christiansand, Fredrikstad, Christiansund, Fredrikshald, Aalesund, Skien, Arendal and Laurvik. All these are ports.

The population of Norway in 1801 was returned as 883,038. A rapid increase obtained from 1815 to 1835, a lesser increase thereafter till 1865, and a very slight increase till 1890. The second half of the 19th century, down to 1890, was the period of heaviest emigration from Norway. The vast majority of Norwegian emigrants go to the United States of America. But emigration slackened in the last decade of the 19th century, during which period the movement from rural districts to towns, which had decreased from about the middle of the century, revived. The number of Norwegians abroad may be taken at 350,000. The Lapps, commonly called Finns by the Norwegians, and confined especially to Finmarken (which is named from them), are estimated at 1% of the population. There are also a few Finns (about half the number of Lapps), whom the Norwegians call Kvæner, a name of early origin. The excess

of births over deaths, about as 1·4 to 1, is much above the European average; the death-rate is also unusually low. The number of marriages is rather low, and the average age of marriage is high. The percentage of illegitimacy has shown some increase, but is not so high as in Sweden or Denmark. The percentage of longevity is high. The preponderance of females over males (about 1073 to 1000) is partly accounted for by the number of males who emigrate. The higher mortality of males is traced in part to the dangers of a seafaring life.

Down to the middle of the 19th century drunkenness was a strongly-marked characteristic of Norwegians. A strict licensing system was then introduced with success. Local boards were given a wide control over the issue of licences, and in 1871 companies (samlag) were introduced to monopolize and control the retail trade in spirits. Their profits do not, as in the Gothenburg system, go to the municipal funds, but are applied directly to objects of public utility. In 1894 a general referendum resulted in the entire prohibition of the sale of spirits in some towns for five years. The control of retail trade in beer and wine by the samlag has been introduced to some extent.

In Norway a strongly individual national character is to be expected, combined with conservatism of ancient customs and practices. The one finds no better illustration than the individuality of modern Norwegian music and painting. The other is still strong. Such customs as the lighting of the midsummer fires and the attendant celebrations still survive. Peculiar local costumes are still met with, such as those associated with weddings. In the coastwise shipping trade and the fisheries of the north, high-prowed square-sailed boats are frequently employed which are the direct descendants of the vessels of the early Vikings. Some examples of the ancient farmstead, composed of a group of wooden buildings each of a single chamber, are preserved, and medieval ornamental woodwork is met with. Wood is the principal building material except in some larger towns where brick and stone have superseded it. Where this is not the case, fires have left few, if any, ancient domestic buildings, but the preservation of ancient models in wooden houses makes Norwegian towns peculiarly picturesque. Norway retains a few highly interesting examples of ecclesiastical architecture. There are the peculiar small wooden churches (stavekirke) dating from the 11th to the 14th century, with high-pitched roofs rising in tiers so as to give the building something of the form of a pyramid. The roofs are beautifully shingled in wood. The wall timbers are vertical. To protect them from the weather, the roofs overhang deeply, and the lowest sometimes covers a species of external colonnade. The carving is often very rich. The most famous of these churches is that of Borgund near Laerdalsören; another fine example is at Hitterdal on the Kongsberg-Telemark road. On the other hand there are a few Romanesque and Gothic stone churches. In some of these the influence of English architecture is clear, as in the metropolitan cathedral of Trondhjem and the nave of Stavanger cathedral. St Mary’s Church at Bergen, however, tends towards the French models. A good example of the smaller stone church is at Vossevangen, and there are several of Late Romanesque character in the Trondhjem district. There are ruins of a cathedral at Hamar, and a few monastic remains, as at Utstein, north of Stavanger, and on the island of Selje off Statland. Remains of pure Early English work are occasionally found, as at Ogne in Jæderen, but the later Gothic styles were not developed in Norway.

Tourist Traffic and Communications.—During the later decades of the 19th century Norway was rapidly opened up to British, American and German visitors. Passenger communications from Great Britain are maintained chiefly between Hull and Stavanger, Bergen, Aalesund, Christiansund and Trondhjem; Hull, Christiansand and Christiania; Newcastle and Stavanger, Bergen

and the North; London and Christiania, &c, and there are also passenger services from Grimsby, Grangemouth and other ports. Yachting cruises to the great fjords and the North Cape are also provided. A daily service of mail steamers works between Christiania and all ports to Bergen; thence the summer service is hardly less frequent to Trondhjem. From each large port small steamers serve the fjords and inner waters in the vicinity, and there are also

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 may say that defines the irrational number $$\sqrt{2}$$. The theory of cuts, in fact, provides a logical basis for the treatment of all finite numerical irrationalities, and enables us to justify all arithmetical operations involving the use of such quantities.

17. Since the aggregate of cuts ( say) has an order of magnitude, we may construct cuts in this aggregate. Thus if is any element of, and  is the aggregate which consists of  and all anterior elements of , We may write = +′, and (, ′) is a cut in which  has a last element. It is a remarkable fact that no other kind of cut in is possible; in other words, every conceivable cut in  is defined by one of its own elements. This is expressed by saying that is a continuous aggregate, and itself is referred to as the numerical continuum of real numbers. The property of continuity must be carefully distinguished from that of close order (§ 11); a continuous aggregate is necessarily in close order, but the converse is not always true. The aggregate is not countable.

18. Another way of treating irrationals is by means of sequences. A sequence is an unlimited succession of rational numbers a1, a2, a3. . . am, am+1. .. (in order-type ) the elements of which can be assigned by a definite rule, such that when any rational number, however small, has been fixed, it is possible to find an integer m, so that for all positive integral values of n the absolute value of (am+n − am) is less than. Under these conditions the sequence may be taken to represent a definite number, which is, in fact, the limit of am when m increases without limit. Every rational number a can be expressed as a sequence in the form (a, a, a, . . .), but this is only one of an infinite variety of such representations, for instance— 1 ＝ (·9, ·99, ·999, . . .) ＝ $\left({1\over 2}, {3\over 4}, {7\over 8}, . . . {2^n - 1\over 2^n} . . . \right)$ and so on. The essential thing is that we have a mode of representation which can be applied to rational and irrational numbers alike, and provides a very convenient symbolism to express the results of arithmetical operations. Thus the rules for the sum and product of two sequences are given by the formulae

from which the rules for subtraction and division may be at once inferred. It has been proved that the method of sequences is ultimately equivalent to that of cuts. The advantage of the former lies in its convenient notation, that of the latter in giving a clear definition of an irrational number without having recourse to the notion of a limit.

