OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Parker, Martin

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​PARKER, JOSEPH (1830–1902), English Nonconformist divine, was born at Hexham-on-Tyne on the 9th of April 1830, his father being a stonemason. He managed to pick up a fair education, which in after-life he constantly supplemented. In the revolutionary years from 1845 to 1850 young Parker as a local preacher and temperance orator gained a reputation for vigorous utterance. He was influenced by Thomas Cooper, the Chartist, and Edward Miall, the Liberationist, and was much associated with Joseph Cowen, afterwards M. P. for Newcastle. In the spring of 1852 he wrote to Dr John Campbell, minister of Whitefield Tabernacle, Moorfields, London, for advice as to entering the Congregational ministry, and after a short probation he became Campbell’s assistant. He also attended lectures in logic and philosophy at University College, London. From 1853 to 1858 he was pastor at Banbury. His next charge was at Cavendish Street, Manchester, where he rapidly made himself felt as a power in English Nonconformity. While here he published a volume of lectures entitled Church Questions, and, anonymously, Ecce Deus (1868), a work provoked by Seeley’s Ecce Homo. The university of Chicago conferred on him the degree of D.D. In 1869 he returned to London as minister of the Poultry church, founded by Thomas Goodwin. Almost at once he began the scheme which resulted in the erection of the great City Temple in Holborn Viaduct. It cost £70,000, and was opened on the 19th of May 1874. From this centre his influence spread far and wide. His stimulating and original sermons, with their notable leaning towards the use of a racy vernacular, made him one of the best known personalities of his time. Dr Parker was twice chairman of the London Congregational Board and twice of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. The death of his second wife in 1899 was a blow from which he never fully recovered, and he died on the 28th of November 1902.
Parker was pre-eminently a preacher, and his published works are chiefly sermons and expositions, chief among them being City Temple Sermons (1869–1870) and The People’s Bible, in 25 vols. (1885–1895). Other volumes include the autobiographical Springdale Abbey (1869), The Inner Life of Christ (1881), Apostolic Life (1884), Tyne Chylde: My Life and Teaching (1883; new ed., 1889), A Preacher’s Life (1899).
See E. C. Pike, Dr Parker and his Friends (1905); Congregational Year-Book (1904).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Parker, Sir Gilbert

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​PARKER, SIR GILBERT (1862–), British novelist and politician, was born at Camden East, Addington, Ontario, on the 23rd of November 1862, the son of Captain J. Parker, R.A. He was educated at Ottawa and at Trinity University, Toronto. In 1886 he went to Australia, and became for a while associate-editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. He also travelled extensively in the Pacific, and subsequently in northern Canada; and in the early ’nineties he began to make a growing reputation in London as a writer of romantic fiction. The best of his novels are those in which he first took for his subject the history and life of the French Canadians; and his permanent literary reputation rests on the fine quality, descriptive and dramatic, of his Canadian stories. Pierre and his People (1892) was followed by Mrs Falchion (1893), The Trail of the Sword (1894), When Valmond came to Pontiac (1895), An Adventurer of the North (1895), and The Seats of the Mighty (1896, dramatized in 1897). The Lane that had no Turning (1900) contains some of his best work. In The Battle of the Strong (1898) he broke new ground, laying his scene in the Channel Islands. His chief later books were The Right of Way (1901), Donovan Pasha (1902), The Ladder of Swords (1904), The Weavers (1907) and Northern Lights (1909). In 1895 he married Miss Van Tine of New York, a wealthy heiress. His Canadian connexion and his experience in Australia and elsewhere had made him a strong Imperialist in politics, and from that time he began to devote himself in large measure to a political career. He still kept up his literary work, but some of the books last mentioned cannot compare with those by which he made his name. He was elected to parliament in 1900 (re-elected 1906 and 1910) as Conservative member for Gravesend and soon made his mark in the House of Commons. He was knighted in 1902, and in succeeding years continually strengthened his position in the party, particularly by his energetic work on behalf of Tariff Reform and Imperial Preference. If he had given up to public life what at one time seemed to be due to literature, he gave it for enthusiasm in the Imperialist movement; and with the progress of that cause he came to rank by 1910 as one of the foremost men in the Unionist party outside those who had held office.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Parker, Samuel

