title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: Huck and Jim come across a grounded steamer, the "Walter Scott", where two thieves are discussing murdering a third. Finding that their own raft has drifted away, Huck and Jim flee in the thieves' boat before being noticed. They find their own raft again and sink the thieves' boat, keeping their loot. Huck tricks a watchman into going to rescue the stranded thieves to assuage his conscience. Huck and Jim are separated in a fog, and when they reunite, Huck tricks Jim into thinking he dreamed the entire incident. Jim is disappointed when Huck admits the truth. Huck is surprised by Jim's strong feelings and apologizes.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: Huck is conflicted about supporting a runaway slave, which he has been taught is a sin. He decides to turn Jim in, but when two white men seeking runaway slaves come upon the raft, he lies to them and they leave. Jim and Huck realize they have passed Cairo. With no way of getting back upriver, they decide to continue downriver. The raft is struck by a passing steamship, again separating the two.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: On the riverbank, Huck meets the Grangerford family, who are engaged in a 30-year blood feud with the Shepherdson family, although no one remembers why the feud originally started. After a Grangerford daughter elopes with a Shepherdson boy, the feud boils over and all the Grangerford males are shot and killed in a Shepherdson ambush. Huck escapes and is reunited with Jim, who has recovered and repaired the raft.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: Downriver, Jim and Huck are joined by two confidence men claiming to be a King and a Duke. The swindlers rope Huck and Jim into playing along with a series of scams. In one town, the swindlers scam the townsfolk with a short and overpriced performance. On the third night, the grifters flee before the townsfolk can take revenge. In the next town, the swindlers impersonate brothers of recently-deceased Peter Wilks to steal his estate. Huck tries to retrieve the money for Wilks's orphaned nieces. Two men claiming to be Wilks' real brothers arrive, causing an uproar. Huck tries to flee in the confusion, but is caught by the grifters. Eventually he escapes, but finds that the swindlers have sold Jim to the Phelps family plantation. Huck vows to free Jim, despite believing he will go to hell as a consequence.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: The Phelps family mistakes Huck for their nephew Tom, who is expected for a visit, and Huck plays along. It turns out their nephew is Tom Sawyer. When he arrives, he plays along with Huck's story and develops a theatrical plan to free Jim. During the escape, Tom is wounded. Jim tends to him instead of escaping, and is arrested and returned to the plantation. Tom's Aunt Polly arrives and reveals the boys' true identities. She explains that Miss Watson has died, freeing Jim in her will. Tom admits he knew this, but wanted to "rescue" Jim in style. Jim says that Huck's father was the dead man they found in the floating house, so Huck may return safely to St. Petersburg. Huck declares that he intends to flee west to Indian Territory to escape being adopted by the Phelps family.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" explores themes of race and identity; what it means to be free and civilized; and the ideas of humanity and social responsibility in the changing landscape of America. A complexity exists concerning Jim's character. While some scholars point out that Jim is good-hearted and moral, and he is not unintelligent (in contrast to several of the more negatively depicted white characters), others have criticized the novel as racist, citing the use of the word "nigger" and emphasizing the stereotypically "comic" treatment of Jim's lack of education, superstition and ignorance. This argument is supported by incidents early in the novel where Huck deliberately "tricks" Jim, taking advantage of his gullibility and Jim still remains loyal to him.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: But this novel is also Huck's 'coming of age' story where he overcomes his initial biases and forms a deeper bond with Jim. Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he lives. Huck is unable consciously to rebut those values even in his thoughts but he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jim's friendship and human worth, a decision in direct opposition to the things he has been taught. Twain, in his lecture notes, proposes that "a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience" and goes on to describe the novel as "...a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat".


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: To highlight the hypocrisy required to condone slavery within an ostensibly moral system, Twain has Huck's father enslave his son, isolate him and beat him. When Huck escapes, he immediately encounters Jim "illegally" doing the same thing. The treatments both of them receive are radically different, especially in an encounter with Mrs. Judith Loftus who takes pity on who she presumes to be a runaway apprentice, Huck, yet boasts about her husband sending the hounds after a runaway slave, Jim.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: Some scholars discuss Huck's own character, and the novel itself, in the context of its relation to African-American culture as a whole. John Alberti quotes Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who writes in her 1990s book "Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices", "by limiting their field of inquiry to the periphery," white scholars "have missed the ways in which African-American voices shaped Twain's creative imagination at its core." It is suggested that the character of Huckleberry Finn illustrates the correlation, and even interrelatedness, between white and Black culture in the United States.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: The original illustrations were done by E. W. Kemble, at the time a young artist working for "Life" magazine. Kemble was hand-picked by Twain, who admired his work. Hearn suggests that Twain and Kemble had a similar skill, writing that:


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: Whatever he may have lacked in technical grace ... Kemble shared with the greatest illustrators the ability to give even the minor individual in a text his own distinct visual personality; just as Twain so deftly defined a full-rounded character in a few phrases, so too did Kemble depict with a few strokes of his pen that same entire personage.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: As Kemble could afford only one model, most of his illustrations produced for the book were done by guesswork. When the novel was published, the illustrations were praised even as the novel was harshly criticized. E.W. Kemble produced another set of illustrations for Harper's and the American Publishing Company in 1898 and 1899 after Twain lost the copyright.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: Twain initially conceived of the work as a sequel to "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" that would follow Huckleberry Finn through adulthood. Beginning with a few pages he had removed from the earlier novel, Twain began work on a manuscript he originally titled "Huckleberry Finn's Autobiography." Twain worked on the manuscript off and on for the next several years, ultimately abandoning his original plan of following Huck's development into adulthood. He appeared to have lost interest in the manuscript while it was in progress, and set it aside for several years. After making a trip down the Hudson River, Twain returned to his work on the novel. Upon completion, the novel's title closely paralleled its predecessor's: "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade)".


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: Mark Twain composed the story in pen on notepaper between 1876 and 1883. Paul Needham, who supervised the authentication of the manuscript for Sotheby's books and manuscripts department in New York in 1991, stated, "What you see is [Clemens'] attempt to move away from pure literary writing to dialect writing". For example, Twain revised the opening line of "Huck Finn" three times. He initially wrote, "You will not know about me", which he changed to, "You do not know about me", before settling on the final version, "You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'; but that ain't no matter." The revisions also show how Twain reworked his material to strengthen the characters of Huck and Jim, as well as his sensitivity to the then-current debate over literacy and voting.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: Demand for the book spread outside of the United States. "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was eventually published on December 10, 1884, in Canada and the United Kingdom, and on February 18, 1885, in the United States. The illustration on page 283 became a point of issue after an engraver, whose identity was never discovered, made a last-minute addition to the printing plate of Kemble's picture of old Silas Phelps, which drew attention to Phelps' groin. Thirty thousand copies of the book had been printed before the obscenity was discovered. A new plate was made to correct the illustration and repair the existing copies.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: In 1885, the Buffalo Public Library's curator, James Fraser Gluck, approached Twain to donate the manuscript to the library. Twain did so. Later it was believed that half of the pages had been misplaced by the printer. In 1991, the missing first half turned up in a steamer trunk owned by descendants of Gluck's. The library successfully claimed possession and, in 1994, opened the Mark Twain Room to showcase the treasure.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: In relation to the literary climate at the time of the book's publication in 1885, Henry Nash Smith describes the importance of Mark Twain's already established reputation as a "professional humorist", having already published over a dozen other works. Smith suggests that while the "dismantling of the decadent Romanticism of the later nineteenth century was a necessary operation," "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" illustrated "previously inaccessible resources of imaginative power, but also made vernacular language, with its new sources of pleasure and new energy, available for American prose and poetry in the twentieth century."


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: While it is clear that "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was controversial from the outset, Norman Mailer, writing in "The New York Times" in 1984, concluded that Twain's novel was not initially "too unpleasantly regarded." In fact, Mailer writes: "the critical climate could hardly anticipate T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway's encomiums 50 years later," reviews that would remain longstanding in the American consciousness.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: Alberti suggests that the academic establishment responded to the book's challenges both dismissively and with confusion. During Twain's time and today, defenders of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" "lump all nonacademic critics of the book together as extremists and 'censors', thus equating the complaints about the book's 'coarseness' from the genteel bourgeois trustees of the Concord Public Library in the 1880s with more recent objections based on race and civil rights."


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: Upon issue of the American edition in 1885, several libraries banned it from their shelves. The early criticism focused on what was perceived as the book's crudeness. One incident was recounted in the newspaper the "Boston Transcript":


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain's latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The library and the other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: Writer Louisa May Alcott criticized the book's publication as well, saying that if Twain "[could not] think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them".


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: In 1905, New York's Brooklyn Public Library also banned the book due to "bad word choice" and Huck's having "not only itched but scratched" within the novel, which was considered obscene. When asked by a Brooklyn librarian about the situation, Twain sardonically replied: I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' & 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: Many subsequent critics, Ernest Hemingway among them, have deprecated the final chapters, claiming the book "devolves into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy" after Jim is detained. Although Hemingway declared, "All modern American literature comes from" "Huck Finn", and hailed it as "the best book we've had", he cautioned, "If you must read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys . That is the real end. The rest is just cheating." The African-American writer Ralph Ellison argued that "Hemingway missed completely the structural, symbolic and moral necessity for that part of the plot in which the boys rescue Jim. Yet it is precisely this part which gives the novel its significance." Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Powers states in his Twain biography ("Mark Twain: A Life") that "Huckleberry Finn endures as a consensus masterpiece despite these final chapters", in which Tom Sawyer leads Huck through elaborate machinations to rescue Jim.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: In his introduction to "The Annotated Huckleberry Finn", Michael Patrick Hearn writes that Twain "could be uninhibitedly vulgar", and quotes critic William Dean Howells, a Twain contemporary, who wrote that the author's "humor was not for most women". However, Hearn continues by explaining that "the reticent Howells found nothing in the proofs of Huckleberry Finn so offensive that it needed to be struck out".


