Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/864

Rh 832 M E K M E L tanneries, &c. A considerable trade is carried on in the wine produced in the surrounding vineyards. The population in 1880 was 14,106. Meissen, one of the oldest and most interesting towns in Saxony, was founded by the emperor Henry I. in 928 as an outpost against the Wends, and became the capital of a margraviate, which was after wards merged in the duchy of Saxony. Its margraves were among the most powerful mediaeval princes in Germany, and were the direct ancestors of the present royal house of Saxony. From 965 till 1581 Meissen was also the seat of an important line of bishops, who ranked as princes of the empire. The town suffered greatly from the Hussites in the 15th 6entury, and it was captured by the imperial troops in the war of the Smalkaldian League, and again in the Thirty Years War. In 1637 it was severely handled by the Swede?, and in 1745 it fell into the hands of the 1 russians. See Die Stadt Meissen und ihre Umgrgend, 1S5-J; and II. Herbst s Praktischer Wegiceiser durch die Stadt Meissen, 187S. MEKONG, MEKHONG, or MAKONG, less frequently NAM-KONG, the Da-Kio of the Tibetans, the Lantsang- Kiang or Lankiang of the Chinese, and the Son-Kong of the Anamese, sometimes also called the Cambodia or Camboja, is one of the largest and most remarkable rivers of southern Asia. As it rises in Tibet, probably about 34 N. lat. and 94 E. long., and reaches the China Sea about 10 N. lat., after a somewhat devious course through Yunnan, Burmah, Siam, Cambodia, and Cochin-China, its total course may be safely stated at 2000 miles. In spite, however, of this great length, the Mekong must be regarded as little more than a mountain torrent on an unusually large scale. It certainly forms a very extensive delta (see COCHIX-CHINA, vol. vi. pp. 93, 94), and is navigable for steamboats as far up as Cratieh (about 280 miles from the river mouth), but navigation soon becomes difficult, not through want of water, but from the great irregularity of the bed. At Stung-Streng the river measures about 2 leagues from bank to bank, and its current is strong even to violence ; it &quot; twists into the sharpest eddies, and drives against the banks with fury.&quot; A little higher up are the great cataracts of Kong. Beyond these the channel again becomes navigable as far as Bassac, when it is still about G500 feet in width; but before long the banks close in and the river, narrowed to about 900 feet, pours along a current of extraordinary depth. Above Khemarat the rapids again begin. At Paklay, Mouhot describes the Mekong as larger than the Menam at Bangkok, forcing its way between the lofty mountains with a noise like the roaring of the sea. About 130 miles farther up, at Luang-Prabang, it has again an unob structed channel about 3000 feet wide ; above Sien-kong the river winds through a magnificent plain ; but soon afterwards, in spite of its volume of water, it becomes less navigable than before. The great French expedition of 18G6-67 touched its course only at one place higher up, Sien-hong ; but other travellers have crossed it at various points in Yunnan. Mr Grosvenor found it, near Yung-feng- chang, at a height of 4700 feet above the sea, a stream of from GO to 80 yards wide, flowing smoothly and steadily in the floor of a deep gorge (see Coleborne Baker, &quot; Trav. and Ptes. in Western China,&quot; Roy. Geog. Soc. Suppl. Papers, 1882). It is there crossed by an iron suspension bridge, of Chinese workmanship, consisting of twelve chains with links about 1 foot long (see Gill, River of Golden Sand, vol. ii. p. 330). Higher up, near Tse-ku mission-station, lies the ter rific defile to which Cooper (Trav. of a Pioneer of Commerce, 1871) gave the name of Hogg s Gorge. The head waters of the Mekong have never been traced to their source ; but Hue and Gabet saw the confluence of the two main branches at Tsiamdo (32 N. lat.), and the abbe Desgodins has followed the stream from that point down to Ye-tche in 27 20 N. lat. (see La Mission du Thibet, Paris, 1872, and the abbd s papers in Bull. Soc. Guog., 1871, 1875, 1876, and 1877). At Yerkalo he observed a curious phenomenon : a number of wells from 12 to 24 feet deep were sunk down among the granite pebbles which form the bed of the river, just above mean-watermark; and they all yielded water with a greater or less degree of saltness and warmtli. They are covered when the river is in full flood. The river basin in all the upper section is extremely narrow, being separated by long lines of high mountains from the valley of the Salvvin on the west and from that of the Chin-sha- kiang or Paver of Golden Sands on the east. Not till thu comparatively low country of j3iam is reached are there any affluents of considerable size. The most important are the Se-mun and the Udong on the right, and the Attopeu or Se-Kong on the left. The Se-mun or Ubon river was explored as far as Korat by the Lagre e expedition, and its tributary the Se-d6m has been followed by Dr Harmand (Bull. Soc. Geoff., 1877). Both streams have a rapid and interrupted course. Like the Nile, the Mekong is subject to a great annual inundation, described as early as the 16th century by Camoens, who calls the river Mecom. At some places the difference between flood-mark arid ordinary level is from 35 to 40 feet (see COCHIN-CHINA). The first Europeans to make true acquaintance with the river course were the Dutchman ^Yusthoff and his fellow ambassadors, who in 1641 ascended as far as Winkyan, i.e., Vienchang; their narrative is given by Valentijn, and might have been enough to suggest that the Mekong could not form a trade route to the interior. For the French exploration which finally settled the question, see Garnier s Expedition, etc., 1873, and the notice of Gamier in vol. x. p. 82. MELA, POMPONIUS, a Koman writer on geography. His little work, though a mere compendium, is the only systematic treatise on the subject preserved to us in the Latin language, with the exception of that which forms part of the encyclopaedic work of the elder Pliny, and from this circumstance it derives a value to which it would be little entitled from its intrinsic merits. Nothing is known of the author except his name, and that he w:;,s born, as he himself informs us, at a small town called Tingentera in the south of Spain. But the date of his work may be fixed with little doubt from an allusion in the preface to a proposed expedition of the reigning emperor to Britain, which can hardly be referred to any other event than the visit to that island of the emperor Claudius in 43 A.D. This conclusion is accepted by all the recent editors ; the view of some earlier scholars, who understood this passage as referring to the expedition of Julius Csesar, is clearly disproved by the mention of several facts which were not anterior to the reign of Augustus. The little treatise is not only a mere abridg ment, occupying less than one hundred pages of ordinary print, but is so deficient in method and systematic character that we should have supposed it to be little more than a mere schoolbook, were it not that we find the name of the author figuring in a prominent manner among the authori ties cited by Pliny for the geographical books of his vast compilation. His general views of the geography of the earth do not differ materially from those which were current among Greek writers from the time of Eratosthenes to that of Strabo, and are well known to us from the great work of the latter author, which was, however, in all probability unknown to Mela, as it certainly was to Pliny. But in one of his views he stands alone among ancient writers on geography, that after describing the division of the earth into five zones, of which two only were inhabitable, he states as an undoubted fact the existence of antichthones, who inhabited the southern temperate zone, but were inaccessible and consequently unknown to the inhabitants of the corresponding zone in the north, on account of the excessive heat of the intervening torrid zone. His views