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 4:34 AMORITES pains upon her education, born at Oneglia in 1756, died in 1787. At the age of 16 she sus- tained, in public, arguments on various topics in philosophy. She studied law, and at the age of 21 graduated at Pavia, and received from the university her doctor's diploma. She wrote a treatise om Eoman law, which was published after her death. AMORITES (according to Simonis and Ewald, Highlanders), the most powerful tribe of the Canaanites, to all of whom the name is occa- sionally applied in the Hebrew Scriptures. They dwelt W. of the Jordan, in the territory subsequently allotted to Judah, chiefly in its mountainous portion ; and E. of that river they held the two kingdoms of Heshbon and Ba- shan, of the latter of which the gigantic Og was king when Moses invaded their country. They were a people of large stature and great prowess, and the Israelites had long and severe contests with them, under Moses, Joshua, and other leaders. AMORTIZATION, or Amortlzement (law Lat. amortisare), in old English law, the alienation or conveyance of real estate to corporations. It was prohibited by a series of statutes, the earliest of which, the Magna Charta of Henry III., ap- plied only to ecclesiastical, but which were sub- sequently extended to all corporations. Their influence is not yet extinct, either in England or America, though the powers of corporations have been much enlarged in both countries, and in some states put upon the same footing in this regard with those of private parties. These statutes were called the statutes of mort- main, as forbidding conveyances into dead hands ; hence amortization. AMORY, Thomas, an English author, born about 1691, died Nov. 25, 1788. He was edu- cated as a physician, but lived chiefly in retire- ment on a small income. In 1755 he published " Memoirs of several Ladies of Great Britain," all of whom were, like himself, zealous Unita- rians; and in 1756 appeared the first volume of his better known and very curious " Life of John Buncle, Esq.," in which he is supposed to have sketched his own picture. The second volume was published in 1766. He was a man of learning, ability, and deep religious convic- tions, but very eccentric. AMOS, one of the minor prophets, who proph- esied in the days of TJzziah, king of Judah, and Jeroboam II. of Israel, toward the close of the 9th century B. C. He was a native of Tekoah in Judah. He does not appear to have been educated as a prophet, but according to his own account was taken from his flocks to prophesy. His prophecies were especially ad- dressed to the kingdom of the ten tribes, and were delivered in the time of their greatest prosperity as a separate people. They de- nounce the idolatry practised at Bethel, Gilgal, Dan, and at Beersheba hi Judah, and also the sins of the nations bordering on both Hebrew kingdoms, and predict punishment, as well as a brighter future for the Israelitish people. AMPERE AMOSREAG. See MANCHESTER, N. H. AMOY (Chin. Hia-men or Sya-min ; Fr. fimouy), a seaport town of the province of Fokien, China, situated at the S. end of an isl- and of the same name, in lat. 24 40' N., Ion. 118 13' E., opposite the centre of the island of Formosa ; pop. about 250,000. It is built upon rising ground, facing a very spacious and excel- lent harbor, contains many large buildings, had at the time of the British invasion several con- siderable forts, one of them 1,100 yards long, and is reckoned to be nearly 9 m. in circumfer- ence. It is the port of the large inland city of Chang-choo-foo, with which it has river com- munication. Its inhabitants are chiefly em- ployed in trade, and its merchants are reckoned among the most enterprising in China. The port was open to the world till 1734, when it was closed. It was captured by the British in 1841, and by the treaty of Nanking was thrown open, first to Britain, then to all nations alike. The native merchants carry on an extensive trade coastwise, and with Formosa, Manila, Siam, and the Malay islands. The foreign im- ports in 1870 were valued at $4,500,000, and the exports at $2,300,000. Amoy is a princi- pal seat of Protestant missionary activity, and the missions of the Reformed church of Amer- ica and other denominations in 1869 numbered 1,271 communicants. AMPERE. I. And IT Marie, a French physicist and mathematician, born in Lyons, Jan. 20, 1775, died in Marseilles, June 10, 1836. As a boy he showed a singular passion for mathe- matics, in which at 10 years of age he had made remarkable progress, but could not be persuaded to appfy himself with zeal to other studies. He finally consented to study Virgil, that he might be able to master the works of Euler and Bernoulli, which were then accessi* ble only in Latin. At the age of 18 he had gone through the whole range of scientific studies, and had read the great encyclopaedia of Dide rot and D'Alembert so thoroughly, that 40 years afterward he could still repeat whole pages of it. The death of his father by the guillotine during the revolution affected him so that for upward of a year his friends feared that his intellect had been permanently im- paired. In 1802 he was appointed professor of mathematics at Lyons, a post which he owed to his first publication, u Considerations upon the Mathematical Theory of Games of Chance." In 1805 he became a teacher in the polytechnic school at Paris, in 1808 inspector general of the university, in 1809 professor of mathematical analysis in the polytechnic school, and in 1814 a member of the institute. In 1820 he began to devote much attention to the phenomena of electro-magnetism, and in 1824-'6 published Recueil dea observations elec- tro-dynamiques (2 vols.), a work characterized by profound thought and extraordinary philo- sophical sagacity. His publications are nu- merous, many of them being contributions to the Journal de Vecole poly technique and the