Taree

City, northeastern New South Wales, Australia, 10 miles (16 km) above the coastal mouth of the Manning River. Established in 1854 as a private town, it was proclaimed a municipality in 1885 and a city in 1981; it derives its name from the Aboriginal tareehin, or tarrebit, referring to a local wild fig. Situated on the Sydney-Brisbane rail line and the Pacific Highway, 80 miles (130 km) northeast of Newcastle,

Henri, Robert

Henri studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, from 1884 to 1888, and at both the Acad�mie Julian and the �cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Upon

Aesthetics, The origins of modern aesthetics

Francis Bacon wrote essays on beauty and deformity, but he confined his remarks to the human figure. Ren� Descartes produced a treatise on music, although it contains little that would be recognized as aesthetics in the modern sense. During the first decades of modern philosophy, aesthetics flourished, not in the works of the great philosophers, but in the writings

West Germanic Languages, Characteristics of modern Standard German

German has the following consonants, given here in phonetic symbols because the spelling often varies: stops, p, b, t, d, k, g; fricatives, f, v, �~x; sibilants, s, z,

Self-fertilization

Fusion of male and female gametes (sex cells) produced by the same individual. Self-fertilization occurs in bisexual organisms, including most flowering plants, numerous protozoans, and many invertebrates. Autogamy, the production of gametes by the division of a single parent cell, is frequently found in unicellular organisms such as the protozoan Paramecium

Benedetti, Vincent, Comte

Benedetti studied law in Paris and in 1840 entered consular service. He served in several embassies in Europe and the Middle East between 1845 and 1864, when he was named ambassador to Prussia with instructions from Napoleon III to prevent

Andreini, Isabella

In 1578 Flaminio Scala, a theatrical manager and scenario writer, engaged Isabella Canali to play the female lead in his company. There she met Francesco Andreini and married him the same year. They helped form the

Nix

Also called �nixie�, or �nixy� in Germanic mythology, a water being, half human, half fish, that lives in a beautiful underwater palace and mingles with humans by assuming a variety of physical forms (e.g., that of a fair maiden or an old woman) or by making itself invisible. One of three attributes may betray the disguises of nixes: they are music lovers and excellent dancers, and they have the gift of prophecy.

Abbadie, Antoine-thomson D'; And Abbadie, Arnaud-michel D'

Their parents, a French father and an Irish mother, moved to France in 1818. In 1835 the French Academy sent Antoine on a scientific mission to Brazil. Arnaud

Mukacheve

Russian �Mukachovo, �also spelled �Mukachevo, or Mukacevo, �Hungarian �Munk�cs, � city, Zakarpattya oblast (province), western Ukraine, on the Latoritsa River. Its location controls the southern approach to a major pass across the Carpathian Mountains, today followed by road and rail. This position has given Mukacheve a key fortress role in sub-Carpathian Ruthenia since its foundation in the 10th century - mainly during its period of Hungarian rule

O'higgins, Bernardo

Bernardo O'Higgins was born in Chill�n, a town in southern Chile, then a colony of Spain. As noted in his certificate of Baptism, he was the illegitimate

Biblical Literature, Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls

New literary documents from the intertestamental period were found in the caves of Qumran in the vicinity of the Dead Sea in the 1940s, but only a portion of them has yet been published. All the Dead Sea Scrolls were written before the destruction of the Second Temple; with the exception of small Greek fragments, they are all in Hebrew and Aramaic. The scrolls formed the library