accompanied on his journeys as representative of the foreign office. He was present with the king during the campaigns of 1866 and 1870-71. In 1851 he published anonymously Babylon und Jerusalem, a slashing criticism of the views of the Countess von Hahn-Hahn (q.v.).

See Heinrich Abeken, ein schlichtes Leben in bewegter Zeit (Berlin, 1898), by his widow. This is valuable by reason of the letters written from the Prussian headquarters.

"

ABEL (Hebrew for breath), the second son of Adam, slain by Cain, his elder brother (Gen. iv. 1-16). The narrative in Genesis which tells us that "the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering, but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect,' is supplemented by the statement of the New Testament, that "by faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain" (Heb. xi. 4), and that Cain slew Abel "because his own works were evil and his brother's righteous" (1 John iii. 12). See further under CAIN. The name has been identified with the Assyrian ablu, “son," but this is far from certain. It more probably means herdsman (cf. the name Jabal), and a distinction is drawn between the pastoral Abel and the agriculturist Cain. If Cain is the eponym of the Kenites it is quite possible that Abel was originally a South Judaean demigod or hero; on this, see Winckler, Gesch. Israels, ii. p. 189; E. Meyer, Israeliten, p. 395. A sect of Abelitae, who seem to have lived in North Africa, is mentioned by Augustine (De Haeresibus, lxxxvi.).

ABEL, SIR FREDERICK AUGUSTUS, BART. (1827-1902), English chemist, was born in London on the 17th of July 1827. After studying chemistry for six years under A. W. von Hofmann at the Royal College of Chemistry (established in London in 1845), he became professor of chemistry at the Royal Military Academy in 1851, and three years later was appointed chemist to the War Department and chemical referee to the government. During his tenure of this office, which lasted until 1888, he carried out a large amount of work in connexion with the chemistry of explosives. One of the most important of his investigations had to do with the manufacture of guncotton, and he developed a process, consisting essentially of reducing the nitrated cotton to fine pulp, which enabled it to be prepared with practically no danger and at the same time yielded the product in a form that increased its usefulness. This work to an important extent prepared the way for the "smokeless powders " which came into general use towards the end of the 19th century; cordite, the particular form adopted by the British government in 1891, was invented jointly by him and Professor James Dewar. Our knowledge of the explosion of ordinary black powder was also greatly added to by him, and in conjunction with Sir Andrew Noble he carried out one of the most complete inquiries on record into its behaviour when fired. The invention of the apparatus, legalized in 1879, for the determination of the flash-point of petroleum, was another piece of work which fell to him by virtue of his official position. His first instrument, the open-test apparatus, was prescribed by the act of 1868, but, being found to possess certain defects, it was superseded in 1879 by the Abel close-test instrument (see PETROLEUM). In electricity Abel studied the construction of electrical fuses and other applications of electricity to warlike purposes, and his work on problems of steel manufacture won him in 1897 the Bessemer medal of the Iron and Steel Institute, of which from 1891 to 1893 he was president. He was president of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (then the Society of Telegraph Engineers) in 1877. He became a member of the Royal Society in 1860, and received a royal medal in 1887. He took an important part in the work of the Inventions Exhibition (London) in 1885, and in 1887 became organizing secretary and first director of the Imperial Institute, a position he held till his death, which occurred in London on the 6th of September 1902. He was knighted in 1891, and created a baronet in 1893.

Among his books were-Handbook of Chemistry (with C. L. Bloxam), Modern History of Gunpowder (1866), Gun-cotton (1866), On Explosive Agents (1872), Researches in Explosives (1875), and

Electricity applied to Explosive Purposes (1884). He also wrote several important articles in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

