Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/22

Rh 14 U R S U R U children, ranging in age from two months to seven years, had now been found buried with the sacred virgins. But even such a diffi culty Hermann explains away as readily as he does the fact of his having changed St Elizabeth s name for the royal bridegroom from JStherius to Holofernes: the prince in question had two names, and the little children were brothers, sisters, or more distant relatives of the eleven thousand. Hermann s revelations are mainly taken up with an attempt to show the mutual relationship of nearly all the characters he introduces. The names are a most extraordi nary mixture. Among British bishops we have Michael William, James, and Columbanus. Sovereign princes, an Oliver, a Clovis, and a Pippin, start out in every page, till the writer finds it neces sary to apologize for the number of his kings and his own blunders. But, for all this, Hermann exposes his own doubts when he tells that often, as he was preparing to write, he heard a voice bidding him lay down the pen, &quot; for whatever you write will be an unmixed lie.&quot; Hermann makes St Ursula a native of Brittany, and so approxi mates to the version of the story given by Geoffrey of Monmouth (Historia Britonum), according to whom Maximian, after fleeing from Rome, and acquiring Britain by marriage, proceeds to conquer Brittany and settle it with men from the island opposite. For these settlers he has to find British wives, and to this end collects 11,000 noble and 60,000 plebeian virgins, who are wrecked on their passage across. Certain of the vessels being driven upon &quot;bar barous islands,&quot; their passengers are slain by Guanius and Melga, &quot;kings of the Huns and Picts,&quot; whom Gratian had called in to his aid against Maximian. In this version St Ursula is a daughter of Dionotus, king of Cornwall. Hermann alludes more than once to the Historia Britonum, and even to King Arthur. The legend of St Ursula is perhaps the most curious instance of the development of an ecclesiastical myth. &quot;We know, however, too little about its earlier stages to justify any serious attempt at estimating what amount of historic truth underlies it, and it is doubtful whether many of the efforts in this direction do not make a larger demand on human credulity than the legend itself. Even in the earliest form known to us this legend is probably the com plex growth of centuries, and any claim to the discovery of the first germ can hardly approve itself to the historic sense. These remarks apply especially to that venerable rationalization which evolves the whole legend from a misreading of Undecrimilla into undecim millia. A more modern theory makes St Ursula the Christianized representative of the old Teutonic goddess Freya, who, in Thuringia, under the name of Horsel, welcomed the souls of dead maidens. Not a few singular coincidences seem to point in the same direction, especially the two virgins, Martha and Saula,&quot; whom Usuard states to have suffered &quot;cum aliis pluribus&quot; on 20th October, whence they were probably transferred to 21st October. It is curious to note that Jerome and many of the ear liest martyrologies extant have on 21st October the entry &quot;Dasius Zoticus, Gains cum dnodecim militibus.&quot; Even in copies of Jerome this is transformed into millibus ; and it is perhaps not impossible that to this misreading we may indirectly owe the &quot;thousands&quot; in the Ursula legend. So far as is known to the present writer, the two entries are mutually exclusive in all the early martyr ologies mentioned in this article, and in those printed in Migne, cxxxvii. The earlier &quot;Dasius&quot; entry seems to disappear steadily, though slowly, as the Ursula legend works its way into current martyrologies. See Crombach, Vita ct Marlyrium S. Ursulfe, Cologne, 1647, and the Bolland- ist Ada Sanctorum, 21st October. The rationalization of the story is to be found in Oscar Schade s Die Sage von der heiligen Ursula, Hanover, 1854, of which there is a short rtsume in Baring-Gould s Lives of the Saints. Schade s results seem to be now generally accepted. (T. A. A.) URSULINES, a religious order founded at Brescia by Angela de Merici l in 1537, primarily for the education of girls. It was approved in 1544 by Paul III., and in 1572 Gregory XIII., at the instance of Charles Borromeo, made enclosure obligatory and declared it a religious order under the rule of St Augustine. In the following century it was powerfully encouraged and supported by St Francis de Sales ; and towards the beginning of the 18th century, the period of its greatest prosperity, the order embraced some 20 congregations, with 