Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 20.djvu/812

* XENOPHON. 692 XEROPHYTES. stowed upon him an estate on the road to Olym- pia in territory taken from Elis. Here he spent the next sixteen years in the pursuits of litera- ture and the chase. Here his two sons grew to manhood, and here his chief works were written. The defeat of the Spartans by the Thebans at Leuctra in 371 emboldened the Eleians to repel the Spartan protege; but though the Athenians, now friendly to Sparta, repealed the decree of banishment," and though he sent his son Gryllus with tlic Athenian cavalry at Mantinea, Xeno- phon did not himself return to Athens, but made his home at Corinth, where he died about the year 355. Besides the Anabasis, Xenophon's chief works are: (1) The so-called ilemonihiUa, or recollec- tions of Socrates and Socratic conversations. This was probably called forth by the declama- tion against Socrates of the Sophist Polycrates (about 394). After ten years of campaigning and adventure Xenophon could not possibly have remembered the details which he professes to give, and a comparison with his other writings shows that much of the material of the book is Xenophontic rather than Socratic. Especially famous are the chapters on the evidences of de- sign in nature, and the apologue of the choice of Herakles, borrowed, so Xenophon tells us, from the Sophist Prodicus. Complementary to the Memonibilia are the representation of Socrates's table talk in the Siiiiiposiiim or Banquet, the relation of which to Plato's Sympos'uim is much debated, and the CEconomicus or dialogue on the management of a house and family, often quoted for its pleasing picture of the young Greek wife and her education by her husband. (2) The UcUenica begins abruptly in 411, as a continuation of Thucydides's unfinislied history of the Peloponnesian War. The first two books bring the story down to the overthrow of the 'thirty' in 403. The last five books, composed later," are a general sketch of the history of Greece to the battle of Mantinea in 362. An al- lusion to the death of Alexander of Pher* dates the publication after 357. The work sufl'ers by contrast with the philosophic history of Thucy- dides and has been severely censured for lack of just proportion, particularly to Sparta, and fail- ure to appreciate the greatness of the Theban Epaminondas. (3) The Cyropwdia, or education of Cyrus, is a philosophical romance embodying in the jicrsun of Cyrus the Elder, the founder of the Persian Empire, Xenophon's favorite notions of the souml training of mind and body and the art of commanding men and winning willing obedience. It is quite unreadable as a whole, but the love story of the wedded pair Abradates and Panthea and the dying speech of Cyrus on the inunortality of the soul are oflen (pioted. Minor works are the LacecUemonian Polily, the laudatory biography of Agesilaus, the tract on the lioven'iies of Athens, the Jlicro, or dialogue on Tyranny, the (probably spurious) Apolopi/ of Socrates, and the special treatises on Horseman- ship, The Chase, and the Duties of a Cavalry Of- fictr. Xenophon is the perfect amateur. As sohlicr, orator, philosopher, essayist, historian, he gives us the measure of the ability and versatility of an Athenian gentleman of extraordinary talent, but not of genius. He writes a simple unaf- fected style, but is not nicely scrupulous for the purity of Attic idiom or vocabulary. Xenophon may be read in Teubner texts, or in the edition of Sauppe (Leipzig, 1807-70). School editions abound, especially of the Anabasis and the ilemorahilia. There is a good transla- tion by Dakyns (London, 1890 et seq. ). XENY, or XENIA (Neo-Lat. nom. pi, from Gk. iims, xenos, host; so called because the fruit is modified by its host, the hybrid ovule). This term was proposed by Focke for certain alleged hereditary phenomena in plants which are analogous to telegony (q.v.) in animals. Dar- win held that the action of foreign pollen on the mother-plant is of the highest theoretical im- portance, and is in itself a remarkable and ap- parently anomalous circumstance, for the male element not only affects, in accordance with its proper function, the germ, but at the same time various parts of the mother-plant, in the same manner as it affects the same parts in the seminal offspring from the same two parents. Eminent botanists, such as Focke and De Vries, have expressed doubt as to the interpretation given to xeny, though Romanes accepts Darwin's facts and interpretation. In maize (Zea) this phenomenon is said to occur regularly. The variety with white kernels, fertilized by a kind ith yellow, brown, or blue kernels, bears kernels of these colors, the reverse never taking place. Gartner found that white jieas fertilized by colored peas bore colored seeds, and white and colored seeds have often occurred in the same pod. At present xeny is in the same unsettled state as telegony. Consult: Darwin, T/ie Vuria- tio)i of Animals and Plants Vnthr Domcstica- iion (London, 1888) ; Focke. Die Pflanzen-Misch- linpe. Ein Beitrag zur Biologie der Gemichse (Berlin, 1881); Romanes, An Examination of Weismannism (Chicago, 1893) ; Delage, Z.tt s<rwc- tiirc da protoplasm, et Ics theories sur Vhir(dit6 (Paris. 1895). XEREZ, na'rath. A city in Spain. See Jeeez de la Frontera. XEREZ, Francisco de (c.1.500-?). A Span- ish historian, born at Seville. He became the sec- retary of Pizarro, and as such wrote an account of the conquest of Peru, Verdadera relacidn de I'l conquista del Peril y de la provincia del Cuzeo llnmada la Niiera Castilla (1547). This nar- rative, translated into French by TernauxCom- jians, and into Italian by Ramusio, is occasionally found appended to Oviedo's history of the Indies. XEROPHYTES, zerVi-flts (from Gk. ir,p6s, xcros, dry _)- tpvrdv. phylon, plant). Phuits whose structure specially fits them to withstand excessive transpiration, especiallj' plants of deserts and sandy or rocky habitats, to which forms the term was ))reviously restricted. JIany recent authors, however, have extended the term to all plants, e.g. those of marshes, jieat bogs, etc., which show structures typical of desert plants. Schimpcr defines xerophytes as jilants which in- habit physiologically dry areas, by which phrase the ]ilants' inability to get water from the soil is ciiipliasized rather than the actual quantity of water present. For example, a frozen soil is I)hysiologieally dry, as may also be a peat hog and a salt niar.sh; the first self-evidently, the last two because osmotically acting sub.-^tances