remarkable play to have appeared suddenly amidst the run of secu lar pieces. It seems to have been popular, and was several times reprinted before the Restoration. That the Renegado should have found favour is still more remarkable. In itself it is a powerfully constructed play, strong in character and incident. Massinger's leaning to Roman doctrine is supposed to be shown by his making one of his heroines-a converted Turk, a sultan's sister-experience complete spiritual transformation after receiving the rite of baptism. But there is a more suggestive and stranger fact than this. The hero of the piece, Francisco, is a Jesuit priest, treated with profound respect throughout, a man of noble unselfish aims, running all risks to save and gain souls, exercising the strongest moral influence for the wisest and most benevolent purposes. Francisco's influence pervades the play, and is crowned with triumph at the end. He sails back to Venice with a noble lady rescued from the infidel, her virtue protected by an amulet during her captivity, a renegade military hero restored to his country and the church, a noble Venetian rescued from spiritual and physical perils, the beautiful sister of the sultan converted to Christianity. That a London audience should have tolerated this glorification of a Jesuit within twenty years of the Gunpowder Plot is an extraordinary fact, of which the explanation is still to seek. In the Maid of Honour the heroine relieves a highly complicated situation at the end by taking the veil, giving a third of her property to a nunnery, a third for pious uses, and a third to an honest, faithful, but to her unattractive lover. For this she is held up as "to all posterity a fair example for noble maids to imitate." Only an audience of very pious Catholics could have sympathized with such a conclusion.

Such plays show that Massinger, if not a Roman Catholic, was at least not blinded by the popular hatred of them, but could dwell in rapt admiration on what was noble and lofty in the motives supplied by the Roman Church. The strange thing is that he found a manager to produce these plays, or an audience to tolerate them. It may be doubted whether Massinger was ever a popular dramatist. His poverty is not indeed conclusive on this point, for the prices paid for plays were so small that a dramatist could hardly make a livelihood by play writing, unless he was also an actor or a theatrical manager. But the best qualities of his plays appeal rather to thoughtful politicians, moralists, and students of character than to the simple feelings of the ordinary playgoer. Only one of them, A New Way to Pay Old Debts (printed 1633), has kept the stage, and that chiefly because the leading character, Sir Giles Overreach, a sort of commercial Richard IIL, a compound of "the lion and the fox," provides many opportunities for a great actor. Like all Massinger's plays, it is most ingenious and effective in construction, but in this as in others he has been more intent upon the elaboration of a plot and the exhibition of a ruling passion than upon winning the love and admiration of his audience for heroes and heroines. The other personages besides Sir Giles are either conventional comic figures, or dim, feebly outlined, uninteresting characters. The reformed prodigal and the two pairs of lovers who outwit the cunning diplomatist by simple means seem poor, joyless, bloodless phantoms when put side by side with the rich life of Shakespeare's youthful lovers and reckless scapegraces; they are mere foils to Overreach; their life is not displayed, it is only indicated in the dialogue. With the exception of this play, all Massinger's have been relegated to the study since his own time. The Fatal Dowry, (printed 1632), in which Massinger had the assistance of Field, was partially resuscitated by Rowe, being made the basis of the Fair Penitent. In Massinger's own judgment, the Roman Actor was "the most perfect birth of his Minerva." It is in effect a study of the tyrant Domitian, and of the results of despotic rule on the despot himself and his court; the intrigues and counter intrigues, the rise of sycophancy, the fall of honesty, the growth of the appetite for blood, the growth and final triumph of the spirit of revenge, are exhibited with great power. Among the dramatists of that great period, Massinger comes next to Shakespeare in the art of opening and developing a plot. The Bondman, the Duke of Milan, and the Great Duke of Florence are also

favourable specimens of Massinger's power. But what was said by one of his admirers in the dedication of the City Madam is perfectly true, that, "though he composed many plays, he wrote none amiss." The manners and the characters are always clearly conceived, although the dramatist's strength is put forth in the portrayal of some one ruling passion. The action always marches forward steadily, with as little as possible of irrelevant digression; so steadily in fact is the main purpose pursued as to produce a certain air of labour and constraint. The language is never mean, and never turgid; in impassioned situations it wants fire and directness. If the stage were ever deliberately employed as an historical school, frequented by audiences anxious to get a clear and vivid impression of important situations, going to the theatre not to be interested against their will but willing to be interested, the dramas of Massinger would furnish excellent models.

