The Nuttall Encyclopaedia Part 184

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

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

EMERY, a dull, blue-black mineral, allied in composition to the sapphire, but containing a varying quant.i.ty of iron oxide; is found in large ma.s.ses; is exceedingly hard, and largely used in polis.h.i.+ng metals, plate-gla.s.s, and precious stones.

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

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

EMIR, a t.i.tle bestowed on the descendants of Mahomet's daughter Fatima, the word denoting a "prince" or "ruler"; has lost this its primary meaning; the emirs, of whom there are large numbers in Turkey, enjoying no privileges save the sole right to wear a green turban, the supposed favourite colour of Mahomet, though they hold a high social position; the t.i.tle is also given to chieftains of N. Africa.

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

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

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

dates from 1852 to 1870; OF THE INDIES, founded in 1876 under the crown of England.

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

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

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

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

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

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

ENAMEL, a vitreous compound, easily fusible, and coloured in various tints by the admixture of different metallic oxides; is fused to the surface of metals for utility and ornament; was known to the European and Asiatic ancients, and has maintained its popularity to the present day.

Various schools have been formed, of which the Byzantine, Rhenish, and Limoges are the most noted.

ENCAUSTIC PAINTING, an ancient style of decorative art somewhat similar to enamelling, which consisted in overlaying the surface (e. g.

of walls) with wax, then inlaying a coloured design, the whole being subsequently polished.

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

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

ENCHIRIDION OF EPICTETUS. See EPICTETUS.

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

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

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

ENCYCLOPaeDIA, a name of Greek derivation, given to works which embrace within their pages a more or less complete account, in alphabetical order, of the whole round of human knowledge, or of some particular section of it. Attempts in this direction were made as far back as Aristotle's day, and various others have since been made from time to time, according as the circle of knowledge widened. Amongst famous encyclopaedias which have appeared, mention may be made of the French "ENCYCLOPeDIE" (q. v.); the "Encyclopaedia Britannica,"

Edinburgh (1708-1771), now in its ninth edition (1889); the German "Encyclopedie," begun in 1818 by Ersch and Gruber, and not yet completed, although 170 volumes have appeared; while the largest of all is the Chinese encyclopaedia, in 5020 vols., printed in Pekin in 1726.

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

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

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

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

See EXOGENS.

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

7).

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

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

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