Encyclopædia Britannica Australia -

Encyclopedias since 1768

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Forbes ... Forest

Forbes: town, south central New South Wales, Australia, on the Lachlan River. Named after former New South Wales chief justice Sir Francis Forbes, it was proclaimed a town in 1861 during a gold rush and became a municipality in 1870. The ...
Forbes' disease: rare hereditary disease in which the the metabolic breakdown of glycogen to the simple sugar glucose is incomplete, allowing intermediate compounds to accumulate in the cells of the liver. Affected persons lack the enzyme amylo-1,6-glucosidase, one of several enzymes involved ...
Forbes, Duncan: Scottish statesman whose loyalty to the Hanoverian king George II of Great Britain contributed markedly to the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745-46.
Forbes, Edward: British naturalist, pioneer in the field of biogeography, who analyzed the distribution of plant and animal life of the British Isles as related to certain geological changes.
Forbes, George William: farmer and politician who served as prime minister of New Zealand during the depression years (1930-35).
Forbes, James David: Scottish physicist noted for his research on heat conduction and glaciers.
Forbes, Malcolm S.: American business leader, owner-publisher of Forbes magazine, and promoter of capitalism known for his opulent lifestyle and lively self-promotion.
Forbes, Steve: American publishing executive who was twice a candidate for the nomination of the Republican Party for president.
Forbes-Robertson, Sir Johnston: English actor who was considered the finest Hamlet of his time, noted for his elocution and ascetic features. (See .)
Forbidden City: imperial palace complex at the heart of Peking (Beijing), China. Commissioned in 1406 by the Yung-lo emperor of the Ming dynasty, it was first officially occupied by the court in 1420. It was so named because access to the area ...
forbidden lines: in astronomical spectroscopy, bright emission lines in the spectra of certain nebulae (H II regions), not observed in the laboratory spectra of the same gases, because on Earth the gases cannot be rarefied sufficiently. The term forbidden is misleading; a ...
Forbin, Claude de: French naval officer notable for his daring exploits in Louis XIV's wars. These he recorded in his lively but not always objective Memoires, first published in 1730.
Forbush effect: in astronomy, an occasional decrease in the intensity of cosmic rays as observed on Earth, attributed to magnetic effects produced by solar flares, which are disturbances on the Sun. The effect was discovered in 1937 by the American physicist Scott ...
Forcados River: river, a major navigable channel of the Niger Delta, southern Nigeria. It leaves the main course of the Niger River about 20 miles (32 km) downstream from Aboh and flows through zones of freshwater swamps, mangrove swamps, and coastal sand ...
force: in mechanics, any action that tends to maintain or alter the position of a body or to distort it. The concept of force is commonly explained in terms of Newton's three laws of motion set forth in his Principia Mathematica ...
Force Acts: in U.S. history, series of four acts passed by Republican Reconstruction supporters in the Congress between May 31, 1870, and March 1, 1875, to protect the constitutional rights guaranteed to blacks by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
Force, Juliana Rieser: American art administrator, the first director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, whose natural aesthetic sensitivity guided her strong influence on that institution's development.
force, line of: in physics, path followed by an electric charge free to move in an electric field or a mass free to move in a gravitational field, or generally any appropriate test particle in a given force field. More abstractly, lines of ...
forced labour: labour performed involuntarily and under duress, usually by relatively large groups of people. Forced labour differs from slavery in that it involves not the ownership of one person by another but rather merely the forced exploitation of that person's labour.
Forche, Carolyn: American poet whose concern for human rights is reflected in her writing, especially in the collection The Country Between Us (1981), which examines events she witnessed in El Salvador.
Forchheimer, Philipp: Austrian hydraulic engineer, one of the most significant contributors to the study of groundwater hydrology during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He showed that many of the standard techniques of mathematical physics could be applied to problems of ...
Forckenbeck, Maximilian Franz August von: prominent leader of the 19th-century German National Liberal Party.
Ford Foundation: American philanthropic foundation, established in 1936 with gifts and bequests from Henry Ford and his son, Edsel. At the beginning of the 21st century, its assets exceeded $9 billion. Its chief concerns have been international affairs (particularly population control, the ...
Ford Motor Company: American automotive corporation founded in 1903 by Henry Ford and 11 associate investors. In 1919 the company was reincorporated, with Ford, his wife, Clara, and his son, Edsel, acquiring full ownership; they, their heirs, and the Ford Foundation (formed 1936) ...
