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LEFT MIB 252 MIRAGE MIR (mer), the Russian commune, consisting of the inhabitants of one or more villages, who are as a community owners of the surrounding land, and re- distribute the same to the members from time to time. It is self-governing, but under bureaucratic control. Under the Soviet Republic, 1918, the Mir was never entirely suppressed, and continued, in spite of the Bolshevik government, in some parts of Russia. MIRA (me'ra), or STELLA MIRA (the wonderful star), the star Omicron Ceti, a remarkable variable, whence the name. It is in the neck of "the whale." Its variability was discovered in 1596 by Fabricus. MIR ABE AU (me-ra-bo'K ANDRE BONIFACE RIQUETI, VICOMTE DE, a French royalist, brother of Honore Gabriel de Mirabeau; born in Bignon, t'". MIRABEAU Provence, France, Nov. 30, 1754. From an early age he was notorious for his ill- regulated life and for a thirst that earned him the nickname of "Barrel Mirabeau." He fought with distinction m the American war, and at the out- break of the Revolution was returned to the States-General by the nobility of Limoges. After the death of his brother he quitted France, and raised on the Rhine the "Hussars of Death," a legion of embittered emigres, with whom he began in 1792 a bloody partisan warfare against his country. He was run through by accident in Freiburg. Baden. Sept. 15, 1792. MIRABEAU, HONORE GABRIEL RIQUETI, COUNT DE, one of the most celebrated characters of the French Revolution; bom in Bignon, Provence, France, March 9, 1749. He was the son of the Marquis Victor Riquetti de Mira- beau, an author on political economy. On leaving school, he entered the mili- tary service; and his intercourse with young and dissipated officers familiar- ized him with all their vices. His father procured his confinement in a fortress on the island of Rhe. After his liberation he went, as a volunteer, to Corsica, dis- tinguished himself, and obtained a com- mission as a captain of dragoons; but his father refusing to purchase him a regiment, he abandoned, though unwill- ingly, the military profession. In 1772 he espoused a rich heiress of Aix, but he soon squandered the fortune he received with her and plunged himself in debt. In 1784 he visited London, and after- ward Berlin, being sent to the latter city on a secret political mission; and he was variously employed in literary quarrels and occupations till the commencement of the French Revolution. He was elected for Aix and Marseille! as deputy of the third estate, and wa6 chosen president in January, 1791. At length he entered into a treaty with the court, to use his influence in stopping the progress of republicanism. Before, however, he could carry his intentions into effect, a sudden illness teirminated his existence in Paris, France, April 2, 1791. His remains were honored with a public funeral, and deposited in the Pantheon. MIRACLE PLAYS, a sort of dramatic entertainments common in the Middle Ages, in which the subjects were taken from the lives of saints and the miracles they wrought. They were originally per- formed in church, but latterly outside, in market places and elsewhere. In Eng- land they were first produced in the 12th century. MIRAGE (me-razh'), an optical illu- sion by which images of distant objects or scenes appear inverted, and generally in mid-air. The phenomenon is best ob- served in the Egyptian or other deserts, though occasionally seen elsewhere. The soldiers of Napoleon I., when in Egypt, were much tantalized by the mirage; and Monge, who accompanied the expedi- tion, was the first to explain the illusion. The layers of air in contact with the heated soil are rarefied and expanded more than those immediately above them; a ray of light from an elevated ob- ject has to traverse strata of air less and less refracting, and the angle of in-