The Nuttall Encyclopaedia Part 328

OBEID (35), in the Eastern Soudan, 220 m. SW. of Khartoum, is the capital of Kordofan; was the scene in November 1883 of the annihilation by the forces of the Mahdi, after three days' fighting, of an Egyptian army under Hicks Pasha and other English officers; its trade consists of ivory, gold, feathers, and gum.

OBELISK, a tall four-sided pillar, generally monolithic, tapering to a pyramidal pointed top, erected in connection with temples in Egypt, and inscribed all over with hieroglyphs, and in memorial, as is likely, of some historical personage or event; they are of ancient date.

OBER-AMMERGAU, a small village in Bavaria, 45 m. SW. of Munich; famed for the Pa.s.sion Play performed there by the peasants, some 500 in number, every ten years, which attracts a great many spectators to the spot; the play was inst.i.tuted in 1634 in token of grat.i.tude for the abatement of a plague.

OBERLIN, JEAN FRIEDRICH, a benevolent Protestant pastor, born at Strasburg; laboured all his life at Ban de la Roche, a wild mountain district of Alsace, and devoted himself with untiring zeal to the spiritual and material welfare of the people, which they rewarded with their pious grat.i.tude and warmest affection.

OBERON, the king of the fairies, and the husband of t.i.tania.

OBI, a river and, with its tributaries, great water highway of West Siberia, which rises in the Altai Mountains, and after a course of 2120 m. falls into the Arctic Ocean.

OBJECTIVE, a philosophical term used to denote that which is true universally apart from all merely private sense or judgment, and finds response in the universal reason, the reason that is common to all rational beings; it is opposed to subjective, or agreeable to one's mere feelings or fancy.

OBLATES, the name given to an organisation of secular priests living in community, founded by St. Charles Borromeo at the end of the 16th century, and who are ready to render any services the bishop may require of them.

OBOE, a treble-sounding musical instrument of the reed cla.s.s, to which the ba.s.soon is reckoned the ba.s.s.

OBELUS, a small coin worth about a penny, according to a custom among the Greeks placed in the mouth of a corpse at burial to pay to Charon to ferry the ghost of it over the Styx.

O'BRIEN, WILLIAM, journalist, and a Nationalist ex-M.P. for Cork; was twice over imprisoned for political offences; had to retire in 1895; _b_. 1852.

O'BRIEN, WILLIAM SMITH, Irish patriot; entered Parliament in 1826; sat for Limerick from 1835 to 1843, when he joined the Repeal a.s.sociation under O'Connell, but separated from it; joined the physical force Young Ireland party, and became the head; attempted an insurrection, which failed, and involved him in prosecution for treason and banishment for life; a free pardon was afterwards granted on promise of abstaining from all further disloyalty; he died at Bangor, in North Wales (1803-1864).

OBSCURANTIST, name given to an opponent to modern enlightenment as professed by the devotees of modern science and philosophy.

OBSIDIAN, a hard, dark-coloured rock of a gla.s.sy structure found in lava, which breaks with conchoidal fracture.

OCCAM or OAKHAM, WILLIAM OF, an English Scholastic philosopher, born at Oakham, Surrey, surnamed _Doctor Invincibilis_; was a monk of the order of St. Francis; studied under DUNS SCOTUS (q. v.), and became his rival, and a reviver of NOMINALISM (q. v.) in opposition to him, by his insistence on which he undermined the whole structure of Scholastic dogmatism, that is, its objective validity, and plunged it in hopeless ruin, but cleared the way for modern speculation, and its grounding of the OBJECTIVE (q. v.) on a surer basis (1280-1347).

OCCASIONALISM, the doctrine that the action of the spiritual organisation on the material, and of the material on the spiritual, or of the inner on the outer, and the outer on the inner, is due to the divine interposition taking occasion of the effort of mind, or of the inner, on the one hand, and the effort of matter, or the outer, on the other, to work the effect or result; or that the link connecting cause and effect in both cases, that is, the acion of the outer world on the inner, and _vice versa_, is G.o.d.

OCEANIA, an imaginary commonwealth described by James Harrington (1611-1697) in which the project of a doctrinaire republic is worked out; also a book of Froude's on the English colonies.

OCEANIA, the name given to the cl.u.s.ters of islands, consisting of Australasia in the S., Malaysia in the E. Indian Archipelago, and Polynesia in the N. and E. of the Pacific.

OCEANIDES, the nymphs of the Ocean, all daughters of Ocea.n.u.s, some 3000 in number.

OCEa.n.u.s or OKEANOS, in the Greek mythology the great world-stream which surrounds the whole earth, and is the parent source of all seas and streams, presided over by a t.i.tan, the husband of Tethys, and the father of all river-G.o.ds and water-nymphs. He is the all-father of the world, as his wife is the all-mother, and the pair occupy a palace apart on the extreme verge of the world.

OCHILS (i. e. the heights), a range of hills lying NE. and SW.

between the valleys of the Forth and Tay; reach their highest point in Ben Cleugh (2363 ft.), near Stirling; the range is 24 m. long by 12 broad, and affords pasture for black-faced sheep; of the peaks of the range Dunmyat is the most striking, as Ben Cleuch is the highest.

OCHILTREE, EDIE, a talkative, kind-hearted gaberlunzie who figures a good deal in Scott's "Antiquary."

