OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Muhlenberg, John Peter Gabriel

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​MUHLENBERG, JOHN PETER GABRIEL (1746–1807), American preacher and soldier, son of H. M. Muhlenberg (q.v.), was born at Trappe, Pennsylvania, on the 1st of October 1746. With his two brothers he was educated in Germany. He entered the Lutheran ministry, had charge of churches at New Germantown and Bedminster, New Jersey, and after 1772 of a church in Woodstock, Virginia, and there in 1775 raised the 8th Virginia (German) regiment, of which he was made colonel; in February 1777 he became a brigadier-general in the Continental Army; and in September 1783 was breveted major-general. He took part in the battles of Brandywine, Germantown and Monmouth, and at Yorktown commanded the first brigade of light infantry. After the war he removed to Pennsylvania. He was a member of the Virginia convention of 1776, was vice-president of the supreme-executive council of Pennsylvania in 1787–1788, and was a representative in Congress in 1789–1791, in 1793–1795, and in 1799–1801. In 1801 he was elected as a Democratic-Republican to the United States Senate, but immediately resigned to become supervisor of revenue for the district of Pennsylvania. He became collector of the port of Philadelphia in 1803. He was a friend of Thomas Jefferson and of James Monroe.
See Life by Henry A. Muhlenburg (Philadelphia, 1849).
His brother, Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg (1750–1801), became his father’s assistant in Philadelphia in 1770; was pastor of the Christ (or Swamp) German Lutheran Church of New York City from 1773 to 1776; and in 1777–1779 was assistant to his father at New Hanover. In 1779–1780 he was ​a member of the Continental Congress, in 1780–1783 of the Pennsylvania general assembly (then consisting of only one house), and in 1780–1790 of the state constitutional convention. He was president of the Pennsylvania convention which ratified the federal constitution, and was a member in 1789–1797 of the national House of Representatives, of which he was speaker in 1780–1791 and 1793–1795. On the 29th of April 1796, as chairman of the committee of the whole, he cast the deciding vote for the laws necessary to carry out Jay’s treaty.
Another brother, Gotthilf Henry Ernest Muhlenberg (1753–1815), was a prominent Lutheran clergyman, and was pastor of a church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, from 1779 to his death; but he is best known as a botanist, and published Catalogus plantarum Americae septentrionalis (1813) and Descriptio uberior graminum et plantarum calamariarum Americae septentrionalis indignarum et circurum (1817).
See John M. Maisch, G. H. E. Muhlenberg als Botaniker (1886).
Gotthilf’s son, Henry Augustus Muhlenberg (1782–1844), was pastor of a Lutheran Church in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1802–1828, was a Democratic representative in Congress in 1829–1838, and was United States minister to Austria in 1838–1840.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Muff

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​MUFF, an article of outdoor apparel, open at either end, for holding the hands in and keeping them warm, generally made of fur, but also of velvet, silk, &c. Muffs are now only used in England by women, but in the 17th and 18th centuries were fashionable for men. In Roman times the place of the glove was taken by long sleeves (manicae) reaching to the hand, and in winter special sleeves of fur were worn (cf. Cic. Phil. ii. 11, 26). In Medieval Latin we find the word muffulae, defined by Du Cange (Gloss., s.v.) as chirothecae pellitae et hibernae. He quotes from a cartulary of the year 817, of the issuing to monks of sheepskin coverings to be used during the winter. These may have been, as the Roman certainly were, separate coverings for each hand, although the cartulary cited also distinguishes the glove for summer from the muffulae for winter wear. The O. Fr. moufle meant a thick glove or mitten, and from this the Du. mof, Walloon mouffe, and thence Eng. “muff,” are probably derived. From the Fr. moufle have come the various uses, verbal and substantival, of “muffle,” viz. to wrap round for protection, for deadening sound &c., and for a chamber or receptacle in a furnace to protect objects from contact with fire while exposed to heat. The slang use of “muff” for a clumsy, awkward person is of late origin. It appears in the middle of the 19th century.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Muhlenberg, Henry Melchior

