Page:EB1911 - Volume 21.djvu/70

Rh Russian nobility, but his more immediate progenitors were all very poor, and unable to read or write. His grandfather ploughed the ields as a simple peasant, and his father, as Peesemsky himself said, was washed and clothed by a rich relative, and placed as a soldier in the army, from which he retired as a major after thirty years' service. During childhood Peesemsky read eagerly the translated works of Walter Scott and Victor Hugo, and later those of Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, Rousseau, Voltaire and George Sand. From the gymnasium of Kostroma he passed through Moscow University, and in 1884 entered the government service as a clerk in the office of the Crown domains in his native province. Between 1854 and 1872, when He finally quitted the civil service, he occupied similar posts in St Petersburg and Moscow. His early works exhibit a profound disbelief in the higher qualities of humanity, and a disdain for the other sex, although he appears to have been attached to a particularly devoted and sensible Wife. His first novel, Boyarstchina, was forbidden for its unflattering description of the Russian nobility. His principal novels are Tufak (“A Muff”), 1850; Teesicha doush (“A Thousand Souls”), 1862, which is considered his best work of the kind; and Vzbalomoucheneoe more (“A Troubled Sea”), giving a picture of the excited state of Russian society about the year 1862. He also produced a comedy, Gorkaya soudbina (“A Bitter Fate”), depicting the dark sides of the Russian peasantry, which obtained for him the Ouvaroff prize of the Russian Academy. In 1856 he was sent, together with other literary men, to report on the ethnographical and commercial condition of the Russian interior, his particular field of inquiry having been Astrakhan and the region of the Caspian Sea. His scepticism in regard to the liberal reforms of the 'sixties made him very unpopular among the more progressive writers of that time. He died at Moscow on the 2nd of February 1881 (Jan 21, Russian style).

PEGASUS (from Gr., compact, strong), the famous winged horse of Greek fable, said to have sprung from the trunk of the Gorgon Medusa when her head was cut off by Perseus. Bellerophon caught him as he drank of the spring Peirene on the Acrocorinthus at Corinth, or received him tamed and bridled at the hands of Athena (Pindar, Ol. xiii. 63, Pausanias ii. 4). Mounted on Pegasus, Bellerophon slew the Chimaera and overcame the Solymi and the Amazons, but when he tried to fly to heaven on the horse's back he threw him and continued his heavenward course (Apollodorus ii. 3). Arrived in heaven, Pegasus served Zeus, fetching for him his thunder and lightning (Hesiod, Theog. 281). Hence some have thought that Pegasus is a symbol of the thundercloud. According to O. Gruppe (Griechische Mythologie, i. 75, 123) Pegasus, like Arion the fabled offspring of Demeter and Poseidon, was a curse-horse, symbolical of the rapidity with which curses were fulfilled. In later legend he is the horse of Eos, the morning The erroneous derivation from, “a spring of water,” may have given birth to the legends which connect Pegasus with water; e.g. that his father was Poseidon, that he was born at the springs of Ocean, and that he had the power of making springs rise from the ground by a blow of his hoof. When Mt Helicon, enchanted by the song of the Muses, began to rise to heaven, Pegasus stopped its ascent by stamping on the ground (Antoninus Liberalis 9), and where he struck the earth Hippocrene (horse spring), the fountain of the Muses, gushed forth (Pausanias ii. 31, ix. 31). But there are facts that speak for an independent mythological connexion between horses and water, e.g. the sacredness of the horse to Poseidon, the epithets Hippios and Equester applied to Poseidon and Neptune, the Greek fable of the origin of the first horse (produced by Poseidon striking the ground with his trident), and the custom in Argolis of sacrificing horses to Poseidon by drowning them in a well. From his connexion with Hippocrene Pegasus has come to be regarded as the horse of the Muses and hence as a symbol of poetry. But this is a modern attribute of Pegasus, not known to the ancients, and dating only from the Orlando innamorato of Boiardo.

 PEGAU, a town of Germany, in the kingdom of Saxony, situated in a fertile country, on the Elster, 18 m. S.W. from Leipzig by the railway to Zeitz. Pop. (1905), 5656. It has two Evangelical churches, that of St Lawrence being a fine Gothic structure, a 16th-century town-hall; a very old hospital and an agricultural school. Its industries embrace the manufacture of felt, boots and metal wares.

Pegau grew up round a monastery founded in 1096, but does not appear as a town before the close of the 12th century. Markets were held here and its prosperity was further enhanced by its position on a main road running east and west. In the monastery, which was dissolved in 1539, a valuable chronicle was compiled, the Annales pegavienses, covering the period from 1039 to 1227

 PEGMATITE (from Gr., a bond), the name given by Hauy to those masses of graphic granite which frequently occur in veins. They consist of quartz and alkali feldspars in crystalline intergrowth (see, Plate II. fig. 6). The term was subsequently used by Naumann to signify also the coarsely crystalline veins rich in quartz, feldspar and muscovite, which often in great numbers ramify through outcrops of granite and the surrounding rocks. This application of the name has now obtained general acceptance, and has been extended by many authors to include vein-rocks of similar structure and geological relationships, which occur with syenites, diorites and gabbros. Only a few of these pegmatites have graphic structure or mutual intergrowth of their constituents. Many of them are exceedingly coarse-grained; in granite-pegmatites the feldspars may be several feet or even yards in diameter, and other minerals such as apatite and tourmaline often occur in gigantic crystals. Pegmatites consist of minerals which are found also in the rocks from which they are derived, e.g. granite-pegmatites contain principally quartz and feldspar while gabbro-pegmatites consist of diallage and plagioclase. Rare minerals, however, often occur in these veins in exceptional amount and as very perfect crystals The minerals of the pegmatites are always those which were last to separate out from the parent rock. As the basic minerals are the first formed the pegmatites contain a larger proportion of the acid or more siliceous components which were of later origin. In granite-pegmatites there is little hornblende, biotite or sphene, but white mica, feldspar and quartz make up the greater part of the veins. In gabbro-pegmatites olivine seldom occurs, but diallage and plagioclase occur in abundance In this respect the pegmatites and aplites agree; both are of more acid types than the average rock from which they came, but the pegmatites are coarsely crystalline while the aplites are fine-grained. Segregations of the early minerals of a rock are frequent as nodules, lumps and streaks scattered through its mass, and often dikes of basic character (lamprophyres, &c) are injected into the surrounding country. These have been grouped together as intrusions of melanocrate facies (, black,, strength, predominance) because in them the dark basic minerals preponderate. The aplites and pegmatites, on the other hand, are leucocrate (, white), since they are of acid character and contain relatively large amounts of the white minerals quartz and feldspar.

Pegmatites are associated with plutonic or intrusive rocks and were evidently formed by slow crystallization at considerable depths below the surface: nothing similar to them is known in lavas. They are very characteristic of granites, especially those which contain muscovite and much alkali feldspar, in gabbros, diorites and syenites pegmatite dikes are comparatively rare. The coarsely crystalline structure may be ascribed to slow crystallization; and is partly the result of the rocks, in which the veins lie, having been at a high temperature when the minerals of the pegmatites separated out. In accordance with this we find that pegmatite veins are nearly always restricted