19. Complex Numbers.—If is an assigned number, rational or irrational, and n a natural number, it can be proved that there is a real number satisfying the equation $$x^n=a$$, except when n is even and a is negative: in this case the equation is not satisfied by any real number whatever. To remove the difficulty we construct an aggregate of polar couples {x, y}, where x, y are any two real numbers, and define the addition and multiplication of such couples by the rules

We also agree that {x, y} < {x′, y′}, if x<x′ or if x=x′ and y<y′. It follows that the aggregate has the ground element {1, 0}, which we may denote by ; and that, if we write for the element {0, 1}, 2＝{–1, 0} ＝ –.

Whenever m, n are rational, {m, n} = m+n, and we are thus justified in writing, if we like, x+y for {x, y} in all circumstances. A further simplification is gained by writing x instead of x, and regarding as a symbol which is such that 2= −1, but in other respects obeys the ordinary laws of operation. It is usual to write i instead of ; we thus have an aggregate of complex numbers x+yi. In this aggregate, which includes the real continuum as part of itself, not only the four rational operations (excluding division by {0, 0}, the zero element), but also the extraction of roots, may be effected without any restriction. Moreover (as first proved by Gauss and Cauchy), if a0, a1 an an are any assigned real or complex numbers, the equation $a_0 z^n + a_1 z^{n-1} + ... + a_{n-1} z + a_n = 0$, is always satisfied by precisely n real or complex values of z, with a proper convention as to multiple roots. Thus any algebraic function of any finite number of elements of is also contained in, which is, in this sense, a closed arithmetical field, just as  is when we restrict ourselves to rational operations. The power of is the same as that of.

20. Transfinite Numbers.—The theory of these numbers is quite recent, and mainly due to G. Cantor. The simplest of them,, has been already defined (§ 4) as the order-type of the natural scale. Now there is no logical difficulty in constructing a scheme u1, u2, u3. .. indicating a well-ordered aggregate of type immediately followed by a distinct element v1: for example, we may think of all positive odd integers arranged in ascending order of magnitude and then think of the even number 2. A scheme of this kind is said to be of order-type (+1); and it will be convenient to speak of (+1) as the index of the scheme. Similarly we may form arrangements corresponding to the indices +2, +3 . . . +n, where n is any positive integer. The scheme u1, u2, u3. .. is associated with + = 2; u11, u12, u13. . . | u21, u22, u23. . . | . . . | un1, un2,. . . | . .. with. or 2; and so on. Thus we may construct arrangements of aggregates corresponding to any index of the form ＝an+bn−1+. . . +k+l, where n, a, b,. . . l are all positive integers.

We are thus led to the construction of a scheme of symbols— $\begin{matrix} \mbox{I}. & \ 1,\ 2,\ 3,\ .\ .\ .\ n\ .\ .\ .\ \qquad \qquad \qquad \qquad \quad \\ \mbox{II}. & \begin{cases}\omega,\ \omega+1,\ .\ .\ .\ \omega+n,\ .\ .\ .\ \\ 2\omega,\ 2\omega+1,\ .\ .\ .\ 2\omega+n,\ .\ .\ .\ \\ \vdots \\ \omega^2,\ \omega^2 + 1,\ \omega^2 + 2,\ .\ .\ .\ \omega^2 + n,\ .\ .\ .\ \\ \vdots \\ \phi(\omega),\ \phi(\omega)+1,\ .\ .\ .\ \phi(\omega)+n,\ .\ .\ .\ \\ \vdots\end{cases} \\ \mbox{III}. & \begin{cases} \omega^\omega,\ \omega^\omega+1,\ .\ .\ .\ \omega^\omega+n,\ .\ .\ .\ \\ \vdots \\ \omega^{\phi(\omega)},\ \omega^{\phi(\omega)}+1,\ .\ .\ .\ \omega^{\phi(\omega)}+n,\ .\ .\ .\ \\ \vdots \end{cases} \end{matrix}$

The symbols form a countable aggregate: so that we may, if we like (and in various ways), arrange the rows of block (II.) in a scheme of type : we thus have each element  succeeded in its row by (+1), and the row containing  succeeded by a definite next row. The same process may be applied to (III.), and we can form additional blocks (IV.), (V.), &c., with first elements $$\omega_4 = \omega^{\omega^\omega,}$$ $$\omega_5 = \omega^{\omega_4,}$$ &c. All the symbols in which occurs are called transfinite ordinal numbers.

21. The index of a finite set is a definite integer however the set may be arranged; we may take this index as also denoting the power of the set, and call it the number of things in the set. But the index of an infinite ordinable set depends upon the way in which its elements are arranged; for instance, ind. $$(1,\ 2,\ 3,\ .\ .\ .\ )=\omega$$, but ind. $$(1,\ 3,\ 5,\ .\ .\ .\ |\ 2,\ 4,\ 6,\ .\ .\ .\ )=2\omega$$. Or, to take another example, the scheme— $\begin{matrix} 1,\ 3,\ 5,\ .\ .\ .\ (2n - 1)\ .\ .\ .\ \quad \\ 2,\ 6,\ 10,\ .\ .\ .\ 2\ (2n - 1)\ .\ .\ .\ \\ \vdots \ \ \ \vdots \ \ \ \ \ \vdots \qquad \qquad \qquad \qquad \quad \  \\ \quad \qquad \qquad 2^m,\ 2^m\ .\ 3,\ 2^m\ .\ 5,\ .\ .\ .\ 2^m\ (2n-1)\ .\ .\ .\  \\ \vdots \qquad \qquad \qquad \qquad \qquad \qquad \end{matrix}$ where each row is supposed to follow the one above it, gives a permutation of (1, 2, 3, . . . ), by which its index is changed from to 2. It has been proved that there is a permutation of the natural scale, of which the index is, any assigned element of (II.); and that, if the index of any ordered aggregate is , the aggregate is countable. Thus the power of all aggregates which can be associated with indices of the class (II.) is the same as that of the natural scale; this power may be denoted by a. Since a is associated with all aggregates of a

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 NOMAD (Gr. , wandering), a wanderer. The word is particularly used of tribes who shift continually from place to place in search of pasture (Gr.  ). The  of ancient Greek writers meant particularly the pastoral tribes of North Africa; hence the Latin name of the Numidians (see ).

