The Nuttall Encyclopaedia Part 350

PHLOGISTON, a name given by the old chemists to an imaginary principle of fire, latent in bodies, and which escaped during combustion.

PHOCAS, a common soldier who raised himself by the aid of a faction to the throne of the East, and for twenty years defied attempts to dethrone him, but, being deserted by his party, was taken, subjected to torture, and beheaded in 610. "His reign," says Gibbon, "afflicted Europe with ignominious peace, and Asia with desolating war."

PHOCION, a distinguished Athenian general and statesman, a disciple of Plato and Xenocrates; was wise in council as well as brave in war; opposed to the democracy of Athens, led on by Demosthenes in the frantic ambition of coping with Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander; and pled for a pacific arrangement with them; but having opposed war with Antipater, the successor of the latter, he was accused of treason, and condemned to drink hemlock; the Athenians afterwards repented of the crime, raised a bronze statue to his memory, and condemned his accuser to death.

PHOCIS, a province of ancient Greece, W. of Boeotia, and N. of the Gulf of Corinth; was traversed by the mountain range of Parna.s.sus, and contained the oracle of Apollo at Delphi; allied to Athens in the Peloponnesian War, the Phocians were crushed in the "Sacred War" after ten years' fighting by Philip of Macedon, 346 B.C.

PHOEBUS (i. e. the radiant one), an epithet originally applied to Apollo for his beauty, and eventually to him as the sun-G.o.d.

PHOENICIA, a country on the E. sh.o.r.e of the Levant, stretching inland to Mount Lebanon, at first extending only 20 m. N. of Palestine, but later embracing 200 m. of coast, with the towns of Tyre, Zarephath, Sidon, Gebal, and Arvad. The country comprised well-wooded hills and fertile plains, was rich in natural resources, richer still in a people of remarkable industry and enterprise. Of Semitic stock, they emerge from history with Sidon as ruling city about 1500 B.C., and reach their zenith under Tyre 1200-750, thereafter declining, and ultimately merging in the Roman Empire. During their prosperity their manufactures, purple dye, gla.s.s ware, and metal implements were in demand everywhere; they were the traders of the world, their nautical skill and geographical position making their markets the centres of exchange between East and West; their ships sailed every sea, and carried the merchandise of every country, and their colonists settled all over the Mediterranean, aegean, and Euxine, and even beyond the Pillars of Hercules, in Africa, in Britain, and the countries on the Baltic. Her greatest colony was Carthage, the founding of which (823 B.C.) sapped the strength of the mother-country, and which afterwards usurped her place, and contended with Rome for the mastery of the world. But Phoenicia's greatest gift to civilisation was the alphabet, which she herself may have developed from Egyptian hieroglyphics, and which, with its great merit of simplicity, has, slightly altered, at length superseded among civilised nations every other system.

PHOENIX, a bird which was fabled at the end of certain cycles of time to immolate itself in flames, and rise renewed in youth from the ashes. It has become the appropriate symbol of the death-birth that ever introduces a new era in the history of the world, and is employed by Carlyle in "Sartor" as symbol of the crisis through which the present generation is now pa.s.sing, the conflagration going on appearing nowise as a mere conflagration, but the necessary preliminary of a new time, with the germinating principles of which it is pregnant.

PHOENIX PARK, a magnificent public park of 2000 acres in Dublin; is much used for military reviews; it was rendered notorious in 1882 through the murder by the "Invincibles" of Lord Frederick Cavendish, who had just been appointed Irish Secretary, and his subordinate, Thomas Burke.

PHONOGRAPH, an instrument invented by EDISON (q. v.) in 1877 for recording and reproducing articulate sounds of the voice in speech or song, and to which the name of phonogram is given.

PHOTIUS, patriarch of Constantinople; was the great promoter of the schism on the question of the procession of the Holy Ghost, between the Eastern and the Western divisions of the Church, denying as he did, and erasing from the creed the _FILIOQUE_ article (q. v.); _d_. 891.

PHOTOGRAVURE, a process of reproducing pictures from the negative of a photograph on a gelatine surface with the a.s.sistance of certain chemical preparations.

PHOTOSPHERE, name given to the luminous atmosphere enveloping the sun.

PHOTOTYPE, a block with impressions produced by photography from which engravings, &c., can be printed.

PHRENOLOGY claims to be a science in which the relation of the functions of mind to the material of the brain substance is observed. It a.s.serts that just as speech, taste, touch, &c., have their centres in certain convolutions of the brain, so have benevolence, firmness, conscientiousness, &c., and that by studying the configuration of the brain, as indicated by that of the skull, a man's character may be approximately discovered. As a science it is usually discredited, and held to be unsupported by physiology, anatomy, and pathology. It is held as strongly militating against its claims that it takes no account of the convolutions of the brain that lie on the base of the skull. Its originators were Gall, Spurzheim, and Andrew and George Combe.