Several of Massinger's plays a longer extant. Eight of them were among those destroyed by Warburton's cook. The most recent edition of those remaining, nineteen in number, is Cunningham's (1870). Gifford edited Massinger with great care. (W. M.)

MASSORAH (D), better MASSORETH (D), a late Hebrew word meaning "tradition," is the technical term specially applied to the tradition by which Jewish scholars (Massorets, noen hy) sought to fix the correct writing and reading of the text of the Old Testament. An oral tradition on disputed points of this sort naturally existed from the early days of the Jewish schools, but the use of a written Massorah in notes on the margin of Bibles, at the end of Biblical codices or of the individual books contained in them, or in separate works appears to have followed the introduction of the vowel points, and to have been influenced by similar labours of Syrian scholars. See HEBREW LANGUAGE, vol. xi. p. 600

coast of the Red Sea, on a small coral island of the same MASSOWAH, or MESOWAH, a town on the Abyssinian The height name, in 15° 30′ N. lat. and 39° 30′ E long. of the island is from 20 to 25 feet above the sea, the length does not exceed mile, and the breadth is about mile. The western half is occupied by the town; in the eastern cisterns. Most of the dwelling-houses are mere straw half are Mohammedan burying-grounds and dismantled huts; the mosque, the Roman Catholic church, the Government buildings and custom-house, and the residences of the Water was formerly principal merchants are of stone. scarce, and had for the most part to be carried from the mainland; but in 1872 an ancient aqueduct from Mokullu was restored, and continued by an embankment to the town. Besides the original Ethiopians, who speak a Tigré dialect corrupted with Arabic, the population, estimated Hadramaut, Gallas and Somalis, and Hindus from Surat. at from 5000 to 6000, comprises Arabs from Yemen and The trade, which consists mainly in exporting hides, butter, Abyssinian coffee, and civet, and importing European and Indian cotton goods and silks, increased in value from about £65,000 per annum in 1865 to from £240,000 to £280,000 between 1879 and 1881.

The island of Massowah (locally Base) has probably been inhabited from a very early date. It was at Massowah (Matzua, as they called it) that the Portuguese landed in 1542 under Christovão da Gama. Captured by the Turks in 1557, the island has remained more or less strictly a Turkish possession ever since. A military colony of Bosnians settled at Arkiko was appointed, not only to defend it in case of attack from the inainland, but to keep it supplied with water in return for $1400 per month from the town's customs. For some time in the close of last century Massowah was held by the sherif of Mec and it afterwards passed under Mehemet Ali of Egypt. The Turks were reinstated about 1850, but in 1865 they handed the island back to Egypt for an annual tribute of 24 million piastres.

1860; Rassam, Brit. Mission to Abyssinia, 1869; Pennazzi in Nuova See Bruce's Travels, vol. iv. ;Heuglin in Petermann's Mittheilungen, Antologia, July 1880.

service, the hiring is considered as a general hiring, and in | point of law a hiring for a year." But "in the case of domestic and menial servants there is a well-known rule, founded solely on custom, that their contract of service may be determined at any time by giving a month's warning or paying a month's wages, but a domestic or other yearly servant, wrongfully quitting his master's service, forfeits all claim to wages for that part of the current year during which he has served, and cannot claim the sum to which his wages would have amounted had he kept his contract, merely deducting there from one month's wages. Domestic servants have a right by custom to leave their situations at any time on payment of a calendar month's wages in advance, just as a master may discharge them in a similar manner" (Manley Smith's Law of Master and Servant, chaps. ii. and iii.). The master's right to chastise a servant for dereliction of duty (which appears to be still recognized in some American cases) is no longer sustained in English law, unless perhaps in the case of servants under age, to whom the master stands in loco parentis.

The following are assigned by Manley Smith as in general sufficient grounds for discharging a servant :-(1) wilful disobedience of any lawful order; (2) gross moral misconduct; (3) habitual negligence; (4) incompetence or permanent disability caused by illness.