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: Much of modern scholarship of "Huckleberry Finn" has focused on its treatment of race. Many Twain scholars have argued that the book, by humanizing Jim and exposing the fallacies of the racist assumptions of slavery, is an attack on racism. Others have argued that the book falls short on this score, especially in its depiction of Jim. According to Professor Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia, Twain was unable to fully rise above the stereotypes of Black people that white readers of his era expected and enjoyed, and, therefore, resorted to minstrel show-style comedy to provide humor at Jim's expense, and ended up confirming rather than challenging late-19th century racist stereotypes.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: In one instance, the controversy caused a drastically altered interpretation of the text: in 1955, CBS tried to avoid controversial material in a televised version of the book, by deleting all mention of slavery and omitting the character of Jim entirely.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: Because of this controversy over whether "Huckleberry Finn" is racist or anti-racist, and because the word "nigger" is frequently used in the novel (a commonly used word in Twain's time that has since become vulgar and taboo), many have questioned the appropriateness of teaching the book in the U.S. public school system—this questioning of the word "nigger" is illustrated by a school administrator of Virginia in 1982 calling the novel the "most grotesque example of racism I've ever seen in my life". According to the American Library Association, "Huckleberry Finn" was the fifth most frequently challenged book in the United States during the 1990s.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: There have been several more recent cases involving protests for the banning of the novel. In 2003, high school student Calista Phair and her grandmother, Beatrice Clark, in Renton, Washington, proposed banning the book from classroom learning in the Renton School District, though not from any public libraries, because of the word "nigger". The two curriculum committees that considered her request eventually decided to keep the novel on the 11th grade curriculum, though they suspended it until a panel had time to review the novel and set a specific teaching procedure for the novel's controversial topics.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: In 2009, a Washington state high school teacher, John Foley, called for replacing "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" with a more modern novel. In an opinion column that Foley wrote in the "Seattle Post Intelligencer", he states that all "novels that use the ‘N-word' repeatedly need to go." He states that teaching the novel is not only unnecessary, but difficult due to the offensive language within the novel with many students becoming uncomfortable at "just hear[ing] the N-word."


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: In 2016, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was removed from a public school district in Virginia, along with the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird", due to their use of racial slurs.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: Publishers have made their own attempts at easing the controversy by way of releasing editions of the book with the word "nigger" replaced by less controversial words. A 2011 edition of the book, published by NewSouth Books, employed the word "slave" (although the word is not properly applied to a freed man). Their argument for making the change was to offer the reader a choice of reading a "sanitized" version if they were not comfortable with the original. Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben said he hoped the edition would be more friendly for use in classrooms, rather than have the work banned outright from classroom reading lists due to its language.


title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

text: According to publisher Suzanne La Rosa, "At NewSouth, we saw the value in an edition that would help the works find new readers. If the publication sparks good debate about how language impacts learning or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain's works will be more emphatically fulfilled." Another scholar, Thomas Wortham, criticized the changes, saying the new edition "doesn't challenge children to ask, 'Why would a child like Huck use such reprehensible language?'"


title: Basel

text: Basel ( , ), also known as Basle ( ), is a city in northwestern Switzerland on the river Rhine. Basel is Switzerland's third-most-populous city (after Zürich and Geneva) with about 175,000 inhabitants. The official language of Basel is (the Swiss variety of Standard) German, but the main spoken language is the local Basel German dialect.


title: Basel

text: Basel is commonly considered to be the cultural capital of Switzerland and the city is famous for its many museums, including the Kunstmuseum, which is the first collection of art accessible to the public in the world (1661) and the largest museum of art in Switzerland, the Fondation Beyeler (located in Riehen), the Museum Tinguely and the Museum of Contemporary Art, which is the first public museum of contemporary art in Europe. Forty museums are spread throughout the city-canton, making Basel one of the largest cultural centres in relation to its size and population in Europe.


title: Basel

text: The University of Basel, Switzerland's oldest university (founded in 1460), and the city's centuries-long commitment to humanism, have made Basel a safe haven at times of political unrest in other parts of Europe for such notable people as Erasmus of Rotterdam, the Holbein family, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, and in the 20th century also Hermann Hesse and Karl Jaspers.


title: Basel

text: Basel was the seat of a Prince-Bishopric starting in the 11th century, and joined the Swiss Confederacy in 1501. The city has been a commercial hub and an important cultural centre since the Renaissance, and has emerged as a centre for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries in the 20th century. In 1897, Basel was chosen by Theodor Herzl as the location for the first World Zionist Congress, and altogether the congress was held there ten times over a time span of 50 years, more than in any other location. The city is also home to the world headquarters of the Bank for International Settlements. The name of the city is internationally known through institutions like the Basel Accords, Art Basel and FC Basel.


title: Basel

text: The name of Basel is first recorded as "Basilia" in the 3rd century (237/8), at the time referring to the Roman castle.


title: Basel

text: This name is mostly interpreted as deriving from the personal name "Basilius", from a toponym "villa Basilia" ("estate of Basilius") or similar.


title: Basel

text: Another suggestion derives it from a name "Basilia" attested in northern France as a development of "basilica", the term for a public or church building (as in Bazeilles), but all of these names reference early church buildings of the 4th or 5th century and cannot be adduced for the 3rd-century attestation of "Basilia".


title: Basel

text: By popular etymology, or simple assonance, the basilisk becomes closely associated with the city, used as heraldic supporter from 1448, represented on coins minted by the city, and frequently found in ornaments.


title: Basel

text: The Middle French form "Basle" was adopted into English, but this form gradually fell out of use although it continues to be used in some sections of British English including the BBC. Currently, the spelling "Basel" is most often used, to match the official German spelling. In French "Basle" was still in use in the 18th century, but was gradually replaced by the modern French spelling "Bâle". In Icelandic, the city is recorded as "Buslaraborg" in the 12th-century itinerary "Leiðarvísir og borgarskipan".


title: Basel

text: There are traces of a settlement at the nearby Rhine knee from the early La Tène period (5th century BC). In the 2nd century BC, there was a village of the Raurici at the site of "Basel-Gasfabrik" (to the northwest of the Old City, and likely identical with the town of "Arialbinnum" that was mentioned on the "Tabula Peutingeriana").


title: Basel

text: The unfortified settlement was abandoned in the 1st century BC in favour of an "oppidum" on the site of Basel Minster, probably in reaction to the Roman invasion of Gaul.


title: Basel

text: In Roman Gaul, Augusta Raurica was established some from Basel as the regional administrative centre, while a "castrum" (fortified camp) was built on the site of the Celtic "oppidum".


title: Basel

text: In AD 83, the area was incorporated into the Roman province of Germania Superior. Roman control over the area deteriorated in the 3rd century, and Basel became an outpost of the "Provincia Maxima Sequanorum" formed by Diocletian. "Basilia" is first named as part of the Roman military fortifications along the Rhine in the late 4th century.


title: Basel

text: The Germanic confederation of the Alemanni attempted to cross the Rhine several times in the 4th century, but were repelled; one such event was the Battle of Solicinium (368). However, in the great invasion of AD 406, the Alemanni appear to have crossed the Rhine a final time, conquering and then settling what is today Alsace and a large part of the Swiss Plateau.


title: Basel

text: The Alemannic and Frankish settlement of Basel gradually grew around the old Roman castle in the 6th and 7th century. It appears that Basel surpassed the ancient regional capital of Augusta Raurica by the 7th century;


title: Basel

text: based on the evidence of a gold "tremissis" (a small gold coin with the value of a third of a "solidus") with the inscription "Basilia fit", Basel seems to have minted its own coins in the 7th century.


title: Basel

text: A separate bishopric of Basel, replacing the ancient bishopric of Augusta Raurica, was established in the 8th century. Under bishop Haito (r. 806–823), the first cathedral was built on the site of the Roman castle (replaced by a Romanesque structure consecrated in 1019).


title: Basel

text: At the partition of the Carolingian Empire, Basel was first given to West Francia, but it passed to East Francia with the treaty of Meerssen of 870.


title: Basel

text: Basel was destroyed by the Magyars in 917. The rebuilt town became part of Upper Burgundy, and as such was incorporated into the Holy Roman Empire in 1032.


title: Basel

text: From the donation by Rudolph III of Burgundy of the Moutier-Grandval Abbey and all its possessions to Bishop Adalbero II of Metz in 999 until the Reformation, Basel was ruled by Prince-Bishops.


title: Basel

text: In 1019, the construction of the cathedral of Basel (known locally as the "Münster") began under Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor.


title: Basel

text: The main market place is first mentioned in 1091. The first city walls were constructed around 1100 (with improvements made in the mid-13th and in the late 14th century).


title: Basel

text: A city council of nobles and burghers is recorded for 1185, and the first mayor, Heinrich Steinlin of Murbach, for 1253.


title: Basel

text: The first bridge across the Rhine was built in 1225 under bishop Heinrich von Thun (at the location of the modern Middle Bridge), and from this time the settlement of "Kleinbasel" gradually formed around the bridgehead on the far river bank. The bridge was largely funded by Basel's Jewish community who had settled there a century earlier. For many centuries to come Basel possessed the only permanent bridge over the river "between Lake Constance and the sea".


title: Basel

text: The first city guild were the furriers, established in 1226. A total of about fifteen guilds were established in the course of the 13th century, reflecting the increasing economic prosperity of the city. The Crusade of 1267 set out from Basel.


title: Basel

text: Political conflicts between the bishops and the burghers began in the mid-13th century and continued throughout the 14th century. By the late 14th century, the city was for all practical purposes independent although it continued to nominally pledge fealty to the bishops.


title: Basel

text: The House of Habsburg attempted to gain control over the city. This was not successful, but it caused a political split among the burghers of Basel into a pro-Habsburg faction, known as "Sterner", and an anti-Habsburg faction, the "Psitticher".


title: Basel

text: The Black Death reached Basel in 1348. The Jews were blamed, and an estimated 50 to 70 Jews were executed by burning on 16 January 1349 in what has become known as the Basel massacre.


title: Basel

text: The Basel earthquake of 1356 destroyed much of the city along with a number of castles in the vicinity.