ABEL, KARL FRIEDRICH (1725-1787), German musician, was born in Köthen in 1725, and died on the 20th of June 1787 in London. He was a great player on the viola da gamba, and composed much music of importance in its day for that instrument. He studied under Johann Sebastian Bach at the Leipzig Thomasschule; played for ten years (1748-1758) under A. Hasse in the band formed at Dresden by the elector of Saxony; and then, going to England, became (in 1759) chamber-musician to Queen Charlotte. He gave a concert of his own compositions in London, performing on various instruments, one of which, the pentachord, was newly invented. In 1762 Johann Christian Bach, the eleventh son of Sebastian, came to London, and the friendship between him and Abel led, in 1764 or 1765, to the establishment of the famous concerts subsequently known as the Bach and Abel concerts. For ten years these were organized by Mrs Cornelys, whose enterprises were then the height of fashion. In 1775 the concerts became independent of her, and were continued by Abel unsuccessfully for a year after Bach's death in 1782. At them the works of Haydn were first produced in England. After the failure of his concert undertakings Abel still remained in great request as a player on various instruments new and old, but he took to drink and thereby hastened his death. He was a man of striking presence, of whom several fine portraits, including two by Gainsborough, exist.

ABEL, NIELS HENRIK (1802-1829), Norwegian mathe matician, was born at Findöe on the 25th of August 1802. In 1815 he entered the cathedral school at Christiania, and three years later he gave proof of his mathematical genius by his brilliant solutions of the original problems proposed by B. Holmboë. About this time, his father, a poor Protestant minister, died, and the family was left in straitened circum. stances; but a small pension from the state allowed Abel to enter Christiania University in 1821. His first notable work was a proof of the impossibility of solving the quintic equation by radicals. This investigation was first published in 1824 and in abstruse and difficult form, and afterwards (1826) more elaborately in the first volume of Crelle's Journal. Further state aid enabled him to visit Germany and France in 1825, and having visited the astronomer Heinrich Schumacher (17801850) at Hamburg, he spent six months in Berlin, where he became intimate with August Leopold Crelle, who was then about to publish his mathematical journal. This project was warmly encouraged by Abel, who contributed much to the success of the venture. From Berlin he passed to Freiberg, and here he made his brilliant researches in the theory of func tions, elliptic, hyperelliptic and a new class known as Abelians being particularly studied. In 1826 he moved to Paris, and during a ten months' stay he met the leading mathematicians of France; but he was little appreciated, for his work was scarcely known, and his modesty restrained him from proclaiming his researches. Pecuniary embarrassments, from which he had never been free, finally compelled him to abandon his tour, and on his return to Norway he taught for some time at Christiania. In 1829 Crelle obtained a post for him at Berlin, but the offer did not reach Norway until after his death near Arendal on the 6th of April.

The early death of this talented mathematician, of whom Legendre said "quelle tête celle du jeune Norvegien !", cut short a career of extraordinary brilliance and promise. Under Abel's guidance, the prevailing obscurities of analysis began to be cleared, new fields were entered upon and the study of functions so advanced as to provide mathematicians with numerous ramifications along which progress could be made. His works, the greater part of which originally appeared in Crelle's Journal, were edited by Holmboë and published in 1839 by the Swedish government, and a more complete edition by L. Sylow and S. Lie was published in 1881.

For further details of his mathematical investigations see

the 21st of April 1142. First buried at St Marcel, his remains soon after were carried off in secrecy to the Paraclete, and given over to the loving care of Heloise, who in time came herself to rest beside them (1164). The bones of the pair were shifted more than once afterwards, but they were marvellously preserved even through the vicissitudes of the French Revolution, and now they lie united in the well-known tomb in the cemetery of Père-la-Chaise at Paris.

