when the Dutch took the islands from them. The new masters kept possession till 1796, since which time the islands have been twice conquered by the English. By the peace of Paris, they were again restored to the Dutch. These occupy only Amboyna and Banda, but the chiefs of the other islands are more or less tributary to them. After the Dutch had been about twenty-six years in possession of the Moluccas, and the monopoly of the spices, they found it advantageous to transplant the spice-trees to the southerly group of islands, Amboyna and Banda. În 1638, an agreement was made with the king of Ternate, who was subject to them, and the petty rulers of the other islands, by which it was stipulated that all the spice-trees on the islands belonging to them should be rooted up, and that no more should be planted; in consideration of which an annual sum was paid to the king and the nobility of Ternate, and the other princes. To insure the fulfilment of this agreement, the Dutch erected three strong fortresses in Ternate, and about nine others in the other islands. The spice-trees, which again sprung up in these islands, were destroyed every year, as far as the woods and wild beasts permitted them to be reached; and, in order to see that this was properly executed, and to prevent the smuggling of spices, the governor of Amboyna went through his government every year, with a squadron of 20-50 ships. But, notwithstanding these precautions, the spicetrees, the natural growth of the islands, continually sprung up where the power of the Dutch could not penetrate, and the English carried on considerable smuggling business with the oppressed natives. In other respects, the Moluccas are sparingly endowed by nature. They are wanting in water, and are obliged to procure rice and other necessaries of life from Celebes. The want of water is, in some measure, supplied by cocoa-trees, which grow in abundance, and the fruit of which contains a nourishing drink.

MOLWITZ; a village in the circle of Breslau, near Brieg, celebrated for the battle between the Prussians and Austrians, April 10, 1741, which was terminated in favor of the former by the exertions of Schwerin. Frederic II (the Great) was present. He acknowledged that he did not then understand the art of war, and had committed important mistakes, but observed, at the same time, that the battle had been a good school for him and his soldiers.

MOLYBDENUM; a metal which has not

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yet been reduced in masses of any considerable magnitude, but has been obtained only in small, separate globules, of a blackish, brilliant color. It is extremely infusible. By heat, it is converted into a white oxide, which rises in brilliant, needleformed flowers. Nitric acid readily oxidizes and acidifies the metal; nitre detonates with it, and the remaining alkali combines with its oxide. Molybdenum unites with several of the metals, and forms with them brittle compounds. The specific gravity of the pure metal is 8.611: it has three degrees of oxidation, forming two oxides and one acid. The molybdic acid is composed of 48 parts of molybdenum and 24 of oxygen; it has a sharp, metallic taste, reddens litmus paper, and forms salts with alkaline bases; specific gravity, 3.4. It is very sparingly soluble in water; but the molybdates of potash, soda and ammonia, dissolve in that fluid, and the molybdic acid is precipitated from the solutions by any of the strong acids. The protoxide of molybdenum is black, and consists of one equivalent of oxygen and one equivalent of molybdenum. The deutoxide is brown, and contains twice as much oxygen as the protoxide. Berzelius has formed three chlorides of this metal, the composition of which is analogous to the compounds of this metal with oxygen. The native sulphuret of molybdenum is composed of 48 parts, or one equivalent of molybdenum, and 32 parts, or two equivalents of sulphur. It occurs in most primitive countries, disseminated in granite, or gneiss rocks, in thin plates of a foliated structure, soft, flexible, slightly soiling the fingers, and greasy to the feeling; color pure lead-gray; lustre metallic; specific gravity 4.591. It does not melt before the blow-pipe, but emits sulphureous fumes. It is no where found in large quantities, although known to exist in numerous places. Its principal European localities are Altenberg, in Saxony, and Schlaggenwald and Zinnwald, in Bobemia. In the U. States the largest and best pieces have been found in the gneiss quarries of Haddam, Connecticut, where plates half an inch thick, and four inches over, have been met with. At this place, it often exhibits the low six-sided prism. It also occurs at Brunswick, in Maine, in the same rock, and at Chesterfield, Massachusetts, in granite.