 NOME, a mining town about 12 m. W. of Cape Nome, on the S. shore of Seward Peninsula, Alaska, in 1900 the largest settlement in the district. Pop. (1900) 12,448; (1910) 2600. Gulch gold was found near Nome on Anvil Creek in September 1898, and diggings in the ocean beach were first worked in July 1899. The rush to Nome in 1900 was one of the most remarkable stampedes in American mining history; the town soon had hotels, banks, stores, several newspapers and weekly mails from the States, and for part of the year there were, it was estimated, 20,000 inhabitants. This rapidity of growth and the isolation of the settlement raised prices to extraordinary heights, and in other respects created economic conditions remarkable even among Alaskan mining camps. By 1903 the population had greatly decreased, and in subsequent years the winter population averaged about 3500, the summer population from 7000 to 8000. In 1905 the gold output of the Nome region amounted to about $2,500,000 nearly all from placers, though some quartz mining was done. A municipal government and local police force were early organized after the fashion of American mining communities, and United States soldiers from the St Michael reservation aided in the preservation of order. The greatest drawback to the town’s prosperity is the lack of any good harbour nearer than Point Clarence, 80 m. W. The winter ice-floes, sometimes 30 ft. high on the beach, render harbour improvements at Nome almost impossible. There is connexion with Seattle by steamer (since 1904) in about 8 days. In 1901 the town was incorporated under the laws of the United States. It is the north-western terminus of the United States military telegraph. It was first called Anvil City; the name “Nome” is derived from Cape Nome, first so called on a chart dated 1849, and said to have been a draughtsman’s mistake for the query “? Name” on the original chart.

 NOMENOË, or (d. 851), duke of Brittany. The date of his birth is not known, and his origin is obscure; all that is known is that he was of Breton race. In the hope of pacifying Brittany, Louis the Debonair named him count of Vannes in 819 and governor or duke of Brittany in 826. Throughout the reign of Louis, Nomenoë’s fidelity to the emperor never flagged; he put down several attempted insurrections, and maintained peace in Brittany for fifteen years. But in 841 he resolved to make himself independent of Charles the Bald. In 843 Charles made a vain attempt to subdue Brittany. In 844 Nomenoë invaded Maine, and in 845 the emperor was completely defeated at Ballon near Bain-de-Bretagne. In the following year Charles recognized the independence of Brittany. Having resolved to detach the duchy from the ecclesiastical province of Tours, Nomenoé accused the Frankish bishops of Vannes, Quimper, Dol and Léon of simony at the council of Coëtlouh in 848, replaced them by Bretons, and erected Dol into a metropolitan see. In 849 Nomenoë attacked the Frankish county of Anjou. Charles retaliated by establishing a garrison at Rennes; but Nomenoé seized Rennes, Nantes and, finally, the whole of Upper Brittany, and ravaged Maine. In 851 he seized Anjou and invaded Beauce; but he died suddenly, leaving as his successor his son Erispoë.

 NOMENTANA, VIA, an ancient road of Italy, leading N.E. from Rome to (q.v.), a distance of 14 m. It originally bore the name Via Ficulensis, from the old Latin village of Ficulea, about 8 m. from Rome. It was subsequently prolonged to Nomentum, but never became an important highroad, and merged in the Via Salaria (see ) a few miles beyond Nomentum. It is followed as far as Nomentum by the modern highroad, but some traces of its pavement still exist.

NOMENTUM (mod. Mentana), an ancient town of Italy, 14 m. N.E. of Rome by the Via Nomentana. It was a Latin town, but was by some considered to be Sabine, and, like Fidenae and Ficulea, was excluded from the first region by Augustus, who made the Anio its northern boundary. Nomentum received the civitas sine suffragio after the last war of the Latins against Rome (338 ); in its municipal constitution the chief magistrate even in imperial times bore the title of dictator. Pliny and Martial often praise the fertility of its neighbourhood. The site of the town is well protected by ravines except on the east; no ancient remains exist in situ, but inscriptions and other relics have been found.

 NOMINALISM (from Lat. nomen, name), the name of one of the two main tendencies of medieval philosophy, the other being Realism. The controversy between nominalists and realists arose from a passage in Boéthius’ translation of Porphyry’s Introduction to the Categories of Aristotle, which propounded the problem of genera and species, (1) as to whether they subsist in themselves or only in the mind; (2) whether, if subsistent, they are corporeal or incorporeal; and (3) whether separated from sensible things or placed in them. The Realists held that universals alone have substantial reality, existing ante res; the Nominalists that universals are mere names invented to express the qualities of particular things and existing post res; while the Conceptualists, mediating between the two extremes, held that universals are concepts which exist in our minds and express real similarities in things themselves. Though a strong realist tendency is evident in the system of Erigena (9th century), the controversy was not definitely started till the 11th century: it lasted till the middle of the 12th, when the first period of scholastic philosophy ends. Under an appearance of much vain subtlety the controversy about universals involved issues of the greatest speculative and practical importance: realism represented a spiritual, nominalism an anti-spiritual, view of the world; while realism was evidently favourable, and nominalism unfavourable, to the teaching of the Church on the dogmas of the Trinity and the Eucharist. Nominalism was a doctrine of sceptics and suspected heretics, such as Berengar of Tours and Roscellinus. Even Abelard’s mediating doctrine of (q.v.) was sufficiently near to obnoxious ideas to involve him in lifelong persecution. The principles of the great orthodox philosophers of the later scholastic period which begins in the 13th century, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, were those of moderate realism. When nominalism was revived in the 14th century by the English Franciscan, William of Occam, it gave evidence of a new tendency in thought, a distrust of abstractions and an impulse towards direct observation and inductive research, a tendency which had its fulfilment in the scientific movement of the Renaissance. Occam’s dictum “Entia non multiplicanda sunt praeter necessitatem” was inspired by a spirit similar to that of Bacon. Though nominalism is properly a medieval theory, the tendency has passed over into modern philosophy: the term “nominalist” is often applied to thinkers of the empirical, sensationalist school, of whom J. S. Mill may be taken as the chief representative.