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​MUHLENBERG, HENRY MELCHIOR (1711–1787), German-American Lutheran clergyman, was born in Einbeck, Hanover, on the 6th of September 1711. When he was twelve years old his father, a member of the city council, died. The son entered the university of Göttingen in 1735, and his work among the poor of Göttingen led to the establishment of the present orphan house there. In 1738 he went to Halle to finish his theological studies; he was a devoted worker in the Franckesche Stiftung, which later served as a partial model for his great-grandson’s community at St Johnland, Long Island. He was deacon at Grosshennersdorf, in Upper Lusatia, in 1739–1741. In 1742, in reply to a call from the Lutheran churches of Pennsylvania, he went to Philadelphia, and was joined from time to time, especially in 1745, by students from Halle. Muhlenberg occupied himself more particularly with the congregation at New Providence (now Trappe), though he was practically overseer of all the Lutheran churches from New York to Maryland. In 1748 he organized the first Lutheran synod in America. Muhlenberg married in 1745 Anna Maria Weiser, daughter of J. Conrad Weiser, a well-known Indian interpreter, and herself said to have had Indian blood in her veins; by her he had eleven children. Throughout the War of Independence he and his sons (see below) were prominent patriots. He died at Trappe on the 7th of October 1787. The importance of his work in organizing and building up the American Lutheran Church, of which he has been called the Patriarch, can hardly be exaggerated; but his example in preaching in English as well as in German was, unfortunately for the growth of the Lutheran Church, not followed by his immediate successors. He had no sympathy with the Old Lutherans and their strict orthodoxy—on the contrary he was friendly with the Reformed congregations, and with George Whitefield and the Tennents.
See Life and Times by William J. Mann (Philadelphia, 1887).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Muhamrah

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​MUHAMRAH (Mohammerah), a town of Persia, in the province of Arabistan, in 30° 26′ N., 48° 11′ E., on the Hafar canal, which joins the Karun with the Shatt el Arab, and flows into the latter 40 m. above its mouth at Fao and about 20 m. below Basra. It has post and telegraph offices, and a population of about 5000. With the opening of the Karun river, as far as Ahvaz, to international navigation in 1889, Muhamrah acquired greater importance, and its customs, which until then were leased to the governor for £1500 per annum, rose considerably, and paid £8000 until taken over by the central customs department under Belgian officials in 1902. It is estimated that the value of the imports and exports into and from Muhamrah, excluding specie, is about £300,000 per annum, paying customs amounting to about £18,000. Until 1847, when it definitely became Persian territory in accordance with art. ii. of the treaty of Erzerum, Muhamrah was alternately claimed and occupied by Persia and Turkey, its ruler, an Arab sheikh, helping either power as he found it convenient. Since then the governor of the town and adjoining district has been a sheikh of the K’ab or Chaab Arabs, a powerful tribe of the Shi’ah branch of Islam. At the close of the Anglo-Persian campaign in 1857 Muhamrah was taken by a British force.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mesozoic Era

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​MESOZOIC ERA, in geology, the name given to the period of time between the Palaeozoic and Cainozoic eras; it is synonymous with the older and less satisfactory term “Secondary” as applied to the major divisions of geological time and with the “Flözgebirge” of the Wernerian school. This era is subdivided into a lower, Triassic, a middle, Jurassic, and an upper, Cretaceous period or epoch. The duration of the Mesozoic era was not more than one fourth of that of the Palaeozoic era, measured by the thickness of strata formed during these periods. It was an era marked by peaceful conditions in the earth’s crust and by a general freedom from volcanic activity. The sediments as a whole are characterized by the prevalence of limestones as compared with those of the preceding era; they are seldom much altered or disturbed except in the younger mountain regions. Mammals, represented by small marsupials, and primitive forms of birds and bony fishes make their first appearance in rocks of Mesozoic age. Saurian reptiles played an extremely prominent part; ammonites and belemnites lived in extraordinary variety in the seas along with the echinoids and pelecypods, which had to a great extent supplanted the crinoids and brachiopods of the preceding periods. The first clear indications of monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous angiosperms made their appearance, while Cycads and Conifers constituted the bulk of the land flora.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mesnager

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​MESNAGER (or Le Mesagner), NICOLAS (1658–1714), French diplomatist, belonged to a wealthy merchant family. He gave up a commercial career for the law, however, and became advocate before the parlement of Rouen. In 1700 he was sent as deputy of Rouen to the council of commerce which was established in Paris for the extension of French trade. Here he made his mark, and was chosen to go on three missions to Spain, between the years 1704 and 1705, to negotiate financial arrangements. In August 1711 he was sent on a secret mission to London to detach England from the alliance against France, and succeeded in securing the adoption of eight articles which formed the base of the later Treaty of Utrecht. As a reward for his skill he was made one of the three French plenipotentiaries sent to Utrecht in January 1712, and had the honour of signing the treaty the next year. As he had used much of his own large fortune to keep up his state as ambassador, he was granted a pension by the grateful king of France. His portrait by Hyacinthe Rigaud is in the gallery of Versailles.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mesoxalic Acid

