The Nuttall encyclopædia : being a concise and comprehensive dictionary of…
1870. The Government is a constitutional monarchy. Franchise is
2303 words | Chapter 29
exercised by every citizen who can read and write. Conscription is in
force for army and navy. These are both strong, the navy one of the best
in Europe. Finances are bad; the debt amounts to £520,000,000, and
taxation is ruinous.
ITHACA (10), one of the Ionian Islands, and one of the smallest,
known now under the name Thiaki; it was the home of Ulysses, and his
domain as king when he set out for the Trojan War, and which he did not
see again till his return after twenty years. Also a town (11) in New
York State, U.S., seat of CORNELL UNIVERSITY (q. v.).
ITHURIEL, an angel whom Milton represents as sent by Gabriel to
search for Satan in Paradise, who had found entrance by eluding the
vigilance of the guard; he was armed with a _spear_, the touch of which
could unmask any disguise, and by means of which he discovered Satan
lurking in the garden in the form of a toad.
ITINERARY, a name given among the Romans to an account or a map of
the principal routes through the empire and the stations along them.
ITURBIDE, AUGUSTINE DE, a Mexican general, emancipated Mexico from
the yoke of Spain; seized the crown and was proclaimed emperor in 1822,
was obliged to abdicate next year and leave the country, but returning,
was immediately arrested, and shot (1783-1824).
IVAN (i. e. John), the name of two grand-dukes and four czars of
Russia; the two grand-dukes were Ivan I., grand-duke from 1328 to 1340,
and Ivan II., his son, grand-duke from 1353 to 1359.
IVAN III., surnamed The Threatening, sought to free Russia from the
yoke of the Tartars who had held it tributary for two centuries; gained
victories over the Tartars and the Poles, and was the first to receive at
Moscow ambassadors from other Powers of Europe; reigned from 1462 to
1505.
IVAN IV., surnamed The Terrible, grandson of the preceding, assumed
the sovereignty at 14, had himself crowned in 1545, and took the title of
Czar; his first great ambition was to destroy the Tartar power, which he
did at Kasan and Astrakhan, receiving homage thereafter from almost all
the Tartar chiefs; on the death of his wife in 1563 he lost all
self-restraint, and by the ferocity of his wars provoked hostility which
the Pope, who had been appealed to, interposed to appease; in a fit of
passion he killed his eldest son, whom he loved, remorse for which
embittered his last days and hastened his end (1530-1584).
IVANHOE, the hero of Sir Walter Scott's novel of the name, the
disinherited son of Cedric of Rotherwood, who falls in love with Rowena,
a ward of his father, but by the exhibition of his prowess as a knight is
at the intercession of King Richard, reconciled to his father, with the
result that he marries Rowena.
IVANOVA (32), a Russian town in Vladimir, 210 m. NE. of Moscow,
engaged in the manufacture of cotton, and known as the "Manchester of
Russia."
IVANOVITCH, IVAN, a lazy, good-natured impersonation of the typical
Russian, as John Bull is of the Englishman, and Brother Jonathan of the
American.
IVES, ST., a town on the Ouse, in Huntingdonshire, 50 m. N. of
London, where Oliver Cromwell resided from 1631 to 1635; the chief
industries are malting and brewing.
IVIZA (22), the most westerly of the Balearic Isles, is hilly and
well wooded, with fertile valleys and important fisheries.
IVORY COAST, a territory on the K. of the Gulf of Guinea, belonging
partly to Liberia and partly to France and Britain.
IVORY GATE, the gate spoken of in Virgil through which dreams pass
that do not turn out true. See HORN GATE.
IVRY, a village in the dep. of Eure, NE. of Dreux, famous for the
victory of Henry of Navarre over the Leaguers in 1590.
IXION, the king of the LAPITHÆ (q. v.), who being admitted
to heaven attempted to do violence to Hera, and whom Zeus deluded to
embrace a phantom image of her instead, whereby he became the father of
the Centaurs, and whom Zeus thereafter punished by fastening him hands
and feet to an eternally revolving wheel in hell.
IZALIO, a volcano in the republic of San Salvador, which first
announced its existence by a fissure opening in 1798 on the plain that
now surrounds it, from which there vomited lava and cinders, accompanied
with earthquake.