NONCONFORMIST, a term denoting historically (a) those persons who at the beginning of the 17th century refused to conform to certain practices, e.g. the wearing of the surplice, kneeling at the reception of the Sacrament, &c., of the Church of England; (b) those who, after the passing of the Act of Uniformity 1662, refused to conform to that act and ceased to be members of the church. In current usage the term “nonconformist” is applied in Great Britain to any member of a church not conforming to the ceremonies, worship and doctrines (“forms”) of the Church of England, but is generally used of a member of the so-called Free Churches, or Protestant Dissenters, and is not usually applied to Roman Catholics. The name can also be applied, in other countries, to those who do not belong to the established religion. Strictly a “dissenter” is one who dissents from the church as an “established” body, or who

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 nobility. The whole lesson is lost if the words “patrician” and “plebeian” are used in any but their strict sense. The Catuli and Metelli, among the proudest nobles of Rome, were plebeians, and as such could not have been chosen to the purely patrician office of interrex, or flamen of Jupiter. Yet even in good writers on Roman history the words “patrician” and “plebeian” are often misapplied by being transferred to the later disputes at Rome, in which they are quite out of place.

We may now compare the history of nobility at Rome with its history in some other of the most famous city-commonwealths. Thus at Athens its history is in its main outlines very much the same as its history at Rome up to a certain point, while there is nothing at Athens which at all answers to the later course of things at Rome.

At Athens, as at Rome, an old patriciate, a nobility of older settlement, a nobility which had once been the whole people, was gradually shorn of all exclusive privilege, and driven to share equal rights with a new people which had grown up around it. The reform of (q.v.) answers in a general way to the reform of Licinius, though the different circumstances of the two cities hinder us from carrying out the parallel into detail. But both at Rome and at Athens we see, at a stage earlier than the final reform, an attempt to set up a standard of wealth, either instead of or alongside of the older standard of birth. This same general idea comes out both in the constitution of Servius and in the constitution of Solon, though the application of the principle is different in the two cases. Servius made voting power depend on income; by Solon the same rule was applied to qualification for office. By this change power is not granted to every citizen, but it is put within the reach of every citizen. No man can change his forefathers, but the poor man may haply become richer. The Athenian , who were thus gradually brought down from their privileged position, seem to have been quite as proud and exclusive as the Roman patricians; but when they lost their privileges they lost them far more thoroughly, and they did not, as at Rome, practically hand on many of them to a new nobility, of which they formed part, though not the whole. While at Rome the distinction of patrician and plebeian was never wiped out, while it remained to the last a legal distinction even when practical privilege had turned the other way, at Athens, after the democracy had reached its full growth, the distinction seems to have had no legal existence whatever. At Rome down to the last it made a difference whether the candidate for office was patrician or plebeian, though the difference was in later times commonly to the advantage of the plebeian. At Athens, at any rate after Aristides, the eupatrid was neither better nor worse off than another man.

But, what is of far greater importance, there never arose at Athens any body of men which at all answered to the nobilitas of Rome. We see at Athens strong signs of social distinctions, even at a late period of the democracy; we see that, though the people might be led by the low-born demagogue—using that word in its strict and not necessarily dishonourable meaning—their votes most commonly fell on men of ancient descent. We see that men of birth and wealth often allowed themselves a strange licence in dealing with their low-born fellow-citizens. But we see no sign of the growth of a body made up of patricians and leading plebeians who contrived to keep office to themselves by a social tradition only less strong than positive law. We have at Athens the exact parallel to the state of things when Appius Claudius shrank from the thought of the consulship of Gaius Licinius; we have no exact parallel to the state of things when Quintus Metellus shrank from the thought of the consulship of Gaius Marius. The cause of the difference seems to be that, while the origin of the patriciate was exactly the same at Rome and at Athens, the origin of the commons was different. The four Ionic tribes at Athens seem to have answered very closely to the three patrician tribes at Rome; but the Athenian demos grew up in a different way from the Roman plebs. If we could believe that the Athenian demos arose out of the union of the other Attic towns with Athens, this would be an exact analogy to the origin of the Roman plebs; the  would be the Athenians and the demos the Atticans ( ). But from such glimpses of early Attic history as we can get the union of the Attic towns would seem to have been completed before the constitutional struggle began, That union would answer rather to the union of the three patrician tribes of Rome. Such hints as we have, While they set before us, just as at Rome, a state of things in which small landed proprietors are burthened with debt, also set before us the Attic demos as, largely at least, a body of various origins which had grown up in the city. Cleisthenes, for instance, enfranchised many slaves and strangers, a course which certainly formed no part of the platform of Licinius, and which reminds us rather of Gnaeus Flavius somewhat later. On the whole it seems most likely that, while the kernel of the Roman plebs was rural or belonged to the small towns admitted to the Roman franchise, the Attic demos, largely at least, though doubtless not wholly, arose out of the mixed settlers who had come together in the city, answering to the  of later times. If so, there would be no place in Athens for those great plebeian houses, once patrician in some other commonwealth, out of which the later Roman nobilitas was so largely formed.

Thus the history of nobility at Athens supplies a close analogy to the earlier stages of its history at Rome, but it has nothing answering to its later stages. At Sparta we have a third instance of a people shrinking up into a nobility, but it is a people whose position differs altogether from anything either at Rome or at Athens. Sparta is the best case of a nobility of conquest. This is true, whether we look on the  as Achaeans or as Dorians, or as belonging some to one race and some to the other (see ). In any case the Spartans form a ruling body, and a body whose privileged position in the land is owing to conquest. The Spartans answer to the patricians, the  to the plebs; the helots are below the position of plebs or demos. The only difference is that, probably owing to the fact that the distinction was due to conquest, the local character of the distinction lived on much longer than it did at Rome. We hardly look on the Spartans as a nobility among the other Lacedaemonians; Sparta rather is a ruling city bearing sway over the other Lacedaemonian towns. But this is exactly what the original Roman patricians, the settlers on the three oldest hills, were in the beginning. The so-called cities ( ) of the  answered pretty well to the local plebeian tribes; the difference is that the  never became a united corporate body like the Roman plebs. Sparta to the last remained what Rome was at the beginning, a city with a populus ( ) but no plebs. And, as at Rome in early times, there were at Sparta distinctions within the populus; there were  and , like the majores and minores gentes at Rome. Only at Rome, where there was a plebs to be striven against, these distinctions seem to have had a tendency to die out, while at Sparta they seem to have had a tendency to widen. The Spartan patriciate could afford to disfranchise some of its own members.