350 convents and from 15,000 to 20,000 nuns. It still has some importance and possesses about 36 convents in Germany and Austria alone. URUGUAY. The republic of Uruguay, officially known as the ORIENTAL REPUBLIC OF THE URUGUAY, and long locally called the BANDA ORIENTAL (meaning the land on the eastern side of the large river from which the country takes its modern name), is the smallest independent state Bound- in South America. It runs conterminous with the south- ies&amp;gt; ern border of the empire of Brazil and lies between 30 1 Born 1470, died 1540, canonized 1807. and 35 S. lat. and 53 25 and 57 42 W. long. ; its area is 73,185 square miles. The country is in some sense a peninsula, having a seaboard on the Atlantic Ocean of 120 miles, a shore line to the south on the river Plate of 235 miles, and another of 270 miles along the Uruguay on the west. The boundaries separating it from Rio Grande do Sul, a province of Brazil, are Lake Mirim, the rivers Chuy, Yaguaron, and Cuareim, and a cuchilla or low range of hills called Santa Ana. The extent of the northern frontier from the Cuareim to the bar of the Chuy on the coast of the Atlantic is 450 miles. Uruguay is intersected nearly from Rivers, west to north-east by the river Negro and its affluent the Yi. The Uruguay (see PLATE RIVER, vol. xix. p. 187) is navigable all the year by steamers from the island of Martin Garcia at the mouth to Salto (200 miles). Above this place the navigation is interrupted by rapids. The ordinary volume of water in the Uruguay averages 1 1 millions of cubic feet per minute. The Negro, of which the principal port is the city of Mercedes, is the only important and to any practical extent navigable inland river. Others are navigable for short distances and by steamers of light draught. Besides the rivers mentioned, the chief streams are the Santa Lucia, which falls into the Plate a little west of Montevideo ; the Queguay in Paysandii ; and the Cebollati, rising in the sierras in Minas and flowing into Lake Mirim. These rivers as well as the Uruguay are fed by innumerable smaller streams or &quot;arroyos,&quot; many of which have the importance and sometimes the names of rivers, such as the Arapey in Salto, the Dayman in Pay- sandu, the Yaguary (an affluent of the Negro) in Tacua- remb6, the Arroyo Grande between the departments of Soriano and San Jose, and the San Jose (an affluent of the Santa Lucia). None of the sierras or mountains in Moun- Uruguay exceed (or perhaps even attain) a height of tains. 2000 feet ; but, contrasting in their tawny colour with the grassy undulating plains, they loom up high and are often picturesque. They are ramifications of a range which, breaking away from the Andes in about 20 S. lat., reaches the frontier of Uruguay in 32. Here the chain divides, forming the Cuchilla de Haedo on the north and west and the Cuchilla Grande on the south and east. In the departments of Minas and Maldonado the second range takes the name of the Ghost Mountains. No accurate geological survey has yet been made, but it is known that the hills in the north are chiefly gneiss and granite and in other parts porphyry and sandstone. The hilly districts in the north and east contain minerals of many kinds, in cluding gold, lead, copper, agate, amethyst, alabaster, and marble. The limestone, granite, and marble quarries have some commercial value ; but so far little progress has been made in the working of metallic veins. For the gold mines, see below. The seat of government is the city of MONTEVIDEO (q.v.) at the entrance of the river Plate. The harbour and roadstead of that port form the only good natural refuge for shipping for hundreds of miles south of Rio de Janeiro. Uruguay has a healthy climate. Endemic diseases are unknown Climate and epidemics are rare. According to the tables of mortality for 1882, out of a total of 9640 deaths 45 were of persons over 100 years of age. In the interior, away from the sea and the shores of the great rivers, the temperature frequently rises in summer as high as 86 Fahr. and in winter falls as low as 35 6 Fahr. In the dis tricts bordering on the coast the thermometer seldom falls below 37 ; and only for a few moments and at long intervals has it been known to rise as high as 105. The annual rainfall is stated to be more than twice that of Paris (19 68 inches). This arises not from the frequency of rain but from the greater quantity which falls in a given time. Observations made during the years 1842 to 1852 inclusive showed that there were in Montevideo in the summer season November, December, and January 701 fine days, 141 cloudy, and 61 wet ; in winter May, June, and July there were 54 3 fine, 271 cloudy, and 10 6 wet days.