Page:1902 Encyclopædia Britannica - Volume 25 - A-AUS.pdf/275

 AINSWORTH—AINP Ainsworth, William Harrison (1805-1882), English novelist, son of Thomas Ainsworth, solicitor, was born at Manchester, 4th February 1805. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School, and articled to the firm of which his father was a member, proceeding to London in 1824 to complete his legal training at the Inner Temple. At the age of twenty-one he married a daughter of John Ebers, the publisher, and started in his father-in-law’s line of business. This, however, soon proved unprofitable, and he decided to attempt literary work. A novel called Sir John Chioerton, in which he appears to have had a share, had attracted the praise of Sir Walter Scott, and this encouragement decided him to take up fiction as a career. In 1834 he published Rookwood, which had an immediate success, and thenceforth he was always occupied with the compilation of “ historical ” novels. He published about forty such stories, of which the best known are Jack Sheppard (1839), The Tower of London (1840), Guy Fawkes (1841), Old St Pauls (1841), and Windsor Castle (1843). He edited Bentley's Miscellany, in which Jack Sheppard was published as a serial, and for twelve years from 1842 he was proprietor of Ainsworth’s Magazine. He continued his literary activity until his death, but his later stories were less striking than the earlier, perhaps owing to his having exhausted the more fruitful fields of historical narrative in his first flights. He died at Reigate, 3rd January 1882, and was buried at Kensal Green. Ainsworth had a lively talent for plot, and his books have many attractive qualities. He was skilful in weaving historical facts into the fabric of fiction, and in giving just sufficient of the former to leaven the latter with an air of probability. His style was not without archaic affectation and awkwardness, but when his energies were aroused by a striking situation he could be brisk, vigorous, and impressive. He did a great deal to interest the less educated classes in the historical romances of their country, and his tales were invariably instructive, clean, and manly. (a. Wa) Aintab, mediaeval Ilamtab, a large garrison town in Syria, in the Aleppo vilayet, situated in the broad valley of the Sajiir. Its position is one of military and commercial importance, and its castle was noted in the Middle Ages for its great strength. In 1895 many Armenians were massacred and the bazars were pillaged. American missionary and educational enterprise has established Central Turkey College, with a medical school, a girls’ school, and an hospital. Cereals and tobacco are exported, and cotton cloths are made. Population, 45,000 (Moslems, 26,000; Christians, 18,500; Jews, 500). Ainu.—The Ainu—often erroneously called Aino— are usually spoken of as the autochthonous inhabitants of Japan, but the most accurate researches go to prove that they were immigrants, who reached Yezo from the Kuriles, and subsequently crossing Tsugaru strait, colonized a great part of the main island of Japan, exterminating a race of pit-dwellers to whom they gave the name of koro-pok-guru (men with sunken places). These koro-pokguru were of such small stature as to be considered dwarfs. They wore skins of animals for clothing, and that they understood the potter’s art and used flint arrow-heads is clearly proved by excavations at the sites of their pits. The Ainu, on the contrary, never had any knowledge of pottery. Ultimately the Ainu, coming into contact with the Japanese, who had immigrated from the south and west, were driven northward into the island of Yezo, where, as well as in the Kuriles and in the southern part of Saghalien, they are still found in some numbers. When, at the close of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, Russian enterprises drew the attention of

231 the Japanese Government to the northern districts of the empire, the Tokugawa Shoguns adopted towards the Ainu a policy of liberality and leniency consistent with the best principles of modern colonization. But the doom of unfitn ss appears to have begun to overtake the race long ago. History indicates that in ancient times they were fierce fighters, able to offer a stout resistance to the incomparably better armed and more civilized Japanese. To-day, they are drunken, dirty, spiritless folk, whom it is difficult to suppose capable of the warlike role they once played. Their number is virtually stationary, as the census shows :— Ainu Population of Yezo and the Kuriles. 1893 ..... 17,280 1894 ..... 15,308 1895 ..... 17,314 1896 ..... 17,400 1897 ..... 16,972 1898 ..... 17,573 The Ainu are somewhat taller than the Japanese, stoutly built, well proportioned; with dark-brown eyes, high cheek-bones, short broad noses and faces lacking length. Naturally very hairy and never shaving after a certain age, they have full beards and moustaches. Men and women alike cut their hair level with the shoulders at the sides of the head, but trim it semicircularly behind. The women tattoo their mouths, arms, and sometimes their foreheads, using for colour the smut deposited on a pot hung over a fire of birch bark. Their original dress is a robe spun from the bark of the elm tree. It has long sleeves, reaches nearly to the feet, is folded round the body and tied with a girdle of the same material. Females wear also an undergarment of Japanese cloth. In winter, the skins of animals are worn, with leggings of deer-skin and boots made from the skin of dogs or salmon. Both sexes are fond of ear-rings, which are said to have been made of grape-vine in former times, but are now purchased from the Japanese, as also are bead necklaces, which the women prize highly. Their food is meat, whenever they can procure it—the flesh of the bear, the fox, the wolf, the badger, the ox, or the horse—fish, fowl, millet, vegetables, herbs, and roots. They never eat raw fish or flesh, but always either boil or roast it. Their habitations are reedthatched huts, the largest 20 feet square, without partitions and having a fireplace in the centre. There is no chimney, but only a hole at the angle of the roof; there is one window on the eastern side and there are two doors. Public buildings do not exist, whether in the shape of inn, meeting-place, or temple. The furniture of their dwellings is exceedingly scanty. They have no chairs, stools, or tables, but sit on the floor, which is covered with two layers of mats, one of rush, the other of flag; and for beds they spread planks, hanging mats around them on poles, and employing skins for coverlets. The men use chop-sticks and moustache-lifters when eating; the women have wooden spoons. Uncleanliness is characteristic of the Ainu, and all their intercourse with the Japanese has not improved them in that respect. The Rev. Mr Batchelor, in his Notes on the Ainu, says that he lived in one Ainu habitation for six weeks on one occasion, and for two months on another, and that he never once saw personal ablutions performed, or cooking or eating utensils washed. Not having been at any period acquainted with the art of writing, they have no literature and are profoundly ignorant. But at schools established for them by the Japanese in recent times, they have shown that • their intellectual capacity is not deficient. No distinct conception of a universe enters into their cosmology. They picture to themselves many floating worlds, yet they deduce the idea of rotundity from the course of the sun, and they imagine that the “Ainu world”