The other old Greek cities, as well as those of medieval Italy and Germany, would supply us with endless examples of the various ways in which privileged orders arose. Venice, a city not exactly belonging to any of these classes, essentially a city of the Eastern empire and not of the Western, gives us an example than which none is more instructive. The renowned patriciate of Venice was as far removed as might be from the character either of a nobility of conquest or of a nobility of older settlement. Nor was it strictly a nobility of office, though it had more in common with that than with either of the other two. As Athens supplies us with a parallel to the older nobility of Rome without any parallel to the later, so Venice supplies us with a parallel to the later nobility of Rome without any parallel to the earlier. Athens has Fabii and Claudii, but no Catuli or Metelli; Venice has Catuli and Metelli, but no Fabii or Claudii.

In one point, however, the Venetian nobility differed from either the older or the newer nobility of Rome, and also from the older nobilities of the medieval Italian cities. Nowhere else did nobility so distinctly rise out of wealth, and that wealth gained

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 order—the populus, patres, patricians—has all the characteristics which we commonly expect to find in a privileged order. It is a minority, a minority strictly marked out by birth from other members of the commonwealth, a minority which seems further, though this point is less clearly marked, to have had on the whole the advantage in point of wealth. When we are first entitled to speak with any kind of certainty, the non-privileged class possess a certain share in the election of magistrates and the making of laws. But the privileged class alone are eligible to the greatest offices of the state; they have in their hands the exclusive control of the national religion; they have the exclusive enjoyment of the common land of the state—in Teutonic phrase, the folkland. A little research shows that the origin of these privileges was a very simple one. Those who appear in later times as a privileged order among the people had once been the whole people. The patricians, patres, housefathers, goodmen—so lowly is the origin of that proud name—were once the whole Roman people, the original inhabitants of the Roman hills. They were the true populus Romanus, alongside of whom grew up a secondary Roman people, the plebs or commons. As new settlers came, as the people of conquered towns were moved to Rome, as the character of Romans was granted to some allies and forced upon some enemies, this plebs, sharing some but not all of the rights of citizens, became a non-privileged order alongside of a privileged order. As the non-privileged order increased in numbers, while the privileged order, as every exclusive hereditary body must do, lessened, the larger body gradually put on the character of the nation at large, while the smaller body put on the character of a nobility. But their position as a nobility or privileged class arose solely because a class with inferior rights to their own grew up around them. They were not a nobility or a privileged class as long as there was no less privileged class to distinguish them from. Their exclusive possession of power made the commonwealth in which they bore rule an aristocracy; but they were a democracy among themselves. We see indeed faint traces of distinction among the patricians themselves, which may lead us to guess that the equality of all patricians may have been won by struggles of unrecorded days, not unlike those which in recorded days brought about the equality of patrician and plebeian. But at this we can only guess. The Roman patricians, the true Roman populus, appear at our first sight of them as a body democratic in its own constitution, but standing out as an order marked by very substantial privileges indeed from the other body, the plebs, also democratic in its own constitution, but in every point of honour and power the marked inferior of the populus.

The old people of Rome thus grew, or rather shrank up, into a nobility by the growth of a new people by their side which they declined to admit to a share in their rights, powers and possessions. A series of struggles raised this new people, the plebs, to a level with the old people, the populus. The gradual character of the process is not the least

instructive part of it. There are two marked stages in the struggle. In the first the plebeians strive to obtain relief from laws and customs which were actually oppressive to them, while they were profitable to the patricians. When this relief has been gained by a series of enactments, a. second struggle follows, in which the plebeians win political equality with the patricians. In this second struggle, too, the ground is won bit by bit. No general law was ever passed to abolish the privileges of the patricians; still less was any law ever passed to abolish the distinction between patrician and plebeian. All that was done was done step by step. First, marriage between the two orders was legalized. Then one law admitted plebeians to one office, another law to another. Admission to military command was won first, then admission to civil jurisdiction; a share in religious functions was won last of all. And some offices, chiefly those religious offices which carried no political power with them, always remained the exclusive property of the patricians, because no special law was ever passed to throw them open to plebeians. In this gradual way every practical advantage on the part of the patricians was taken away. But the result did not lead to the abolition of all distinctions between the orders. Patricians and plebeians went on as orders defined by law, till the distinction died out in the confusion of things under the empire, till at last the word “patrician” took quite a new meaning. The distinction, in truth, went on till the advantage turned to the side of the plebeians. Both consuls might be plebeians, both could not be patricians; a patrician could not wield the great powers vested in the tribunes of the commons. These were greater advantages than the exclusive patrician possession of the offices of interrex, rex sacrorum and the higher flamens. And, as the old distinction survived in law and religion after all substantial privileges were abolished, so presently a. new distinction arose of which law and religion knew nothing, but which became in practice nearly as marked and quite as important as the older one.

This was the growth of the new nobility of Rome, that body, partly patrician, partly plebeian, to whom the name nobilitas strictly belongs in Roman history. This new nobility gradually became as well marked and as exclusive as the old patriciate. But if differed from the old patriciate in this, that, while the privileges of the old patriciate rested on law, or perhaps rather on immemorial custom, the privileges of the new nobility rested wholly on a sentiment of which men could remember the beginning. Or it would be more accurate to say that the new nobility had really no privileges at all. Its members had no legal advantages over other citizens. They were a social caste, which strove to keep, and which largely succeeded in keeping, all high offices and political power in its own hands. Such privileges, even of an honorary kind, as the nobles did enjoy by law belonged to them, not as nobles, but as senators and senators’ sons. Yet practically the new nobility was a privileged class; it felt itself to be so, and it was felt to be so by others. This nobility consisted of all those who, as descendants of curule magistrates, had the jus imaginum—that is, who could point to forefathers ennobled by office. That is to say, it consisted of the remains of the old patriciate, together with those plebeian families any members of which had been chosen to curule offices. These were naturally those families which had been patrician in some other Italian city, but which were plebeian at Rome. Many of them equalled the patricians in wealth and antiquity of descent, and as soon as inter marriage was allowed they became in all things their social equals. The practical result of the Licinian reform was that the great plebeian families became, for all practical purposes, patrician. They separated themselves from the mass of the plebeians to form a single body with the surviving patricians. just as the old patricians had striven to keep plebeians out of high offices, so now the new nobles, patrician and plebeian alike, strove to keep “new men,” men who had not the jus imaginum, out of high office. But there was still the difference that in the old state of things the plebeian was shut out by law, while in the new state of things no law shut out the new man. It needed a change in the constitution to give the consulship to Lucius Sextius; it needed only union and energy in the electors to give it to Gaius Marius.

