The Atellanae or Atellan gables were interludes in the Roman theatre introduced from Atella in Campania. They were performed not by the regular actors, but by freeborn young Romans. The characters of Macchus and Bucco are thought to be the foundations of the modern Punch and Clown. Research Atellanae
In civil engineering, a cofferdam (coffer-dam)is a water-tight enclosure sometimes of piles packed with clay, from which the water is pumped to expose the bottom of a river, etc. and so permit the laying of foundations, building of piers, etc. Research Cofferdam
Diving is the art or act of descending into water to considerable depths, and remaining there for a time. The uses of diving are important, particularly in fishing for pearls, corals, sponges, examining the foundations of bridges, recovering valuables from sunken ships, and the like. Without the aid of artificial appliances a skilful diver may remain under water for two, or even three minutes and rarely longer. Various methods have been proposed and engines contrived to render diving more safe and easy. The great object in all these is to furnish the diver with fresh air, without which he must either make but a short stay under water or perish. Research Diving
The Eddystone Lighthouse is a lighthouse in the English Channel, erected to mark a group of rocks lying in the fair-way from the Start to the Lizard. The rocks are covered only at the flood. The first lighthouse was of wood, and built by Henry Winstanley in 1696. It was carried away in the storm of 1703. Another lighthouse, also of wood, was built in 1706 by Mr. Rudyerd, but was burned down in 1755. It was succeeded by one built by John Smeaton in 1757 to 1759, which was a circular tower some 85 feet tall. The foundations becoming weakend this structure was replaced in 1879 - 1822 by one designed by Sir J N Douglass and placed on the neighbouring reef. Research Eddystone Lighthouse
Gonville and Caiss College is a college of Cambridge University. It was founded in 1358 by Edmund Gonville, of Terrington, Norfolk. In 1558 Dr. Caius obtained the royal charter by which all the former foundations were confirmed and his own foundation was established. By this charter the college was thenceforth to be called Gonville and Caius College. Research Gonville and Caius College
Health Acts (Public) are acts passed in order to secure the good sanitary condition of any country or district. The first British Public Health Act was passed in 1848, and was followed by others, a comprehensive general act being the Public Health Act (1875), which was subsequently amended and extended. Through history there have been separate legislation for London, Scotland, and Ireland. The acts contained provisions respecting sewers, water supply, unsound food, contagious diseases, etc, and formed the foundations of modern legislation and regulation. Research Health Acts
The Renaissance was that change in the outlook of Europe which took place during the centuries from the fourteenth to the sixteenth. In its broadest sense the Renaissance affected every department of human life. But in its narrower sense it refers to the revival of the learning of ancient Greece, and to the effects of that revival on the arts and literature of modern peoples. The Church in the Middle Ages had taught men to revere authority and to find in her teaching an answer to all the problems of life, whereas the Greeks taught men to inquire and to explore rather than to accept, and to enjoy rather than to suffer. It was this attitude of mind, more than anything else, which shook the medieval world to its foundations. The views of the ancient Greeks, now re-born into the world, were in sharp contrast with the ideals of the Middle Ages. From these ideals many men for a time turned with a feeling of contempt.
The Renaissance was a many-sided movement: it deeply influenced learning and education, art and architecture, science and invention, geography and exploration, and, above all, religion. After the fall of Rome, a knowledge of Greek had rapidly died out in the West and no provision was made for its teaching similar to that made for Latin. In Italy, owing to the closeness of its relations with the East, the number of scholars, monks, and others, who learnt some Greek was greater than elsewhere. It is not, surprising, therefore, that the revival of learning received its main impulse from Italy. From the time of Petrarch and Boccaccio, Italian scholars became more and more devoted to ancient studies, and they began to visit Constantinople, where Greek learning had been preserved. There they hunted out, copied, and eagerly studied the precious manuscripts of the past, and these opened up a new world of thought. Further, from the time that the Turks' crossed from Asia into Europe, some of the Greeks themselves began to travel westwards and to accept well-paid teaching posts in the wealthy Italian cities. And, though the revival began in Italy, the new ideas were rapidly circulated by the new printing presses invented at the time, and every nation in due course played its part in the Renaissance.
The great and wealthy city of Florence was the centre of the Italian Renaissance. Cosimo de Medici, a merchant prince who became ruler of the city, was a patron of the New Learning, and he encouraged Greek scholars to settle in Florence. His grandson, Lorenzo de Medici, known as The Magnificent, loved to gather round him the learned men of the day; he spent 60,000 pounds a year on books; and he caused 200 rare manuscripts to be brought from the East to the Medici library. Rome was second only to Florence as a centre of the New Learning. The Popes themselves became great patrons of learning. Nicholas V founded the Vatican Library. When the son of Lorenzo de Medici became Pope as Leo X, the Renaissance in Rome reached its highest point. Leo made Rome, as he said, ' the capital of the world in literature, as it is in everything else'. He provided a hundred professors for his Greek college in Rome, and he brought his father's library to the Holy City. The library was afterwards restored to Florence by his cousin Clement VII, another member of this remarkable Medici family. The New Learning influenced England from the time of Edward IV, and it made great headway in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII when the scholars known as the Oxford Reformers were flourishing.
The first Englishman to bring Greek manuscripts to England was William Selling. One of his pupils was Thomas Linacre, who went to Florence and shared the instruction given to the young Medici princes; he read in the Vatican Library, and made the acquaintance of Aldo at Venice. Another Oxford teacher who drew his inspiration from Italian sources was William Grocyn, one of the first men to give lectures on Greek literature at his University.