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​PARKER, SAMUEL (1640–1688), English bishop, was born at Northampton, and educated at Wadham College, Oxford. His Presbyterian views caused him to move to Trinity College, where, however, the influence of the senior fellow induced him to join the Church of England, and he was ordained in 1664. In 1665 he published an essay entitled Tentamina physico-theologica de Deo, dedicated to Archbishop Sheldon, who in 1667 appointed him one of his chaplains. He became rector of Chartham, Kent, in the same year. In 1670 he became archdeacon of Canterbury, and two years after he was appointed rector of Ickham, Kent. In 1673 he was elected master of Edenbridge Hospital. His Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (London, 1670), advocating state regulation of religious affairs, led him into controversy with Andrew Marvell (1621–1675). James II. appointed him to the bishopric of Oxford in 1686, and he in turn forwarded the king’s policy, especially by defending the royal right to appoint Roman Catholics to office. In 1687 the ecclesiastical commission forcibly installed him as president of Magdalen College, Oxford, the fellows having refused to elect any of the king’s nominees. He was commonly regarded as a Roman Catholic, but he would appear to have been no more than an extreme exponent of the High Church doctrine of passive obedience. After he became president the action of the king in replacing the expelled fellows with Roman Catholics agitated him to such a degree as to hasten his end; to the priests sent to persuade him on his death-bed to be received into the Roman Church he declared that he “never had been and never would be of that religion,” and he died in the communion of the Church of England.
Parker’s second son, Samuel Parker (1681–1730), was the author of Bibliotheca biblica, or Patristic Commentary on the Scriptures (1720–1735), an abridged translation of Eusebius, and other works. He was also responsible during 1708 and 1709 for a monthly periodical entitled Censura temporum, or Good and Ill Tendencies of Books. He passed most of his life in retirement at Oxford. His younger son Richard founded the well-known publishing firm in Oxford.
See Magdalen College and James II. 1686–1688, by the Rev. J. R. Bloxam (Oxford Historical Society, 1886).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Parkersburg

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​PARKERSBURG, a city and the county-seat of Wood county, West Virginia, U.S.A., on the Ohio river, at the mouth of the Little Kanawha, about 95 m. below Wheeling. Pop. (1890), 8408; (1900), 11,703, of whom 515 were foreign-born and 783 were negroes; (1910 census), 17,842. Parkersburg is served by the Baltimore & Ohio, the Baltimore & Ohio Southwestern, and the Little Kanawha railways, by electric railway to Marietta, Ohio, and by passenger and freight boats to Pittsburg, Cincinnati, intermediate ports, and ports on the Little Kanawha. Parkersburg is the see of a Protestant Episcopal bishop. Oil, coal, natural gas and fire-clay abound in the neighbouring region, and the city is engaged in the refining of oil and the manufacture of pottery, brick and tile, glass, lumber, furniture, flour, steel, and foundry and machine-shop products. In 1905 the value of the factory products was $3,778,139 (21·9% more than in 1900). Parkersburg was settled in 1789, was incorporated in 1820, and received a new charter in 1903, when its boundaries were enlarged. About 2 m. below the city is the island which was the home of Harman Blennerhassett (q.v.) and bears his name.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Parkin, George Robert

