Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VIII.djvu/842

 HORNPIPE HORSE family ; it is often seen on trees infested with aphides or plant lice, for the sake of devouring and of carrying to its young the honey dew or sugary excretion of these insects. This species is very fierce if attacked. The nests of some of the South American species, cleared of the platforms of cells, are used as baskets, being light, strong, and very tight. Hornets, like the other wasps, make no honey. Many large wasps, varied with black and yellow, are called hornets in different parts of the country. HORNPIPE, a wind instrument, once a fa- vorite with the Welsh peasantry, and probably still in use among them, consisting of a wooden pipe with holes at stated distances, and a horn at each end. The tone is pleasing, and some- what resembles that of the hautboy. For this instrument was composed the lively dance tune known as the hornpipe, a name applied also to the dance which accompanies it. Both the tune and the dance are supposed to be of Eng- lish invention, and the former is generally in triple time, six crotchets in a bar. HORROX, or Horroeks, Jeremiah, an English astronomer, born at Toxteth, near Liverpool, about 1616, died there, Jan. 3, 1641. He was matriculated as a sizar at Emmanuel college, Cambridge, July 5, 1632, but left without a degree. Devoting himself to astronomy, he found difficulty in procuring the books and in- struments he desired. He was for a time mis- led and induced to distrust the accuracy of his own observations by their incompatibility with those of Lansberg, but was set right by the study of Tycho Brahe and of Kepler. His tel- escope, which he did not obtain until May, 1638, cost him only 2s. 6<Z., but it enabled him to make the first observation ever made of the transit of Venus over the sun's disk, Nov. 24, 1639. The transit in 1631 had been predicted by Kepler, but he had failed to point out that of 1639. The tables of Lansberg indicated the latter, but did not give the time. Horrox sup- plied the omission by his own calculations, and prepared to watch the phenomenon. At this time he was curate of Hoole, a small village near Preston. The transit, according to his cal- culation, would take place about 3 o'clock of a Sunday afternoon, but to avoid mistake he be- gan his observations at noon the preceding day. After careful watching for more than 24 hours, except during the time of divine service, which he would not neglect even in the interest of sci- ence, he was rewarded for all his toil and anxie- ty. This transit was observed only by himself and his friend Crabtree, whom he apprised of the coming event the preceding month. Horrox's account of it, entitled Venus in Sole visa, was printed by Hevelius at the end of his Mercu- rius in Sole visus (Dantzic, 1662). He re- mained at Hoole only about six months after this great achievement. The last three months of his life were devoted to a study of the irregu- larities of the tides, from which he hoped to obtain a demonstration of the rotation of the earth. He was also the author of the theory that the lunar motions might be represented by supposing an elliptic orbit, if the eccentrici- ty of the ellipse were made to vary, and an oscillatory motion given to the line of apsides. Newton afterward verified his suppositions, and showed that they were consequences of the law of gravitation, but he attributed to Halley what properly belonged to Horrox. The re- maining works of Horrox were published by Wallis in 1672, with an exposition of his lunar theory by Flam steed. A translation of the Venus in Sole visa is appended to the " Me- moirs of the Life and Labors of the Rev. Jere- miah Horrox," by Whatton (London, 1859; 2d ed., 1869). HORRY, an E. county of South Carolina, bordering on the Atlantic and North Carolina, bounded W. by the Little Pedee, which flows into the Great Pedee on the S. W. border of the county, and drained by the Waccamaw river ; area, 1,200 sq. m. ; pop. in 1870, 10,- 721, of whom 3,235 were colored. It has a Iqw marshy surface, and is partly covered with large forests of pine. The soil is generally poor. The Wilmington, Columbia, and Au- gusta railroad touches the N. corner. The chief productions in 1870 were 62,039 bushels of Indian corn, 72,232 of sweet potatoes, 74 bales of cotton, and 417,507 Ibs of rice. There were 451 horses, 3,347 milch cows, 6,431 other cattle, 7,592 sheep, and 17,399 swine; 3 saw mills, and 8 manufactories of tar and turpen- tine. Capital, Conwayborough. HORSA. See HENGIST. HORSCHELT, Tlieodor, a German painter, born in Munich, March 16, 1829, died there, April 3, 1871. He travelled in 1853 in Spain and Algeria, and was from 1858 to 1863 in the Caucasus with the Russian army. He was es- pecially distinguished for his pictures of bat- tles and of life in the Caucasus. HORSE, a simple - hoofed, non - ruminating quadruped, constituting the soliped family of Cuvier's order of packydermata, and, in Prof. Owen's system, the family solidungula, of the order perissodactyla (odd-toed), of the group ungulata (hoofed), and of the mammalian sub- class gyrencephala (wave-brained). Zoologi- cally considered, the family consists of the single genus equus (Linn.), distinguished from all other quadrupeds by having only one ap- parent toe and a single solid hoof on each foot, although under the skin, on the sides of the metacarpal and metatarsal bones, are the rudi- ments of two others on each limb. The den- tition is : six sharp and cutting incisors in each jaw ; six molars on each side of each jaw, with crowns of a quadrangular form, and having the surface intersected by deep plates of enamel arranged in four crescentic masses, and with a small additional disk of enamel on the inner border of the upper teeth ; there are also, in the males, two small upper canines, and some- timeslower ones, usually absent in thefemales; there is a considerable space between the ca- nines and the molars, opposite the commissure