Page:EB1911 - Volume 20.djvu/387

 

 OSNABURG, the name given to a coarsish type of plain fabric, originally made from flax yarns. It is now made from either flax, tow or jute yarns—sometimes flax or tow warp with mixed or jute weft, and often entirely of jute. The finer and better qualities form a kind of common sheeting, and the various kinds may contain from 20 to 36 threads per inch and 10 to 15 picks per inch.  OSORIO, JERONYMO (1506–1580), Portuguese historian, was a native of Lisbon and son of the Ouvidor Geral of India. In 1519 his mother sent him to Salamanca to study civil law, and in 1525 he went on to Paris to study philosophy, and there became intimate with Peter Fabre, one of the founders of the Society of Jesus. Returning to Portugal, Osorio next proceeded for theology to Bologna, where he made such a name that King John III. invited him in 1536–1537 to lecture on scripture in the reorganized university of Coimbra. He returned to Lisbon in 1540, and acted as secretary to Prince Luiz, and as tutor to his son, the prior of Crato, obtaining also two benefices in the diocese of Vizeu. In 1542 he printed in Lisbon his treatise De nobilitate. After the death of Prince Luiz in 1553, he withdrew from court to his churches. He was named archdeacon of Evora in 1560, and much against his will became bishop of Silves in 1564. The Cardinal Prince Henry, who had bestowed these honours, desired to employ him at Lisbon in state business when King Sebastian took up the reins of power in 1568, but Osorio excused himself on the ground of his pastoral duties, though he showed his zeal for the commonwealth by writing two letters, one in which he dissuaded the king from going to Africa, the other sent during the latter’s first expedition there (1574), in which he called on him to return to his kingdom. Sebastian looked with disfavour on opponents of his African adventure, and Osorio found it prudent to leave Portugal for Parma and Rome on the pretext of a visit ad limina. His scruples regarding residence, and the appeals of the king and the Cardinal Prince, prevented him enjoying for long the hospitality of Pope Gregory XIII., and he returned to his diocese and died at Tavira on the 20th of August 1580. An exemplary prelate, a learned scholar and an able critic, Osorio gained a European reputation by writing in Latin, then the lingua franca of the studious throughout Christendom, and the perfection of his prose style caused him to be named by contemporaries “the Portuguese Cicero.” His well-stocked library was carried off from Faro when the earl of Essex captured the town in 1596, and many of the books were bestowed on the Bodleian at Oxford.

 OSPREY, or, a word said to be corrupted from “Ossifrage,” Lat. ossifraga, bone-breaker. The Ossifraga of Pliny (H.N. x. 3) and some other classical writers seems to have

been the (q.v.); but the name, not inapplicable in that case, has been transferred to another bird which is no breaker of bones, save incidentally those of the fishes it devours. The osprey is a rapacious bird, of middling size and of conspicuously-marked plumage, the white of its lower parts, and often of its head, contrasting sharply with the dark brown of the back and most of its upper parts when the bird is seen on the wing. It is the Falco haliaetus of Linnaeus, but was, in 1810, established by J. C. Savigny (Ois. de l’Égypte, p. 35) as the type of a new genus Pandion. It is closely related to the family Falconidae, but is the representative of a separate family, Pandionidae. Pandion differs from the Falconidae not only pterylologically, as observed by C. L. Nitzsch, but also osteologically, as pointed out by A. Milne-Edwards (Ois. foss. France, ii. pp. 413, 419). In some of the characters in which it differs structurally from the Falconidae, it agrees with certain of the owls; but the most important parts of its internal structure, as well as of its pterylosis, forbid a belief that there is any near alliance of the two groups. The special characters of the family are the presence of a reversible outer toe, the absence of an aftershaft and the feathering of the tibiae.

The osprey is one of the most cosmopolitan birds-of-prey. From Alaska to Brazil, from Lapland to Natal, from Japan to Tasmania, and in some of the islands of the Pacific, it occurs as a winter-visitant or as a resident. Though migratory in Europe at least, it is generally independent of climate. It breeds equally on the half-thawed shores of Hudson’s Bay and on the cays of Honduras, in the dense forests of Finland and on the barren rocks of the Red Sea, in Kamchatka and in West Australia. Among the countries it does not frequent are Iceland and New Zealand. Where, through abundance of food, it is numerous—as in former days was the case in the eastern part of the United States—the nests of the fish-hawk (to use its American name) may be placed on trees to the number of three hundred close together. Where food is scarcer and the species accordingly less plentiful, a single pair will occupy an isolated rock, and jealously expel all intruders of their kind, as happens in Scotland. Few birds lay eggs so beautiful or so rich in colouring: their white or pale ground is spotted, blotched or marbled with almost every shade of purple, orange and red—passing from the most delicate lilac, buff and peach-blossom, through violet, chestnut and crimson, to a nearly absolute black. The fierceness with which ospreys defend their eggs and young, in addition to the dangerous situation not infrequently chosen for the eyry, make the task of robbing the nests difficult.

The term “osprey,” applied to the nuptial plumes of the egrets in the feather trade, is derived from the French esprit; it has nothing to do with the osprey bird, and its use has been supposed to be due to a confusion with “spray.”

 OSROENE, or, a district of north-western Mesopotamia, in the hill country on the upper Bilechas (Belichus; mod. Nahr Belik, Bilikh), the tributary of the Euphrates, with its capital at (q.v.), founded by Seleucus I. About 130 Edessa was occupied by a nomadic Arabic tribe, the Orrhoei (Plin. v. 85; vi. 25, 117, 129), who founded a small state ruled by their chieftains with the title of kings. After them the district was called Orrhoene (thus in the inscriptions, in Pliny and Dio Cassius), which occasionally has been changed into Osroene, in assimilation to the Parthian name Osroes or Chosroes (Khosrau). The founder of the dynasty is therefore called Osroes by Procop. Bell Pers. i. 17; but Orhāi or Urhāi, son of Hewyā (i.e. “the