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​PARKIN, GEORGE ROBERT (1846–), British Canadian educationist, was born at Salisbury, New Brunswick, on the 8th of February 1846. His father had gone to Canada from Yorkshire. Parkin was the youngest of a family of thirteen, and after attending the local schools he started at an early age as a teacher. Bent on improving his own education, he then entered the university of New Brunswick, where he carried off high honours in 1866–1868. From 1868 to 1872 he was head master ​of Bathurst grammar school; but he was not content with the opportunities for study open to him in Canada, and he went to England and entered Oxford. Here the enthusiastic young Canadian was not only profoundly affected himself by entering strenuously into the life of the ancient university (he was secretary of the Union when H. H. Asquith was president), but in his turn was instrumental in bringing the possibilities of British Imperialism to the minds of some of the ablest among his contemporaries—his juniors by six or eight years. It is hardly too much to say that in his intercourse at Oxford in the early ’seventies with men of influence who were then undergraduates the imperialist movement in England substantially began. On returning to Canada he became principal of the chief New Brunswick school at Fredericton (where in 1878 he married), and for fifteen years he did excellent work in this capacity. But in 1889 he was again drawn more directly into the imperialist cause. The federation movement had gone ahead in the meanwhile, and Parkin had always been associated with it; and now he became a missionary speaker for the Imperial Federation League, travelling for several years about the empire for that purpose. He also became Canadian correspondent of The Times, and in that capacity helped to make Canada better known in the mother country. In 1894 he was given the honorary degree of LL.D. by Oxford. In 1895 he returned to scholastic work as principal of Upper Canada College, Toronto, and retained this post till 1902; but he continued in the meanwhile to support the imperialist movement by voice and pen. When in 1902 an organizer was required for the Rhodes Scholarship Trust (see Rhodes, Cecil), in order to create the machinery for working it in the countries to which it applied, he accepted the appointment; and his devotion to this task was largely responsible for the success with which Rhodes’s idea was carried out at Oxford. His publications include Reorganization of the British Empire (1882), Imperial Federation (1892), Round the Empire (1892), Life of Edward Thring (1897), Life of Sir John Macdonald (1907).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Menangkabos

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​MENANGKABOS, the most civilized of all the true Malays of Sumatra, inhabiting the mountains above Padang. Their district is regarded as the cradle of the Malay race, and thence began, about 1160, those migrations which ended in the true Malays becoming the dominant race throughout the peninsula and the Malay Archipelago. The Menangkabos are said to be the original conquerors of the island, and the real form of the word is Menang-Karbau (“victory of the buffalo”), in reference to a local legend of a fight between a Sumatran and Javanese buffalo, ending in victory for the former. Though converts to Islam, the ancient confederate village communes and the matriarchal system still exist. The people are divided into clans, the chiefs together forming the district council. Early in the 19th century a religious sect was founded among the Manangkabos, known as “Padris” from its zealous proselytism, or Orang puti (white men) from the converts being dressed in white. The tendency was towards asceticism, the chief tenet being the prohibition of opium, the use of which was made a capital offence. The sect brought a large portion of the interior of Sumatra under its rule, but the neighbouring tribes asked the Dutch to protect them, and this led to the Netherlands government acquiring the Menangkabo territory.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Menai Straits

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​MENAI STRAITS, a channel of the Irish Sea, separating Anglesea from Carnarvonshire, N. Wales, extending 14 m. from Beaumaris to Abermenai, and varying in breadth from 200 yds. to 2 m. It is famous for the suspension and tubular bridges which cross it. The suspension bridge carries the Holyhead road from Bangor. Designs were prepared by T. Telford. It was begun in 1819; the first chain carried over in April 1825; the last in July of the same year, and the bridge opened to the public the 30th of January 1826. The cost was £120,000. The length of the chains (from rock-fastenings) is 1715 ft., and between the piers 590 ft.; the length of the roadway between the piers is 550 ft. and the total roadway length 1000 ft.; the height of the roadway from the spring tide high-water level is 100 ft.; the breadth of the roadway including two carriage-ways and a footpath is 30 ft. The sixteen suspending chains are carried 60 ft. through rock. Their sustaining power has been calculated at 2016 tons, while the whole weight of the suspended part of the bridge is only 489 tons. During a gale a slight oscillation is noticeable on the bridge itself and from the shore. The tubular bridge carries the London & North Western railway. Here the channel is about 1100 ft. wide, and divided in the middle by the Britannia Rock, bare at low water. The tide generally rises 20 ft., with great velocity. The principal measurements are: each abutment 176 ft.; from abutment to side tower, 230 ft.; from side tower to central tower, 460 ft.; breadth of each side tower at road-level, 32 ft.; breadth of centre tower, 45 ft. 5 in. The total length of the roadway is 1841 ft. 5 in. The Britannia tower measures at its base 62 by 521/2 ft.; with a total height of 230 ft. There are 101 ft. between the sea at high tide and the bridge roadway bottom. The limestone used is from Penmon, 4 m. from Beaumaris. Four stone lions couchant guard the approaches to the bridge. The first tube of the tubular bridge was deposited in its place on the 9th of November 1849, the last on the 13th of September 1850. The total cost was £621,865. The engineer of the tubular bridge was Robert Stephenson, who was assisted by Sir William Fairbairn and Eaton Hodgkinson.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Menander (rhetorician)

