Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/523

Rh R H A R H E 505 contest against the Roman arms, as well as in their final subjugation, extended down the northern slope of the Alps as far as the Danube. By far the greater part of this extensive region was occupied by rugged mountains, the inhabitants of which, when compelled to abandon their predatory habits, subsisted principally upon the produce of their flocks. Some of the valleys, however, which extended on the south side down to the plains of Italy, were rich and fertile, and produced excellent wine, which was considered equal to any of those grown in Italy itself. The most important of these valleys was that of the Adige, which descends from the high Alps adjoining the Brenner to Verona ; of this the upper portions were held by the Breuni, whose name is still perpetuated in that of the Brenner, while the lower and more fertile region was occupied by the Tridentini, whose chief town of Tridentum was the same as the now celebrated city of Trent. The next people towards the west were the Triumpilini, in the valley still known as Val Trompia ; the Camuni in Val Camonica ; the Orobii, who appear to have occupied the Val Tellina and adjoining districts ; and the Lepontii, between the Lago Maggiore and the Pennine Alps/ The tribes in the interior and heart of the mountain ranges cannot be for the most part assigned to definite localities. The Genauni, mentioned by Horace as well as by Strabo, are supposed to have occupied the Val di Non, and the Vennones or Venostes the lofty ranges near the source of the Adige. The boundaries of the Roman province were repeatedly changed. At first it appears to have comprised all Vinde- licia, so as to have extended to the Danube from its sources to its confluence with the Inn, which constituted its eastern boundary on the side of Noricum. But at a later period this northern tract was separated from the central mountain region, and the two were named Rhaetia Prima and Rhaetia Secunda, in which form they appear in the Notitia. At the same time the southern valleys were gradually incorporated with Italy and assigned to the territory of the neighbouring municipal towns. Thus Tridentum, which was originally a Rhastian town, came to be included in Venetia, and is ass.igned by Pliny to the tenth region of Italy. The only important town in the northern part of the province was the Roman colony of Augusta Vindelicorum, which still retains the name of Augsburg. The same is the case with Curia, now Chur or Coire, the capital of the Grisons, and Brigantia(Bregenz), which gave name in ancient times to the lake now called the Lake of Constance. The province of Rhaetia was traversed by two great lines of Roman roads, the one leading from Verona and Tridentum (Trent) across the pass of the Brenner to Inns- bruck (Pons (Eni), and thence to Augsburg (Augusta Vin- delicorum), and the other from Bregenz on the Lake of Constance, by Coire and Chiavenna, to Como and Milan. RHAPSODIST. See HOMER, vol. xii. p. 109 sq. RHAZES. See MEDICINE, vol. xv. p. 805. RHEA, the name given in 1752 by Mohring l to a South-American bird which, though long before known and described by the earlier writers Nieremberg, Marcgrave, and Piso (the last of whom has a recognizable but rude figure of it) had been without any distinctive scientific appellation. Adopted a few years later by Brisson, the name has since passed into general use, especially among English authors, for what their predecessors had called the American Ostrich ; but on the European continent the bird is commonly called Nandu? a word corrupted from a 1 What prompted his bestowal of this name, so well known in classical mythology, is not apparent. 2 The name Touyou, also of South-American origin, was applied to it by Brisson and others, but erroneously, as Cuvier shews, since by that name, or something like it, the JABIRU (vol. xiii. p. 529) is properly meant. name it is said to have borne among the aboriginal inhabitants of Brazil, where the Portuguese settlers called it Ema (cf. EMEU, vol. viii. p. 171). The resemblance of the Rhea to the OSTRICH (vol. xviii. p. 62) was at once perceived, but the differences between them were scarcely less soon noticed, for some of them are very evident. The former, for instance, has three instead of two toes on each foot, it has no apparent tail nor the showy wing-plumes of the latter, and its head and neck are clothed with feathers, while internal distinctions of still deeper significance have since been dwelt upon by Prof. Huxley (Proc. Zool. Society, 1867, pp. 420-422) and the late Mr W. A. Forbes (op. cit., 1881, pp. 784-787), thus justifying the separation of these two forms more widely even than as Families ; and there can be little doubt that they should be regarded as types of as many Orders Stmthiones and Rhese, of Rhea. the Subclass Ratitx? Structural characters no less im- portant separate the Rheas from the Emeus, and, apart from their very different physiognomy, the former can be readily recognized by the rounded form of their contour-feathers, which want the hyporrhachis or after-shaft that in the Emeus and Cassowaries is so long as to equal the main shaft, and contributes to give these latter groups the appearance of being covered with shaggy hair. Though the Rhea is not decked with the graceful plumes which adorn the Ostrich, its feathers have yet a considerable market value, and for the purpose of trade in them it is annually killed by thousands, so that it has been already extirpated from much of the country it formerly inhabited, 4 and its total 3 Ann. Nat. History, ser. 4, xx. p. 500. 4 Mr Harting, in his and Mr De Mosenthal's Ostriches and Ostrich Farming, from which the woodcut here introduced is by permission copied, gives (pp. 67-72) some portentous statistics of the destruction of Rheas for the sake of their feathers, which, he says, are known in the trade as " Vautour " to distinguish them from those of the African bird. XX. -- 64