title: Basel

text: To free itself from Habsburg hegemony, Basel joined the Swabian League of Cities in 1385, and many knights of the pro-Habsburg faction, along with duke Leopold himself, were killed in the Battle of Sempach the following year.


title: Basel

text: Basel had gained its de facto independence from both the bishop and from the Habsburgs and was free to pursue its own policy of territorial expansion, beginning around 1400.


title: Basel

text: It is of unknown origin or significance (beyond its obvious status of bishop's crozier), but it is assumed to have represented a relic, possibly attributed to Saint Germanus of Granfelden.


title: Basel

text: This staff (known as "Baselstab") became a symbol representing the Basel diocese, depicted in bishops' seals of the late medieval period.


title: Basel

text: It is represented in a heraldic context in the early 14th century, not yet as a heraldic charge but as a kind of heraldic achievement flanked by the heraldic shields of the bishop. The staff is also represented in the bishops's seals of the period.


title: Basel

text: From this time, the "Baselstab" in red represented the bishop, and the same charge in black represented the city.


title: Basel

text: The blazon of the municipal coat of arms is "In Silber ein schwarzer Baselstab" (Argent, a staff of Basel sable). In 1400, Basel was able to purchase the towns of Liestal, Homburg and Waldenburg with its surrounding territory.


title: Basel

text: In 1412 (or earlier), the well-known Gasthof zum Goldenen Sternen was established. Basel became the focal point of western Christendom during the 15th century Council of Basel (1431–1449), including the 1439 election of antipope Felix V. In 1459, Pope Pius II endowed the University of Basel, where such notables as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Paracelsus later taught. At the same time the new craft of printing was introduced to Basel by apprentices of Johann Gutenberg. In 1461, the land around Farnsburg became a part of Basel.


title: Basel

text: The Schwabe publishing house was founded in 1488 by Johannes Petri and is the oldest publishing house still in business. Johann Froben also operated his printing house in Basel and was notable for publishing works by Erasmus. In 1495, Basel was incorporated into the Upper Rhenish Imperial Circle; the Bishop of Basel was added to the Bench of the Ecclesiastical Princes of the Imperial Diet. In 1500 the construction of the Basel Münster was finished. In 1521 so was the bishop. The council, under the supremacy of the guilds, explained that henceforth they would only give allegiance to the Swiss Confederation, to whom the bishop appealed but in vain.


title: Basel

text: The city had remained neutral through the Swabian War of 1499 despite being plundered by soldiers on both sides. The Treaty of Basel ended the war and granted the Swiss confederates exemptions from the emperor Maximillian's taxes and jurisdictions, separating Switzerland "de facto" from the Holy Roman Empire.


title: Basel

text: On 9 June 1501, Basel joined the Swiss Confederation as its eleventh canton. It was the only canton that was asked to join, not the other way round. Basel had a strategic location, good relations with Strasbourg and Mulhouse, and control of the corn imports from Alsace, whereas the Swiss lands were becoming overpopulated and had few resources. A provision of the Charter accepting Basel required that in conflicts among the other cantons it was to stay neutral and offer its services for mediation.


title: Basel

text: In 1503, the new bishop Christoph von Utenheim refused to give Basel a new constitution; whereupon, to show its power, the city began to build a new city hall.


title: Basel

text: In 1529, the city became Protestant under Oecolampadius and the bishop's seat was moved to Porrentruy. The bishop's crook was however retained as the city's coat of arms. For centuries to come, a handful of wealthy families collectively referred to as the "Daig" played a pivotal role in city affairs as they gradually established themselves as a "de facto" city aristocracy.


title: Basel

text: The first edition of "Christianae religionis institutio" ("Institutes of the Christian Religion" – John Calvin's great exposition of Calvinist doctrine) was published at Basel in March 1536.


title: Basel

text: In 1544, Johann von Brugge, a rich Dutch Protestant refugee, was given citizenship and lived respectably until his death in 1556, then buried with honors. His body was exhumed and burnt at the stake in 1559 after it was discovered that he was the Anabaptist David Joris.


title: Basel

text: In 1543, "De humani corporis fabrica", the first book on human anatomy, was published and printed in Basel by Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564).


title: Basel

text: There are indications Joachim Meyer, author of the influential 16th-century martial arts text "Kunst des Fechten" ("The Art of Fencing"), came from Basel. In 1661 the "Amerbaschsches Kabinett," a vast collection of exotic artifacts, coins, medals and books was purchased by Basel. It was to become to the first public museum of art. Its collection became the core of the later Basel Museum of Art.


title: Basel

text: The Bernoulli family, which included important 17th- and 18th-century mathematicians such as Jakob Bernoulli, Johann Bernoulli and Daniel Bernoulli, were from Basel. The 18th-century mathematician Leonhard Euler was born in Basel and studied under Johann Bernoulli.


title: Basel

text: In 1792, the Republic of Rauracia, a revolutionary French client republic, was created. It lasted until 1793. After three years of political agitation and a short civil war in 1833 the disadvantaged countryside seceded from the Canton of Basel, forming the half canton of Basel-Landschaft. Between 1861 and 1878 the city walls were slighted.


title: Basel

text: On 3 July 1874, Switzerland's first zoo, the Zoo Basel, opened its doors in the south of the city towards Binningen.


title: Basel

text: In 1897 the first World Zionist Congress was held in Basel. Altogether the World Zionist Congress was held in Basel ten times, more than in any other city in the world.


title: Basel

text: On 16 November 1938, the psychedelic drug LSD was first synthesized by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel.


title: Basel

text: In 1967, the population of Basel voted in favor of buying three works of art by painter Pablo Picasso which were at risk of being sold and taken out of the local museum of art, due to a financial crisis on the part of the owner's family. Therefore, Basel became the first city in the world where the population of a political community democratically decided to acquire works of art for a public institution. Pablo Picasso was so moved by the gesture that he subsequently gifted the city with an additional three paintings.


title: Basel

text: Basel has often been the site of peace negotiations and other international meetings. The Treaty of Basel (1499) ended the Swabian War. Two years later Basel joined the Swiss Confederation. The Peace of Basel in 1795 between the French Republic and Prussia and Spain ended the First Coalition against France during the French Revolutionary Wars. In more recent times, the World Zionist Organization held its first congress in Basel from 29 August through 31 August 1897. Because of the Balkan Wars, the (Socialist) Second International held an extraordinary congress at Basel in 1912. In 1989, the Basel Convention was opened for signature with the aim of preventing the export of hazardous waste from wealthy to developing nations for disposal.


title: Basel

text: Basel is located in Northwestern Switzerland and is commonly considered to be the capital of that region. It is close to the point where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, and Basel also has suburbs in France and Germany. , the Swiss Basel agglomeration was the third-largest in Switzerland, with a population of 541,000 in 74 municipalities in Switzerland (municipal count as of 2018). The initiative "Trinational Eurodistrict Basel (TEB)" of 62 suburban communes including municipalities in neighboring countries, counted 829,000 inhabitants in 2007.


title: Basel

text: Basel has an area, , of . Of this area, or 4.0% is used for agricultural purposes, while or 3.7% is forested. Of the rest of the land, or 86.4% is settled (buildings or roads), or 6.1% is either rivers or lakes.


title: Basel

text: Of the built up area, industrial buildings made up 10.2% of the total area while housing and buildings made up 40.7% and transportation infrastructure made up 24.0%. Power and water infrastructure as well as other special developed areas made up 2.7% of the area while parks, green belts and sports fields made up 8.9%. Out of the forested land, all of the forested land area is covered with heavy forests. Of the agricultural land, 2.5% is used for growing crops and 1.3% is pastures. All the water in the municipality is flowing water.


title: Basel

text: Under the Köppen system, Basel features an oceanic climate (Köppen: "Cfb"), although with notable continental influences due to its relatively far inland position with cool to cold, overcast winters and warm to hot, humid summers.


title: Basel

text: The city averages 118.2 days of rain or snow annually and on average receives of precipitation. The wettest month is May during which time Basel receives an average of of rain. The month with the most days of precipitation is also May, with an average of 11.7 days. The driest month of the year is February with an average of of precipitation over 8.4 days.


title: Basel

text: The canton Basel-Stadt consists of three municipalities: Riehen, Bettingen, and the city Basel itself. The political structure and agencies of the city and the canton are identical.


title: Basel

text: The city's and canton's executive, the Executive Council ("Regierungsrat"), consists of seven members for a mandate period of 4 years. They are elected by any inhabitant valid to vote on the same day as the parliament, but by means of a system of Majorz, and operates as a collegiate authority. The president () is elected as such by a public election, while the heads of the other departments are appointed by the collegiate. The current president is Beat Jans. The executive body holds its meetings in the red Town Hall () on the central "Marktplatz". The building was built in 1504–14.


title: Basel

text: , Basel's Executive Council is made up of three representatives of the SP (Social Democratic Party) including the president, two LDP (Liberal-Demokratische Partei of Basel), and one member each of Green Liberals (glp), and CVP (Christian Democratic Party). The last election was held on 25 October and 29 November 2020 and four new members have been elected.


title: Basel

text: Barbara Schüpbach-Guggenbühlis is State Chronicler ("Staatsschreiberin") since 2009, and Marco Greiner is Head of Communication ("Regierungssprecher") and Vice State Chronicler ("Vizestaatsschreiber") since 2007 for the Executive Council.


title: Basel

text: The city's and canton's parliament, the Grand Council of Basel-Stadt (Grosser Rat), consists of 100 seats, with members (called in German: "Grossrat/Grossrätin") elected every 4 years. The sessions of the Grand Council are public. Unlike the members of the Executive Council, the members of the Grand Council are not politicians by profession, but they are paid a fee based on their attendance. Any resident of Basel allowed to vote can be elected as a member of the parliament. The delegates are elected by means of a system of Proporz. The legislative body holds its meetings in the red Town Hall ("Rathaus").