MOLYN, Peter. (See Tempesta.)

MOLYNEUX, William; a mathematician and astronomer, born at Dublin, in 1656, whence he removed to the Inner Temple, London, in 1675. Being possessed of a

competent fortune, he never engaged in the law as a profession, but, returning to Ireland in 1678, occupied himself with researches into various departments of natural philosophy, particularly astronomy. Having been appointed joint-surveyor of public works and chief engineer, he had a commission to examine the principal fortresses in Flanders. After his return, in 1686, he published his Sciothericum Telescopicum, containing an account of a telescope-dial of his invention. In 1689, he removed to London, on account of the political commotions of Ireland, and, in 1692, published a treatise on dioptrics, under the title of Dioptrica Nova (4to.). Going back to his native country, he was chosen member of parliament for Dublin, in 1692; and, in 1695, he was elected representative of the university. He died October 11, 1698. Mr. Molyneux was a fellow of the Royal Society, and a contributor to the Philosophical Transactions. His son, Samuel Molyneux, who was secretary to George II, when prince of Wales, was also a cultivator of the mathematical sciences, and made some improvement in the construction of telescopes, of which doctor Robert Smith published an account, in his treatise on optics.

MOLZA, Francesco Maria, an Italian poet, was born at Modena, in 1489, of a distinguished family, lived principally in Rome, on terms of friendly intercourse with the most eminent scholars, and died 1544. His talents would have opened to him a brilliant career, had not his excesses obstructed his progress. Among his poems, the stanzas on the portrait of Giulia Gonzaga, and the Ninfa Tiberina, a poetical picture in ottave rime, are the most highly esteemed. His Capitolo in Lode dei Fichi is full of indelicacies; Annibal Caro wrote a commentary upon it. Molza is favorably known as a Latin poet. A complete collection of his works first appeared in 1747, with an account of his life, by the abbate Serassi.

MOMENT; an indefinite small portion of time, having the same relation to duration as a point has to a line.

MOMENTUM, in mechanics, is the same with impetus, or quantity of motion, and is generally estimated by the product of the velocity and mass of the body. This is a subject, however, which has led to various controversies between philosophers, some estimating it by the mass into the velocity, as stated above, while others maintain that it varies as the mass into the square of the velocity; but this difference seems to have arisen rather from a mis

conception of the term than from any other cause, those who maintain the former doctrine understanding momentum to signify the momentary impact, and the latter as the sum of all the impulses, till the motion of the body is destroyed.

MOMIERS; a Protestant sect, of recent origin, in Geneva and some other parts of Switzerland, founded by Empeytaz, a student of theology and follower of the baroness von Krüdener (q. v.), about 1813. He held conventicles for the edification of those who were not satisfied with the ordinary religious exercises; and, when he had completed his course of theology, the consistory of Geneva required of him a promise to discontinue these private meetings. This Empeytaz refused, and published a work on the divinity of Christ, in which he charged the clergy of Geneva with denying the divinity of Christ. The clergy of Geneva then required of all young candidates a promise to abstain from treating of the nature of Christ, original sin, grace and predestination, in the pulpit. This excited some discontents, and Malan, a clergyman of Geneva, at the head of the dissatisfied, and in connexion with Mr. Drummond, an Englishman, with Empeytaz and others, formed a new church, or Orthodox church, and attacked their adversaries in pamphlets, with charges of Arianism, Socinianism, deism, and atheism. The Genevese clergy kept silence; and, since 1823, Malan has erected a house of worship, and administers the Lord's supper. His doctrines are of a mystical character. The name Momiers was at first given to the sect by way of contempt (from momerie, mummery), but has since been used as their appropriate designation. (See Hist. véritable des Momiers (Paris, 1824); Geschichte der sogen. Momiers (Basil, 1825.)