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​MENANDER, of Laodicea on the Lycus, Greek rhetorician and commentator. Two incomplete treatises on epideictic (or show) speeches have been preserved under his name, but it is generally considered that they cannot be by the same author. Bursian attributes the first to Menander, whom he placed in the 4th century, and the second to an anonymous rhetorician of Alexandria Troas, who possibly lived in the time of Diocletian. Others, from the superscription of the Paris MS., assign the first to Genethlius of Petrae in Palestine. In view of the general tradition of antiquity, that both treatises were the work of Menander, it is possible that the author of the second was not identical with the Menander mentioned by Suïdas; since the name is of frequent occurrence in later Greek literature. The first treatise, entitled Διαίρεσις τῶν ἐπιδεικτικῶν, discusses the different kinds of epideictic speeches; the second, Περὶ ἐπιδεικτικῶν, has special titles for each chapter.
Text in L. Spengel’s Rhetores graeci, iii. 329–446, and in C. Bursian’s “Der Rhetor Menandros und seine Schriften” in Abhandl. der bayer. Akad. der Wissenschaften, xvi. (1882); see also W. Nitsche, Der Rhetor M. und die Scholien zu Demosthenes; J. E. Sandys, Hist. of Classical Scholarship (1906), i. 338; W. Christ, Gesch. der griechischen Litteratur (1898), § 550.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Menasha

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​MENASHA (an Indian word meaning “thorn” or “island”), a city of Winnebago county, Wisconsin, U.S.A., 88 m. N. of Milwaukee, and 14 m. N. of Oshkosh, attractively situated at the N. extremity of Lake Winnebago at its outlet into the Fox river. Pop. (1890), 4581; (1900), 5589 (1535 foreign-born); (1905, state census), 5960; (1910), 6081. Menasha is served by the Minneapolis, St Paul & Sault Ste Marie, the Chicago, Milwaukee & St Paul, and the Chicago & North-Western railways, and by an inter-urban electric railway system. Several bridges across the Fox River connect Menasha with Neenah, with which it really forms one community industrially. Doty Island, at the mouth of the river and divided about equally between the cities, is a picturesque and popular summer resort. ​Menasha had good water power and among its manufactures are paper and sulphite pulp, lumber, wooden-ware and cooperage products, woollen and knit goods, leather, boats and bricks. The first white man to visit the site of Menasha was probably Jean Nicolet, who seems to have come in the winter of 1634–1635 and to have found here villages of Fox and Winnebago Indians. Subsequently there were French and English trading posts here. The city was settled permanently in 1848, and was chartered in 1874.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Menam