title: Basel

text: The last election was held on 25 October 2020 for the mandate period ("Legislatur") of 2021–2025. , the Grand Council consist of 30 (-5) members of the Social Democratic Party (SP), 18 (+5) "Grün-Alternatives Bündnis (GAB)" (a collaboration of the Green Party (GPS), its junior party, and Basels starke Alternative (BastA!)), 14 (-1) Liberal-Demokratische Partei (LDP), 11 (-4) members of the Swiss People's Party (SVP), 8 (+5) Green Liberal Party (glp), 7 (-3) The Liberals (FDP), 7 (-) Christian Democratic People's Party (CVP), 3 (+2) Evangelical People's Party (EVP), and one each representative of the "Aktive Bettingen (AB)" and "Volks-Aktion gegen zuviele Ausländer und Asylanten in unserer Heimat" (VA).


title: Basel

text: In the 2019 federal election the most popular party was the Social Democratic Party (SP) which received two seats with 34% (−1) of the votes. The next five most popular parties were the Green Party (GPS) (19.4%, +7.3), the LPS (14.5%, +3.6) and the FDP (5.8, −3.5), which are chained together at 20.3%, (+0.1), the SVP (11.3%, ), and the Green Liberal Party (GLP) (5%, +0.6), CVP (4.1%, -1.9). In the federal election, a total of 44,628 votes were cast, and the voter turnout was 49.4%.


title: Basel

text: On 18 October 2015, in the federal election the most popular party was the Social Democratic Party (SP) which received two seats with 35% of the votes. The next three most popular parties were the FDP (20.2%), the SVP (16.8%), and the Green Party (GPS) (12.2%), each with one seat. In the federal election, a total of 57,304 votes were cast, and the voter turnout was 50.4%.


title: Basel

text: On 20 October 2019, in the federal election Eva Herzog, member of the Social Democratic Party (SP), was elected for the first time as a State Councillor () in the first round as single representative of the canton of Basel-Town and successor of Anita Fetz in the national Council of States () with an absolute majority of 37'210 votes.


title: Basel

text: On 18 October 2015, in the federal election State Councillor () Anita Fetz, member of the Social Democratic Party (SP), was re-elected in the first round as single representative of the canton of Basel-Town in the national Council of States () with an absolute majority of 35'842 votes. She has been a member of it since 2003.


title: Basel

text: The canton of Basel (slightly more than the city itself) has a population () of 201,971, of whom 36.9% are resident foreign nationals.


title: Basel

text: Over the 10 years of 1999–2009 the population has changed at a rate of −0.3%. It has changed at a rate of 3.2% due to migration and at a rate of −3% due to births and deaths.


title: Basel

text: Of the population in the municipality 58,560 or about 35.2% were born in Basel and lived there in 2000. There were 1,396 or 0.8% who were born in the same canton, while 44,874 or 26.9% were born somewhere else in Switzerland, and 53,774 or 32.3% were born outside of Switzerland.


title: Basel

text: In there were 898 live births to Swiss citizens and 621 births to non-Swiss citizens, and in same time span there were 1,732 deaths of Swiss citizens and 175 non-Swiss citizen deaths. Ignoring immigration and emigration, the population of Swiss citizens decreased by 834 while the foreign population increased by 446. There were 207 Swiss men and 271 Swiss women who emigrated from Switzerland. At the same time, there were 1756 non-Swiss men and 1655 non-Swiss women who immigrated from another country to Switzerland. The total Swiss population change in 2008 (from all sources, including moves across municipal borders) was an increase of 278 and the non-Swiss population increased by 1138 people. This represents a population growth rate of 0.9%.


title: Basel

text: , there were 70,502 people who were single and never married in the municipality. There were 70,517 married individuals, 12,435 widows or widowers and 13,104 individuals who are divorced.


title: Basel

text: , there were 86,371 private households in the municipality, and an average of 1.8 persons per household. There were 44,469 households that consist of only one person and 2,842 households with five or more people. Out of a total of 88,646 households that answered this question, 50.2% were households made up of just one person and there were 451 adults who lived with their parents. Of the rest of the households, there are 20,472 married couples without children, 14,554 married couples with children There were 4,318 single parents with a child or children. There were 2,107 households that were made up of unrelated people and 2,275 households that were made up of some sort of institution or another collective housing.


title: Basel

text: Most of the population () speaks German (129,592 or 77.8%), with Italian being second most common (9,049 or 5.4%) and French being third (4,280 or 2.6%). There are 202 persons who speak Romansh.


title: Basel

text: From the , 41,916 or 25.2% were Roman Catholic, while 39,180 or 23.5% belonged to the Swiss Reformed Church. Of the rest of the population, there were 4,567 members of an Orthodox church (or about 2.74% of the population), 459 individuals (or about 0.28% of the population) who belonged to the Christian Catholic Church and 3,464 individuals (or about 2.08% of the population) who belonged to another Christian church. There were 12,368 individuals (or about 7.43% of the population) who were Muslim, 1,325 individuals (or about 0.80% of the population) who were Jewish, however only members of religious institutions are counted as such by the municipality, which makes the actual number of people of Jewish descent living in Basel considerably higher. There were 746 individuals who were Buddhist, 947 individuals who were Hindu and 485 individuals who belonged to another church. 52,321 (or about 31.41% of the population) belonged to no church, are agnostic or atheist, and 8,780 individuals (or about 5.27% of the population) did not answer the question.


title: Basel

text: Basel is subdivided into 19 quarters ("Quartiere"). The municipalities of Riehen and Bettingen, outside the city limits of Basel, are included in the canton of Basel-Stadt as rural quarters ("Landquartiere").


title: Basel

text: Basel's airport is set up for airfreight; heavy goods reach the city and the heart of continental Europe from the North Sea by ship along the Rhine. The main European routes for the highway and railway transport of freight cross in Basel. The outstanding location benefits logistics corporations, which operate globally from Basel. Trading firms are traditionally well represented in the Basel Region.


title: Basel

text: Basel has Switzerland's only cargo port, through which goods pass along the navigable stretches of the Rhine and connect to ocean-going ships at the port of Rotterdam.


title: Basel

text: EuroAirport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg is operated jointly by two countries, France and Switzerland, although the airport is located completely on French soil. The airport itself is split into two architecturally independent sectors, one half serving the French side and the other half serving the Swiss side; prior to Schengen there was an immigration inspection point at the middle of the airport so that people could "emigrate" to the other side of the airport.


title: Basel

text: Basel has long held an important place as a rail hub. Three railway stations—those of the German, French and Swiss networks—lie within the city (although the Swiss (Basel SBB) and French (Bâle SNCF) stations are actually in the same complex, separated by Customs and Immigration facilities). Basel Badischer Bahnhof is on the opposite side of the city. Basel's local rail services are supplied by the Basel Regional S-Bahn. The largest goods railway complex of the country is located just outside the city, spanning the municipalities of Muttenz and Pratteln. The new highspeed ICE railway line from Karlsruhe to Basel was completed in 2008 while phase I of the TGV Rhin-Rhône line, opened in December 2011, has reduced travel time from Basel to Paris to about 3 hours.


title: Basel

text: A somewhat anachronistic yet still widely used system of reaction ferry boats links the two shores. There are four ferries, each situated approximately midway between two bridges. Each is attached by a cable to a block that rides along another cable spanning the river at a height of . To cross the river, the ferryman orients the boat around 45° from the current so that the current pushes the boat across the river. This form of transportation is therefore completely hydraulically driven, requiring no outside energy source.


title: Basel

text: Basel has an extensive public transportation network serving the city and connecting to surrounding suburbs, including a large tram network. Today, Basel has the largest tramway in terms of kilometers of rail tracks in Switzerland. Historically, only Geneva had a larger one at some point.


title: Basel

text: The green-colored local trams and buses are operated by the Basler Verkehrs-Betriebe (BVB). The yellow-colored buses and trams are operated by the Baselland Transport (BLT), and connect areas in the nearby half-canton of Baselland to central Basel. The BVB also shares commuter bus lines in cooperation with transit authorities in the neighboring Alsace region in France and Baden region in Germany. The Basel Regional S-Bahn, the commuter rail network connecting to suburbs surrounding the city, is jointly operated by SBB, SNCF and DB.


title: Basel

text: Basel is located at the meeting point of France, Germany, and Switzerland; because it sits on the Swiss national border and is beyond the Jura Mountains, many within the Swiss military reportedly believe that the city is indefensible during wartime. It has numerous road and rail crossings between Switzerland and the other two countries. With Switzerland joining the Schengen Area on 12 December 2008, immigration checks were no longer carried out at the crossings. However, Switzerland did not join the European Union Customs Union (though it did join the EU Single Market) and customs checks are still conducted at or near the crossings.


title: Basel

text: Additionally there are many footpaths and cycle tracks crossing the border between Basel and Germany.


title: Basel

text: As the biggest town in the Northwest of Switzerland numerous public and private health centres are located in Basel. Among others the Universitätsspital Basel and the Universitätskinderspital Basel. The anthroposophical health institute Klinik-Arlesheim (formerly known as Lukas-Klinik and Ita-Wegman-Klinik) are both located in the Basel area as well. Private health centres include the Bethesda Spital and the Merian Iselin Klinik. Additionally the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute is located in Basel too.


title: Basel

text: Basel is at the forefront of a national vision to more than halve energy use in Switzerland by 2050. To research, develop and commercialise the technologies and techniques required for the country to become a 2000 Watt society, a number of projects have been set up since 2001 in the Basel metropolitan area. These include demonstration buildings constructed to Minergie or "Passivhaus" standards, electricity generation from renewable energy sources, and vehicles using natural gas, hydrogen and biogas.


title: Basel

text: A building construction law was passed in 2002 also which stated that all new flat roofs must be greened leading to Basel becoming the world's leading green roof city. This was driven by an energy saving programme.


title: Basel

text: A hot dry rock geothermal energy project was cancelled in 2009 since it caused induced seismicity in Basel.


title: Basel

text: The city of Basel, located in the north west of Switzerland, is one of the most dynamic economic regions of Switzerland.


title: Basel

text: , Basel had an unemployment rate of 3.7%. , 19.3% of the working population was employed in the secondary sector and 80.6% was employed in the tertiary sector. There were 82,449 residents of the municipality who were employed in some capacity, of which women made up 46.2% of the workforce.