A master has a right of action against any person who deprives him of the services of his servant, by enticing him away, harbouring or detaining him after notice, confining or disabling him, or by seducing his female servant. Indeed the ordinary and only available action for seduction in English law is in form a claim by a parent for the loss of his daughter's services.

The death of either master or servant in general puts an end to the contract. A servant wrongfully discharged may either treat the contract as rescinded and sue for services

actually rendered, or he may bring a special action for damages for the breach. A master is bound to provide food (but apparently not medical attendance) for a servant living under his roof, and wilful breach of duty in that respect is a misdemeanour under 24 & 25 Vict. c. 100.

A servant has no right to demand "a character" from an employer, and if a character be given it will be deemed a privileged communication, so that the master will not be liable thereon to the servant unless it be false and malicious. A master by knowingly giving a false character of a servant to an intending employer may render himself liable-should the servant for example rob or injure his new master.

For penalties incurred by personating masters and giving false certificates of character, or by persons offering themselves as servants with false or forged certificates, see 32 Geo. III. c. 56.

Reference may be made to the article on LABOUR AND LABOUR LAWS for the cases in which special terms have been introduced into contracts of service by statute (e.g., Truck Act), and for the recent legislation on the subject generally, including the Employers' Liability Act, 1880.

The master's liability on the contracts of his servant depends on altogether different principles from those on which his liability for negligence has been justified. It is substantially a case of liability as principal for the acts of an agent. The main question in all cases is whether the alleged agent had authority to make a contract for his principal, and in the relation of master and servant there may be any variety of circumstances giving rise to that presumption. Here the rights of third persons have to be considered, and the master will be held liable to them wherever he has "by words, conduct, or demeanour held out his servant as a general agent, whether in all kinds of business or in transacting business of a particular kind," even if the servant should act contrary to express orders. For example, a horse-dealer sending his servant to market with a horse to sell will be liable on the servant's warranty, although he has been positively ordered not to warrant; whereas an owner sending a stranger to sell would not be liable on a warranty given contrary to express directions.

MASTIC, or MASTICH, a resinous exudation obtained from the lentisk, Pistacia Lentiscus, an evergreen shrub of the natural order Anacardiacea. The lentisk or mastic plant is

indigenous to the Mediterranean coast region from Syria to Spain, but grows also in Portugal, Morocco, and the Canaries. Although experiments have proved that excellent mastic might be obtained in other islands in the archipelago, the production of the drug has been, since the time of Dioscorides, almost exclusively confined to the island of Scio. The mastic districts of that island are for the most part flat and stony, with little hills and few streams The shrubs are about 6 feet high. The resin is contained in the bark and not in the wood, and in order to obtain it numerous vertical incisions are made, during June, July, and August, in the stem and chief branches. The resin speedily exudes and hardens into roundish or oval tears, which are collected, after about fifteen days, by women and children, in little baskets lined with white paper or cotton wool. The ground around the trees is kept hard and clean, and flat pieces of stone are often laid beneath them to prevent any droppings of resin from becoming contaminated with dirt. The collection is repeated three or four times between June and September, a fine tree being found to yield about 8 or 10 b of mastic during the season. Besides that obtained from the incisions, mastic of very fine quality spontaneously exudes from the small branches. The harvest is affected by showers of rain during the period of collection, and the trees are much injured by frost, which is, however, of rare occurrence in the districts where they grow.

Four qualities of mastic are recognized by the dealers in Scio. 1. Cake, consisting of large pieces, sold chiefly for use in the seraglios, being chewed by women of all ranks throughout the Turkish empire, for the purpose of imparting an agreeable odour to the breath. This quality is worth 120 to 130 piastres per oke (of 2.83 lb) or even inore.

2. Large tears, worth 90 to 100 piastres.

3. Small tears, valued at 75 to 80 piastres.

4. Mastic mixed with fragments of leaves and sand, chiefly con sumed in the manufacture of the Turkish liqueur, or mastic brandy, called raki, and other cordials.

The third sort, in small tears, is that which is chiefly exported to England, the first and second qualities being sent to Turkey, especially Constantinople, also to Trieste, Vienna, and Marseilles. These varieties are known to the dealers as κυλιστό, φλισκάρι, πῆττα, and φλούδα respectively.