MOMUS; the god of satire and pleasantry among the ancients. He was son of Nox, according to Hesiod. He blamed Vulcan, because, in the human form, which he had made of clay, he had not placed a window in the breast, by which whatever was done or thought there might be easily brought to light. He censured the house which Minerva had made, because the goddess had not made it movable, by which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided. In the bull which Neptune had produced, he observed that his blows might have been surer if his eyes had been placed nearer the horns. Venus herself was exposed to his satire; and when the sneering god could find no fault in the body of the goddess, he observed that

the noise of her feet was too loud for the goddess of beauty. These illiberal reflections upon the gods were the cause that Momus was driven from heaven. He is generally represented raising a mask from his face, and holding a small figure in his

hand.

MONA; the ancient name of the island of Anglesea. (q. v.) The marquis of Anglesea (q. v.) was created duke of Mona in 1831.

MONACO; an Italian principality, lying between the Sardinian province Nizza (Nice) and the Mediterranean, with a population of 7000 inhabitants, and a superficial area of 535 square miles. In the 10th century, the emperor Otho I conferred it on a prince of the house of Grimaldi, which became extinct, in the male line, in 1731. In 1641, the reigning prince, having put his territories under the protection of France, was created duke of Valentinois. The daughter of the last prince having married Francis de Matignon (1716), the princely and ducal titles passed to the French family of Matignon. In 1793, Monaco was incorporated with France, but, in 1814, was restored to its princes, and placed under the protection of Sardinia. The capital, Monaco (Monceci Arx), with 1200 inhabitants, is a fortified place, situated on the sea, in the midst of olive, orange and lemon-groves. Lat. 43° 43 N.; lon. 7° 22′ E.

MONADNOCK MOUNTAIN, usually called the Grand Monadnock, is situated in the towns of Jaffrey and Dublin, Cheshire county, New Hampshire. It is about 22 miles east of Connecticut river. The mountain is about five miles long, from north to south, and three miles broad, and its height is 3450 feet above the level of the sea. It affords a very extensive pros

pect.

MONADS. (See Leibnitz, vol. vi, page 492.)

MONALDESCHI. (See Christina, queen of Sweden.)

MONARCHY. (See Political Institutions.) MONASTERY. Monastic seclusion is found, even in the times previous to the Christian era. The inclination to a solitary life arose with the corruptions of society. The better disposed persons, who felt themselves unequal to resist these corruptions, sought, in solitude, a protection against temptation. That indisposition to action, and that fondness for undisturbed contemplation, which is still remarked among the Hindoos, existed among the earliest inhabitants of Southern Asia, and gave rise to the most ancient

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Oriental philosophy, whose tendency to a contemplative life, aspiring to shake off the fetters of the body and sense, gave to retirement from the world the charm of a peculiar sanctity. To this was added the opinion, that transgressions may be best atoned for by abstinence from all the pleasures of life, and from all society of men, and thus, according to an ancient notion, popular throughout the East, the Deity might be appeased. Anachorites, hermits, recluses and monks are therefore found, in the ante-Christian times of Asiatic antiquity (see Gymnosophists); and, at the present time, the countries which profess the religions of Brama, Fo, Lama and Mohammed, are full of fakirs and santons, tanirs, or songesses, talapoins, bonzes and dervises, whose fanatical and absurd penances are rather arts of deception than fruits of piety. The ancient Hebrew people, also, had such devotees, as its Nazarites, to whom Moses gave peculiar privileges; and the life of the Essenes and Therapeutes, who flourished in Palestine and Egypt about the times of Jesus, was entirely formed on the idea of separation from the world, and of monastic discipline and piety, which we afterwards see prevalent in the better period of Christian monasticism. Among the Christians, whose religion strictly distinguishes the corporeal and the spiritual, and, moreover, since the third century, has been impregnated with Gnostic and New Platonic ideas of incorporeality and elevation above the world of sense (see Saints), solitary life began to be esteemed, as early as the fourth century. (See Chrysostom.) Monasteries were first founded in the deserts of Upper Egypt, where Antony, commonly called the Great, collected a number of hermits, about the year 305, who, for the sake of enjoying the benefits of retirement from the world in each other's society, built their huts near each other, and performed their devotional exercises in common, as the monks of Palestine did at a later period, and as those of Abyssinia do at the present day. More close than this connexion, which was called Laura (see Anachoret), was that founded by his disciple Pachomius, in the middle of the fourth century He built a number of houses, at a small distance from each other, upon the island of Tabenna, in the Nile, each of which was occupied by three or four monks (monachi) in cells, who were all under the superintendence of a prior. These priories formed together the cœnobium, or monastery, which was under the care

