Haraszthy De Mokcsa, Agoston

The son of a landowner, Haraszthy immigrated to the United States in 1840. He went to the upper Midwest and founded what is now Sauk City, Wis. In 1849 he journeyed with his family to San Diego, Calif., where he

Black Rock Desert

Arid region of lava beds and alkali flats composing part of the Basin and Range Province and lying in Humboldt and Pershing counties of northwestern Nevada, U.S. With an area of about 1,000 square miles (2,600 square km), the desert is 70 miles (110 km) long and up to 20 miles (32 km) wide. Once occupied by ancient Lake Lahontan, it serves as the sink of the Quinn River and, at times, is largely covered with

Biblical Literature, Bel and the Dragon

The third Greek addition to the Book of Daniel is the story of Bel and the Dragon. The Babylonians worshipped the idol of the god Bel and daily provided him with much food, but Daniel proved to the King that the food was in reality eaten by the priests. The priests were punished by death and Bel's temple destroyed. The Babylonians also worshipped a dragon, but Daniel declined

Elijah

The Israelite king Omri had allied himself with the Phoenician cities of the coast, and his son Ahab was married to Jezebel, daughter of Ethbaal, king of Tyre and Sidon. Jezebel, with her Tyrian courtiers and a large contingent of pagan priests and prophets, propagated her native religion in a sanctuary built for Baal in the royal city of Samaria. This meant that the Israelites

Arduino, Giovanni

From an early age, Arduino showed an interest in mining, establishing a reputation throughout northern Italy

Aerospace Industry, Working of materials

Metals are cut, shaped, bored, bent, and formed by tools and machines operated manually or, increasingly, under the control of computers programmed to guide the necessary operations consistently and with greater precision than can normally be provided by humans. The parallels for electrical and electronic fabrication are robotic tools for insertion of components

Australian Aboriginal

Also called �Aborigine � any member of the indigenous people of Australia and Tasmania. Estimates of the Aboriginal population at the time of European colonization in the late 18th century range from 300,000 to more than 1,000,000. Both people and languages (or dialects) were associated with stretches of territory, and the largest entities recognized by the people were language-named groups, sometimes referred

Haber, Fritz

Morris Goran, The Story of Fritz Haber (1967), contains an exhaustive bibliography of writings by and relating to Haber.

Xie Jun

Cathy Forbes, Meet the Masters (1994), contains a collection of interviews with many notable chess players.

Torez

Formerly �(until 1964) Chistyakovo� city, Donetsk oblast (province), Ukraine. Torez is a typical coal-mining centre of the Donets Basin coalfield, but in Soviet times its industrial base was considerably widened. It is now a centre for engineering industries, especially electrical engineering, and for building materials. The city of Torez has been replanned in modern style, and its streets have been widened.

Venetia

Historically Venetia was the mainland territory under the control of the Republic of Venice from the 14th and

Qatar, Health and welfare

Health care and medical services are provided free to all residents through government programs. The government also funds recreational and cultural clubs and facilities for young people as part of its extensive �youth welfare� campaign.

Gon�alves, Nuno

Apparently Gon�alves was appointed court

Abseron Peninsula

Also spelled �Apsheron�, Azerbaijani �Abseron Yasaqligi� peninsula in Azerbaijan that extends 37 miles (60 km) eastward into the Caspian Sea and reaches a maximum width of 19 miles (30 km). An eastern extension of the Caucasus Mountains, the Abseron Peninsula consists of a gently undulating plain, in part dissected by ravines and characterized by frequent salt lakes and lands flooded by tides. Vineyards and tea plantations are features

M.b.e.

Member of the British Empire, member of a British order of knighthood, though this rank does not confer knighthood. See British Empire, The Most Excellent Order of the.

Crab Spider

The body of the crab spider is gray or brown in colour and is about 12 mm (0.5 inch) long. Members of Misumena

Macau

Also spelled �Macao�, Chinese (Pinyin romanization) �Aomen� or (Wade-Giles romanization) �Ao-men � special administrative region (Pinyin tebie xingzhengqu; Wade-Giles t'e-pieh hsing-cheng-ch'�) of China, on the country's southern coast. Macau is located on the western side of the Pearl River (Chu Chiang) estuary (at the head of which is the port of Canton) and stands about 40 miles (64 km) opposite the special administrative region of Hong Kong, which is on the eastern side of the

Abia

State, east-central Nigeria. Abia was administratively created in 1991 from the eastern half of former Imo state. It is bordered by the states of Enugu to the north, Cross River and Akwa Ibom to the east, Rivers to the south, and Imo and Anambra to the west. Abia includes areas of oil-palm bush and tropical rain forest in its southern part and woodland savanna in its hilly north.