Upon the return of new dangers, or at least of fears, Abelard left the Paraclete to make trial of another refuge, accepting an invitation to preside over the abbey of St Gildas-de-Rhuys, on the far-off shore of Lower Brittany. It proved a wretched exchange. The region was inhospitable, the domain a prey to lawless exaction, the house itself savage and disorderly. Yet for nearly ten years he continued to struggle with fate before he fled from his charge, yielding in the end only under peril of violent death. The misery of those years was not, however, unrelieved; for he had been able, on the breaking up of Heloise's convent at Argenteuil, to establish her as head of a new religious house at the deserted Paraclete, and in the capacity of spiritual director he often was called to revisit the spot thus made doubly dear to him. All this time Heloise had lived amid universal esteem for her knowledge and character, uttering no word under the doom that had fallen upon her youth; but now, at last, the occasion came for expressing all the pent-up emotions of her soul. Living on for some time apart (we do not know exactly where), after his flight from St Gildas, Abelard wrote, among other things, his famous Historia Calamitatum, and thus moved her to pen her first Letter, which remains an unsurpassed utterance of human passion and womanly devotion; the first being followed by the two other Letters, in which she finally accepted the part of resignation which, now as a brother to a sister, Abelard commended to her. He not long after was seen once more upon the field of his early triumphs lecturing on Mount St Geneviève in 1136 (when he was heard by John of Salisbury), but it was only for a brief space: no new triumph, but a last great trial, awaited him in the few years to come of his chequered life. As far back as the Paraclete days, he had counted as chief among his foes Bernard of Clairvaux, in whom was incarnated the principle of fervent and unhesitating faith, from which rational inquiry like his was sheer revolt, and now this uncompromising spirit was moving, at the instance of others, to crush the growing evil in the person of the boldest offender. After preliminary negotiations, in which Bernard was roused by Abelard's steadfastness to put forth all his strength, a council met at Sens (1141), before which Abelard, formally arraigned upon a number of heretical charges, was prepared to plead his cause. When, however, Bernard, not without foregone terror in the prospect of meeting the redoubtable dialectician, had opened the case, suddenly Abelard appealed to Rome. The stroke availed him nothing; for Bernard, who had power, notwithstanding, to get a condemnation passed at the council, did not rest a moment till a second condemnation was procured at Rome in the following year. Meanwhile, on his way thither to urge his plea in person, Abelard had broken down at the abbey of Cluny, and there, an utterly fallen man, with spirit of the humblest, and only not bereft of his intellectual force, he lingered but a few months before the approach of death. Removed by friendly hands, for the relief of his sufferings,

Great as was the influence exerted by Abelard on the minds of his contemporaries and the course of medieval thought, he has been little known in modern times but for his connexion with Heloise. Indeed, it was not till the 19th century, when Cousin in 1836 issued the collection entitled Ouvrages inédits d'Abélard, that his philosophical performance could be judged at first hand; of his strictly philosophical works only one, the ethical treatise Scito te ipsum, having been published earlier, namely, in 1721. Cousin's collection, besides giving 'extracts from the theological work Sic et Non (an assemblage of opposite opinions on doctrinal points, culled from the Fathers as a basis for discussion, the main interest in which lies in the fact that there is no attempt to reconcile the different opinions), includes the Dialectica, commentaries on logical works of Aristotle, Porphyry and Boëthius, and a fragment, De Generibus et Speciebus. The last-named work, and also the psychological treatise De Intellectibus, published apart by Cousin (in Fragmen's Philosophiques, vol. ii.), are now 'considered upon internal evidence not to be by Abelard himself, but only to have sprung out of his school. A genuine work, the Glossulae super Porphyrium, from which Charles de Rémusat, in his classical monograph Abelard (1845), has given extracts, remains in manuscript.

The general importance of Abelard lies in his having fixed more decisively than any one before him the scholastic manner of philosophizing, with its object of giving a formally rational expression to the received ecclesiastical doctrine. However his own particular interpretations may have been condemned, they were conceived in essentially the same spirit as the general scheme of thought afterwards elaborated in the 13th century with approval from the heads of the church. Through him was prepared in the Middle Age the ascendancy of the philosophical authority of Aristotle, which became firmly established in the half-century after his death, when first the completed Organon, and gradually all the other works of the Greek thinker, came to be known in the schools: before his time it was rather upon the authority of Plato that the prevailing Realism sought to lean. As regards his so-called Conceptualism and his attitude to the question of Universals, see SCHOLASTICISM. Outside of his dialectic, it was in ethics that Abelard showed greatest activity of philosophical thought; laying very particular stress upon the subjective intention as determining, if not the moral character, at least the moral value, of human action. His thought in this direction, wherein he anticipated something of modern speculation, is the more remarkable because his scholastic successors accomplished least in the field of morals, hardly venturing to bring the principles and rules of conduct under pure philosophical discussion, even after the great ethical inquiries of Aristotle became fully known to them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Abelard's own works remain the best sources for

