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Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. It was founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The ...
The great Athenian orator, born in Athens; had many impediments to overcome to succeed in the profession, but by ingenious methods and indomitable perseverance he subdued them all, and became the first orator not of Greece only, but of all antiquity; a stammer in his speech he overcame by practising with pebbles in his mouth, and a natural diffidence by declaiming on the sea-beach amid the noise of the waves; while he acquired a perfect mastery of the Greek language by binding himself down to copy five times over in succession Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War"; he employed 15 years of his life in denunciation of Philip of Macedon, who was bent on subjugating his country; pronounced against him his immortal "Philippics" and "Olynthiacs"; took part in the battle of Cheronea, and continued the struggle even after Philip's death; on the death of Alexander he gave his services as an orator to the confederated Greeks, and in the end made away with himself by poison so as not to fall into the hands of Autipater (385-322 B.C.). See Ctesiphon.
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A silver coin among the Romans, first coined in 269 B.C., and worth 8½ d.
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The county town of Denbighshire, in the Vale of the Clwyd, 30 m. W. of Chester; manufactures shoes and leather.
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A county in North Wales, of rugged hills and fertile vales, 40 m. long and 17 m. on an average broad, with a coal-field in the NE., and with mines of iron, lead, and slate.
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A village in Upper Egypt, on the left bank of the Nile, 28 m. N. of Thebes, on the site of ancient Tentyra, with the ruins of a temple in almost perfect preservation; on the ceiling of a portico of which there was found a zodiac, now in the museum of the Louvre in Paris, and dates from the period of Cleopatra and the early Roman emperors, and has sculptured portraits of that queen and her son Caesarion.
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A disease peculiar to the tropics, occurs in hot weather, and attacks one suddenly with high fever and violent pains, and after a relapse returns in a milder form and leaves the patient very weak.
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A king of Portugal from 1279 to 1325; the founder of the University of Coimbra and the Order of Christ.
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A French philosopher, born at Langres, the son of a cutler there; a zealous propagator of the philosophic ideas of the 18th century, and the projector of the famous "Encyclopédie," which he edited along with D'Alembert, and which made a great noise in its day, but did not enrich its founder, who was in the end driven to offer his library for sale to get out of the pecuniary difficulties it involved him in, and he would have been ruined had not Catharine of Russia bought it, which she not only did, but left it with him, and paid him a salary as librarian. Diderot fought hard to obtain a hearing for his philosophical opinions; his first book was burnt by order of the parlement of Paris, while for his second he was clapped in jail; and all along he had to front the most formidable opposition, so formidable that all his fellow-workers were ready to yield, and were only held to their task by his indomitable resolution and unquenchable ardour. "A deist in his earlier writings," says Schwegler, "the drift of his subsequent writings amounts to the belief that all is God. At first a believer in the immateriality and immortality of the soul, he peremptorily declares at last that only the race endures, that individuals pass, and that immortality is nothing but life in the remembrance of posterity; he was kept back, however, from the materialism his doctrines issued in by his moral earnestness"; that Diderot was at heart no sceptic is evident, as Dr. Stirling suggests, from his "indignation at the darkness, the miserable ignorance of those around him, and his resolution to dispel it" (1713-1784).
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The smallest of the three Scandinavian kingdoms, consisting of Jutland and an archipelago of islands in the Baltic Sea, divided into 18 counties, and is less than half the size of Scotland; is a low-lying country, no place in it more above the sea-level than 500 ft., and as a consequence has no river to speak of, only meres or lakes; the land is laid out in cornfields and grazing pastures; there are as good as no minerals, but abundance of clay for porcelain; while the exports consist chiefly of horses, cattle, swine, hams, and butter; it has 1407 m. of railway, and 8686 of telegraph wires; the government is constitutional, and the established religion Lutheran.
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A village in Brandenburg, 40 m. SW. of Berlin, where Marshal Ney with 70,000 was defeated by Marshal Bulow with 50,000.
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