of a superior, the abbot (from abbas, father), higumen or mandrite, and were obliged to submit to uniform rules of life. At the death of Pachomius, in 348, the monastic colony, at Taberna, amounted to 50,000 persons. The districts in Palestine, Syria and Armenia were filled with Coenobites, and institutions of the same kind arose in and about the towns, in which a strict confinement within the walls of the establishment, was to preserve the inmates from the temptations of the world around them, and to supply the place of the solitude of deserts. Hence the name of cloisters, from claustra, enclosures. The monastic life, at first freely chosen by men alone, and therefore restrained by such laws only as each one thought fit to impose upon himself, for promoting the ends of solitary life, was subjected, by St. Basil, to stricter rules, about the middle of the fourth century, when female monasteries, or convents of nuns (a word said, in Coptic, to signify pure), were instituted, and persons of all ages and stations entered the establishments. By means of these rules, the same discipline was kept up in all the monasteries through the East. Still there was not, in the fourth or fifth centuries, any thing like regular monastic vows, or public profession; except that the entrance into a monastery was regarded as a tacit devotion of one's self to a life of purity and abstinence from worldly pleasures, and a promise of obedience to the rules and restrictions of the institution. These vows were introduced in the sixth century, by St. Benedict. It may be chiefly ascribed to his strict and judicious regulations, first established in a monastery founded by him at Monte Casino, near Naples, in 529, and afterwards introduced into all the monasteries of the West, that these houses now became the dwellings of piety, industry and temperance, and the refuge of learning, driven to them for shelter from the troubles of the times. Missionaries were sent out from them; deserts and solitudes were made habitable by industrious monks; and, in promoting the progress of agriculture and civilizing the German and Sclavonian nations, they certainly rendered great services to the world, from the sixth century to the ninth. But it must be admitted that these institutions, so useful in the dark ages of barbarism, changed their character, to a great degree, as their wealth and influence increased. Idleness and luxury crept within their walls, together with all the vices of the world, and their decay became inevitable, when,

by a custom first introduced by the Frankish kings, and afterwards imitated by other princes, of bestowing monasteries upon the nobility for the sake of their income, they came under the care of lay abbots or superiors, who, thinking only of the enjoyment of the revenue which they yielded, did nothing to maintain discipline among the monks and nuns, daily becoming more irregular, and when they were robbed and oppressed, or left wholly to their own government (in consequence of the privileges and exemptions they had obtained) by the bishops, who were originally their overseers, but had now lost their fondness for a monastic life. A few only, by means of the convent schools (founded by Charlemagne, for the education of the clergy), as, for instance, those at Tours, Lyons, Cologne, Treves, Fulda, Osnabrück, Paderborn, Würzburg, &c. maintained their character for usefulness and respectability till the ninth and tenth centuries. The monastery at Clugny, in Burgundy, first led the way to the reform, so generally acknowledged to be necessary. This was founded in the year 910, and was governed by the rules of St. Benedict, with additional regulations of a still more rigid character. A considerable number of monasteries in France, Spain, Italy and Germany, were reformed on this model, while others gave to the Benedictine rules a new form, and founded, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, several orders with affiliated monasteries, which, as branches of the old Benedictine order, composed so many monastic communities, closely united by a proud and jealous spirit of confederation. With the reputation of renewed sanctity, the monasteries acquired new influence and new possessions. Many of them ("exempt monasteries") released themselves from all superintending authority, except that of the pope himself, and acquired great wealth in the time of the crusades, when those who adventured upon these expeditions left them their estates in trust till their return, or even the reversion of them in case of their death abroad. The privilege of inviolability, which had been granted, by common consent, to all monastic establishments, during the feuds of the middle ages, had induced many, who could find no better security for their property, in those days of rapine and violence, to place it under their protection. In this manner it happened that, as the zeal for reformation abated, and their influence was confirmed, new abuses sprung up in these establishments; and, as the authority of