J
JABALPUR (84), a town, district, and one of the four divisions of
the Central Provinces, India; the town is an important commercial and
railway centre, situated 228 m. SW. of Allahabad; cotton and carpets are
amongst its chief manufactures.
JACK, a familiar form of John, the most widely spread of Christian names,
and said to be derived from the French JACQUES or, as others maintain,
from JANKIN, a distinctive form of JOHAN or JOHN; JOHNKIN gives us JOCK
and JOCKEY; from its extreme commonness it has acquired that slightly
contemptuous signification observable in such compounds as "every man
JACK," "JACK-of-all-trades," "JACK-an-apes," and the name as applied to
the _knaves_ in playing-cards, and to the small white ball used as a mark
in the game of bowls is an example of its transferred sense.
JACKAROO, name given in Australia to a green-horn from England
inexperienced in bush life.
JACKDAW OF RHEIMS, one of the INGOLDSBY LEGENDS (q. v.).
JACKSON, 1, a prosperous manufacturing city (21) in Michigan,
U.S.A., on the Grand River, 70 m. W. of Detroit; has various mills,
iron-works, breweries, &c., and bituminous coal-mines on its outskirts.
2, A cotton market-town (10), capital of Madison County, Tennessee, on
the South Fork of the Forked Deer River, 107 m. SE. of Cairo, Illinois.
JACKSON, ANDREW, GENERAL, president of the United States, born at
Waxhaw, N. Carolina, adopted law as a profession, and in 1788 became
public prosecutor at Nashville; took a prominent part in establishing the
State of Tennessee, of which he subsequently became a senator and a,
judge; during the war with Britain (1812-14) be came to the front and
crowned a series of successes by his great victory over Sir E. Pakenham
at New Orleans; for a time he was governor of the newly purchased State
of Florida, but resigning, he again entered the U.S. Senate in 1823;
five years later he became President, and in 1832 was again elected; his
Presidency is associated with the readjustment of the tariff on a purely
protective basis, which led to disputes with S. Carolina, the sweeping
away of the United States Bank, the wiping out of the national debt in
1835, and the vigorous enforcement of claims against the French for
damage done during the Napoleonic wars; his imperious yet honest nature
led him to make a more frequent use of the President's veto than any of
his predecessors (1767-1845).
JACKSON, THOMAS JONATHAN, known as Stonewall Jackson, an American
general, born in Virginia; bred for the army; distinguished himself in
the Mexican War; retired from the army in 1853, and became a professor in
Mathematics and Military Science in Virginia; was appointed
brigadier-general in the Confederate army at the outbreak of the Civil
War, and earned the _nom de guerre_ of "Stonewall" by his firmness at the
battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861; distinguished himself in subsequent
engagements; at Chancellorville was by mistake fired at in the dark and
mortally wounded by his own men on May 6, 1863; he was a man of the
Cromwell stamp, and his death was not only a blow to his own party, but
matter of grief to the whole American nation (1824-1863).
JACKSONVILLE, 1, the chief seat of commerce (17) in Florida State,
is situated on St. John's River, some 20 m. from its mouth; is a busy
railway centre, and has an active river trade in lumber, cotton, fruits,
&c., and is a health resort. 2, Capital (13) of Morgan County, Illinois,
is pleasantly situated on a fertile plain, 34 m. SW. of Springfield; is
noted as an educational centre, and for its many charity asylums; its
manufactures embrace woollens, paper, &c.
JACOB, a Hebrew patriarch, younger son of Isaac and Rebecca, the
favourite of his mother, and had twelve sons, the fathers of the twelve
tribes of Israel; his character and the story of his life are naïvely
delineated in the book of Genesis.
JACOB, JEAN CLAUDE, a serf from the Jura Mountains, 120 years old,
who was brought from his native place to figure as "dean of the human
race" in Paris at the great federation festival of June 1790.
JACOBI, FRIEDRICH HEINRICH, a German philosopher, born at
Düsseldorf; bred for business, and after engaging in it for a time threw
it up for a revenue appointment; devoted all his by-hours to philosophy
and correspondence with eminent men, and was appointed President of the
Academy of Sciences at Münich in 1807; he formed no system and he founded
no school; his thoughts present themselves in a detached form, and are to
be gathered from letters, dialogues, and imaginative works; he contended
for the dogma of "immediate cognition as the special organ of the
supersensuous," and failed to see, as SCHWEGLER notes, that said
cognition "has already described a series of subjective intermediating
movements, and can pretend to immediacy only in entire oblivion of its
own nature and origin" (1743-1819).
