Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/575

Rh M A E M A E 547 angels in a double rank,&quot; the angels ringing bells. &quot;Like wise machines descending from above, double, with Dives rising out of hell and Lazarus seen in Abraham s bosom ; besides several figures dancing jiggs, sarabands, and country dances, with the merry conceits of Squire Punch and Sir John Spendall.&quot; Yates showed a mov ing picture of a city, with an artificial cascade, and a temple, with mechanical birds in which attention was called to the exact imitation of living birds, the quick motion of the bills, just swelling of the throat, and fluttering of the wings. The puppets were wax figures 5 feet in stature. Toward the end of the 18th cen tury, Flockton s show presented five hundred figures at work at various trades. Brown s Theatre of Arts showed at country fairs, from 1830 to 1840, the battle of Trafalgar, Napoleon s army crossing the Alps, and the marble palace of St Petersburg ; and at a still later date Clapton s similar exhibition presented Grace Darling rescuing the crew of the &quot; Forfarshire &quot; steamer wrecked on the Fern Islands, with many ingenious moving figures of quadrupeds, and, in particular, a swan which .dipped its head into imitation water, opened its wings, and with flexible neck preened and trimmed its plumage. In these mechanical scenes the figures, painted upon a flat surface and cut out, commonly of pasteboard, are slid along grooves arranged transversely in front of the set scenery, the actions of legs and arms being worked by wires from the hands of persons below the stage, though sometimes use is made of clockwork. Marionettes proper, and the dolls exhibited in puppet shows (not including Punch and his companion actors), are constructed of wood or of pasteboard, with faces of composition, sometimes of wax; and each figure is suspended by a number of threads to a short bar of wood which is commonly held in one hand of the hidden performer while the finger of his other hand poses the figure or gives action to it by means of the threads. In the mode of constructing the joints, and the greater elaboration with which the several parts of the limbs are supported and moved, and especially in the fine degrees of movement given to the heads, marionettes have been so improved as to present very exact imitations of the gestures of actors and actresses, and the postures and evolutions of acrobats ; and, in addition, ingenious exhibitors such as Theodon, who introduced many novelties from twenty to thirty years ago, have employed mechanical arrangements for accomplishing the tricks of pantomime harlequinade. Among the puppet personages presented in the small street shows are generally included a sailor who dances a hornpipe, a hoop-dancer, a dancer of the Highland fling, a wooden-legged pensioner, a vaulter on a pole also balancing two chairs, a clown playing with a butterfly, a dancing figure without head until the hearl rises out of the body, gradually displaying an enormously long neck, a juggler tossing gilt balls which, sliding up and down upon tight invisible threads, fall into his hands again, a milk-woman carrying buckets out of which fly white dolls, and a skeleton, seen at first in scattered parts lying about the stage, but piece successively flying to piece, the body first sitting up, then standing, and finally capped by the skull, when the completed figure begins to dance. Ombres Chinois are the shadows of figures projected upon a stretched sheet of thin calico or a gauze scene painted as a transparency. The cardboard flat figures are held behind this screen, illuminated from behind, the performer supporting each figure by a long wire held in one hand while wires from all the movable parts terminate in rings in which are inserted the fingers of his other hand. MARIOTTE, EDME (died 1G84), a celebrated French physicist, was a native of Burgundy. He lived chiefly near Dijon as prior of St Martin sous Beaune, and was one of the first members of the Academy of Sciences, which was founded at Paris in 1666. He died at Paris May 12, 1684. The first volume of the Histoire et Memoires de V Academie (1733) contains many original papers by him upon a great variety of physical subjects, such as the motion of fluids, the nature of colour, the notes of the trumpet, the barometer, the fall of bodies, the recoil of guns, the freezing of water, &amp;lt;fec. His Essais de Physique, four in number, of which the first three were published at Paris between 1676 and 1679, are his most important works, and form, together with an elaborate treatise on the per cussion of bodies, the first volume of the CEuvres d&amp;lt;- Mariotte (2 vols., Leyden, 1717). The second of these essays (&quot; De la Nature de 1 Air &quot;) contains the statement ot the law connecting the pressure and volume of a gas which, though very generally called by the name of Mariotte, was discovered seven years before by Boyle. The fourth essay is a systematic treatment of the nature of colour, with a description of many curious experiments and a discussion of the rainbow, halos, parhelia, dill raction, and the more purely physiological phenomena of colour. The discovery of the blind spot is noted in a short paper in the second volume of his collected works. MARITIME LAW. See SEA LAWS. MARITIME PROVINCE (Russian, Primorshiya OUast], a province of the Russian empire, and part of the general- governorship of Eastern Siberia, is a strip of territory which extends along the Siberian coast of the Pacific from Corea to the Arctic Ocean, and also includes the peninsula of KAMCHATKA (&amp;lt;?.v.), the island of Saghalien or Sakhalin, and several small islands scattered along the coast. Its western boundary stretches northwards from the Corean town of King-hing (41 45 N. lat.) by Lake Khangka and along the Usuri, keeping bo the eastward of the hilly tracts and prairies of northern Manchuria ; it then follows an ima ginary line which runs due north from the mouth of the Usuri to the bay of Udskoy, separating the province from the lowlands and mountain wildernesses of the Amur pro vince ; it next runs along the Stanovoy watershed between the Pacific and the Arctic Ocean, leaving to the west the elevated tracts of the Siberian plateau, and finally it crosses the spurs of this plateau through barren tundras belonging to Yakutsk, reaching the Arctic Ocean at the Chaunskaya Bay (70 N. lat). The province has a length of 2300 miles and a width varying from 40 to 420 miles ; it covers an area of 730,000 square miles, and exhibits very great varieties of climate, scenery, and population. The northern part, known as the land of the Chukchees, occupies the north-eastern peninsula of Asia between the Arctic Ocean on the one side and the Seas of Behring and Okhotsk on the other, and has the character of a barren plateau from 1000 to 2000 feet high, deeply indented by the livers of the Anadyr basin, and by long fiords, such as the Koluchin Bay (the wintering-place of Nordenskjold s &quot;Vega&quot;), the Gulf of Anadyr, and the Bays of Penzhina and Gbizhiga. To the north this plateau is bordered by a chain of mountains, the highest known within the Arctic circle, several summits of which reach a height of 8200 feet (Makachinga peak and others), while the promontories by which the Asiatic continent terminates towards Behr ing Strait Serdtze-kamen, Cape Vostochnyi (the most easterly point of Asia), and Cape Chukotskiy have heights ranging from 1000 to 2000 feet. Only lichens and mosses, with a few dwarf species of Siberian trees, cover this district, in marked contrast to the rich forests of the corresponding part of Arctic America. The fauna, however, is far richer than might have been expected, owing to the migrations of animals along the plateaus of Eastern Siberia, which extend in a north-eastern direction from the very heart of Asia to Behring Strait. The faunu is further enlarged by a few American birds and mammals, which cross the strait when it is frozen. This country, and still more the seas by which it is surrounded, have been for the last two centuries the paradise of hunters, and have supplied Siberian trade with its best furs. _ Entire species of animals have been exterminated within this short period ; the renowned blue fox and black sable have nearly disappeared, and the whale, which was hunted a few decades ago by hundreds of American vessels, has become very rare. The sea-otter, of which the party of Stellei-