his life, especially his Historia Calamitatum, an autobiography, and the correspondence with Heloise. The literature on Abelard is extensive, but consists principally of monographs on different aspects of his philosophy. Charles de Rémusat's Abelard (2 vols., 1845) remains an authority; it must be distinguished from his drama Abelard (1877), which is an attempt to give a picture of medieval See also the valuable analysis by Nitsch in the article "Abalard life. McCabe's life of Abelard is written closely from the sources. in Hauck's Realencyklopädie f. prot. Theol. u. Kirche, 3rd ed., 1896. There is a comprehensive bibliography in U. Chevalier, Répertoire des sources hist. du moyen âge, s. "Abailard." (G. C. R.; J. T. S.*)

ABELIN, JOHANN PHILIPP, an early 16th-century German chronicler, was born, probably, at Strasburg, and died there between the years 1634 and 1637. He wrote numerous histories over the pseudonyms of Philipp Arlanibäus, Abeleus and Johann Ludwig Gottfried or Gotofredus, his earliest works of importance

Swansea to return one member; but in 1885 the older portion of Swansea was given a separate member.

The district of Egba, of which Abeokuta is the capital, has an estimated area of 3000 sq. m. and a population of some 350,000. It is officially, known as the Abeokuta province of the Southern Nigeria protectorate. It contains luxuriant forests of palmtrees, which constitute the chief wealth of the people. Cotton is indigenous and is grown for export. The Egbas are enthusiastic farmers and have largely adopted European methods of cultivation. They are very tenacious of their independence, but accepted without opposition the establishment of a British protectorate, which, while putting a stop to inter-tribal warfare, slave-raiding and human sacrifices, and exercising control over the working of the laws, left to the people executive and fiscal autonomy. The administration is in the hands of a council of chiefs which exercises legislative, executive and, to some extent, judicial functions. The president of this council, or ruling chief -chosen from among the members of the two recognized reigning families is called the alake, a word meaning "Lord of Ake," Ake being the name of the principal quarter of Abeokuta, after the ancient capital of the Egbas. The alake exercises little authority apart from his council, the form of government being largely democratic. Revenue is chiefly derived from tolls or import duties. A visit of the alake to England in 1904 evoked considerable public interest. The chief was a man of great intelligence, eager to study western civilization, and an ardent agriculturist.

See the publications of the Church Missionary Society dealing with the Yoruba Mission; Col. A. B. Ellis's The Yoruba-speaking Peoples (London, 1894); and an article on Abeokuta by Sir Wm. Macgregor, sometime governor of Lagos, in the African Society's Journal, No. xii, (London, July 1904).

ABERAVON, a contributory parliamentary and municipal borough of Glamorganshire, Wales, on the right bank of the Avon, near its mouth in Swansea Bay, 11 m. E.S.E. of Swansea and 170 m. from London by rail. Pop. (1901) 7553. It has a station on the Rhondda and Swansea Bay railway and is also on the main South Wales line of the Great Western, whose station, however, is at Port Talbot, half a mile distant, on the eastern side of the Avon. The valley of the Avon, which is only some three miles long, has been from about 1840 a place of much metallurgical activity. There are tinplate and engineering works within the borough. At Cwmavon, 1m. to the north-east, are large copper-smelting works established in 1838, acquired two years later by the governor and Company of the Copper Miners of England, but now worked by the Rio Tinto Copper Company. There are also iron, steel and tinplate works both at Cwmavon and at Port Talbot, which, when it consisted only of docks, was appropriately known as Aberavon Port.