title: Basel

text: , there were 121,842 workers who commuted into the municipality and 19,263 workers who commuted away. The municipality is a net importer of workers, with about 6.3 workers entering the municipality for every one leaving. About 23.9% of the workforce coming into Basel are coming from outside Switzerland, while 1.0% of the locals commute out of Switzerland for work. Of the working population, 49.2% used public transportation to get to work, and 18.7% used a private car.


title: Basel

text: The Roche Tower, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, is 41 floors and high, upon its opening in 2015 it has become the tallest building in Switzerland. Basel has also Switzerland's third tallest building (Basler Messeturm, ) and Switzerland's tallest tower (St. Chrischona TV tower, ).


title: Basel

text: The Swiss chemical industry operates largely from Basel, and Basel also has a large pharmaceutical industry. Novartis, Syngenta, Ciba Specialty Chemicals, Clariant, Hoffmann-La Roche, Basilea Pharmaceutica and Actelion are headquartered there. Pharmaceuticals and specialty chemicals have become the modern focus of the city's industrial production.


title: Basel

text: In addition, Basel is a major European hub for Biotech and Biopharmaceuticals. There are plenty of small and mid-sized start-ups. The vibrant VC scene also supports this.


title: Basel

text: Swiss International Air Lines, the national airline of Switzerland, is headquartered on the grounds of EuroAirport Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg in Saint-Louis, Haut-Rhin, France, near Basel. Prior to the formation of Swiss International Air Lines, the regional airline Crossair was headquartered near Basel.


title: Basel

text: "Basler Zeitung" ("BaZ") and "bz Basel" are the local newspapers. The local TV station is called "Telebasel". The German-speaking Swiss Radio and Television SRF company, part of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR, holds offices in Basel as well. The academic publishers Birkhäuser, Karger and MDPI are based in Basel.


title: Basel

text: Important trade shows include Art Basel, the world's most important fair for modern and contemporary art, Baselworld (watches and jewelry), Swissbau (construction and real estate) and Igeho (hotels, catering, take-away, care). The Swiss Sample Fair ("Schweizer Mustermesse") was the largest and oldest consumer fair in Switzerland. It was held from 2007 to 2019 and took place in Kleinbasel on the right bank of the Rhine.


title: Basel

text: Besides Humanism the city of Basel has also been well known for its achievements in the field of mathematics. Among others, the mathematician Leonhard Euler and the Bernoulli family have done research and been teaching at the local institutions for centuries. In 1910 the Swiss Mathematical Society was founded in the city and in the mid-twentieth century the Russian mathematician Alexander Ostrowski taught at the local university.


title: Basel

text: In 2000 about 57,864 or (34.7%) of the population have completed non-mandatory upper secondary education, and 27,603 or (16.6%) have completed additional higher education (either university or a "Fachhochschule"). Of the 27,603 who completed tertiary schooling, 44.4% were Swiss men, 31.1% were Swiss women, 13.9% were non-Swiss men and 10.6% were non-Swiss women.


title: Basel

text: In 2010 11,912 students attended the University of Basel (55% female). 25% were foreign nationals, 16% were from canton of Basel-Stadt. In 2006, 6162 students studied at one of the nine academies of the FHNW (51% female).


title: Basel

text: , there were 5,820 students in Basel who came from another municipality, while 1,116 residents attended schools outside the municipality.


title: Basel

text: Basel hosts Switzerland's oldest university, the University of Basel, dating from 1460. Erasmus, Paracelsus, Daniel Bernoulli, Leonhard Euler, Jacob Burckhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Tadeusz Reichstein, Karl Jaspers, Carl Gustav Jung and Karl Barth worked there. The University of Basel is currently counted among the 90 best educational institutions worldwide.


title: Basel

text: In 2007, the ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich) established the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE) in Basel. The creation of the D-BSSE was driven by a Swiss-wide research initiative SystemsX, and was jointly supported by funding from the ETH Zürich, the Swiss Government, the Swiss University Conference (SUC) and private industry.


title: Basel

text: Basel also hosts several academies of the "Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz|Fachhochschule NW (FHNW)": the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, FHNW Academy of Music, and the FHNW School of Business.


title: Basel

text: Basel is renowned for various scientific societies, such as the Entomological Society of Basel (Entomologische Gesellschaft Basel, EGB), which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2005.


title: Basel

text: In 2005 16,939 pupils and students attended the "Volksschule" (the obligatory school time, including "Kindergarten" (127), primary schools ("Primarschule", 25), and lower secondary schools ("Sekundarschule", 10), of which 94% visited public schools and 39.5% were foreign nationals. In 2010 already 51.1% of all pupils spoke another language than German as their first language. In 2009 3.1% of the pupils visited special classes for pupils with particular needs. The average amount of study in primary school in Basel is 816 teaching hours per year.


title: Basel

text: In 2010 65% of the youth finished their upper secondary education with a vocational training and education, 18% finished their upper secondary education with a Federal Matura at one of the five gymnasiums, 5% completed a "Fachmaturität" at the "FMS", 5% completed a "Berufsmaturität" synchronously to their vocational training, and 7% other kind of upper secondary maturity. 14.1% of all students at public gymnasiums were foreign nationals. The Maturity quota in 2010 was on a record high at 28.8% (32.8 female, 24.9% male).


title: Basel

text: Basel has five public gymnasiums (', ', ', ', ""), each with its own profiles (different focus on major subjects, such as visual design, biology and chemistry, Italian, Spanish, or Latin languages, music, physics and applied mathematics, philosophy/education/psychology, and economics and law) that entitles students with a successful Matura graduation to attend universities. And one "Fachmaturitätsschule", the "FMS", with six different major subjects (health/natural sciences, education, social work, design/art, music/theatre/dance, and communication/media) that entitles students with a successful Fachmatura graduation to attend "Fachhochschulen". Four different "höhere Fachschulen" (higher vocational schools such as "Bildungszentrum Gesundheit Basel-Stadt" (health), "Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel" (trade), "Berufsfachschule Basel", "Schule für Gestaltung Basel" (design)) allows vocational students to improve their knowledge and know-how.


title: Basel

text: As a city with a percentage of foreigners of more than thirty-five percent and as one of the most important centres in the chemical and pharmaceutical field in the world, Basel counts several international schools including: "Academia International School", "École Française de Bâle", "Freies Gymnasium Basel" (private), "Gymnasium am Münsterplatz" (public), "Schweizerisch-italienische Primarschule Sandro Pertini", International School Basel and SIS Swiss International School.


title: Basel

text: Basel is home to at least 65 libraries. Some of the largest include; the Universitätsbibliothek Basel (main university library), the special libraries of the University of Basel, the "Allgemein Bibliotheken der Gesellschaft für Gutes und Gemeinnütziges (GGG) Basel", the Library of the "Pädagogische Hochschule", the Library of the "Hochschule für Soziale Arbeit" and the Library of the "Hochschule für Wirtschaft". There was a combined total () of 8,443,643 books or other media in the libraries, and in the same year a total of 1,722,802 items were loaned out.


title: Basel

text: The red sandstone Münster, one of the foremost late-Romanesque/early Gothic buildings in the Upper Rhine, was badly damaged in the great earthquake of 1356, rebuilt in the 14th and 15th century, extensively reconstructed in the mid-19th century and further restored in the late 20th century. A memorial to Erasmus lies inside the Münster. The City Hall from the 16th century is located on the Market Square and is decorated with fine murals on the outer walls and on the walls of the inner court.


title: Basel

text: Basel is also host to an array of buildings by internationally renowned architects. These include the Beyeler Foundation by Renzo Piano, or the Vitra complex in nearby Weil am Rhein, composed of buildings by architects such as Zaha Hadid (fire station), Frank Gehry (Design Museum), Álvaro Siza Vieira (factory building) and Tadao Ando (conference centre). Basel also features buildings by Mario Botta (Jean Tinguely Museum and Bank of International settlements) and Herzog & de Meuron (whose architectural practice is in Basel, and who are best known as the architects of Tate Modern in London and the Bird's Nest in Beijing, the Olympia stadium, which was designed for use throughout the 2008 Summer Olympics and Paralympics). The city received the Wakker Prize in 1996.


title: Basel

text: "Badischer Bahnhof" (German Baden's railway station) with fountain, Bank for International Settlements, "Blaues Haus (Reichensteinerhof)" at Rheinsprung 16, "Bruderholzschule" (school house) at Fritz-Hauser-Strasse 20, "Brunschwiler Haus" at Hebelstrasse 15, "Bahnhof Basel SBB" (Swiss railway station), "Bürgerspital" (hospital), "Café Spitz (Merianflügel)", "Coop Schweiz" company's central archive, Depot of the "Archäologischen Bodenforschung des Kanton Basel-Stadt", former Gallizian Paper Mill and Swiss Museum of Paper, former "Klingental-Kaserne" (casern) with "Klingentaler Kirche" (church), "Fasnachtsbrunnen" (fountain), "Feuerschützenhaus" (guild house of the riflemen) at Schützenmattstrasse 56, "Fischmarktbrunnen" (fountain), "Geltenzunft" at Marktplatz 13, "Gymnasium am Kohlenberg (St Leonhard)" (school), "Hauptpost" (main post office), "Haus zum Raben" at Aeschenvorstadt 15, "Hohenfirstenhof" at Rittergasse 19, "Holsteinerhof" at Hebelstrasse 30, Markgräflerhof a former palace of the margraves of Baden-Durlach, "Mittlere Rhein Brücke" (Central Rhine Bridge), "Stadtcasino" (music hall) at Steinenberg 14, "Ramsteinerhof" at Rittergasse 7 and 9, Rathaus (town hall), "Rundhof" building of the "Schweizerischen Mustermesse", "Safranzunft" at Gerbergasse 11, "Sandgrube" at Riehenstrasse 154, "Schlösschen" (Manor house) Gundeldingen, "Schönes Haus" and "Schöner Hof" at Nadelberg 6, "Wasgenring" school house, "Seidenhof" with painting of Rudolf von Habsburg, "Spalenhof" at Spalenberg 12, "Spiesshof" at Heuberg 7, city walls, Townhouse (former post office) at Stadthausgasse 13 / Totengässlein 6, "Weisses Haus" at Martinsgasse 3, "Wildt'sches Haus" at Petersplatz 13, "Haus zum Neuen Singer" at Speiserstrasse 98, "Wolfgottesacker" at Münchensteinerstrasse 99, "Zerkindenhof" at Nadelberg 10.


