Percheron

Heavy draft-horse breed that originated in the Perche region of France. The breed probably stems from the Flemish “great horse” of the Middle Ages; modified by Oriental blood to develop a coach-horse type, it was changed again in the 19th century by introduction of draft-type blood to produce animals for heavy farm work. Although a few Percherons were imported earlier,

Feminine Ending

In prosody, a line of verse having an unstressed and usually extrametrical syllable at its end. In the opening lines from Robert Frost's poem “Directive,” the fourth line has a feminine ending while the rest are masculine: Back out of all this now too much for us,Back in a time made simple by the lossOf detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off Like graveyard marble sculpture

Moscheles, Ignaz

Moscheles studied at the Prague Conservatory and later at Vienna under J.G. Albrechtsberger and Antonio Salieri. In 1814, commissioned by Artaria & Co., publishers, he made the first piano arrangement of Ludwig van

Dominion

Town, Cape Breton county, northeastern Nova Scotia, Canada, immediately northwest of Glace Bay and a few miles northeast of Sydney, on the northeast coast of Cape Breton Island. The town originally was named Dominion No. 1 and was developed in the 1890s around a colliery (now defunct) of the Dominion Coal Company. The name of the coal town was changed to Dominion in 1906. The first of

Ramillies, Battle Of

The battle was fought at the village of Ramillies, 13 miles north of Namur (in modern Belgium), between a 62,000-man Allied army under Marlborough and a 60,000-man

New Castile

Spanish  Castilla La Nueva,   historic provincial region, central upland Spain. It generally includes the area of the Moorish kingdom of Toledo annexed to the former kingdom of Castile in the 11th century AD. In modern Spanish geographic usage, New Castile as an administrative region included the provinces of Ciudad Real, Cuenca, Guadalajara, Madrid, and Toledo. Its area was 27,940 square miles (72,363 square km).

Darshan

Sanskrit  Darsana  (“auspicious viewing”), in Hindu worship, the beholding of an auspicious deity, person, or object. The experience results in a blessing of the viewer. The rathayatras (car festivals), in which images of gods are taken in procession through the streets, enable even those who in former days were not allowed to enter the temple to have darshan of the deity. The capability of darshan

Vale Royal

Borough, administrative and historic county of Cheshire, England. It is named for a great Cistercian abbey built by Edward I near the present village of Whitegate. The borough is centred on the Cheshire salt field in the middle of the county. Its two main towns, Winsford and Northwich, were both founded on salt production; Northwich was important for salt as early as

Animal Interlace

In calligraphy, rich, fanciful decorative motif characteristic of work by the Hiberno-Saxon book artists of the early Middle Ages in the British Isles. Its intertwined, fantastic animal and bird forms are often densely and minutely detailed—an example in the Book of Kells (c. 800) contains 158 interlacements in a space of 0.25 square inch (1.61 square cm). Another work of comparable stylistic

China, The air masses

China lies in Asia, the world's largest continent, and faces the Pacific, the world's largest ocean. Between the Pacific and China's part of Asia, there is a seasonal movement of air masses. The polar continental air mass, originating in Siberia, dominates a large part of China during the winter, while the tropical Pacific air mass exerts its influence during the summer.

China

The People's Republic of China is situated in eastern Asia, with coastlines on the Yellow Sea and the East and South China seas. Area: 9,572,900 sq km (3,696,100 sq mi), including Tibet and excluding Taiwan. (See Taiwan, below.) Pop. (1994 est., excluding Taiwan): 1,192,300,000. Cap.: Beijing (Peking). Monetary unit: renminbi yuan, with (Oct. 7, 1994) an interbank rate of 8.53 yuan to U.S. $1 (13.57 yuan = £ 1 sterling). President in 1994, Jiang Zemin (Chiang Tse-min); premier,

Ahlin, Lars

The early novel Tåbb med manifestet (1943; “Tåbb with the Manifesto”) presents many of the central ideas of Ahlin's writings. In it, a young proletarian finds the Communist ideology unsatisfactory, rejects the notion of social rather than individual value, and reaches a better understanding of himself

Australian Antarctic Territory

External territory claimed by Australia and located in Antarctica. See Australian External Territories.