The town derives its name from the river Avon (corrupted from Avan), which also gave its name to a medieval lordship. On the Norman conquest at Glamorgan, Caradoc, the eldest son of the defeated prince, Lestyn ab Gwrgan, continued to hold this lordship, and for the defence of the passage of the river built here a castle whose foundations are still traceable in a field near the churchyard. His descendants (who from the 13th century onwards styled themselves De Avan or D'Avene) established, under the protection of the castle, a chartered town, which in 1372 received a further charter from Edward Le Despenser, into whose family the lordship had come on an exchange of lands. In modern times these charters were not acted upon, the town being deemed a borough by prescription, but in 1861 it was incorporated under the Municipal Corporations Act. Since: 1832 it has belonged to the Swansea parliamentary dis

ABERCARN, an urban district in the southern parliamentary division of Monmouthshire, England, 10 m. N.W. of Newport by the Great Western railway. Pop. (1901) 12,607. There are collieries, ironworks and tinplate works in the district; the town, which lies in the middle portion of the Ebbw valley, being situated on the south-eastern flank of the great mining region of Glamorganshire and Monmouthshire.

ABERCORN, JAMES HAMILTON IST EARL OF (c. 1575-1618), was the eldest son of Claud Hamilton, Lord Paisley (4th son of James, 2nd earl of Arran, and duke of Chatelherault), and of Margaret, daughter of George, 6th Lord Seton. He was made sheriff of Linlithgow in 1600, received large grants of lands in Scotland and Ireland, was created in 1603 baron of Abercorn, and on the 10th of July 1606 was rewarded for his services in the matter of the union by being made earl of Abercorn, and Baron Hamilton, Mount Castle and Kilpatrick. He married Marion, daughter of Thomas, 5th Lord Boyd, and left five sons, of whom the eldest, baron of Strabane, succeeded him as 2nd earl of Abercorn. He died on the 23rd of March 1618. The title of Abercorn, held by the head of the Hamilton family, became a marquessate in 1790, and a dukedom in 1868, the 2nd duke of Abercorn (b. 1838) being a prominent Unionist politician and chairman of the British South Africa Company. ABERCROMBIE, JOHN (1780-1844), Scottish physician, was the son of the Rev. George Abercrombie of Aberdeen, where he was born on the 10th of October 1780. He was educated at the university of Edinburgh, and after graduating as M.D. in 1803 he settled down to practise in that city, where he soon attained a leading position. From 1816 he published various papers in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, which formed the basis of his Pathological and Practical Researches on Diseases of the Brain and Spinal Cord, and of his Researches on the Diseases of the Intestinal Canal, Liver and other Viscera of the Abdomen, both published in 1828. He also found time for philosophical speculations, and in 1830 he published his Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers of Man and the Investigation of Truth, which was followed in 1833 by a sequel, The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings. Both works, though showing little originality of thought, achieved wide popularity. He died at Edinburgh on the 14th of November 1844.

ABERCROMBY, DAVID, à 17th-century Scottish physician who was sufficiently noteworthy a generation after the probable date of his death to have his Nova Medicinae Praxis reprinted at Paris in 1740. During his lifetime his Tuta ac efficax luis venereae saepe absque mercurio ac semper absque salivatione mercuriali curando methodus (1684) was translated into French, Dutch and German. Two other works by him were De Pulsus Variatione (London, 1685), and Ars explorandi medicas facultates plantarum ex solo sapore (London, 1685-1688). His Opuscula were collected in 1687. These professional writings gave him a place and memorial in A. von Haller's Bibliotheca Medicinae Pract. (4 vols. 8vo, 1779, tom. iii. p. 619); but he claims notice rather by his remarkable controversial books in theology and philosophy than by his medical writings. Bred up at Douai as a Jesuit, he abjured popery, and published Protestancy proved Safer than Popery (London, 1686). But the most noticeable of his productions is A Discourse of Wit (London, 1685), which contains some of the most characteristic and most definitely-put metaphysical opinions of the Scottish philosophy of common sense. It was followed by Academia Scientiarum (1687), and by A Moral Treatise of the Power of Interest (1690), dedicated to Robert Boyle. A Short Account of Scots Divines, by him, was printed at Edinburgh in 1833, edited by James Maidment. The exact date of his death is unknown, but according to Haller he was alive early in the 18th century.