Franz, Robert

Franz studied organ at Dessau from 1835 to 1837. Later he returned to Halle, where he became a friend of Wilhelm Osterwald, many of whose poems he set to music. About the time he published his first

Tractatus Coislinianus

Statement of a Greek theory of comedy found in a 10th-century manuscript (published 1839) in the collection of Henri Charles du Cambout de Coislin. The treatment of comedy displays marked Aristotelian influence, even to the point of paralleling the model offered in the Poetics. The Tractatus is assumed to be either a version of a lost Aristotelian original or a statement

Painting, Western, Archaic period (c. 625 - 500 BC)

Corinth remained the leading exporter of Greek vases until about 550 BC, though mass production quickly led to a drop in quality. These later vases were decorated with unambitious and stereotyped groups of animal or human figures; there was little or no interest in narrative. By the late 7th century BC Athenian artists had adopted many of the stylistic features of Corinthian

Pencil Drawing

Drawing executed with an instrument composed of graphite enclosed in a wood casing and intended either as a sketch for a more elaborate work in another medium, an exercise in visual expression, or a finished work. The cylindrical graphite pencil, because of its usefulness in easily producing linear gray-black strokes, became the successor of the older, metallic

Lusatia

In the 9th century the area settled by the Sorbs, a Slavic people, extended westward to the Saale River and

Brunei

Officially �State of Brunei, Abode of Peace, �Malay �Negara Brunei Darussalam, � independent Islamic sultanate on the northern coast of the island of Borneo. It has an area of 2,226 square miles (5,765 square kilometres) and is bounded to the north by the South China Sea and on all other sides by the East Malaysian state of Sarawak, which also divides the state into two enclaves of unequal size. The western enclave is the larger of the two and contains the capital

Magnus V Erlingsson

The son of Erling the Crooked, Magnus became king in 1162 when his supporters, led by his father, defeated the forces of the incumbent king, Haakon II Sigurdsson.

Gabon

Protesting the disparity between living conditions in the capital and those in the regional towns,

Bioelectricity

Bioelectric effects were known in ancient times from

Zeiss, Carl

In 1846 Zeiss opened a workshop in Jena for producing microscopes and other optical instruments. Realizing that improvements in optical instruments depended on advances in optical theory, he engaged as research

Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism

(Palestinian Judaism): Solomon Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology (1961), a concise, authoritative, and engaging treatment of classical (i.e., rabbinic) Judaism. (Babylonian Judaism): Jacob Neusner, A History of the Jews in Babylonia, 5 vol. (1965 - 70; vol. 1, rev. 1969), the most comprehensive treatment of Babylonian Jewry during the Tannaitic and Amoraic periods. (Judeo-Arabic culture): S.D. Goitein, Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts Through the Ages, 3rd rev. ed. (1974), a popular work by the ranking authority on all aspects of Jewish - Arabic symbiosis, particularly valuable for the medieval period; Abraham Ibn Daud, Sefer ha-Qabbalah (The Book of Tradition), ed. and trans. by Gerson D. Cohen (1967), the classic medieval Hebrew chronicle with analytic essays on Spanish Jewry's �golden age.� (Jews of medieval Europe): Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, new ed. rev. by Cecil Roth (1932), delightful and erudite studies of social life and institutions in medieval Europe; Moritz G�demann, Geschichte des Erziehungswesens und der Cultur der Juden, 3 vol. (1880 - 88), a social and intellectual history of medieval Ashkenazic Jewry (France, Germany, Italy); Cecil Roth, The Jews in the Renaissance (1959), lucid and informative, but with little critical analysis, valuable on Jewish contact with Christian men of letters; Gershom Scholem, Shabbethai Zevi, 2 vol. (1957), a penetrating and comprehensive study (in Hebrew) of the great false Messiah as well as of his religious antecedents and legacy; Stephen Sharot, Messianism, Mysticism, and Magic: A Sociological Analysis of Jewish Religious Movements (1982), an informative scholarly study.

Ibn Al-abbar

Ibn al-Abbar began his official career as a secretary to the Muslim governor of the Emirate of Balansiya. After the fall of Valencia (September 1238), he settled in Tunisia and was employed

Tank

Any heavily armed and armoured combat vehicle that moves on two endless metal chains called tracks. Tanks are the principal type of armoured vehicle. Other major types include tracked and wheeled infantry carriers, which were conceived only for transporting troops into action but which also have been used to some extent for fighting; armoured cars, which often