Roundhead

Adherent of the Parliamentary Party during the English Civil War (1642–51) and after. Many Puritans wore their hair closely cropped in obvious contrast to the long ringlets fashionable at the court of Charles I. Roundhead appears to have been first used as a term of derision toward the end of 1641, when debates in Parliament on the Bishops' Exclusion Bill were causing riots at Westminster.

Kin

Also called  Kinsfolk,   persons deemed related through blood or marriage or both. See kinship.

Alkali Feldspar

Any of several common silicate minerals that often occur as variously coloured, glassy crystals. They are used in the manufacture of glass and ceramics; transparent, highly coloured, or iridescent varieties are sometimes used as gemstones. The alkali feldspars are primarily important as constituents of rocks; they are very widespread and abundant in alkali and

La Salle, Saint Jean-baptiste De

Of noble birth, La Salle was ordained priest in 1678 and devoted himself to education of the poor. He helped to establish

K.b.e.

Knight commander of the British Empire, member of the second highest class of a British order of knighthood. See British Empire, The Most Excellent Order of the.

Crocidolite

Crocidolite is often replaced

Dacorum

Borough (district), administrative and historic county of Hertfordshire, England. The borough, in the northwestern corner of the county, includes part of the range of chalk hills known as the Chilterns, which border the London Basin on the north. Dacorum embraces a number of the outer suburban communities of London, including the new town of Hemel Hempstead, 25 miles (40 km)

Banda Sea

Bahasa Indonesia  Laut Banda  portion of the western South Pacific, bounded by the southern islands of the Moluccas of Indonesia (Alor, Timor, Wetar, Babar, Tanimbar, and Kai on the south and Ceram, Buru, and Sula on the north). It occupies a total of 180,000 square miles (470,000 square km) and opens to the Flores (west), Savu (southwest), Timor (south), Arafura (southeast), and Ceram and Molucca (north) seas. The sea's North Banda Basin,

Sorolla Y Bastida, Joaquín

Sorolla was from a poor family and was orphaned at age two. He displayed an early talent and was admitted to the Academy of San Carlos in Valencia at

Earth Sciences, Knowledge of Earth history

The occurrence of seashells embedded in the hard rocks of high mountains aroused the curiosity of early naturalists and eventually set off a controversy on the origin of fossils that continued through the 17th century. Xenophanes of Colophon (flourished c. 560 BC) was credited by later writers with observing that seashells occur “in the midst of earth and in mountains.” He

Sundial

The first device for indicating the time of day was probably the gnomon, dating from

Baal

God worshiped in many ancient Middle Eastern communities, especially among the Canaanites, who apparently considered him a fertility deity and one of the most important gods in the pantheon. As a Semitic common noun baal (Hebrew ba'al) meant “owner” or “lord,” although it could be used more generally; for example, a baal of wings was a winged creature, and, in the plural, baalim

Brooks, Louise

Brooks was the daughter of a lawyer, and she danced with the Denishawn company in 1922–24 and appeared in Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies on Broadway in 1925. She made her film debut that same year,

France, History Of, Later Capetians

Louis IX was succeeded by his son, Philip III (ruled 1270–85); his grandson, Philip IV the Fair (ruled 1285–1314); and three great-grandsons, Louis X (ruled 1314–16), Philip V (ruled 1316–22), and Charles IV (ruled 1322–28). The greatest of these last Capetian reigns was that of Philip IV. Worldly and ambitious, yet pious and intelligent, he was less accommodating than his forebears and more devoted to his power than to his reputation.

Aesthetics, The role of imagination

Such paradoxes suggest the need for a more extensive theory of the mind than has been so far assumed. We have referred somewhat loosely to the sensory and intellectual components of human experience but have said little about the possible relations and dependencies that exist between them. Perhaps, therefore, the paradoxes result only from our impoverished description

Indo-aryan Languages

Linguists generally assign the Indo-Aryan languages to three major periods: Old, Middle, and New Indo-Aryan. These periods are linguistic, not strictly chronological. Old Indo-Aryan includes different dialects and linguistic states referred

Ninigi

Amaterasu delegated Ninigi to assume ownership and rule of the central land of the reed plains (Japan) and gave him three signs

Astrobleme

(from Greek astron, blema, “star wound”), remains of an ancient meteorite-impact structure on the Earth's surface, generally in the form of a circular scar of crushed and deformed bedrock. Because such telltale features as crater walls, fused silica glass, and meteorite fragments are heavily modified over time by erosion and weathering, the identification of astroblemes