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 carried on till the owners formed themselves in 1890 into a limited company (Crawshay Brothers Cyfarthfa Limited), the controlling interest in which has since been acquired by the Dowlais Company. The Plymouth works, started soon after Cyfarthfa, by Wilkinson and Guest, passed later into the hands of Anthony Hill from whose descendants they were purchased in 1863. They were closed down in 1882, but the collieries belonging to them continue to be worked on a large scale, yielding over 2000 tons of coal a day. The fourth great ironworks were those of Pen-y-darran which were carried on from 1782 to 1859. It was at Dowlais (in 1856) that Bessemer steel was first rolled into rails, but the use of puddled iron was not wholly abandoned at the works till 1882. It has now eighteen blast furnaces, and extensive collieries are also worked by the company, and large branch works were opened on the sea-board at Cardiff in 1891. Cyfarthfa was converted into steel works in 1883. The iron ore used is mainly imported from Spain. Merthyr Vale is almost entirely dependent on coal-mining and has one of the largest collieries in south Wales (Nixon’s Navigation). The population of this district more than quintupled between 1881 and 1901.

From 1850 the government of the town was vested in a local board of health which in 1894 became an urban district council; by charter granted on the 5th of June 1905, it was vested in a corporation consisting of a mayor, 8 aldermen and 24 councillors. It was made a county borough from the 1st of April 1908. It comprises about 17,759 acres, is divided into eight wards and besides the older town, it includes Penydarran (1 m. N.E.), Dowlais (2 m. N.E.), Plymouth (1 m. S.) and Merthyr Vale (5 m. S.). It has a separate commission of the peace, and in conjunction with Aberdare and Mountain Ash, has had a stipendiary magistrate since 1829. The parliamentary borough which was created and given one member in 1832 and a second in 1867, includes the parish of Aberdare and parts of the parishes of Llanwonno, Merthyr Tydfil and Vainor (Brecon).

There is an electric tramway (completed in 1901) from the town to Cefn and Dowlais. In 1901 about 50% of the population above three years of age spoke both Welsh and English, 7% spoke Welsh only, and the remainder English only. The ancient parish of Merthyr Tydfil has been divided into five ecclesiastical parishes (Merthyr, Cyfarthfa, Dowlais, Pentrebach, and Penydarran) and part of another parish (Treharris). These six parishes form the rural deanery of Merthyr in the archdeaconry and diocese of Llandaff, and in 1906 had nine churches and fifteen mission rooms. An inscribed stone (Artbeu) has been built into the east wall of the parish church; and two other inscribed stones removed from. Abercar Farm in the greater Taff valley now lie in the parish churchyard. The old structure of the parish church has been entirely removed except the base of the tower. There is a Roman Catholic church in Penydarran Park and another at Dowlais. The Nonconformists, of which the chief denominations are the Baptists, Congregationalists and Methodists—Wesleyan and Calvinistic—had in 1906 82 chapels, 49 of which were used for Welsh services and 33 for English.

The public buildings include, besides the churches, a town hall and law courts (1898), drill hall (1866), library, market house, a county intermediate school, general hospital built in 1887 and enlarged in 1897, and an isolation fever hospital, a theatre (1894) and a fountain presented by Sir W. T. Lewis as a memorial to the pioneers of the town’s industry. At Dowlais there are public baths (1900) and a free library which have been provided by the owners of the Dowlais Works, Oddfellows hall (1878), and a fever hospital (1869). At Thomas Town there is a recreation ground of 16 acres, formed in 1902. In 1908 the corporation purchased Cyfarthfa Castle (formerly the residence of the Crawshay family) with a park of 62 acres including a lake of 6 acres.

 MERULA, GEORGIUS (the Latinized name of ; c. 1430–1494), Italian humanist and classical scholar, was born at Alessandria in Piedmont. The greater part of his life was spent at Venice and Milan, where he held a professorship and continued to teach until his death. To Merula we are indebted for the editio princeps of Plautus (1472), of the Scriptores rei rusticae, Cato, Varro, Columella, Palladius (1472) and possibly of Martial (1471). He also published commentaries on portions of Cicero (especially the De finibus), on Ausonius, Juvenal, Curtius Rufus, and other classical authors. He wrote also Bellum scodrense (1474), on account of the siege of Scodra (Scutari) by the Turks, and Antiquitates vicecomitum, the history of the Visconti, dukes of Milan, down to the death of Matteo the Great (1322); He violently attacked, Politian (Poliziano), whose Miscellanea (a collection of notes on classical authors) were declared by Merula to be either plagiarized from his own writings or, when original, to be entirely incorrect.

 MERV, or, an oasis and town of Asia, in the Transcaspian province of Russia. The oasis is situated on the S. edge of the Kara-kum desert, in 37° 30′ N. and 62° E. It is about 230 m. N. from Herat, and 280 S.S.E. from Khiva. Its area is about 1900 sq. m. The great chain of mountains which, under the names of Paropamisus and Hindu-Kush, extends from the Caspian to the Pamirs is interrupted some 180 m. south of Merv. Through or near this gap flow northwards in parallel courses the rivers Heri-rud (Tejend) and Murghab, until they lose themselves in the desert of Kara-kum. Thus they make Merv a sort of watch tower over the entrance into Afghanistan on the north-west and at the same time create a stepping-stone or étape between north-east Persia and the states of Bokhara and Samarkand. The present inhabitants of the oasis are Turkomans of the Tekke tribe. In 1897 they numbered approximately 240,000. The oasis is irrigated by an elaborate system of canals cut from the Murghab. The country has at all times been renowned throughout the East for its fertility. Every kind of cereal and many fruits grow in great abundance, e.g. wheat, millet, barley and melons, also rice and cotton. Silkworms are bred. The Turkomans possess a famous breed of horses and keep camels, sheep, cattle, asses and mules. They are excellent workers in silver and noted as armourers, and their carpets are superior to the Persian. They also make felts and a rough cloth of sheep’s wool. The heat of summer is most oppressive. The least wind raises clouds of fine dust, which fill the air, render it so opaque as to obscure the noonday sun, and make respiration difficult. In winter the climate is very fine. Snow falls rarely, and when it does, it melts at once. The annual rainfall rarely exceeds 5 in., and there is often no rain from June till October. While in summer the thermometer goes up to 97° F., in winter it descends to 19·5°. The average yearly temperature is 60°. Here is a Russian imperial domain of 436 sq. m., artificially irrigated by works completed in 1895.

History.—In Hindu (the Puranas), Parsi and Arab tradition, Merv is looked upon as the ancient Paradise, the cradle of the Aryan families of mankind, and so of the human race. Under the name of Mouru this place is mentioned with Bakhdi (Balkh) in the geography of the Zend-Avesta (Vendidad, ed. Spiegel, 1852–1863), which dates probably from at least 1200 Under the name of Margu it occurs in the cuneiform (Behistun) inscriptions of the Persian monarch Darius Hystaspis, where it is referred to as forming part of one of the satrapies of the ancient Persian Empire. It afterwards became a province (Margiana) of the Graeco-Syrian, Parthian and Persian kingdoms. On the Margus—the Epardus of Arrian and now the Murghab—stood the capital of the district, Antiochia Margiana, so called after Antiochus Soter, who rebuilt the city founded by Alexander the Great.