title: Basel

text: Among others, there is the Anatomical Museum of the University Basel, Berri-Villen and Museum of Ancient Art Basel and Ludwig Collection, Former Franciscan "Barefoot" Order Church and Basel Historical Museum, Company Archive of Novartis, "Haus zum Kirschgarten" which is part of the Basel Historical Museum, Historic Archive Roche and Industrial Complex Hoffmann-La Roche, Jewish Museum of Switzerland, Caricature & Cartoon Museum Basel, Karl Barth-Archive, "Kleines Klingental" (Lower Klingen Valley) with Museum Klingental, Art Museum of Basel, hosting the world's oldest art collection accessible to the public, Natural History Museum of Basel and the Museum of Cultures Basel, Museum of Modern Art Basel with the E. Hoffmann collection, Museum Jean Tinguely Basel, Music Museum, Pharmacy Historical Museum of the University of Basel, Poster Collection of the School for Design ("Schule für Gestaltung"), Swiss Business Archives, Sculpture Hall, Sports Museum of Switzerland, Archives of the Canton of Basel-Stadt, UBS AG Corporate Archives, University Library with manuscripts and music collection, Zoological Garden ("Zoologischer Garten").


title: Basel

text: Basel is the home of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, founded in 1933, a worldwide centre for research on and performance of music from the Medieval through the Baroque eras. Theater Basel, chosen in 1999 as the best stage for German-language performances and in 2009 and 2010 as "Opera house of the year" by German opera magazine "Opernwelt", presents a busy schedule of plays in addition to being home to the city's opera and ballet companies. Basel is home to the largest orchestra in Switzerland, the Sinfonieorchester Basel. It is also the home of the Basel Sinfonietta and the Kammerorchester Basel, which recorded the complete symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven for the Sony label, led by its music director Giovanni Antonini. The Schola Cantorum and the Basler Kammerorchester were both founded by the conductor Paul Sacher, who went on to commission works by many leading composers. The Paul Sacher Foundation, opened in 1986, houses a major collection of manuscripts, including the entire Igor Stravinsky archive.


title: Basel

text: In May 2004, the fifth European Festival of Youth Choirs (Europäisches Jugendchorfestival, or EJCF) opened; this Basel tradition started in 1992. Host of the festival is the local Basel Boys Choir.


title: Basel

text: In 1997, Basel contended to become the "European Capital of Culture", though the honor went to Thessaloniki.


title: Basel

text: The Basel museums cover a broad and diverse spectrum of collections with a marked concentration in the fine arts. They house numerous holdings of international significance. The over three dozen institutions yield an extraordinarily high density of museums compared to other cities of similar size and draw over one million visitors annually.


title: Basel

text: Constituting an essential component of Basel culture and cultural policy, the museums are the result of closely interwoven private and public collecting activities and promotion of arts and culture going back to the 16th century. The public museum collection was first created back in 1661 and represents the oldest public collection in continuous existence in Europa. Since the late 1980s, various private collections have been made accessible to the public in new purpose-built structures that have been recognized as acclaimed examples of avant-garde museum architecture.


title: Basel

text: The city of Basel is a centre for numerous fairs and events all year round. One of the most important fairs for contemporary art worldwide is the Art Basel which was founded in 1970 by Ernst Beyeler and takes place in June each year. Baselworld, the watch and jewellery show ("Uhren- und Schmuckmesse") one of the biggest fairs of its kind in Europe is held every year as well, and attracts a great number of tourists and dealers to the city. Live marketing company and fair organizer MCH Group has its head office in Basel.


title: Basel

text: The carnival of the city of Basel ("Basler Fasnacht") is a major cultural event in the year. The carnival is the biggest in Switzerland and attracts large crowds every year, despite the fact that it starts at exactly four o'clock in the morning ("Morgestraich") on a winter Monday. The Fasnacht asserts Basel's Protestant history by commencing the revelry five days after Ash Wednesday and continuing exactly 72 hours. Almost all study and work in the old city cease. Dozens of fife and drum clubs parade in medieval guild tradition with fantastical masks and illuminated lanterns.


title: Basel

text: Basel Tattoo, founded in 2006 by the local Top Secret Drum Corps, has grown to be the world's second largest military tattoo in terms of performers and budget after the Edinburgh Military Tattoo. The Basel Tattoo annual parade, with an estimated 125,000 visitors, is considered the largest event in Basel. The event is now sponsored by the Swiss Federal Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport (DDPS), making it the official military tattoo of Switzerland.


title: Basel

text: There are a number of culinary specialties originating in Basel, including "Basler Läckerli" cookies and "Mässmogge" candies. Being located in the meeting place between Switzerland, France and Germany the culinary landscape as a whole is very varied and diverse, making it a city with a great number of restaurants of all sorts.


title: Basel

text: "Zoo Basel" is, with over 1.7 million visitors per year, the most visited tourist attraction in Basel and the second most visited tourist attraction in Switzerland.


title: Basel

text: Established in 1874, Zoo Basel is the oldest zoo in Switzerland and, by number of animals, the largest. Through its history, Zoo Basel has had several breeding successes, such as the first worldwide Indian rhinoceros birth and Greater flamingo hatch in a zoo. These and other achievements led Forbes Travel to rank Zoo Basel as one of the fifteen best zoos in the world in 2008.


title: Basel

text: Despite its international fame, Basel's population remains attached to Zoo Basel, which is entirely surrounded by the city of Basel. Evidence of this is the millions of donations money each year, as well as Zoo Basel's unofficial name: locals lovingly call "their" zoo ""Zolli"" by which is it known throughout Basel and most of Switzerland.


title: Basel

text: Basel has a reputation in Switzerland as a successful sporting city. The football club FC Basel continues to be successful and in recognition of this the city was one of the Swiss venues for the 2008 European Championships, as well as Geneva, Zürich and Bern. The championships were jointly hosted by Switzerland and Austria. BSC Old Boys and Concordia Basel are the other football teams in Basel.


title: Basel

text: Among the most popular sports in Switzerland is ice hockey. Basel is home to the EHC Basel which plays in the MySports League, the third tier of the Swiss ice hockey league system. They play their home games in the 6,700-seat St. Jakob Arena. The team previously played in the National League and the Swiss League, but they had to file for bankruptcy after the 2013–14 Swiss League season.


title: Basel

text: Amongst its major sports venues, Basel features a large football stadium that has been awarded four stars by UEFA, a modern ice hockey arena, and a sports hall.


title: Basel

text: A large indoor tennis event takes place in Basel every October. Some of the best ATP-professionals play every year at the Swiss Indoors, including Switzerland's biggest sporting hero and frequent participant Roger Federer, a Basel native who describes the city as "one of the most beautiful cities in the world".


title: Basel

text: The annual Basel Rhine Swim draws several thousand visitors to the city to swim in or float on the Rhine.


title: Basel

text: While football and ice hockey are by far the most popular sports, basketball has a very small but faithful fan base. The top division, called the SBL, is a semi-professional league and has one team from the Basel region, the "Birstal Starwings".


title: Basel

text: Two players from Switzerland are currently active in the NBA, Thabo Sefolosha and Clint Capela. As in most European countries, and contrary to the U.S., Switzerland has a club-based rather than a school-based competition system. The Starwings Basel are the only first division basketball team in German-speaking Switzerland.


title: Cactus

text: A cactus (, or less commonly, cactus) is a member of the plant family Cactaceae, a family comprising about 127 genera with some 1750 known species of the order Caryophyllales. The word "cactus" derives, through Latin, from the Ancient Greek word ("káktos"), a name originally used by Theophrastus for a spiny plant whose identity is now not certain. Cacti occur in a wide range of shapes and sizes. Although some species live in quite humid environments, most cacti live in habitats subject to at least some drought. Many live in extremely dry environments, even being found in the Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth. Because of this, cacti show many adaptations to conserve water. For example, almost all cacti are succulents, meaning they have thickened, fleshy parts adapted to store water. Unlike many other succulents, the stem is the only part of most cacti where this vital process takes place. Most species of cacti have lost true leaves, retaining only spines, which are highly modified leaves. As well as defending against herbivores, spines help prevent water loss by reducing air flow close to the cactus and providing some shade. In the absence of true leaves, cacti's enlarged stems carry out photosynthesis. Cacti are native to the Americas, ranging from Patagonia in the south to parts of western Canada in the north—except for "Rhipsalis baccifera", which also grows in Africa and Sri Lanka.


title: Cactus

text: Cactus spines are produced from specialized structures called areoles, a kind of highly reduced branch. Areoles are an identifying feature of cacti. As well as spines, areoles give rise to flowers, which are usually tubular and multipetaled. Many cacti have short growing seasons and long dormancies and are able to react quickly to any rainfall, helped by an extensive but relatively shallow root system that quickly absorbs any water reaching the ground surface. Cactus stems are often ribbed or fluted, which allows them to expand and contract easily for quick water absorption after rain, followed by retention over long drought periods. Like other succulent plants, most cacti employ a special mechanism called "crassulacean acid metabolism" (CAM) as part of photosynthesis. Transpiration, during which carbon dioxide enters the plant and water escapes, does not take place during the day at the same time as photosynthesis, but instead occurs at night. The plant stores the carbon dioxide it takes in as malic acid, retaining it until daylight returns, and only then using it in photosynthesis. Because transpiration takes place during the cooler, more humid night hours, water loss is significantly reduced.