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​MESOXALIC ACID (dioxymalonic acid), (HO$_2$C)$_2$C(OH)$_2$ or C$_2$H$_4$O$_6$, is obtained by hydrolysis of alloxan with baryta water (J. v. Liebig, Ann., 1838, 26, p. 298), by warming caffuric acid with lead acetate solution (E. Fischer, Ann., 1882, 215, p. 283), or from glycerin diacetate and concentrated nitric acid in the cold (E. Seelig, Ber., 1891, 24, p. 3471). It crystallizes in deliquescent prisms and melts with partial decomposition at 119–120° C. It behaves as a ketonic acid, being reduced in aqueous solution by sodium amalgam to tartronic acid, and also combining with phenylhydrazine and hydroxylamine. It reduces ammoniacal silver solutions. When heated with urea to 100° C. it forms allantoin. By continued boiling of its aqueous solution it is decomposed into carbon dioxide and glyoxylic acid, C$_2$H$_4$O$_4$.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mesomedes

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​MESOMEDES of Crete, Greek lyric poet, who lived during the 2nd century A.D. He was a freedman of the emperor Hadrian, on whose favourite Antinous he is said to have written a panegyric. Two epigrams by him in the Greek anthology (Anthol. pal. xiv. 63, xvi. 323) and a hymn to Nemesis are extant. The hymn is of special interest as preserving the ancient musical notation written over the text. Two other hymns—to the muse Calliope and to the sun—formerly assigned to Dionysius of Alexandria, have also been attributed to him.
See J. F. Bellermann, Die Hymnen des Dionysius und Mesomedes (1840); C. de Jan, Musici scriptores graeci (1899); S. Reinach in Revue des études grecques, ix. (1896); Suidas, s.v.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mesne

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​MESNE (an Anglo-French legal form of the O. Fr. meien, mod. moyen, mean, Med. Lat. medianus, in the middle, cf. “mean”), middle or intermediate, an adjective used in several legal phrases. A mesne lord is one who has tenants holding under him, while himself holding of a superior lord. Mesne process was such process as intervened between the beginning and end of a suit (see Process). Mesne profits are profits derived from land whilst in wrongful possession, and may be claimed in damages for trespass either in a separate action or joined with an action for the recovery of the land. The plaintiff must prove that he has re-entered into possession, his title during the period for which he claims, the fact that the defendant has been in possession during that period, and the amount of the mesne profits. The amount recovered as mesne profits need not be limited to the rental value of the land, but may include a sum to cover such items as deterioration or reasonable costs of getting possession, &c.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mesocephalic

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​MESOCEPHALIC, a term applied by anthropologists to those skulls which exhibit a cephalic index intermediate between the dolichocephalic and brachycephalic crania (see Craniometry). Taking the longer diameter of a skull, i.e. the one from front to back, as 100, mesocephalic skulls are those of which the transverse diameter varies between 75 to 80.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mesonero Romanos, Ramón de

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​MESONERO ROMANOS, RAMÓN DE (1805–1882), Spanish prose-writer, was born at Madrid on the 19th of July 1803, and at an early age became interested in the history and topography of his native city. His Manual de Madrid (1831) was published when literature was at a low ebb in Spain; but the author’s curious researches and direct style charmed the public, and next year, in a review entitled Cartas españolas, under the pseudonym of “El Curioso parlante,” he began a series of articles on the social life of the capital which were subsequently collected and called Panorama matritense (1835–1836). Mesonero Romanos was elected to the Spanish Academy in 1838 and, though he continued to write, had somewhat outlived his fame when he issued his pleasing autobiography, Memorias de un setentón, natural y vecino de Madrid (1880). He died at Madrid on the 30th of April 1882, shortly after the publication of his Obras completas (8 vols., 4to, 1881).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mercier, Louis Sebastien

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​MERCIER, LOUIS SEBASTIEN (1740–1814), French dramatist and miscellaneous writer, was born in Paris on the 6th of June 1740. He began his literary career by writing heroic epistles, but early came to the conclusion that Boileau and Racine had ruined the French language, and that the true poet was he who wrote in prose. The most important of his miscellaneous works are L’ An 2440 (1770); L’Essai sur l’art dramatique (1773); Néologie (1801); Le Tableau de Paris (1781–1788); Le nouveau Paris (1799); Histoire de France (1802) and Satire contre Racine et Boileau (1808). He decried French tragedy as a caricature of antique and foreign customs in bombastic verse, and advocated the comédie larmoyante as understood by Diderot. To the philosophers he was entirely hostile. He denied that modern science had made any real advance; he even carried his conservatism so far as to maintain that the earth was a circular flat plain around which revolved the sun. Mercier wrote some sixty dramas, among which may be mentioned Jean Hennuyer (1772); La Destruction de la ligue (1782); Jennéval (1769); Le Juge (1774); Natalie (1775) and La Brouette du vinaigrier (1775). In politics he was a Moderate, and as a member of the Convention he voted against the death penalty for Louis XVI. During the Terror he was imprisoned, but was released after the fall of Robespierre. He died in Paris on the 25th of April 1814.
See Léon Bechard, Sebastien Mercier, sa vie, son œuvre (Paris, 1903); R. Doumic in the Revue des deux mondes (15th July 1903).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mercié, Marius Jean Antonin

