Part 350 (1/2)

PHLOGISTON, a name given by the old chemists to an imaginary principle of fire, latent in bodies, and which escaped during combustion.

PHOCAS, a common soldier who raised himself by the aid of a faction to the throne of the East, and for twenty years defied attempts to dethrone him, but, being deserted by his party, was taken, subjected to torture, and beheaded in 610. ”His reign,” says Gibbon, ”afflicted Europe with ignominious peace, and Asia with desolating war.”

PHOCION, a distinguished Athenian general and statesman, a disciple of Plato and Xenocrates; was wise in council as well as brave in war; opposed to the democracy of Athens, led on by Demosthenes in the frantic ambition of coping with Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander; and pled for a pacific arrangement with them; but having opposed war with Antipater, the successor of the latter, he was accused of treason, and condemned to drink hemlock; the Athenians afterwards repented of the crime, raised a bronze statue to his memory, and condemned his accuser to death.

PHOCIS, a province of ancient Greece, W. of Boeotia, and N. of the Gulf of Corinth; was traversed by the mountain range of Parna.s.sus, and contained the oracle of Apollo at Delphi; allied to Athens in the Peloponnesian War, the Phocians were crushed in the ”Sacred War” after ten years' fighting by Philip of Macedon, 346 B.C.

PHOEBUS (i. e. the radiant one), an epithet originally applied to Apollo for his beauty, and eventually to him as the sun-G.o.d.

PHOENICIA, a country on the E. sh.o.r.e of the Levant, stretching inland to Mount Lebanon, at first extending only 20 m. N. of Palestine, but later embracing 200 m. of coast, with the towns of Tyre, Zarephath, Sidon, Gebal, and Arvad. The country comprised well-wooded hills and fertile plains, was rich in natural resources, richer still in a people of remarkable industry and enterprise. Of Semitic stock, they emerge from history with Sidon as ruling city about 1500 B.C., and reach their zenith under Tyre 1200-750, thereafter declining, and ultimately merging in the Roman Empire. During their prosperity their manufactures, purple dye, gla.s.s ware, and metal implements were in demand everywhere; they were the traders of the world, their nautical skill and geographical position making their markets the centres of exchange between East and West; their s.h.i.+ps sailed every sea, and carried the merchandise of every country, and their colonists settled all over the Mediterranean, aegean, and Euxine, and even beyond the Pillars of Hercules, in Africa, in Britain, and the countries on the Baltic. Her greatest colony was Carthage, the founding of which (823 B.C.) sapped the strength of the mother-country, and which afterwards usurped her place, and contended with Rome for the mastery of the world. But Phoenicia's greatest gift to civilisation was the alphabet, which she herself may have developed from Egyptian hieroglyphics, and which, with its great merit of simplicity, has, slightly altered, at length superseded among civilised nations every other system.

PHOENIX, a bird which was fabled at the end of certain cycles of time to immolate itself in flames, and rise renewed in youth from the ashes. It has become the appropriate symbol of the death-birth that ever introduces a new era in the history of the world, and is employed by Carlyle in ”Sartor” as symbol of the crisis through which the present generation is now pa.s.sing, the conflagration going on appearing nowise as a mere conflagration, but the necessary preliminary of a new time, with the germinating principles of which it is pregnant.

PHOENIX PARK, a magnificent public park of 2000 acres in Dublin; is much used for military reviews; it was rendered notorious in 1882 through the murder by the ”Invincibles” of Lord Frederick Cavendish, who had just been appointed Irish Secretary, and his subordinate, Thomas Burke.

PHONOGRAPH, an instrument invented by EDISON (q. v.) in 1877 for recording and reproducing articulate sounds of the voice in speech or song, and to which the name of phonogram is given.

PHOTIUS, patriarch of Constantinople; was the great promoter of the schism on the question of the procession of the Holy Ghost, between the Eastern and the Western divisions of the Church, denying as he did, and erasing from the creed the _FILIOQUE_ article (q. v.); _d_. 891.

PHOTOGRAVURE, a process of reproducing pictures from the negative of a photograph on a gelatine surface with the a.s.sistance of certain chemical preparations.

PHOTOSPHERE, name given to the luminous atmosphere enveloping the sun.

PHOTOTYPE, a block with impressions produced by photography from which engravings, &c., can be printed.

PHRENOLOGY claims to be a science in which the relation of the functions of mind to the material of the brain substance is observed. It a.s.serts that just as speech, taste, touch, &c., have their centres in certain convolutions of the brain, so have benevolence, firmness, conscientiousness, &c., and that by studying the configuration of the brain, as indicated by that of the skull, a man's character may be approximately discovered. As a science it is usually discredited, and held to be unsupported by physiology, anatomy, and pathology. It is held as strongly militating against its claims that it takes no account of the convolutions of the brain that lie on the base of the skull. Its originators were Gall, Spurzheim, and Andrew and George Combe.

PHRYGIA, a country originally extending over the western sh.o.r.es of Asia Minor, but afterwards confined to the western uplands, where are the sources of the Hermus, Maeander, and Sangarius; was made up of barren hills where sheep famous for their wool grazed, and fertile valleys where the vine was cultivated; marble was quarried in the hills, and gold was found; several great trade roads from Ephesus crossed the country, among whose towns the names of Colosse and Laodicea are familiar; the Phrygians were an Armenian people, with a mystic orgiastic religion, and were successively conquered by a.s.syrians, Lydians, and Persians, falling under Rome in 43 B.C.

PHRYGIAN CAP, a cap worn by the Phrygians, and worn in modern times as the symbol of freedom.

PHRYNe, a Greek courtesan, celebrated for her beauty; was the model to Praxiteles of his statue of Venus; accused of profaning the Eleusinian Mysteries, she was brought before the judges, to whom she exposed her person, but who acquitted her of the charge, to preserve to the artists the image of divine beauty thus recognised in her.

PHTAH, a G.o.d of ancient Egypt, wors.h.i.+pped at Memphis; identified with Osiris and Socaris, and placed by the Egyptians at the head of the dynasty of the kings of Memphis.