their spiritual and temporal lords was lessened by numerous exemptions, and was of little avail, when opposed by the combination of powerful religious orders, who had acquired great strength in all the countries of Europe, from the protection of the popes, the character of each monastery came, at last, to depend chiefly upon that of the abbot who was at its head. The number of monasteries was much diminished at the time of the reformation, when the rich estates of the establishments which were deserted by the monks and nuns, in Protestant states, were in part appropriated by the sovereign to his own use, and partly devoted to the founding and supporting of institutions for the purposes of education, or transferred to universities and academies, were bestowed as rewards upon deserving ecclesiastics (as was the case with the abbeys in Lower Saxony and Wurtemburg), or were employed for the support of noble ladies until they married, as in Hesse, Holstein, Mecklenburg, &c. (For the suppression of the monasteries in England, under Henry VIII, see Henry VIII, vol. vi., p. 255.) In Catholic countries, they retained their original constitution till the 18th century; but, from the influence of the spirit of the age, they sunk in the public estimation, and were obliged, as the papal power diminished, to submit to many restrictions, imposed upon them by Catholic princes, or to purchase immunity at a high price. The benefits which they had formerly conferred upon the world, as the preservers of literary treasures; as places of refuge for the poor and the persecuted; as institutions for the education of youth; as places of retirement for persons of distinction who had outlived their usefulness, or were weary of the world; as schools for the mild correction and improvement of erring members of the human family,-appeared unimportant in the eyes of politicians and philosophers, when compared with their injurious effect upon the increase of population by their encouragement of celibacy; upon the public welfare, by their incessant grasping at the estates of wealthy persons, who had committed their children to their care; upon industry, by the idleness of their inhabitants; and upon public morals, by the sins which were notoriously committed within their walls. In this light were monasteries regarded by the greater portion of enlightened men, when, in 1781, the houses of some orders were wholly abolished by Joseph II, and those which he suffered to remain were

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limited to a certain number of inmates, and cut off from all connexion with any foreign authority. In France, the abolition of all orders and monasteries was decreed, in 1790, which example was followed by all the states incorporated with France, as well as by all the other Catholic states upon the continent of Europe, in the nineteenth century under the protection of Napoleon, with the exception of Austria, Spain, Portugal, Naples, Poland and Russia. This measure seems to have been the result of financial calculations rather than the dictate of true humanity. In Prussia, provision was made for the monks who were dispossessed; and, after Joseph's example, the wealth obtained by secularizing the monasteries was appropriated to the support of churches and schools; but where the French system prevailed, these estates were thrown into the public treasury. Late events have much improved their condition in Italy; and Pius VII, in his concordate with France, Bavaria and Naples, made provision for the maintenance of those already existing, and the foundation of new ones in those countries. In Austria, many monasteries have been suffered to become extinct. Not a few of these institutions render themselves useful, by the instruction of youth, especially of the female sex, and by taking care of the sick. (For the monastic vows, see the next article; for further information, see Orders, religious, Abbot, Anachoret, &c.)

MONASTIC Vows are three in number; poverty, chastity and obedience. The vow of poverty prevents the monks from holding any property individually; monasteries, however, may hold corporate property; for the Roman Catholic church makes a distinction between the high, higher and highest degrees of poverty. In the first case, a monastery may possess portions of real estate, yet not more than enough for its support; as the Carmelites and Augustines. In the second, a monastery cannot hold any real estate, but only personal property; as books, dresses, supplies of food and drink, rents, &c.; as the Dominicans. The third permits neither the holding of real nor of personal property; as is the case with the Franciscans, and especially the Capuchins. The vow of chastity requires an entire abstinence from familiar intercourse with the other sex; and that of obedience, entire compliance with the rules of the order, and the commands of the superior.

MONBODDO, lord. (See Burnett, James.)