Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/768

 736 P H I P H I of the cornice and architrave. The various groups are skilfully united together by some dominant line or action, so that the whole subject forms one unbroken composition. The relief is very high, more than 3i inches in the most salient parts, and the whole treatment is quite opposite to that of the Parthenon frieze, which is a very superior work of art to that at Bassa-. Many of the limbs are quite detached from the ground ; the drill has been largely used to emphasize certain shadows, and iu many places, for want of due calculation, the sculptor has had to cut into the flat background behind the figures. From this it would appear that no finished clay-model was prepared, but that the relief was sculptured with only the help of a drawing. The point of sight, more than 20 feet below the bottom of the frieze, and the direction in which the light fell on it have evidently been carefully considered. Many parts, invisible from below, are left comparatively rough. The workmanship throughout is unequal, and the hands of several sculptors can be detected. On the whole, it must be ad mitted that the execution is not equal to the beauty of the design, and the whole frieze is somewhat marred by au evident desire to produce the maximum of effect with the least possible amount of labour, very different from the almost gem-like finish of the Par thenon frieze. Even the design is inferior to the Athenian one ; most of the figures are ungracefully short in their proportions, and there is a great want of refined beauty in many of the female hands and faces. It is in the fire of its varied action and its subtlety of expression that this sculpture most excels. The noble move ments of the heroic Greeks form a striking contrast to the feminine weakness of the wounded Amazons, or the struggles with teeth and hoofs of the brutish Centaurs ; the group of Apollo and Artemis in their chariot is full of grace and dignified power. The marble in which this frieze is sculptured is somewhat coarse and crystalline; the slabs appear not to have been built into their place but fixed afterwards, with the aid of two bronze bolts driven through the face of each. Of the metopes, which were 2 feet 8 inches square, only one exists nearly complete, with eleven fragments ; the one almost per fect has a relief of a nude warrior, with floating drapery, overcom ing a long-haired bearded man, who sinks vanquished at his feet. The relief of these is rather less than that of the frieze figures, and the work is nobler in character and superior in execution. The other pieces are too fragmentary to show what were their subjects. No modern Greek village exists now on the site either of Bassa; or of Phigalia. In addition to the works mentioned in the text the following may be con sulted : Leake, Morea (vol. i. p. 490, and ii. p. 319); Curtius, Peloponnesos (i. 319); Ross, lleisen in Peloponnesos ; Stackelberg, Der Apollo-Tempd zu Bassx (1826); Lenormant, Bas-reliefs du Parthenon et de Phigalie (1834); and Frie- derichs, Geschichte der griechischen Plastik (1868). (J. H. M.) PHILADELPHIA, the name of several cities of anti quity, of which the two most important have been noticed under ALA-SHEHR, vol. i. p. 443, and AMMONITES, vol. i. p. 743. PHILADELPHIA, the chief city of Pennsylvania, and the second city in the United States of America, is situ ated (39 57 7-5&quot; N. lat., 75 9 23 4&quot; W. long.) on the west bank of the Delaware river, 96 miles from the Atlantic and in a direct line 125 miles north-east of Washington, D.C., and 85 miles south-west of the city of New York. Its greatest length north-north-east is 22 miles, its breadth from 5 to 10 miles, and its area 82,603 acres, or about 129 square miles (greater than that of any other city in America). The surface of the city between the rivers Delaware and Schuylkill the latter running parallel with the Delaware and dividing the city about in half, east and west is remarkably level. It varies, how ever, in elevation from 24| feet above the sea to 440 feet, the latter in the northern and suburban sections. The eastern and western sections of the city are connected by eight bridges. The length of river-front on the Delaware is nearly 20 miles, and the length of wharves 5 miles. On both sides of the Schuylkill, to Fairmount dam, the front is 16 miles and the length of wharves 4 miles. The mean low-water mark of the Delaware is 24 feet, and the tide rises 6 feet, while the average depth of water at the city wharves is 50 feet. The wharf-line, which varies from 14 feet to 68 feet, gives extraordinary accommodation for ship ping. The Delaware is navigable at all seasons of the year for vessels of the heaviest burden, and Philadelphia affords one of the best protected harbours in the country. The substratum of the city is a clay soil mixed with more or less sand and gravel. The site of the present Philadelphia was originally settled by the Swedes, and so Penn found it when he came to lay General Plan of Philadelphia. out the city ; and many of the original patentees for town lots under him were descendants of these first settlers. The original city limits were from east to west 10,922 feet 5 inches, and from north to south 5370 feet 8 inches, or more than 2 square miles. The boundaries were Vine street on the N., Cedar (now South) street on the S., the Delaware river on the E., and the Schuylkill river on the W. And this was the city of Philadelphia from its foundation until the 2d day of February 1854, when what is known as the Consolidation Act was passed by the legislature of the State, and the old limits of the city proper were extended to take in all the territory embraced within the then county of Philadelphia. This legislation abolished the districts of Southwark, Northern Liberties, Kensington, Spring Garden, Moyamensing, Penn, Richmond, West Philadelphia, and Belmont ; the boroughs of Frankforcl, Germantown, Manayunk, White-Hall, Bridesburg, and Aramingo ; and the townships of Passyunk, Blockley, Kingsessing, Ptoxborough, Germantown, Bristol, Oxford, Lower Dublin, Moreland, Bybery, Delaware, and Penn ; and it transferred all their franchises and property to the consolidated city of Phil adelphia under one municipal government. The present boundaries of the city are : on the E. the Delaware, on the N.E. Bucks county, on the N.N.W. and W. Montgomery county, and on the W. and S. Delaware county and the Delaware. The greater part is laid out in parallelograms, with streets at right angles to each other. Each main parallelogram contains about 4 acres, or is 400 feet on each