The Roman case is often misunderstood, because the later Roman writers did not fully understand the case themselves. Livy could never get rid of the idea that the old struggle between patrician and plebeian was something like the struggle between the nobility and the people at large in the later days of the commonwealth. In a certain sense he knew better; at any rate, he often repeats the words of those who knew better; but the general impression given by his story is that the plebeians were a low mob and their leaders factious and interested ringleaders of a mob. The case is again often misunderstood because the words “patrician” and “plebeian,” like so many other technical Roman and Greek words, have come in modern language to be used in a. way quite unlike their original sense. The word “plebeian,” in its strict sense, is no more contemptuous than the word commoner in England. The plebs, like the English commons, contained families differing widely in rank and social position, among them those families which, as soon as an artificial barrier broke down, joined with the patricians to form the new

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 The first three of these prizes are for eminence in physical science, in chemistry and in medical science or physiology; the fourth is for the most remarkable literary work dans le sens d’idéalisme; and the fifth is to be given to the person or society that renders the greatest service to the cause of international brotherhood, in the suppression or reduction of standing armies, or in the establishment or furtherance of peace congresses.

NOBILI, LEOPOLDO (1784–1835), Italian physicist, born at Reggio nell’ Emilia in 1784, was in youth an officer of artillery, but afterwards became professor of physics in the archducal museum at Florence, the old habitat of the Accademia del Cimento. His most valuable contributions to science consist in the suggestion of the astatic combination of two needles for galvanometers, and in the invention of the so-called thermomultiplier used by him and M. Melloni. In 1826 he described the prismatically-coloured films of metal, known as Nobili’s rings, deposited electrolytically from solutions of lead and other salts when the anode is a polished iron plate and the cathode is a fine wire placed vertically above it. His papers were mostly published in the Bibliothèque universelle of Geneva. He died at Florence in August 1835.

NOBILIOR, MARCUS FULVIUS, Roman general, a member of one of the most important families of the plebeian Fulvian gens. When praetor (193 ) he served with distinction in Spain, and as consul in 189 he completely broke the power of the Aetolian league. On his return to Rome, Nobilior celebrated a triumph (of which full details are given by Livy) remarkable for the magnificence of the spoils exhibited. On his Aetolian campaign he was accompanied by the poet Ennius, who made the capture of Ambracia, at which he was present, the subject of one of his plays. For this Nobilior was bitterly attacked by Cato the Censor, on the ground that he had compromised his dignity as a Roman general. He restored the temple of Hercules and the Muses in the Circus Flaminius, placed in it a list of Fasti drawn up by himself, and endeavoured to make the Roman calendar more generally known. He was a great enthusiast for Greek art and culture, and introduced many of its masterpieces into Rome, amongst them the picture of the Muses by Zeuxis from Ambracia.

NOBILITY. To form a true understanding of what is strictly implied in the word “nobility,” in its social as opposed to a purely moral sense, it is needful to distinguish its meaning from that of several words with which it is likely to be confounded. In England nobility is apt to be confounded with the peculiar institution of the British peerage. Yet nobility, in some shape or another, has existed in most places and times of the world’s history, while the British peerage is an institution purely local, and one which has actually hindered the existence of a nobility in the sense which the word bears in most other countries. Nor is nobility the same thing as aristocracy. This last is a word which is often greatly abused; but, whenever it is used with any regard to its true meaning, it is a word strictly political, implying a. particular form of government. But nobility is not necessarily a political term; the distinction which it implies may be accompanied by political privileges or it may not. Again, it is sometimes thought that both nobility and aristocracy are in some special way connected with kingly government. To not a few it would seem a contradiction to speak of nobility or aristocracy in a republic. Yet, though many republics have eschewed nobility, there is nothing in a republican, or even in a democratic, form of government inconsistent with the existence of nobility; and it is only in a republic that aristocracy, in the strict sense of the word, can exist. Aristocracy implies the existence of nobility; but nobility does not imply aristocracy; it may exist under any form of government. The peerage, as it exists in the three British kingdoms, is something which is altogether peculiar to the three British kingdoms, and which has nothing in the least degree like it elsewhere.

Nobility, then, in the strict sense of the word, is the hereditary handing on from generation to generation of some acknowledged pre-eminence, a pre-eminence founded on hereditary succession, and on nothing else. Such nobility may be immemorial or it may not. There may or there may not be a power vested somewhere of conferring nobility; but it is essential to the true idea of nobility that, when once acquired, it shall go on for ever to all the descendants—or, more commonly, only to all the descendants in the male line—of the person first ennobled or first recorded as noble. The pre-eminence so handed on may be of any kind, from substantial political power to mere social respect and precedence. It does not seem necessary that it should be formally enacted by law if it is universally acknowledged by usage. It may be marked by titles or it may not. It is hardly needful to prove that nobility does not imply wealth, though nobility without wealth runs some risk of being forgotten. This definition seems to take in all the kinds of nobility which have existed in different times and places. They have differed widely in the origin of the noble class and in the amount of privilege implied in membership of it; but they all agree in the transmission of some privilege or other to all the descendants, or to all the male descendants, of the first noble.

In strictness nobility and gentry are the same thing. This fact is overshadowed in England, partly by the habitual use of the word “” (q.v.) in various secondary uses, partly by the prevalent confusion between nobility and peerage. But that they are the same is proved by the use of the French word gentilhomme, a word

which has pretty well passed out of modern use, but which, as long as it remained in use, never lost its true meaning. There were very wide distinctions within the French noblesse, but they all formed one privileged class as distinguished from the roturier. Here, then, is a nobility in the strictest sense. If there is no such class in England, it is simply because the class which answers to it has never been able to keep any universally acknowledged privileges. The word “gentleman” has lost its original meaning in a variety of other uses, while the word “nobleman” has come to be confined to members of the peerage and a few of their immediate descendants.

That the English peerage does not answer to the true idea of a nobility will be seen with a very little thought. There is no handing on of privilege or pre-eminence to perpetual generations. The peer holds a great position, endowed with substantial powers and privileges, and those powers and privileges are handed on by hereditary succession. But they are handed on only to one member of the family at a time. The peer’s children, in some cases his grandchildren, have titles and precedence, but they have no substantial privileges. His remoter descendants have no advantage of any kind over other people, except their chance of succeeding to the peerage. The remote descendant of a duke, even though he may chance to be heir presumptive to the dukedom, is in no way distinguished from any other gentleman; it is even possible that he may not hold the social rank of gentleman. This is not nobility in the true sense; it is not nobility as nobility was understood either in the French kingdom or in the Venetian commonwealth.