Mastic still forms the principal revenue of Scio. In 1871, 28,000 Ib of picked and 42,000 lb of common were exported from that island, the former being worth 6s. 10d. and the latter 2s. 10d. per b. The average price in London varies from 2s. 6d. to 4s. 6d. per lb. During the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries mastic enjoyed a high reputation as a medicine, and formed an ingredient in a large num ber of medical compounds, but its use in medicine is now almost

obsolete.

Mastic occurs in English commerce in the form of roundish tears about the size of peas, some of them, however, being oblong or pear-shaped. They are transparent, with a glassy fracture, of a pale yellow or faint greenish tinge, which darkens slowly by age. When chewed they rapidly soften, by which character they are easily distinguished from Sandarac resin, which while bearing a strong resemblance to mastic occurs in tears of a more cylindrical shape. The mastic which has been imported of late years presents a bright glassy appearance from having been washed free from dust. Mastic is soluble in turpentine, chloroform, ether, acetone, and oil of cloves; but cold alcohol dissolves only 90 per cent. of it. The soluble portion is called Alpha resin (C20H3203), and possesses acid properties. The insoluble portion, Beta resin or Masticin, is somewhat less rich in oxygen, and is a translucent colourless tough substance insoluble in caustic alkali.

Pistacia Khinjuk, Stocks, and P. cabulica, St., trees growing throughout Sindh, Baluchistan, and Cabul, yield a kind of mastic which is met with in the Indian bazaars under the name of Mustagimarket is known as East Indian or Bombay mastic. In Algeria rúmi, i.e., Roman mastic. This when met with in the European P. atlantica, Desf., yields a solid resin, which is collected and used by the Arabs as a masticatory. Cape mastic, used by the colonists, but not exported to England, is the produce of Euryops multifidus, posite order growing abundantly in the Clanwilliam district. the resin bush, or harpuis bosch, of the Boers,-a plant of the com

The

Dammar resin is sometimes sold under the name of mastic. West Indian mastic tree is the Bursera gummifera, and the Peruvian mastic is Schinus Molle; but neither of these furnishes commercial resins.

MASTODON (from parrós, "nipple," and dous, "tooth"), a name, suggested by the conical or papillary form of the projections on the molar teeth of some of the species, given by Cuvier to a genus of extinct elephant-like animals. Their position in the suborder Proboscidea of the great order Ungulata has been indicated in the article MAMMALIA (p. 425 of the present volume).

In size, general form, and principal osteological characters the Mastodons resembled the Elephants. It is by the teeth alone that the two groups are to be distinguished, and, as shown in the article just referred to, so numerous are the modifications of these organs in each, and so insensibly do they pass by a series of gradations into one another, that the distinction between the two is an arbitrary and artificial one, though convenient and even necessary for descriptive purposes.

As in other Proboscideans, the teeth of Mastodons consist only of incisors and molars. The incisors or tusks are never more than a single pair in each jaw. In the upper jaw they are always present and of large size, but apparently never so much curved as in some species of Elephant, and they often have longitudinal bands of enamel, more or less spirally disposed upon their surface, which are not met

with in Elephants. Lower incisors, never found in true Elephants, are present throughout life in some species of Mastodon, which have the symphysis of the lower jaw greatly elongated to support them (as in M. angustidens, M. pentelici, and M. longirostris (see fig. 1, C). In the common American species (M. ohioticus, Blumenbach) there were two tusks in the lower jaw in the young of both sexes; these were soon shed in the female, but one of them was retained in the male. In other species no inferior tusks have been found, at all events in adult life (see figure of M. turicensis).

The molar teeth are six in number on each side, increas ing in size from before backwards, and, as in the Elephants, with a horizontal succession, the anterior teeth being lost before the full development of the posterior teeth, which gradually move forward, taking the place of those that have been destroyed by wear. This process is, however, not so complete as in the true Elephants, and as many as three teeth may be in place in each jaw at one time. There is, moreover, in many species a true vertical succession, affecting either the third, or the third and second, or (in one American species, M. productus) the first, second, and third of the six molariform teeth.