title: Cactus

text: Many smaller cacti have globe-shaped stems, combining the highest possible volume for water storage with the lowest possible surface area for water loss from transpiration. The tallest free-standing cactus is "Pachycereus pringlei", with a maximum recorded height of , and the smallest is "Blossfeldia liliputiana", only about in diameter at maturity. A fully grown saguaro ("Carnegiea gigantea") is said to be able to absorb as much as of water during a rainstorm. A few species differ significantly in appearance from most of the family. At least superficially, plants of the genera "Leuenbergeria", "Rhodocactus" and "Pereskia" resemble other trees and shrubs growing around them. They have persistent leaves, and when older, bark-covered stems. Their areoles identify them as cacti, and in spite of their appearance, they, too, have many adaptations for water conservation. "Leuenbergeria" is considered close to the ancestral species from which all cacti evolved. In tropical regions, other cacti grow as forest climbers and epiphytes (plants that grow on trees). Their stems are typically flattened, almost leaf-like in appearance, with fewer or even no spines, such as the well-known Christmas cactus or Thanksgiving cactus (in the genus "Schlumbergera").


title: Cactus

text: Cacti have a variety of uses: many species are used as ornamental plants, others are grown for fodder or forage, and others for food (particularly their fruit). Cochineal is the product of an insect that lives on some cacti.


title: Cactus

text: Many succulent plants in both the Old and New World – such as some Euphorbiaceae (euphorbias) – are also spiny stem succulents and because of this are sometimes incorrectly referred to as "cactus".


title: Cactus

text: The 1,500 to 1,800 species of cacti mostly fall into one of two groups of "core cacti": opuntias (subfamily Opuntioideae) and "cactoids" (subfamily Cactoideae). Most members of these two groups are easily recognizable as cacti. They have fleshy succulent stems that are major organs of photosynthesis. They have absent, small, or transient leaves. They have flowers with ovaries that lie below the sepals and petals, often deeply sunken into a fleshy receptacle (the part of the stem from which the flower parts grow). All cacti have areoles—highly specialized short shoots with extremely short internodes that produce spines, normal shoots, and flowers.


title: Cactus

text: The remaining cacti fall into only two groups: three tree-like genera, "Leuenbergeria", "Pereskia" and "Rhodocactus" (all formerly placed in "Pereskia"), and the much smaller "Maihuenia". These two groups are rather different from other cacti, which means any description of cacti as a whole must frequently make exceptions for them. Species of the first three genera superficially resemble other tropical forest trees. When mature, they have woody stems that may be covered with bark and long-lasting leaves that provide the main means of photosynthesis. Their flowers may have superior ovaries (i.e., above the points of attachment of the sepals and petals) and areoles that produce further leaves. The two species of "Maihuenia" have succulent but non-photosynthetic stems and prominent succulent leaves.


title: Cactus

text: Cacti show a wide variety of growth habits, which are difficult to divide into clear, simple categories.


title: Cactus

text: Cacti can be tree-like (arborescent), meaning they typically have a single more-or-less woody trunk topped by several to many branches. In the genera "Leuenbergeria", "Pereskia" and "Rhodocactus", the branches are covered with leaves, so the species of these genera may not be recognized as cacti. In most other cacti, the branches are more typically cactus-like, bare of leaves and bark and covered with spines, as in "Pachycereus pringlei" or the larger opuntias. Some cacti may become tree-sized but without branches, such as larger specimens of "Echinocactus platyacanthus". Cacti may also be described as shrubby, with several stems coming from the ground or from branches very low down, such as in "Stenocereus thurberi".


title: Cactus

text: Smaller cacti may be described as columnar. They consist of erect, cylinder-shaped stems, which may or may not branch, without a very clear division into trunk and branches. The boundary between columnar forms and tree-like or shrubby forms is difficult to define. Smaller and younger specimens of "Cephalocereus senilis", for example, are columnar, whereas older and larger specimens may become tree-like. In some cases, the "columns" may be horizontal rather than vertical. Thus, "Stenocereus eruca" can be described as columnar even though it has stems growing along the ground, rooting at intervals.


title: Cactus

text: Cacti whose stems are even smaller may be described as globular (or globose). They consist of shorter, more ball-shaped stems than columnar cacti. Globular cacti may be solitary, such as "Ferocactus latispinus", or their stems may form clusters that can create large mounds. All or some stems in a cluster may share a common root.


title: Cactus

text: Other cacti have a quite different appearance. In tropical regions, some grow as forest climbers and epiphytes. Their stems are typically flattened and almost leaf-like in appearance, with few or even no spines. Climbing cacti can be very large; a specimen of "Hylocereus" was reported as long from root to the most distant stem. Epiphytic cacti, such as species of "Rhipsalis" or "Schlumbergera", often hang downwards, forming dense clumps where they grow in trees high above the ground.


title: Cactus

text: The leafless, spiny stem is the characteristic feature of the majority of cacti (and all of those belonging to the largest subfamily, the Cactoideae). The stem is typically succulent, meaning it is adapted to store water. The surface of the stem may be smooth (as in some species of "Opuntia") or covered with protuberances of various kinds, which are usually called tubercles. These vary from small "bumps" to prominent, nipple-like shapes in the genus "Mammillaria" and outgrowths almost like leaves in "Ariocarpus" species. The stem may also be ribbed or fluted in shape. The prominence of these ribs depends on how much water the stem is storing: when full (up to 90% of the mass of a cactus may be water), the ribs may be almost invisible on the swollen stem, whereas when the cactus is short of water and the stems shrink, the ribs may be very visible.


title: Cactus

text: The stems of most cacti are some shade of green, often bluish or brownish green. Such stems contain chlorophyll and are able to carry out photosynthesis; they also have stomata (small structures that can open and close to allow passage of gases). Cactus stems are often visibly waxy.


title: Cactus

text: Areoles are structures unique to cacti. Although variable, they typically appear as woolly or hairy areas on the stems from which spines emerge. Flowers are also produced from areoles. In the genus "Leuenbergeria", believed similar to the ancestor of all cacti, the areoles occur in the axils of leaves (i.e. in the angle between the leaf stalk and the stem). In leafless cacti, areoles are often borne on raised areas on the stem where leaf bases would have been.


title: Cactus

text: Areoles are highly specialized and very condensed shoots or branches. In a normal shoot, nodes bearing leaves or flowers would be separated by lengths of stem (internodes). In an areole, the nodes are so close together, they form a single structure. The areole may be circular, elongated into an oval shape, or even separated into two parts; the two parts may be visibly connected in some way (e.g. by a groove in the stem) or appear entirely separate (a dimorphic areole). The part nearer the top of the stem then produces flowers, the other part spines. Areoles often have multicellular hairs (trichomes) that give the areole a hairy or woolly appearance, sometimes of a distinct color such as yellow or brown.


title: Cactus

text: In most cacti, the areoles produce new spines or flowers only for a few years and then become inactive. This results in a relatively fixed number of spines, with flowers being produced only from the ends of stems, which are still growing and forming new areoles. In "Pereskia", a genus close to the ancestor of cacti, areoles remain active for much longer; this is also the case in "Opuntia" and "Neoraimondia".


title: Cactus

text: The great majority of cacti have no visible leaves; photosynthesis takes place in the stems (which may be flattened and leaflike in some species). Exceptions occur in three (taxonomically, four) groups of cacti. All the species of "Leuenbergeria", "Pereskia" and "Rhodocactus" are superficially like normal trees or shrubs and have numerous leaves with a midrib and a flattened blade (lamina) on either side. This group is paraphyletic, forming two taxonomic clades. Many cacti in the opuntia group (subfamily Opuntioideae) also have visible leaves, which may be long-lasting (as in "Pereskiopsis" species) or produced only during the growing season and then lost (as in many species of "Opuntia"). The small genus "Maihuenia" also relies on leaves for photosynthesis. The structure of the leaves varies somewhat between these groups. Opuntioids and "Maihuenia" have leaves that appear to consist only of a midrib.


title: Cactus

text: Even those cacti without visible photosynthetic leaves do usually have very small leaves, less than long in about half of the species studied and almost always less than long. The function of such leaves cannot be photosynthesis; a role in the production of plant hormones, such as auxin, and in defining axillary buds has been suggested.


title: Cactus

text: Botanically, "spines" are distinguished from "thorns": spines are modified leaves, and thorns are modified branches. Cacti produce spines, always from areoles as noted above. Spines are present even in those cacti with leaves, such as "Pereskia", "Pereskiopsis" and "Maihuenia", so they clearly evolved before complete leaflessness. Some cacti only have spines when young, possibly only when seedlings. This is particularly true of tree-living cacti, such as "Rhipsalis" and "Schlumbergera", but also of some ground-living cacti, such as "Ariocarpus".


title: Cactus

text: The spines of cacti are often useful in identification, since they vary greatly between species in number, color, size, shape and hardness, as well as in whether all the spines produced by an areole are similar or whether they are of distinct kinds. Most spines are straight or at most slightly curved, and are described as hair-like, bristle-like, needle-like or awl-like, depending on their length and thickness. Some cacti have flattened spines (e.g. "Sclerocactus papyracanthus"). Other cacti have hooked spines. Sometimes, one or more central spines are hooked, while outer spines are straight (e.g., "Mammillaria rekoi").


title: Cactus

text: In addition to normal-length spines, members of the subfamily Opuntioideae have relatively short spines, called glochids, that are barbed along their length and easily shed. These enter the skin and are difficult to remove due to being very fine and easily broken, causing long-lasting irritation.


title: Cactus

text: Most ground-living cacti have only fine roots, which spread out around the base of the plant for varying distances, close to the surface. Some cacti have taproots; in genera such as "Ariocarpus", these are considerably larger and of a greater volume than the body. Taproots may aid in stabilizing the larger columnar cacti. Climbing, creeping and epiphytic cacti may have only adventitious roots, produced along the stems where these come into contact with a rooting medium.


title: Cactus

text: Like their spines, cactus flowers are variable. Typically, the ovary is surrounded by material derived from stem or receptacle tissue, forming a structure called a pericarpel. Tissue derived from the petals and sepals continues the pericarpel, forming a composite tube—the whole may be called a floral tube, although strictly speaking only the part furthest from the base is floral in origin. The outside of the tubular structure often has areoles that produce wool and spines. Typically, the tube also has small scale-like bracts, which gradually change into sepal-like and then petal-like structures, so the sepals and petals cannot be clearly differentiated (and hence are often called "tepals"). Some cacti produce floral tubes without wool or spines (e.g. "Gymnocalycium") or completely devoid of any external structures (e.g. "Mammillaria"). Unlike the flowers of most other cacti, "Pereskia" flowers may be borne in clusters.