Nobility thus implies the vesting of some hereditary privilege or advantage in certain families, without deciding in what such privilege or advantage consists. Its nature may differ widely according to the causes which have led to the establishment of the distinction between family and family in each particular case.

The way in which nobility has arisen in different times and places is very various, and there are several nations whose history will supply us with examples of a nobility of one kind giving way to a nobility of another kind. The history of the Roman commonwealth illustrates this perhaps better than any other. What we may call the nobility of earlier occupation makes way for the nobility of office. Our first glimpses of authentic Roman history set before us two orders in the same state, one of which is distinguished from the other by many exclusive privileges. The privileged

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lived that can feed us ever. The human mind can not be enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side to this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily; and, now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.


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 of France towards the end of the reign of Louis XIV., and, after raising the regiment of Noailles in 1689, he commanded in Spain during the war of the Spanish succession, and was made marshal of France in 1693. A younger son, (1651–1729), was made archbishop of Paris in 1695, holding this high dignity until his death; he was made a cardinal in 1699. The name of Noailles occurs with almost confusing reiteration throughout the 18th century. (1678–1766), the third duke, served in all the most important wars of the reign of Louis XV. in Italy and Germany, and became a marshal in 1734. His last command was in the war of the Austrian succession, when he was beaten by the English at the battle of Dettingen in 1743. He married Francoise d’Aubigné, a niece of Madame de Maintenon and two of his sons also attained the rank of marshal of France. The elder, (1713–1793), who bore the title of duc d’Ayen till his father’s death in 1766, when he became duc de Noailles, served in most of the wars of the 18th century without particular distinction, but was nevertheless made a marshal in 1775. He refused to emigrate during the Revolution, but escaped the guillotine by dying in August 1793, before the Terror reached its height. On the 4th Thermidor (July 22) the aged duchesse de Noailles was executed with her daughter-in-law, the duchesse d’Ayen, and her granddaughter, the vicomtesse de Noailles. (1739–1824), the fifth duke, was in the army, but his tastes were scientific, and for his eminence as a chemist he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1777. He became duc d’Ayen in 1766 on his grandfather’s death, and duc de Noailles on his father’s in 1793. Having emigrated in 1792, he lived in Switzerland until the Restoration in 1814, when he took his seat as a peer of France. He had no son, and was succeeded as duc de Noailles by his grand-nephew, (1802–1885), who won some reputation as an author, and who became a member of the French Academy in the place of Chateaubriand in 1849. The grandfather of Paul de Noailles, and brother of the fifth duke, (1743–1822), marquis de Noailles, was ambassador at Amsterdam from 1770–1776, at London 1776–1783, and at Vienna 1783–1792.

 NOAKHALI, a town and district of British India, in the Chittagong division of eastern Bengal and Assam. The town, also known as Sudharam, is on a small river channel 10 m. from the sea. Pop (1901) 6520. The has an area of 1644 sq. m.; pop. (1901) 1,141,728. The district consists of an alluvial tract of mainland, together with several islands at the mouth of the Meghna. In general, each homestead is surrounded by a thick grove of betel- and coco-nut palms, and in the north-western tracts dense forests of betel-nut palms extend for miles. Rice is the great staple of cultivation. The district is very fertile; and, with the exception of some sandbanks and recent accretions, every part of it is under continuous cultivation. The process of alluvion is gradually but steadily going on, the mainland extending seawards. Noakhali is peculiarly liable to destructive floods from the sea, generally caused by southerly gales or cyclones occurring at the time when the Meghna is swollen by heavy rains, and at flood-tides—the tidal bore being sometimes 20 ft. high, and moving at the rate of 15 m. an hour. The cyclone and storm-wave of the 31st of October 1876 was terribly disastrous, sweeping over the whole delta of the Meghna. The loss of human life was estimated at 100,000. The east of the district is served by the Assam-Bengal railway.

The Mahommedan population of the islands at the mouth of the Meghna practised piracy up to a comparatively recent date, and at the beginning of the 17th century Portuguese pirates, under Sebastian Gonzales, occupied Sandwip. They were ultimately reduced to subjection by Shaista Khan, the governor of Bengal, about the middle of the century; and their descendants have sunk to the level of the natives surrounding them, whose dress, customs and language they have, for the most part, adopted. They are Christians, and retain the old Portuguese names. About 1756 the East India Company established factories in Noakhali and Tippera, the ruins of some of which still remain.  NOBEL, ALFRED BERNHARD (1833–1896), Swedish chemist and engineer, was the third son of Emmanuel Nobel (1801–1872), and was born at Stockholm on the 21st of October 1833. At an early age he went with his family to St Petersburg, where his father started torpedo works. In 1859 these were left to the care of the second son, Ludvig Emmanuel (1831–1888), by whom they were greatly enlarged, and Alfred, returning to Sweden with his father, devoted himself to the study of explosives, and especially to the manufacture and utilization of nitroglycerin. He found that when that body was incorporated with an absorbent, inert substance like kieselguhr it became safer and more convenient to manipulate, and this mixture he patented in 1867 as dynamite. He next combined nitroglycerin with another high explosive, gun-cotton, and obtained a transparent, jelly-like substance, which was a still more powerful explosive than dynamite. Blasting gelatin, as it was called, was patented in 1876, and was followed by a host of similar combinations, modified by the addition of potassium nitrate, wood-pulp and various other substances. Some thirteen years later Nobel produced ballistite, one of the earliest of the nitroglycerin smokeless powders, containing in its latest forms about equal parts of gun-cotton and nitroglycerin. This powder was a precursor of cordite, and Nobel’s claim that his patent covered the latter was the occasion of vigorously contested law-suits between him and the British Government in 1894 and 1895. Cordite also consists of nitroglycerin and gun-cotton, but the form of the latter which its inventors wished to use was the most highly nitrated variety, which is not soluble in mixtures of ether and alcohol, whereas Nobel contemplated using a less nitrated form, which is soluble in such mixtures. The question was complicated by the fact that it is in practice impossible to prepare either of these two forms without admixture of the other; but eventually the courts decided against Nobel. From the manufacture of dynamite and other explosives, and from the exploitation of the Baku oil-fields, in the development of which he and his brothers, Ludvig and Robert Hjalmar (1829–1896), took a leading part, he amassed an immense fortune; and at his death, which occurred on the 10th of December 1896 at San Remo, he left the bulk of it in trust for the establishment of five prizes, each worth several thousand pounds, to be awarded annually without distinction of nationality.