PHRYGIA, a country originally extending over the western sh.o.r.es of Asia Minor, but afterwards confined to the western uplands, where are the sources of the Hermus, Maeander, and Sangarius; was made up of barren hills where sheep famous for their wool grazed, and fertile valleys where the vine was cultivated; marble was quarried in the hills, and gold was found; several great trade roads from Ephesus crossed the country, among whose towns the names of Colosse and Laodicea are familiar; the Phrygians were an Armenian people, with a mystic orgiastic religion, and were successively conquered by a.s.syrians, Lydians, and Persians, falling under Rome in 43 B.C.

PHRYGIAN CAP, a cap worn by the Phrygians, and worn in modern times as the symbol of freedom.

PHRYNe, a Greek courtesan, celebrated for her beauty; was the model to Praxiteles of his statue of Venus; accused of profaning the Eleusinian Mysteries, she was brought before the judges, to whom she exposed her person, but who acquitted her of the charge, to preserve to the artists the image of divine beauty thus recognised in her.

PHTAH, a G.o.d of ancient Egypt, worshipped at Memphis; identified with Osiris and Socaris, and placed by the Egyptians at the head of the dynasty of the kings of Memphis.

PHYLACTERIES, strips of vellum inscribed with certain texts of Scripture, enclosed in small cases of calf-skin, and attached to the forehead or the left arm; originally connected with acts of worship, they were eventually turned to superst.i.tious uses, and employed sometimes as charms and sometimes by way of ostentatious display.

PHYSIOCRATIC SCHOOL, a school of economists founded by Quesney, who regarded the cultivation of the land as the chief sources of natural well-being, and argued for legislation in behalf of it.

PIACENZA (35), an old Italian city on the Po, 43 m. by rail SE. of Milan; has a cathedral, and among other churches the San Sisto, which contains the Sistine Madonna of Raphael, a theological seminary, and large library; it manufactures silks, cottons, and hats, and is a fortress of great strategical importance.

PIA-MATER, a membrane which invests the brain and the spinal cord; it is of a delicate vascular tissue.

PIARISTS, a purely religious order devoted to the education of the poor, founded in 1599 by a Spanish priest, and confirmed in 1617 by Paul V., and again in 1621 by Gregory XV.

PIAZZI, Italian astronomer; discovered in 1801 a planet between Mars and Jupiter, which he named Ceres, and the first of the planetoids recognised, as well as afterwards catalogued the stars (1746-1826).

PIBROCH, the Highland bagpipe; also the wild, martial music it discourses.

PICADOR, a man mounted on horseback armed with a spear to incite the bull in a bull-fight.

PICARDY, a province in the N. of France, the capital of which was Amiens; it now forms the department of Somme, and part of Aisne and Pas-de-Calais.

PICCOLOMINI, the name of an ill.u.s.trious family of science in Italy, of which aeneas Silvius (Pope Pius II.) was a member; also Octavio I., Duke of Amalfi, who distinguished himself, along with Wallenstein, in the Thirty Years' War at Lutzen in 1632, at Nordlinger in 1634, and at Thionville in 1639; was one of the most celebrated soldiers that had command of the imperial troops (1599-1656).

PICHEGRU, CHARLES, French general, born at Arbois, in Jura; served with distinguished success in the army of the Republic on the Rhine and in the Netherlands, but sold himself to the Bourbons, and being convicted of treason, was deported to Cayenne, but escaped to England, where in course of time he joined the conspiracy of Georges Cadoudal against the First Consul, and being betrayed, was imprisoned in the Temple, where one morning after he was found strangled (1761-1804).

PICKWICK, SAMUEL, the hero of d.i.c.kens's "Pickwick Papers," a character distinguished for his general goodness and his honest simplicity.

PICO, one of the Azores, consisting of a single volcanic mountain, still in action; produces excellent wine.

PICO DELLA MIRAN'DOLO, a notable Italian champion of the scholastic dogma, who challenged all the learned of Europe to enter the lists with him and controvert any one of 900 theses which he undertook to defend, a challenge which no one, under ban of the Pope, dared accept; he was the last of the schoolmen as well as a humanist in the bud, and was in his lifetime, with an astonishing forecast of destiny, named the PHOENIX (q. v.) (1463-1494).

PICQUART, COLONEL, French military officer; was distinguished as a student at the military schools; served in Algiers; became a captain in 1880; was appointed to the War Office in 1885; served with distinction in Tonquin; became professor at the Military School; rejoined the War Office in 1893, and was made head of the Intelligence Department in 1896; moved by certain discoveries affecting Esterhazy, began to inquire into the Dreyfus case, which led to his removal out of the way to Tunis; returned and exposed the proceedings against Dreyfus, with the result that a revision was demanded, and the charge confirmed; _b_. 1854.

PICTON, SIR THOMAS, British general, born in Pembroke; served in the West Indies, and became governor of Trinidad, also in the Walcheren Expedition, and became governor of Flushing, and in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, where he fell as he was leading his men to the charge (1758-1815).