Page:EB1911 - Volume 19.djvu/182

 NANTWICH, a market town in the Crewe parliamentary division of Cheshire, England, 161 m. N.W. of London, on the London & North-Western and Great Western railways. Pop. of urban district (1901) 7722. It lies on the river Weaver, in the upper part of its flat, open valley. The church of St Mary and St Nicholas is a cruciform building in red sandstone, of the Decorated and Perpendicular periods, with a central octagonal tower. The fine old carved stalls are said to have belonged to Vale Royal Abbey, near Winsford in this county. Nantwich retains not a few old timbered houses of the 16th and 17th centuries, but the town as a whole is modern in appearance. The grammar school was founded in 1611. The salt industry, still the staple of several towns lower down the vale of the Weaver, was so important here in the time of Henry VIII. that there were three hundred salt-works. Though this industry has lapsed, there are brine baths, much used in cases of rheumatism, gout and general debility, and the former private mansion of Shrewbridge Hall is converted into a hotel with a spa. Nantwich has tanneries, a manufacture of boots and shoes, and clothing factories; and corn-milling and iron-founding are carried on. The town is one of the best hunting centres in the county, being within reach of several meets.

NAOROJI, DADABHAI (1825–  ), Indian politician, was born at Nasik on the 4th of September 1825, the son of a Parsi priest. During a long and active life, he played many parts: professor of mathematics at the Elphinstone college (1854); founder of the Rast Goftar newspaper; partner in a Parsi business firm in London (1855); prime minister of Baroda (1874); member of the Bombay legislative council (1885); M.P. for Central Finsbury (1892–1895), being the first Indian to be elected to the House of Commons; three times president of the Indian National Congress. Many of his numerous writings are collected in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901).

NAP, the pile on cloth, the surface of short fibres raised by special processes, differing with the various fabrics, and then smoothed and cut. Formerly the word was applied to the roughness on textiles before shearing. “Nap” in this sense appears in many Teutonic languages, cf. Ger. Noppe, Dutch nop, Nor. napp; the verbal form is noppen or nappen, to trim, cut short. The word nap also means a short sleep or doze (O. Eng. hnappian). In “napkin,” a square of damask or other linen, used for wiping the hands and lips or for protecting the clothes at meals, the second part is a common English suffix, sometimes of diminutive force, and the first is from “nape,” Low Lat. napa or nappa, a corrupt form of mappa, table-cloth. Nape still survives in “napery,” a name for household linen in general.

NAPHTALI, in the Bible, the name of an Israelite tribe, the “son” of Jacob by Bilhah, Rachel’s maid, and the uterine brother of Dan (Gen. xxx. 8). It lay to the south of Dan in the eastern half of upper Galilee (Josh. xix. 32-39), a fertile mountainous district (cf. Gen. xlix. 21; Deut. xxxiii. 23), open to the surrounding influences of Phoenicia and Aram. Apart from its share in the war against Sisera (Judg. iv. seq., see ), little is known of it. It evidently suffered in the bloody conflicts of Damascus with Israel (1 Kings xv. 20), and was depopulated by Tiglath-Pileser IV. (2 Kings xv. 29; Isa. ix. 1). Naphtali and Dan are “brothers,” perhaps partly on geographical grounds, but Dan also had a seat in the south (south-west of Ephraim), and the name of the “mother” Bilhah is apparently connected with Bilhan, an Edomite and also a Benjamite name (Gen. xxxvi. 27; 1 Chron. vii. 10).

NAPHTHA, a word originally applied to the more fluid kinds of petroleum, issuing from the ground in the Baku district of Russia and in Persia. It is the  of Dioscorides, and the naphtha, or bitumen liquidum candidum of Pliny. By the alchemists the word was used principally to distinguish various highly volatile, mobile and inflammable liquids, such as the ethers, sulphuric ether and acetic ether having been known respectively as naphtha sulphurici and naphtha aceti.

NAPHTHALENE, C10H8, a hydrocarbon discovered in the “carbolic” and “heavy oil” fractions of the coal-tar distillate (see ) in 1819 by A. Garden. It is a product of the action of heat on many organic compounds, being formed when the vapours of ether, camphor, acetic acid, ethylene, acetylene, &c., are passed through a red-hot tube (M. Berthelot, Jahresb., 1851), or when petroleum is led through a red-hot tube packed with charcoal (A. Letny, Ber., 1878, 11, p. 1210). It may be synthesized by passing the vapour of phenyl butylene bromide over heated soda lime (B. Aronheim, Ann., 1874, 171, p. 219); and by the action of ortho-xylylene bromide on sodium ethane tetracarboxylic ester, the resulting tetra-hydronaphthalene tetracarboxylic ester being hydrolysed and heated, when it yields hydronaphthalene dicarboxylic acid, the silver salt of which decomposes on distillation into naphthalene and other products (A. v. Baeyer and W. H. Perkin, junr., Ber., 1884, 17, p. 451):—