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 NOCTURN, or (Lat. nocturnus, of or belonging to the night, nox), in the Roman Church, one of the three divisions of the office of matins, corresponding with the vigils, beginning at 9 midnight and 3  respectively. The service consists of psalms, lessons and antiphons (see ). The term “nocturne” is applied to a musical composition, answering to the earlier “serenade,” of a quiet, dreamy and romantic character. The name and style are said to have originated with John Field (1782–1837). The best-known compositions of this kind are the pianoforte pieces of Chopin. J. McNeill Whistler also introduced the term into painting by using the name for some of his night-pieces. A “nocturnal” is an instrument for finding the hour of the night by observation of the relative positions of the pole-star and other stars, generally the pointers of Ursa Major. The British Museum contains a fine nocturnal made about 1560 by Humfray Cole (see ).  NODDY, the name applied, originally by sailors, to a sea-bird, from its showing so little fear of man as to be accounted stupid. It is the Sterna stolida of Linnaeus, and the Anous stolidus of modern ornithology, having the figure of a (q.v.), and belonging to the sub-family Sterninae, but is heavier in flight, with shorter wings, and the tail less deeply forked. The plumage is of a uniform sooty hue, excepting the crown of the head, which is light grey. The Noddy is very generally distributed throughout the tropical or nearly tropical oceans, but occasionally wanders into colder climates, and has been met with even in the Irish Sea. It breeds, often in astounding numbers, on low cays and coral-islets, commonly making a shallow nest of sea-weed or small twigs. Howard Saunders (Proc. Zool. Society, 1876, pp. 669-672) admits four other species of the genus: Anous tenuirostris, supposed to be confined to the southern part of the Indian Ocean, from Madagascar to West Australia; A. melanogenys, often confounded with the last, but having nearly as wide a range as the first; and A. leucocapillus, hitherto known only from Torres Strait and the Southern Pacific. These three have much resemblance to A. stolidus, but are smaller in size, and the two latter have the crown white instead of grey. The fourth species, A. caeruleus (with which he includes the A. cinereus of some authors), differs not inconsiderably, being of a dove-colour, lighter on the head and darker on the back, the wings bearing a narrow white bar, with their quill-feathers blackish-brown, while the feet are reddish and the webs yellow. Three more species—A. superciliosus from the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, A. plumbeigularis from the Red Sea, and A. galapagensis from the Galapagos—have been added by R. Bowdler Sharpe (Philos. Transactions, clxviii. pp. 468, 469), according to whom (Proc. Zool. Society, 1878, p. 272) A. cinereus of the Eastern Pacific is distinct from A. caeruleus of Australia and the Western Pacific.

 NODE (Lat. nodus, a loop), in astronomy, one of two opposite points at which a heavenly body passes through the principal co-ordinate plane to which its motion is referred. In the case of the heavenly bodies this plane is commonly that of the ecliptic, but, in special cases, the plane through the origin parallel to the earth’s equator or the plane of a planet’s orbit is used. The ascending node is that at which the body moves from the south or negative towards the north or positive side of the plane. The moon’s nodes are the points in which its path intercepts the plane of the ecliptic. In the geometry of curves, a node is the name given to the loop formed by a continuous curve crossing itself, the point of crossing is termed a “double point,” and at it there are two non-coincident tangents to the curve; the remaining species of double points, termed “acnode,” “spinode” or “cusp,” admits of two coincident tangents (see ).  NODIER, CHARLES (1780–1844), French author, was born on the 29th of April 1780 at Besançon. His father, on the outbreak of the Revolution, was appointed mayor of Besançon and consequently chief police magistrate; he seems to have rather lent himself as an instrument to the tyranny of the Jacobins than to have shared their principles; but his son was for a time an ardent citizen, and is said to have been a club member when he could at the most have been twelve years old. In 1793 Charles

saved the life of a lady guilty of sending money to an émigré, by declaring to his father that if she were condemned he would take his own life. He was sent to Strassburg, where he lived in the house of Eulogius Schneider, the notorious Jacobin governor of Alsace, but a good Greek scholar. During the Terror his father put him under the care of Girod de Chautrans, with whom he studied English and German. His love of books began very early, and he combined with it a strong interest in natural science. He became librarian in his native town, but his exertions in the cause of suspected persons brought him under suspicion. An inspection of his papers by the police, however, revealed nothing more dangerous than a dissertation on the antennae of insects. Entomology continued to be a favourite study with him, but he varied it with philology and pure literature and even political writing. For a skit on Napoleon, in 1803, he was imprisoned for some months. He then quitted Paris, whither he had gone after losing his position at Besançon, and for some years lived a very unsettled life at Besançon, Dôle, where he married, and in other places in the Jura. During these wanderings he wrote Le Peintre de Salzbourg, journal des émotions d’un cœur souffrant, suivi des Méditations du cloître (1803). The hero, Charles, who is a variation of the Werther type, desires the restoration of the monasteries, to afford a refuge from the woes of the world. In 1811 Nodier appears at Laibach as editor of a polyglot journal, the Illyrian Telegraph, published in French, German, Italian and Slav. On the evacuation of the Illyrian provinces he returned to Paris, and the restoration found him a royalist, though he retained something of republican sentiment. In 1824 he was appointed to the librarianship of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal. He was elected a member of the Academy in 1833, and made a member of the Legion of Honour in 1843, a year before his death on the 27th of January 1844. These twenty years at the arsenal were by far the most important and fruitful of Nodier’s life. He had much of the Bohemian in his composition. But he had the advantage of a settled home in which to collect and study rare books; and he was able to supply a centre and rallying place to a knot of young literary men of greater individual talent than himself—the so-called Romanticists of 1830—and to colour their tastes and work very decidedly with his own predilections. Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset and Sainte-Beuve all acknowledged their obligations to him. He was a passionate admirer of Goethe and of Shakespeare, and had himself contributed to the personal literature that was one of the leading traits of the Romantic school.

 NOEGGERATH, JOHANN JACOB (1788–1877), German mineralogist and geologist, was born at Bonn on the 10th of