OCHINO, BERNARDINO, an Italian monk, born in Sienna; after 40 years'

zeal in the service of the Church embraced the Reformed doctrine; fled from the power of the Inquisition to Geneva; took refuge in England; ministered here and there to Italian refugees, but was hunted from place to place; died at last of the plague in Moravia (1487-1564).

OCHTERLONY, SIR DAVID, British general, born at Boston, U.S., of Scottish descent; entered the Indian army; distinguished himself in the war against the Goorkhas; was made a baronet, and received a pension of 1000 for his services; a monument to his memory stands in the Maidan Park, Calcutta (1758-1825).

OCKLEY, SIMON, Orientalist, became professor of Arabic; wrote a "History of the Saracens," part of it in a debtors' prison; died in indigence (1678-1720).

O'CONNELL, DANIEL, Irish patriot, known as the "Liberator," born near Cahirciveen, co. Kerry; educated at St. Omer, Douay, and Lincoln's Inn; was called to the Irish bar in 1798, and was for twenty-two years a famous and prosperous pract.i.tioner on the Munster circuit; turning to politics he became leader of the Catholics in 1811, his object being the removal of the Catholic disabilities; the Catholic a.s.sociation of 1823 was organised by him, which he induced the priesthood to join, and awakened irresistible enthusiasm throughout the country; the electors now began to vote independently, and O'Connell was returned for Clare in 1828; the House refused to admit him; but so strong, and at the same time so orderly, was the agitation in Ireland, that in 1829 the Catholic disabilities were removed, and O'Connell, returned again for Clare, took his seat in the House of Commons; next year he represented Waterford in the new Parliament, and subsequently Kerry, Dublin, Kilkenny, and Cork; he now formed a society for promoting the repeal of the Union, which survived several suppressions, and reappeared under different names; but in spite of his exertions in the House and in the country the cause languished, till, in 1843, as Lord Mayor of Dublin, he carried a resolution in its favour in the City Council; but now under the pressure of less experienced agitators, his monster meetings and other proceedings began to overstep legal limits, and in 1844 he, with six of his supporters, was indicted for raising sedition; he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment and a fine of 2000, but the sentence was set aside in 14 weeks; by this time the Young Ireland party had broken away from him, the potato famine came, he was conscious of failure, and his health was broken; he died on his way to Rome, at Genoa; a man of great physical strength and energy, and a master of oratory, he gave himself unselfishly to serve his country, sacrificing a legal practice worth 7000 a year, honestly administering the immense sums contributed, and spending his private means for his cause; with an undeniable taint of coa.r.s.eness, violence, and scurrility in his nature, he was yet a man of independent and liberal mind, an opponent of rebellion, loyal to his sovereign, a great and sincere patriot (1775-1847).

OCTAVIA, the sister of Augustus, a woman distinguished for her beauty and her virtue; was married first to Marcellus, and on his death to Mark Antony, who forsook her for Cleopatra, but to whom she remained true, even, on his miserable end, nursing his children by Cleopatra along with her own; one other grief she had to endure in the death of her son MARCELLUS (q. v.) by her former husband, and the destined successor of Augustus on the throne.

OCTOBER, the tenth month of the year so called (i. e. the eighth) by the Romans, whose year began on March.

OD, name given to a physical force recently surmised and believed to pervade all nature, and as manifesting itself chiefly in connection with mesmeric phenomena.

ODDFELLOWS, the name of several friendly societies. The Independent Order of Oddfellows, Manchester Unity, is the largest and most important of the number, its membership is over 665,000, and its funds amount to 8,000,000. It has been the pioneer in many important movements of the kind, several of the provisions now compulsory on all societies it observed of its own accord, prior to their enactment; the actuarial tables compiled from its statistics in 1845 by its secretary, Henry Radcliffe, are still a standard work. The Grand United Order of Oddfellows has a membership of 241,000, and funds amounting to 882,000; the National Independent Order of Oddfellows embraces 58,000 members, and has 242,000.

ODER, an important German river, rises in Moravia, and crossing the frontier flows NW. through Silesia, and N. through Brandenburg and Pomerania 550 m. into the Stettiner Haff and so to the Baltic. On its banks stand Ratibor, where navigation ends, Breslau, Frankfort, and Stettin; it receives its chief tributary, the navigable Warthe, on the right, and has ca.n.a.l communication with the Spree and the Elbe.

ODESSA (298), on the Black Sea, 25 m. NE. of the mouth of the Dniester, is the fourth largest city of Russia, and the chief southern port and emporium of commerce. It exports large shipments of wheat, sugar, and wool; imports cotton, groceries, iron, and coal, and manufactures flour, tobacco, machinery, and leather. It is well fortified, and though many of the poor live in subterraneous caverns, is a fine city, with a university, a cathedral, and a public library. It was a free port from 1817 till 1857. The population includes many Greeks and Jews.

ODIN or WODIN, the chief G.o.d of the ancient Scandinavians, combined in one the powers of Zeus and Ares among the Greeks, and was attended by two black ravens--Hugin, mind, and Munin, memory, the bearers of tidings between him and the people of his subject-world. His council chamber is in ASGARD (q. v.), and he holds court with his warriors in VALHALLA (q. v.). He is the source of all wisdom as well as all power, and is supposed by Carlyle to have been the deification of some one who incarnated in himself all the characteristic wisdom and valour of the Scandinavian race; Frigga was his wife, and Balder and Thor his sons. See CARLYLE'S "HEROES."