One of Grocyn's pupils was John Colet, who visited Italy in 1496 and returned to lecture on the Gospels in the Greek original at Oxford. He and Sir Thomas More, were friends of Erasmus, a Dutch scholar of international fame. Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, was herself a patroness of the New Learning. She founded two Cambridge colleges, Christ's and St. John's, and two Lady Margaret Professorships of Divinity, one at Oxford and one at Cambridge. The Revival of Learning was one aspect of the Renaissance; the outburst of artistic energy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was another. The painters of the new period broke away from the conventional art of the Middle Ages and began again to draw from living models. As with the artists, so with the sculptors. Donatello 'went straight with his mighty chisel to original sources - to youth and manhood, and the love of living'. The great figures of that age - Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian - still dominate the history of European art. Examples of their works, and of many other Italian artists of the Renaissance, as well as of the Northern artists - Holbein, Durer, and others - are to be seen in the magnificent collection at the National Gallery.
It was natural that men who sought their inspiration from the Greeks should turn with renewed interest to classical architecture. The ruins of ancient Rome provided examples ready to hand; and soon churches planned like classical temples were rising in every city in Italy. St. Peter's, Rome, was designed by Bramante, and the famous dome added by Michelangelo. But great as was the enthusiasm for this architecture Renaissance architecture did not establish itself in England until the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, though Henry VII's tomb at WestminsterAbbey is an example of the Florentine art of the period.
The Renaissance period, filled as it was with a love of experiment, naturally produced a renewed interest in science. With the exception of isolated geniuses like Friar Roger Bacon, there were no medieval scientists worthy of the name. Practically no scientific discoveries had been made for centuries. Modern Science begins its history with the Renaissance and owes a good deal to Leonardo da Vinci. He was the first of a long line of experimenters whose work has continued to the present day. The greatest shock to the medieval notions of the universe was given by Copernicus. For two thousand years mankind with few exceptions had believed that the earth was the centre of the universe, and that the sun revolved round our planet every twenty-four hours. Such had been the teaching of Ptolemy, the Greek scientist. Another Greek, Pythagoras, had questioned it, and advanced the extraordinary notion that the sun, not the earth, was the centre of the universe; but there were few who accepted his theory until Copernicus turned his attention to the 'solar system'. Through slits cut in the walls of his house, Copernicus watched the movements of the planets. Just before he died in 1543 he published a book - 'The Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies' - giving to the world the results of his observations.
Twenty years later the famous Galileo was born at Pisa, and it was he who perfected the telescope. He lived to popularise the theory of Copernicus, but he was nearly put to death for his pains and was forced by the Court of Inquisition to recant. The Italian Galileo, and the English Newton who discovered the laws of gravity, were the two greatest scientists of the seventeenth century. In the realm of geographical discovery, no age in the world' s history was more momentous than the Age of the Renaissance. Columbus, who discovered America; Vasco De Gama, who found the Cape Route to India; Cabot, Cartier, and Cortez, the discoverers of Newfoundland, Canada, and Mexico; Balboa, who first sailed on the Pacific; Magellan, whose ship was the first to sail round the world - all these and many more make the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries an era without parallel in the annals of discovery.
The new ideas which came surging into the world during the Renaissance acted in many respects as disruptive forces. This was particularly true in the realm of religion. An unquestioning acceptance of authority - i.e. of the teaching of the Catholic Church - was the keynote of the medieval attitude to life, but an eager, inquiring generation began to question this attitude. Men, too, were shocked by the moral decay of the Church and of the Papacy; voices were raised demanding reforms. Some reformers, like Colet and Erasmus, tried to reconcile the new ideas with the Church of Rome and worked to reform it; others, of whom Luther was the greatest, rejected altogether its authority.
The revolution in European history known as the Reformation was an indirect result of the Renaissance - of the New Learning which invited comparison between the present and the past; of the invention of printing which scattered broadcast the new ideas; and again, of the growing idea of the Nation and with it the supremacy of the State. Research Renaissance
Soil mechanics is the branch of engineering that studies the nature and properties of the soil. Soil is investigated during construction work to ensure that it has the mechanical properties necessary to support the foundations of dams, bridges, and roads. Research Soil Mechanics
Trinity College is the largest of the colleges of Cambridge University. It was founded by Henry VIII in 1546 by the amalgamation of nine earlier foundations including Michaelhouse, founded by Hervey de Stanton in 1324, and King's Hall founded by Edward III in 1337. Research Trinity College (Cambridge)
The Virginia Resolutions were resolutions passed by the Virginia legislature in 1798, in antagonism to the loose construction view of the Federalists. The passage of the Alien and Sedition laws was the direct cause of their adoption. They were framed by James Madison and sent to the legislatures of the other States, by which they were not approved. They declared the Union to be a compact, each party to which had a right to 'interpose' in order to protect and defend itself against infringements of the compact. They regretted the introduction of a broad construction of the constitution, as tending toward a monarchy. They protested against the Alien and Sedition laws as unconstitutional. With the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799, these were the foundations of the later doctrines of nullification and secession. Research Virginia Resolutions
The Probert Encyclopaedia was designed, edited and programed by
Matt and Leela Probert
Abbreviations
Research Atellanae