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Requiem for a Young Soldier

 * Coates, Florence Earle (1915), "Requiem for a Young Soldier" in Scribner's Magazine (November 1915).
 * Coates, Florence Earle (1916), "Requiem for a Young Soldier" in Poems II.

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History.—The confluence of the Oka and the Volga, inhabited in the 10th century by Mordvinian tribes, began to be coveted by the Russians as soon as they had occupied the upper Volga, and as early as the 11th century they established a fort, Gorodets, 20 m. above the mouth of the Oka. In 1221, the people of Suzdal, under Yuri Vsevolodovich, prince of Vladimir, erected a fort on the hill now occupied by the Kremlin of Nizhniy. Until the beginning of the 14th century Nizhniy-Novgorod, which grew rapidly as the Russians colonized the banks of the Oka, remained subject to Suzdal; it enjoyed, however, almost complete independence, being ruled by its popular assembly. In the 14th century, until 1390, it elected its own princes. Ill-protected by its palisaded walls, it was plundered in 1377 and 1378 by the Tatars, supported by the Mordvinians. In 1390 Prince Vasili of Moscow, in alliance with Toktamish, khan of the Golden Horde of the Mongols, took Nizhniy and established his own governors there; in 1417 it was definitely annexed to Moscow, becoming a stronghold for the further advance of that principality towards the east. It was fortified in 1508–1511, and was able to repel the Tatars in 1513, 1520 and 1536. The second half of the 16th century was for the city a period of peaceful and rapid development. It became a depot for all merchandise brought from the south-east, and even English merchants established warehouses there. With the fall of Kazan, and the opening of free navigation on the Volga, it became the starting-place for the “caravan” of boats yearly sent to the lower Volga under the protection of a military force, whilst the thick forests of the neighbourhood favoured the development of shipbuilding. In 1606–1611 the trading classes of Nizhniy took an active part in the expeditions against the revolted serfs, and it was a Nizhniy dealer in cattle, Kozma. Minin Sukhorukov, who took the initiative in sending an army for the delivery of Moscow from the Poles in 1612. In 1667 the robber chieftain, Stenka Razin, made an unsuccessful attempt to capture the city. During the 17th century the country around Nizhniy became the seat of a vigorous religious agitation, and in its forests the Raskolniks established hundreds of their monasteries and communities, those of the Kerzhenets playing an important part in the history of Russian Nonconformity even to the present time.

Nizhniy-Novgorod had at one time two academies, Greek and Slav, and took some part in the literary movement of the end of the 18th century; its theatre also was of some importance in the history of the Russian stage.

 NOAH (, rest; Septuagint, New Testament, Philo, Josephus,  ,  ,  : Vulg. Noë). According to Gen. v.–x. the tenth patriarch in direct descent from Adam, counting Adam as the first; the son of Lamech; the father of Shem, Ham and Japheth; and the builder of the Ark, in which he and his family, &c. &c., were saved from a universal flood (see ). After the flood subsided God made a covenant with Noah permitting the use of animal food, on condition that the flesh is not eaten with the blood; and forbidding homicide (ix. 1-7, cf. i. 29 f., both P.). Noah was the first to cultivate the vine and to experience the consequences of over-indulgence in its products, an occasion which called forth the filial respect of two of his sons and the irreverence of the third. Through his sons he became the ancestor of the whole human race. The name is mentioned in the genealogy in 1 Chron. i. 4; the “waters of Noah” occur in Isaiah liv. 9; and Noah is mentioned with Daniel and Job as an ancient worthy in Ezek. xiv. 14, 20. The story is referred to in the New Testament in Matt. xxiv. 37 f.; Luke iii. 36, xvii. 26 f.; Heb. xi. 7; 1 Pet. iii. 20; 2 Pet. ii. 5.

The name Noah is explained in Gen. v. 29 as connected with the root nhm “comfort,” but this is etymologically impossible. As a Hebrew word it might connect with nûah, “rest”; and the Septuagint has, “he will give us rest,” instead of “he will comfort us”; and this is sometimes accepted as the original reading.

As the tenth patriarch Noah corresponds to the tenth prehistoric Babylonian king, Xisuthros in Berossus, Ut-napistim or Atrahasis in the cuneiform tablets, the hero of the Babylonian flood story.

Gen. ix. 20-27 is a distinct episode, and has no necessary connexion with the narrative of the Deluge. Probably, as Gunkel, Dillmann and others suggest, it came originally from a cycle of stories different from that which contained the account of the Flood. There are some apparent inconsistencies. Noah is called “the husbandman.” The proper rendering of verse 20 is “and Noah, the husbandman, was the first to plant a vineyard,” the E.V.: “And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard,” is incorrect. It seems, therefore, that in the original context Noah had been described as “the husbandman,” a title in no way suggested by Gen. vi. 9–ix. 19. Moreover, even after making allowance for lack of experience as to the effect of the new product, drunkenness and exposure hardly tally with the statement that “Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God,” vi. 9. This indeed comes from the late Priestly Code; but we are also told in the earlier story that “Noah found favour in the eyes of the Lord,” vi. 8.

The name also occurs in the Bible (,  , Noa) for the daughter of Zelophehad, of the tribe of Manasseh. Zelophehad having only daughters, the case is made the occasion of laying down the law that where there are no sons daughters inherit, but must marry within their own tribe (Num. xxvi. 33, xxvii. 1, xxxvi. 11; Josh. xvii. 3, all Priestly Code).

 NOAILLES, the name of a great French family, derived from the castle of Noailles in the territory of Ayen, between Brive and Turenne in the Limousin, and claiming to date back to the 11th century. It did not obtain fame until the 16th century, when its head, de Noailles (1504–1562), became admiral of France, and was ambassador in England during three important years, 1553–1556, maintaining a gallant but unsuccessful rivalry with the Spanish ambassador, Simon Renard. (1554–1623), son of Antoine, was a commander in the religious wars, and was made comte d’Ayen by Henry IV. in 1593. (d. 1678), the grandson of the first count, played an important part in the Fronde and the early years of the reign of Louis XIV., became captain-general of the newly won province of Roussillon, and in 1663 was made duc d’Ayen, and peer of France. The sons of the first duke raised the family to its greatest fame. The eldest son, (1650–1708), was one of the chief generals

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text: 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Noailles

title: 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Noailles