Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/766

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1em 1em 1em (Author:Charles Francis Bastable)  

 MONFERRATO, or, an ancient marquisate of North Italy, in the valley of the Tanaro, the name of which still survives in the fuller title (Casale Monferrato) of the town of Casale. The princes of Monferrato were among the most powerful Italian families of the Middle Ages. Among them were several famous crusaders: Conrad, prince of Tyre from 1187 to 1192, the valiant opponent of Saladin; and Boniface, king of Thessalonica from 1183 to 1207. In 1305, on the extinction of the male line, the marquisate passed to Theodore Palæologus through his mother, the empress Irene. The Palæologi became extinct in 1533. The duchy was subsequently attached to Mantua, and ultimately absorbed in Savoy in the beginning of last century.  MONGE, (1746-1818), French mathematician, the inventor of descriptive geometry, was born at Beaune on the 10th May 1746. He was educated first at the college of the Oratorians at Beaune, and then in their college at Lyons,—where, at sixteen, the year after he had been learning physics, he was made a teacher of it. Returning to Beaune for a vacation, he made, on a large scale, a plan of the town, inventing the methods of observation and constructing the necessary instruments; the plan was presented to the town, and preserved in their library. An officer of engineers seeing it wrote to recommend Monge to the commandant of the military school at Mézières, and he was received as draftsman and pupil in the practical school attached to that institution; the school itself was of too aristocratic a character to allow of his admission to it. His manual skill was duly appreciated: &ldquo;I was a thousand times tempted,&rdquo; he said long afterwards, &ldquo;to tear up my drawings in disgust at the esteem in which they were held, as if I had been good for nothing better.&rdquo; An opportunity, however, presented itself: being required to work out from data supplied to him the &ldquo;défilement&rdquo; of a proposed fortress (an operation then only performed by a long arithmetical process), Monge, substituting for this a geometrical method, obtained the 