These three

FIG. 1.-Mastodon turicensis (Pliocene). are therefore reckoned as milk molars, and their successors as premolars, while the last three, which are never changed, correspond to the true molars of those animals in which the typical dentition is fully developed. The study of the mode of succession of the teeth in the different species of Mastodons is particularly interesting, as it exhibits so many stages of the process by which the very anomalous dentition of the modern Elephants may have been derived by gradual modification from the typical heterodont and diphyodont dentition of the ordinary Mammal. It also shows that the anterior molars of Elephants do not correspond to the premolars of other Ungulates, but to the milk' molars, the early loss of which in consequence of the peculiar process of horizontal forward-moving succession does not require, or allow time for, their replacement by premolars. It must be noted, however, that, in the Mastodon in some respects the least specialized in tooth-structure, the M. ohioticus of North America, no vertical succession of the molars has yet been observed, although vast numbers of specimens have been examined.

The Mastodons have, generally speaking, fewer ridges on their molar teeth than the Elephants; the ridges are also

Certain of the molar teeth of the middle of the series in both Elephants and Mastodons have the same number of principal ridges, and those in front of them have fewer and those belund a greater number. These teeth were distinguished as "intermediate" molars by Dr Falconer, to whose extensive and conscientious researches we owe much of our knowledge of the structure of this group of animals. In the restricted genus Elephas there are only two, the last milk molar and the first true molar (or the third and fourth of the whole series), which are alike in the number of ridges; whereas in the Mastodons there are three such teeth, the last milk molar and the first and second true molars (or the third, fourth, and fifth of the whole series) In the Elephants the number of ridges on the intermediate molars always exceeds five, but in the Mastodons it is nearly always three or four, and the tooth in front has usually one fewer and that behind one more, so that the ridge formula (ie., a formula expressing the number of ridges on each of the six molar teeth) of most Mastodons can be reduced either to 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4 or 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5. The former characterizes the section called Trilophodon, and the latter that called Tetralophodon by Dr Falconer. These divisions are very useful, as under one or the other all the present known species of Mastodon can be ranged, but observations upon a larger number of individuals have shown that the number of ridges upon the teeth is by no means so constant as implied by the mathematical formulæ given above. Their exact enumeration is even difficult in many cases, as talons " or small accessory ridges at the hinder end of the teeth occur in various stages of development, until they take on the character of true ridges. Transitional conditions have also been shown, at least in some of the teeth, between the trilophodont and the tetralophodont forms, and again between the latter and what has been called a "pentalophodont" type, which leads on towards the condition of dental structure characteristic of the true Elephants.

66

The range of the genus Mastodon in time was from the middle of the Miocene period to the end of the Pliocene in the Old World, when they became extinct; but in America several speciesespecially the best-known, owing to the abundance of its remains, which has been variously called M. ohioticus, M. americanus, and M. giganteus survived quite to a late Pleistocene period.

The range in space will be best indicated by the following list of the generally recognized species. 1. Trilophodont series-M. angustidens, borsoni, pentelici, pyrenaicus, tapiroides (or turicensis), virgatidens, from Europe; M. falconeri and pandionis, from India; M. ohioticus, obscurus, and productus, North America; and M.andium and humboldtii, South America. 2. Tetralophodont series-M. arvernensis, M. dissimilis and longirostris, from Europe; M. latidens, sivalensis, and peramensis, from India; M. mirificus, from North America. The only two of which remains have been found in Great Britain are M. arvernensis and M. borsoni, both from the

crags of Norfolk and Suffolk.

The range of the genus was thus very extensive, and it has even been supposed to reach to Australia, where no Ungulate mammal has ever been proved to exist. This supposition until very recently has been based upon the evidence of a single molar tooth of an animal undoubtedly belonging to Mastodon, and alleged to have been brought from near Boree Creek, an affluent of the Lachlan river in the Ashburnham district, New South Wales, by the late Count Strzelecki, and described by Professor Owen in 1844 under the name of M. australis. Its identity with the South American M. andium has, however, been shown by Dr Falconer, who has thrown grave doubts upon the locality assigned to the specimen. A fragment of a tusk, of the Australian origin of which there is less question, and which presents the characteristic structure only known at present in Elephants and Mastodons, has been lately described by Professor Owen (Proc. Roy. Soc., March 30, 1882). It was found in a drift-deposit of a ravine in a district of Darling Downs, 60 miles to the eastward of Moreton Bay, Queensland Unfortunately no other portions of the remains of the animal to which it belonged have been discovered.