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​MERCIÉ, MARIUS JEAN ANTONIN (1845–), French sculptor and painter, was born in Toulouse on the 30th of October 1845. He entered the École des Beaux Arts, Paris, and studied under Falguiére and Jouffroy, and in 1868 gained the Grand Prix ​de Rome. His first great popular successes were the “David” and “Gloria Victis,” which was shown and received the medal of honour of the Salon. The bronze was subsequently placed in the Square Montholon. “The Genius of the Arts” (1877), a relief, is in the Tuileries, in substitution for Barye’s “Napoleon III.”; a similar work for the tomb of Michelet (1879) is in the cemetery of Père la Chaise; and in the same year Mercié produced the statue of Arago with accompanying reliefs, now erected at Perpignan. In 1882 he repeated his great patriotic success of 1874 with a group “Quand Même!” replicas of which have been set up at Belfort and in the garden of the Tuileries. “Le Souvenir” (1885), a marble statue for the tomb of Mme Charles Ferry, is one of his most beautiful works. “Regret,” for the tomb of Cabanel, was produced in 1892, along with “William Tell,” now at Lausanne. Mercié also designed the monuments to “Meissonier” (1895), erected in the Jardin de l’Infante in the Louvre, and “Faidherbe” (1896) at Lille, a statue of “Thiers” set up at St Germain-en-Laye, the monument to “Baudry” at Père-la-Chaise, and that of “Louis-Philippe and Queen Amélie” for their tomb at Dreux. His stone group of “Justice” is at the Hôtel de Ville, Paris. Numerous other statues, portrait busts, and medallions came from the sculptor’s hand, which gained him a medal of honour at the Paris Exhibition of 1878 and the grand prix at that of 1889. Among the paintings exhibited by the artist are a “Venus,” to which was awarded a medal in 1883, “Leda” (1884), and “Michaelangelo studying Anatomy” (1885)—his most dramatic work in this medium. Mercié was appointed professor of drawing and sculpture at the École des Beaux Arts, and was elected a member of the Académie Française in 1891, after being awarded the biennial prize of the institute of £800 in 1887.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Merck, Johann Heinrich

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​MERCK, JOHANN HEINRICH (1741–1791), German author and critic, was born at Darmstadt on the 11th of April 1741, a few days after the death of his father, a chemist. He studied law at Giessen, and in 1767 was given an appointment in the paymaster’s department at Darmstadt, and a year later himself became paymaster. For a number of years he exercised considerable influence upon the literary movement in Germany; he helped to found the Frankfurter gelehrte Anzeigen in 1772, and was one of the chief contributors to Nicolai’s Allgemeine Bibliothek. In 1782 he accompanied the Landgravine Karoline of Hesse-Darmstadt to St Petersburg, and on his return was a guest of the duke Charles Augustus of Weimar in the Wartburg. Unfortunate speculations brought him into pecuniary embarrassment in 1788, and although friends, notably Goethe, were ready to come to his assistance, his losses—combined with the death of five of his children—so preyed upon his mind that he committed ​suicide on the 27th of June 1791. Merck distinguished himself mainly as a critic; his keen perception, critical perspicacity and refined taste made him a valuable guide to the young writers of the Sturm und Drang. He also wrote a number of small treatises, dealing mostly with literature and art, especially painting, and a few poems, stories, narratives and the like; but they have not much intrinsic importance. Merck’s letters are particularly interesting and instructive, and throw much light upon the literary conditions of his time.
Merck’s Ausgewählte Schriften zur schönen Literatur und Kunst were published by A. Stahr in 1840, with a biography. See Briefe an J. H. Merck von Goethe, Herder, Wieland und andern bedeutenden Zeitgenossen (1835), Briefe an und von J. H. Merck (1838) and Briefe aus dem Freundeskreise von Goethe, Herder, Höpfner und Merck (1847), all edited by K. Wagner. Cf. G. Zimmermann, J. H. Merck, seine Umgebung und seine Zeit (1871).