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​MENAM, or Me Nam (literally the “mother water” or “main river”), a river of Siam, the chief highway of the interior, on whose yearly rise and fall depends the rice crop of Lower Siam. Rising in the Lao or Siamese Shan state of Nan, at a height of 1400 ft. upon the shoulders of the mountain mass of Doi Luang, it is first known as the Nam Ngob, after a village of that name. As the Nam Nan, still a mountain stream, it flows southward through the state so named between high forested ranges, and, notwithstanding the frequent rapids along its course, the natives use it in dug-outs for the transport of hill produce. From Utaradit, where it leaves the hills of the Lao country, it flows southward through the plain of Lower Siam, and is navigable for flat-bottomed native craft of considerable capacity. It is here known as the Nam, or Menam Pichai. Below Pichai the river flows through forest and swamp, the latter providing vast overflow basins for the yearly floods. Thousands of tons of fish are caught and cured here during the fall of the river after the rains. Below Pitsunalok the waters of the Menam Yom, the historic river of Siam, upon which two of its ancient capitals, Sawankalok and Sukotai, were situated, meander by more than one tortuous clayey channel to the main river, and combine to form the Nam Po. At Paknam Po the main western tributary comes in, the shallow Me Ping, the river of Raheng and Chieng Mai, bringing with it the waters of the Me Wang. As the chief duty-station for teak, which is floated in large quantities down all the upper branches of the river and as a place of transshipment for boats, Paknam Po is an important and growing town. From this point southwards the river winds by many channels through the richest and most densely populated portion of Siam. About Chainat the Tachin branches off, forming the main western branch of the Menam, and falling into the gulf at a point about 24 m. west of the bar of the main or Bangkok river. At Ayuthia, another of the ancient capitals of Siam, the Nam Sak flows in from the north-east, an important stream affording communication with the rich tobacco district of Pechabun, and draining the western slopes of the Korat escarpment.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Menander Protector

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​MENANDER PROTECTOR (Προτίκτορ, i.e. one of the imperial bodyguards), Byzantine historian, was born in Constantinople in the middle of the 6th century A.D. The little that is known of his life is contained in the account of himself quoted by Suïdas. He at first took up the study of law, but abandoned it for a life of pleasure. When his fortunes were low, the patronage accorded to literature by the emperor Maurice (582) encouraged him to try Writing history. He took as his model Agathias (q.v.), who like him had been a jurist, and his history begins at the point where Agathias leaves off. It embraces the period from the arrival of the Cotriguri Hunni in Thrace during the reign of Justinian in 558 down to the death of the emperor Tiberius in 582. Considerable fragments of the work are preserved in the excerpts of Constantine Porphyrogenitus and in Suïdas. Although the style is sometimes bombastic, he is considered trustworthy and is one of the most valuable authorities for the history of the 6th century, especially on geographical and ethnographical matters. He was an eye-witness of some of the events he describes. Like Agathias, he wrote epigrams, one of which, on a Persian magus, who became a convert to Christianity and died the death of a martyr, is preserved in the Greek anthology (Anth. Pal. i. 101).
The fragments will be found in C. W. Müller, Frag. hist. graec. iv. 200; J. P. Migne, Patrologia graeca, cxiii., and L. Dindorf, Historici graeci minores, ii.; see also C. Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (1897).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lodz

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​LODZ (Lódż; more correctly Lodzia), a town of Russian Poland, in the government of Piotrków, 82 m. by rail S.W. of Warsaw. It is situated on the Lodz plateau, which at the beginning of the 19th century was covered with impenetrable forests. Now it is the centre of a group of industrial towns—Zgerź, Le̮czyca, Pabianice, Konstantinov and Aleksandrov. Chiefly owing to a considerable immigration of German capitalists and workers, Lodz has grown with American-like rapidity. It consists principally of one main street, 7 m. long, and is a sort of Polish Manchester, manufacturing cottons, woollens and mixed stuffs, with chemicals, beer, machinery and silk. One of the very few educational institutions is a professional industrial school. The population, which was only 50,000 in 1872, reached 351,570 in 1900; the Poles numbering about 37%, Germans 40% and Jews 221/2%.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Loft

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​LOFT (connected with “lift,” i.e. raised in the air; O. Eng. lyft; cf. Ger. Luft; the French term is grenier and Ger. Boden), the term given in architecture to an upper room in the roof, sometimes called “cockloft”; when applied over stabling it is known as a hay-loft; the gallery over a chancel screen, carrying a cross, is called a rood-loft (see Rood). The term is also given to a gallery provided in the choir-aisle of a cathedral or church, and used as a watching-loft at night.