Bibliography.-Cuvier, Ossemens Fossiles; Falconer and Cautley, Fauna Antiqua Sivalensis, 1846-47; H. Falconer, Paleontological Memoirs, edited by C. Murchison, 1868; Warren, Description of the Skeleton of Mastodon giganteus, 1852; Owen, British Fossil Mammals; Lartet, "Sur la dentition des ProbosciA. Gaudry, Animaux Fossiles et Géologie de l'Attique, 1862-67; J. Leidy, Contributions to Extinct Vertebrate Fauna of the Western Territories, vol. 1., 1873; R. Lydekker, Siwalik and Narbada Proboscidea," in Memoirs of the Geological Survey of India, 1880. (W. H. F.)

In 943-44 he made a

MAS'UDY. Abú'l-Hasan Ali ibn Hosein ibn 'Ali el-Mas'udy, was born at Baghdad towards the close of Great part of his life was the 9th Christian century. spent in travel; in 912-13 A.D. he was at Múltán in the Punjab, and also visited Manşúra. Three years later he was at Başra and met Abu Zeid, the geographer whose remarks on the extreme East are comprised in Reinaud's Relation des Voyages (Paris, 1845). His writings and those of Mas'údy are indebted each to the other. In the interval it would seem our traveller had gained that personal acquaintance with Fars and Susiana, and that knowledge of the books of the Persians, of which he speaks in his writings. Once more turning eastward he was at Cambay in 915-16, and soon after at Saimúr. Hence he pushed on to Ceylon and sailed to Madagascar, returning to 'Omán in 916-17. In the introduction to the Meadows he seems also to say that he had journeyed as far as China. A northern journey carried Mas'údy as far as the Caspian Sea. In 926 he was at Palestine, where his curiosity, not limited by religious prejudice, led him to visit the Christian church and describe its relics. careful study of the ruins of Antioch, and subsequently proceeded to Başra. In the same year he composed the Meadows of Gold. The last ten years of his life were passed in Syria and Egypt. His last work, The Indicator and Monitor, was written 345 A. H., and his death took place in Egypt the same year (956-57 A.D.). The vast journeys of Mas'údy did not pass beyond the lines of commercial enterprise among the Moslems of those days, when Irák was not unjustly held to be the centre of the world, and the arms, the trade, and the religion of Islám penetrated to the remotest parts of Asia and Africa. But Mas'udy did not travel for gain. His object was to study with his own eyes the peculiarities of every land, and to collect whatever was of interest for archæology, history, and manners. Singularly free from bigotry-he was himself a Mo'tazilite, one of the heretical sect, as they were reckoned, who held the doctrine of man's free willhe was ready to derive information even from the writings of infidel Persians or of a Christian bishop.3 In the range of his observations and the naive uncritical honesty with which he records them he has naturelly suggested comparison with Herodotus, and so competent a judge as Ibn Khaldún gives him the title of imám of Eastern historians, an epithet precisely parallel to that borne by Herodotus among the historians of the West. The parallel, however, must be taken with great deductions. Of the Meadows, the work by which Mas'údy is chiefly known, by far the greater part is an historical compilation, enlivened indeed in some parts by personal recollection of places and the like, but mainly drawn from a vast mass of earlier books which are used in the common paste-and-scissors fashion of Eastern history. Even in the earlier cosmographical chapters the author's vast and miscellaneous reading, which included the Arabic translations of Ptolemy and other Greek writers, is mingled with his original observa

1 The surname is derived from an ancestor Mas'úd, a Meccan, whose son 'Abdalla accompanied Mohammed on his flight to Medina, and is often mentioned in the history of the prophet. Details as to the family are given by Reiske, Ann. Mos., vol. i., note 208.

2 See De Sacy, Chrest., 1st ed., ii. 490.

3 In the Meadows, iii. 69, he tells us that at Fostát (Old Cairo), in 336 A.H., there fell into his hands a chronicle (now lost) by Godmer, bishop of Gironne, which he uses for his narrative.

Of these the first chapter gives an interesting catalogue.