Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/108

Rh 92 A C - A C E than eight days previously to the close of the existing account. The Account in Securities to Bearer, and, with the above exceptions, in Registered Securities also, extends over a period of from twelve to nineteen days. This period is in each case terminated by the &quot;settlement,&quot; which occurs twice in each month (generally about the middle and end), on days fixed by the committee for general purposes of the Stock Exchange in the preceding month. This &quot; settlement&quot; occupies three continuous days, which are all termed Account days, but the third day is the true Account, Settling, or Pay Day. Continuation or Carrying-over is the operation by which the settlement of a bargain transacted for money, or for a given account, may for a consideration (called either a &quot;Contango&quot; or a &quot;Back wardation&quot;) be deferred for the period of another account. Such a continuation is equivalent to a sale &quot;for the day,&quot; and a repur chase for the succeeding account, or to a purchase &quot; for the day,&quot; and a re-sale for the succeeding account. The price at which such transactions are adjusted is the &quot;Making-Tip&quot; price of the day. Contango is a technical term which expresses the rate of in terest charged for the loan of money upon the security of stock transferred for the period of an account or otherwise, or the rate of interest paid by the buyer to the seller to be allowed to defer paying tor the stock purchased, until the next settlement day. Backwardation, or, as it is more often called, Back (for brevity), in contradistinction to contango, is the amount charged for the loan of stock from one account to the other, and it is paid to the purchaser by the seller in order to allow the seller to defer the deli very of the stock. A Bull Account is one in which either the purchases have pre dominated over the sales, or the disposition to purchase has been more marked than the disposition to sell. A Bear Account is one in which either the sales have preponderated over the purchases, or in which the disposition to sell has been more strongly displayed than the disposition to buy. Sometimes the Bull or the Bear disposition extends to the great majority of securities, as when there are general falls or general rises. Sometimes a Bull Account in one set of securities is con temporaneous with a Bear Account in another. Vide Cracroft s Stock Exchange Manual. ACCOUNTANT, earlier form ACCOMPTANT, in the most general sense, is a person skilled in accounts. It is applied to the person who has the charge of the accounts in a public office or in the counting-house of a large private business. It is also the designation of a distinct profession, ACCOUNTANT-GENERAL, an officer in the English Court of Chancery, who receives all monies lodged in court, ind by whom they are deposited in bank and disbursed. ACCRA or ACRA, a town, or rather a collection of forts, in a territory of the same name, on the Gold Coast of Africa, about 75 miles east of Cape Coast Castle. Of the forts, Fort St James is a British settlement, Crevecoeur was established by the Dutch, and Christianborg by the Danes ; but the two last have since been ceded to Britain Christianborg in 1850, and Crevecoeur in 1871. Accra is considered to be one of the healthiest stations on the west coast of Africa, and has some trade in the productions of the interior, ivory, gold dust, and palm-oil ; while cotton goods, tobacco, rum, and beads are imported in exchange. It is the residence of a British civil commandant. ACCRINGTON, an important manufacturing town of England, in Lancashire, lies on the banks of a stream called the Hindburn, in a deep valley, 19 miles N. from Man chester and 5 miles E. of Blackburn. It has increased rapidly in recent years, and is the centre of the Manchester cotton- printing trade. There are large cotton factories and print works, besides bleach-fields, &c., employing many hands. Coal is extensively wrought in the neighbourhood. The town has a good appearance, and among the more handsome buildings are a fine church, in the Gothic style, erected in 1838, and the Peel Institution, an Italian structure, contain ing an assembly room, a lecture room, &c., The sanitary arrangements generally are good, and a reservoir capable of containing 140,000,000 gallons has been constructed for the water supply of the tawn. Accrington is a station on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. The population of the two townships of Old and New Accrington was in 1861, 17,688; and in 1871, 21,788. ACCUM, FREDERICK, chemist, born at Biickeburg in 1769, came to London in 1793, and was appointed teacher of chemistry and mineralogy at the Surrey Institution in 1801. While occupying this position he published several scientific manuals (Chemistry, 1803; Mineralogy, 1808; Crystallography, 1813), but his name will be chiefly re membered in connection with gas-lighting, the introduction of which was mainly due to him and to the enterprising printseller, Ackermann. His excellent Practical Treatise on Gaslight appeared in 1815; and he rendered another valuable service to society by his Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons (1820), which attracted much notice at the time it appeared. Both works, as well as a number of his smaller publications, were translated into German. In consequence of charges affecting his honesty, Accum left London for Germany, and in 1822 was appointed professor in the Industrial Institute and Academy of Architecture at Berlin. He died there in 1838. ACCUMULATOR, a term applied frequently to a powerful electrical machine, which generates or accumu lates, by means of friction, electric currents of high ten sion, manifested by sparks of considerable length. Accumulators have been employed in many places for exploding torpedoes and mines, for blasting, tfcc. An exceedingly powerful apparatus of this kind was employed by the Confederate authorities during the civil war in America for discharging submarine and river torpedoes. Whatever the nature of the materials employed in the con struction of the accumulator, or the form which it may assume mechanically, it is simply a modification of, or an improvement upon, the ordinary cylindrical or the plate- glass frictional electrical machine, the fundamental scientific principles being the same in nearly every case. The exciting body consists generally of a large disc or circular plate of vulcanite, more frequently termed by electricians &quot; ebonite,&quot; in consequence of its resemblance, in point of hardness and of polish, to polished ebony, the vulcanite disc taking the place of the ordinary circular plate of thick glass. ACE, the received name for the single point on cards or dice the unit. Mr Fox Talbot has a speculation (English Etymologies, p. 262) that the Latins invented, if not the game of dice, at least the name for the single point, which they called unus. The Greeks corrupted this into 6Vos, and at length the Germanic races, learning the game from the Greeks, translated the word into ass, which has now become ace. The fact, however, is, that the root of the word lies in the Latin as, the monetary unit, which is to be identified with the Greek cts; Doric, &amp;lt;us or as. ACEPHALA, a name sometimes given to a section of the molluscous animals, which are divided into encephala and acephala, according as they have or want a distinctly differentiated head. The Acephala, or Lamellibranchiata^ as they are also called, are commonly known as bivalve shell-fish. ACEPHALI (from a privative, and Ke&amp;lt;aA^, a head), a term applied to several sects as having no head or leader; and in particular to a sect that separated itself, in the end of the 5th century, from the rule of the patriarchs of Alex andria, and remained without king or bishop for more than 300 years (Gibbon, c. xlvii.) ACEPHALI was also the name given to the levellers in the reign of Henry I., who are said to have been so poor as to have no tenements, in virtue of which they might acknowledge a superior lord.
 * vhich deals in any required way with mercantile accounts.