JACOBI, KARL GUSTAVO, a celebrated German mathematician, born at
Potsdam, of Jewish birth; was professor at Königsberg and Berlin, and one
of the founders of the theory of determinants (1801-1851).
JACOBINS, a political club, originally known as the Club Breton,
which was founded in Paris during the French Revolution; so called from
its place of meeting in the Rue St. Honoré, which had previously been a
Jacobin friar convent; it exercised a great influence over the course of
the Revolution, and had affiliated societies all over the country,
working along with it; its members were men of extreme revolutionary
views, procured the death of the king, exterminated the Girondists,
roused the lowest classes against the middle, and were the ruling spirits
during the Reign of Terror, of whom Robespierre was the chief, the fall
of whom sealed their doom; they were mobbed out of their place of meeting
with execrations on Hallow-Eve 1794.
JACOBITES, a name given to certain partisans of Eutychean sect in
the 17th century in the East, from the name of their leader.
JACOBITES, the name given to the adherents of the Stuart dynasty in
Great Britain after their expulsion from the throne in 1688, and derived
from that of James II., the last Stuart king; they made two great
attempts to restore the exiled dynasty, in 1715 and 1745, but both were
unsuccessful, after which the movement exhausted itself in an idle
sentimentality, which also is by this time as good as extinct.
JACOBS, a German Greek scholar, born at Gotha; editor of "Anthologia
Græca" (1767-1847).
JACOBUS, a gold coin of the reign of James I., worth 25 shillings.
JACOBY, JOHAN, a Prussian politician, born in Königsberg; bred to
medicine, but best known as a politician in a liberal interest, which
involved him in prosecutions; was imprisoned for protesting against the
annexation of Alsace and Lorraine; he was a man of fearless honesty, and
one day had the courage to say to the Emperor William I., "It is the
misfortune of kings that they will not listen to the truth" (1805-1877).
JACOTOT, JEAN JOSEPH, a celebrated educationalist, born at Dijon,
France; after holding various educational appointments, he in 1818 became
professor of the French Language and Literature at Louvain, and
subsequently held the post of Director of the Military Normal School; he
is noted for his "Universal Method" of education, which is based on his
assumption that men's minds are of equal calibre (1770-1840).
JACQUARD LOOM, a loom with an apparatus for weaving figures in
textiles, such as silks, muslins, and carpets, which was the invention of
an ingenious Frenchman, born in Lyons, of the name of Joseph Marie
Jacquard (1752-1834).
JACQUERIE, the name given to an insurrection of French peasants
against the nobles in the ILE OF FRANCE (q. v.), which broke out
on May 21, 1358, during the absence of King John as a prisoner in
England; it was caused by the oppressive exactions of the nobles, and was
accompanied with much savagery and violence, but the nobles combined
against the revolt, as they did not do at the time of Revolution,
preferring rather to leave the country in a pet, and it was extinguished
on the 9th June following.
JACQUES BONHOMME, a name given to a French peasant as tamely
submissive to taxation.
JADE, is the common name of about 150 ornamental stones, but belongs
properly only to nephrite, a pale grey, yellowish, or white mineral found
in New Zealand, Siberia, and chiefly in China, where it is highly valued.
JAEL, the Jewish matron who slew Sisera the Canaanitish captain,
smiting a nail into his temples as he lay asleep in her tent, Judges iv.
18, 21.
JAEN (26), a picturesque cathedral city, capital of a province of
the same name, in Andalusia, Spain, on a tributary of the Guadalquivir,
50 m. NW. of Granada; the province (438) lies along the valley of the
Guadalquivir, and was once a Moorish kingdom.
JAGGANNATHA. See JUGGERNAUT.
JAGHIR, revenue from land or the produce of it, assigned in India by
the Government to an individual as a reward for some special service.
JAHN, FRED. L., a German patriot, born in Pomerania; did much to
rouse his country into revolt against the domination of France in 1813
(1778-1852).
JAHN, JOHAN, a Catholic theologian and Orientalist, born in Moravia;
held professorships in Olmütz and Vienna; was distinguished as a Biblical
scholar, author of "Biblical Archæology," in five vols., as well as an
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