Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 14.djvu/843

* O'BKIEN. 717 OBSEBVATORY. liberty pole were removed. On June 12th O'Brien and his five brothers, accompiiniod by about tliirtytive of Ihcir townMiieii, many of them armed only with piU-liforks, manned a little sloop in the liarborj allaeked the Mnrytirctta and after a brief engagement captured her. After the bat- tle Captain O'Brien transferred the Margurclta's eannon to his own vessel, which he rechristened the Mticliius Liberty, and used as a coast patrol. Later he became a jirivateer captain sailing under letters of marque from the colony, and while commanding the lldiiiiibat, 20 guns, was cap- tured by two British frigates and sent to Eng- land, where he was confined in the Mill Prison. After the close of the war he was appointed the first collector of the port of JIachias. O'BRIEN, Lrciu.s Richard (1832—). A Canadian i)ainter, born at Shanty Bay, Ontario, and educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, where he studied architecture and civil engineer- ing. He came to be considered the best painter in water colors that Canada has produced. As first president of the Ro_yal Canadian Society of Artists, he furthered the interests of other ar- tists, and Canadian art in general. His best paintings are descriptive of scenery upon the Lower Saint Lawrence. O'BRIEN, WiLLi.M (1852—). An Irish jour- nalist and I'arliamentary leader. He was edu- cated at Cloyne Diocesan College and at Queen's College in Cork. In 1860 he became a reporter on the Cork Daily Herald, in 1875 he joined the staff of the Freeman's Journal, and in 1880 founded the United Ireland. Because of his po- litical activity, he was nine times prosecuted by the law officers of the Crown and was im- prisoned for more than two years. He repre- sented the Nationalists in Parliament almost continuously from 1S83 until 1895, when he re- tired because of dissensions in the party. In 1890 he visited the United States and collected considerable funds for the benefit of the Irish cause, and after Parnell's conviction he became one of the leaders of the anti-Parnell faction. In 1898 he originated a new agrarian movement under the name of the United Irish League, and fotinded the Irish People, as its organ. He pub- lished several I)ooks. among them When ITc Were Boys (1890) and Irish Ideas (1894). O'BRIEN, William Smith (1803-64). An Irish politician. He was educated .at Harrow School, whence he passed to Trinity College, Cambridge. Ho entered Parliament for the Boi-ough of Ennis in 1828. In 1835 he was re- turned for the County of Limerick, and for sev- eral years strongly advocated the claims of Ire- land to a strictly equal justice with England, in legislative as well as executive measures. Pro- fessing his inability to eft'ect this in the United Legislature, and having been committed to prison in the House of Commons by the Speaker's orders for refusing to serve on committees, he A'ithdrew from attendance in Parliament in 1841, and joined actively with Daniel O'Connell (q.v. ) in the agitation for a repeal of the legislative union between England and Ireland. In the progress of that agitation, O'Brien sided with the party known as 'Yinuig Ireland.' and when the political crisis of 1848 resulteil in a recourse to arms, he took part in an attempt at rebellion in tlie south of Ireland. He was arrested, convicted, and sen- tenced to death. The sentence, however, was commuted to transportation fcjr life. He was transported to Tasmania, but in 1856. in common with tile other political exiles, he was permitted to return to his native country. He published The Principles of (lorenimenl (1855). Consult: Sullivan, .Yrir Ireland (London, 1877) ; Duffy, Ydiiii;/ Ireland (2d ed., ib., 1883). OBSERVATORY (from Lat. ohservare, to observe, from oh, before + servare, to keep; eoii- nected with Skt. sar, Av. har, to protect). An institution supplied with instrnments for the regular observation of astronomical, meteorologi- cal, or magnetic phenomena. In some observa- tories all three classes of observation are carried on, but in most eases special attention is paid to astronomy alone, and onl}' such meteorological observations are taken as are required for the calculation of the eft'ect of atmospheric refrac- tion on the position of a heavenly body: there are, however, a few observatories which are de- voted solely to meteorological or magnetical ob- .servations. While observation of the heavenly bodies dates from prehistoric times and individuals at inter- vals made their crude observations of the heavens, the first observatory, in our modern sense of the word, was that of Alexandria, founded about B.C. 300. It continued in activity till A.o. 200; and it was here that Hipparchus dis- covered the precession of the equinoxes and fixed the positions of the sun, moon, and planets by means of armillary spheres (q.v.) and astro- labes, having graduated circles on which celestial latitudes and longitudes could be read off, wlien a pair of sights was pointed to the heavenly body. Ptolemy used a quadrant, with which he measured zenith distances on the meridian. In the ninth and tenth centuries the Arabs fminded observatories at Bagdad, Damascus, and Mokat- tam, near Cairo. In the latter place the Haki- mite tables were constructed. In the thirteenth century the splendi<l observatory at ileragha, Persia, and in the fifteenth century that of Sa- markand were founded by Mongol Khans. Here planetary tables and star catalogues were con- structed. The first observatory in Europe was that of Nuremberg, erected in 1472, and the re- vival of astronomical ob.servations in Europe dates from its foundation. In 1576 Tycho Bralie began the erection of his famous observatory on Hven, an island in the Sound. He con- verted the quadrant used by Ptolemy into an altazimuth by mounting it on a vertical axis in connection with a horizontal or azimuth circle. It was not till the middle of the eighteenth cen- tury that the improvement of time measurement with pendulum clocks enabled astronomers to rely for the determination of right ascensions on the times of passage across the meridian. instea<l of measurements with a graduated circle. The quadrant was then fixed in the meridian, and be- ing attached to a massive wall, its dimensions were increased, and greater accuracy thereby secured in the determination of meridian zenith distances. Neither the quadrant nor the mural circle (q.v.) which succeeded it, however, could be relied upon for accurate motion in the plane of the meridian, but Riimer remedied this defect by inventing the transit instrument (q.v.), which enabled astronomers to observe the times of meridian passage or transit with great accu- racv. and thus to determine the right ascension of