title: Cactus

text: Cactus flowers usually have many stamens, but only a single style, which may branch at the end into more than one stigma. The stamens usually arise from all over the inner surface of the upper part of the floral tube, although in some cacti, the stamens are produced in one or more distinct "series" in more specific areas of the inside of the floral tube.


title: Cactus

text: The flower as a whole is usually radially symmetrical (actinomorphic), but may be bilaterally symmetrical (zygomorphic) in some species. Flower colors range from white through yellow and red to magenta.


title: Cactus

text: All cacti have some adaptations to promote efficient water use. Most cacti—opuntias and cactoids—specialize in surviving in hot and dry environments (i.e. are xerophytes), but the first ancestors of modern cacti were already adapted to periods of intermittent drought. A small number of cactus species in the tribes Hylocereeae and Rhipsalideae have become adapted to life as climbers or epiphytes, often in tropical forests, where water conservation is less important.


title: Cactus

text: The absence of visible leaves is one of the most striking features of most cacti. "Pereskia" (which is close to the ancestral species from which all cacti evolved) does have long-lasting leaves, which are, however, thickened and succulent in many species. Other species of cactus with long-lasting leaves, such as the opuntioid "Pereskiopsis", also have succulent leaves. A key issue in retaining water is the ratio of surface area to volume. Water loss is proportional to surface area, whereas the amount of water present is proportional to volume. Structures with a high surface area-to-volume ratio, such as thin leaves, necessarily lose water at a higher rate than structures with a low area-to-volume ratio, such as thickened stems.


title: Cactus

text: Spines, which are modified leaves, are present on even those cacti with true leaves, showing the evolution of spines preceded the loss of leaves. Although spines have a high surface area-to-volume ratio, at maturity they contain little or no water, being composed of fibers made up of dead cells. Spines provide protection from herbivores and camouflage in some species, and assist in water conservation in several ways. They trap air near the surface of the cactus, creating a moister layer that reduces evaporation and transpiration. They can provide some shade, which lowers the temperature of the surface of the cactus, also reducing water loss. When sufficiently moist air is present, such as during fog or early morning mist, spines can condense moisture, which then drips onto the ground and is absorbed by the roots.


title: Cactus

text: The majority of cacti are stem succulents, i.e., plants in which the stem is the main organ used to store water. Water may form up to 90% of the total mass of a cactus. Stem shapes vary considerably among cacti. The cylindrical shape of columnar cacti and the spherical shape of globular cacti produce a low surface area-to-volume ratio, thus reducing water loss, as well as minimizing the heating effects of sunlight. The ribbed or fluted stems of many cacti allow the stem to shrink during periods of drought and then swell as it fills with water during periods of availability. A mature saguaro ("Carnegiea gigantea") is said to be able to absorb as much as of water during a rainstorm. The outer layer of the stem usually has a tough cuticle, reinforced with waxy layers, which reduce water loss. These layers are responsible for the grayish or bluish tinge to the stem color of many cacti.


title: Cactus

text: The stems of most cacti have adaptations to allow them to conduct photosynthesis in the absence of leaves. This is discussed further below under Metabolism.


title: Cactus

text: Many cacti have roots that spread out widely, but only penetrate a short distance into the soil. In one case, a young saguaro only tall had a root system with a diameter of , but no more than deep. Cacti can also form new roots quickly when rain falls after a drought. The concentration of salts in the root cells of cacti is relatively high. All these adaptations enable cacti to absorb water rapidly during periods of brief or light rainfall. Thus, "Ferocactus cylindraceus" reportedly can take up a significant amount of water within 12 hours from as little as of rainfall, becoming fully hydrated in a few days.


title: Cactus

text: Although in most cacti, the stem acts as the main organ for storing water, some cacti have in addition large taproots. These may be several times the length of the above-ground body in the case of species such as "Copiapoa atacamensis", which grows in one of the driest places in the world, the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.


title: Cactus

text: Photosynthesis requires plants to take in carbon dioxide gas (). As they do so, they lose water through transpiration. Like other types of succulents, cacti reduce this water loss by the way in which they carry out photosynthesis. "Normal" leafy plants use the C mechanism: during daylight hours, is continually drawn out of the air present in spaces inside leaves and converted first into a compound containing three carbon atoms (3-phosphoglycerate) and then into products such as carbohydrates. The access of air to internal spaces within a plant is controlled by stomata, which are able to open and close. The need for a continuous supply of during photosynthesis means the stomata must be open, so water vapor is continuously being lost. Plants using the C mechanism lose as much as 97% of the water taken up through their roots in this way. A further problem is that as temperatures rise, the enzyme that captures starts to capture more and more oxygen instead, reducing the efficiency of photosynthesis by up to 25%.


title: Cactus

text: Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) is a mechanism adopted by cacti and other succulents to avoid the problems of the C mechanism. In full CAM, the stomata open only at night, when temperatures and water loss are lowest. enters the plant and is captured in the form of organic acids stored inside cells (in vacuoles). The stomata remain closed throughout the day, and photosynthesis uses only this stored . CAM uses water much more efficiently at the price of limiting the amount of carbon fixed from the atmosphere and thus available for growth. CAM-cycling is a less water-efficient system whereby stomata open in the day, just as in plants using the C mechanism. At night, or when the plant is short of water, the stomata close and the CAM mechanism is used to store produced by respiration for use later in photosynthesis. CAM-cycling is present in "Pereskia" species.


title: Cactus

text: By studying the ratio of C to C incorporated into a plant—its isotopic signature—it is possible to deduce how much is taken up at night and how much in the daytime. Using this approach, most of the "Pereskia" species investigated exhibit some degree of CAM-cycling, suggesting this ability was present in the ancestor of all cacti. "Pereskia" leaves are claimed to only have the C mechanism with CAM restricted to stems. More recent studies show that "it is highly unlikely that significant carbon assimilation occurs in the stem"; "Pereskia" species are described as having "C with inducible CAM." Leafless cacti carry out all their photosynthesis in the stem, using full CAM. , it is not clear whether stem-based CAM evolved once only in the core cacti, or separately in the opuntias and cactoids; CAM is known to have evolved convergently many times.


title: Cactus

text: To carry out photosynthesis, cactus stems have undergone many adaptations. Early in their evolutionary history, the ancestors of modern cacti (other than "Leuenbergeria" species) developed stomata on their stems and began to delay developing bark. However, this alone was not sufficient; cacti with only these adaptations appear to do very little photosynthesis in their stems. Stems needed to develop structures similar to those normally found only in leaves. Immediately below the outer epidermis, a hypodermal layer developed made up of cells with thickened walls, offering mechanical support. Air spaces were needed between the cells to allow carbon dioxide to diffuse inwards. The center of the stem, the cortex, developed "chlorenchyma" – a plant tissue made up of relatively unspecialized cells containing chloroplasts, arranged into a "spongy layer" and a "palisade layer" where most of the photosynthesis occurs.


title: Cactus

text: Naming and classifying cacti has been both difficult and controversial since the first cacti were discovered for science. The difficulties began with Carl Linnaeus. In 1737, he placed the cacti he knew into two genera, "Cactus" and "Pereskia". However, when he published "Species Plantarum" in 1753—the starting point for modern botanical nomenclature—he relegated them all to one genus, "Cactus". The word "cactus" is derived through Latin from the Ancient Greek ("kaktos"), a name used by Theophrastus for a spiny plant, which may have been the cardoon ("Cynara cardunculus").


title: Cactus

text: Later botanists, such as Philip Miller in 1754, divided cacti into several genera, which, in 1789, Antoine Laurent de Jussieu placed in his newly created family Cactaceae. By the early 20th century, botanists came to feel Linnaeus's name "Cactus" had become so confused as to its meaning (was it the genus or the family?) that it should not be used as a genus name. The 1905 Vienna botanical congress rejected the name "Cactus" and instead declared "Mammillaria" was the type genus of the family Cactaceae. It did, however, conserve the name Cactaceae, leading to the unusual situation in which the family Cactaceae no longer contains the genus after which it was named.


title: Cactus

text: The difficulties continued, partly because giving plants scientific names relies on "type specimens". Ultimately, if botanists want to know whether a particular plant is an example of, say, "Mammillaria mammillaris", they should be able to compare it with the type specimen to which this name is permanently attached. Type specimens are normally prepared by compression and drying, after which they are stored in herbaria to act as definitive references. However, cacti are very difficult to preserve in this way; they have evolved to resist drying and their bodies do not easily compress. A further difficulty is that many cacti were given names by growers and horticulturalists rather than botanists; as a result, the provisions of the "International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants" (which governs the names of cacti, as well as other plants) were often ignored. Curt Backeberg, in particular, is said to have named or renamed 1,200 species without one of his names ever being attached to a specimen, which, according to David Hunt, ensured he "left a trail of nomenclatural chaos that will probably vex cactus taxonomists for centuries."


title: Cactus

text: In 1984, it was decided that the Cactaceae Section of the International Organization for Succulent Plant Study should set up a working party, now called the International Cactaceae Systematics Group (ICSG), to produce consensus classifications down to the level of genera. Their system has been used as the basis of subsequent classifications. Detailed treatments published in the 21st century have divided the family into around 125–130 genera and 1,400–1,500 species, which are then arranged into a number of tribes and subfamilies. The ICSG classification of the cactus family recognized four subfamilies, the largest of which was divided into nine tribes. The subfamilies were:


title: Cactus

text: Molecular phylogenetic studies have supported the monophyly of three of these subfamilies (not Pereskioideae), but have not supported all of the tribes or even genera below this level; indeed, a 2011 study found only 39% of the genera in the subfamily Cactoideae sampled in the research were monophyletic. Classification of the cacti currently remains uncertain and is likely to change.