Ford, Betty: American first lady (1974-77), the wife of Gerald Ford, 38th president of the United States, and founder of the Betty Ford Center, a facility dedicated to helping people recover from drug and alcohol dependence. She was noted for her strong ...
Ford, Edmund Brisco: British geneticist who made substantial contributions to the genetics of natural selection and defined and developed the science of ecological genetics.
Ford, Ford Madox: English novelist, editor, and critic, an international influence in early 20th-century literature.
Ford, Francis Xavier: martyred American Roman Catholic missionary and bishop of Mei-hsien in Kwangtung province, China.
Ford, Gerald R.: 38th president of the United States (1974-77), who, as 40th vice president, succeeded to the presidency on the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon under the process decreed by the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution and thereby became the nation's ...
Ford, Henry: American industrialist who revolutionized factory production with his assembly-line methods.
Ford, Henry, II: American industrialist and head of Ford Motor Company for 34 years (1945-79). He is generally credited with reviving the firm.
Ford, John: original name Sean Aloysius O'feeney, or O'fearna American motion-picture director who was Hollywood's best-known director of westerns. He developed a distinctive directorial style characterized by effective cutting, an emphasis on action, colourful characterization, a sentimentalized vision of the past, and ...
Ford, John: major English dramatist of the Caroline period, whose revenge tragedies are characterized by certain scenes of austere beauty, insight into human passions, and poetic diction of a high order.
Ford, Richard: Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer of novels and short stories.
Forde, Francis Michael: politician and, for a short time, prime minister of Australia (1945).
Fordham University: private, coeducational institution of higher learning in New York, New York, U.S. It is affiliated with the Jesuit order of the Roman Catholic church. The university consists of the original Rose Hill campus in the north Bronx, the Lincoln Center ...
fore-and-aft sail: one of the two basic types of sailing rig, the other being the square sail. The fore-and-aft sail, now usually triangular, is set completely aft of a mast or stay, parallel to the ship's keel, and takes the wind on ...
fore-edge painting: technique of painting the edges of the leaves, or folios, of a book, employed in the European Middle Ages. Manuscript books with gold-tooled bindings often had the edges of their pages gilded with burnished gold. They were also frequently goffered ...
foreclosure: legal proceeding by which a mortgagor's rights to a mortgaged property may be extinguished if the mortgagor (borrower) fails to live up to the obligations agreed to in the mortgage. The mortgagee (the lender) may then declare the entire debt ...
Foreign Affairs: journal of international relations, published in New York City six times a year, one of the most prestigious periodicals of its kind in the world. The organ of the Council on Foreign Relations, by which it was founded in 1922, ...
foreign aid: an international transfer of capital, goods, or services for the benefit of other nations and their citizens. Official foreign aid is offered in two major forms: (1) capital transfers, in cash or kind, either as grants or loans, and (2) ...
Foreign Legion: a military corps consisting originally of foreign volunteers in the pay of France but now including large numbers of Frenchmen. Its officers are nearly all from the French army, and a foreign-born legionnaire becomes eligible for French citizenship after serving ...
foreign service: the field force of a foreign office, comprising diplomatic and consular personnel engaged in representing the home government's interests abroad and providing the necessary information on which foreign policy is based. There is a marked similarity in the foreign service ...
Forel, Auguste-Henri: Swiss neuroanatomist, psychiatrist, and entomologist known for his investigations of brain structure.
Forel, Francois-Alphonse: Swiss physician, scientist, and founder of limnology, the study of lakes.
Foreman, George: American boxer who twice was the world heavyweight champion (1973-74, 1994-95). When Foreman regained the heavyweight title at age 45, he was the oldest world heavyweight champion.
forensic medicine: the science that deals with the application of medical knowledge to legal questions.
foreshadowing: the organization and presentation of events and scenes in a work of fiction or drama so that the reader or observer is prepared to some degree for what occurs later in the work. This can be part of the general ...
foreshortening: method of rendering a specific object or figure in a picture in depth. The artist records, in varying degrees, the distortion that is seen by the eye when an object or figure is viewed at a distance or at an ...
Forest: southwestern commune, one of 19 forming Greater Brussels, Brussels region, central Belgium. Its two wooded parks on the slopes of the Zenne valley were once part of the Foret de Soignes. Manufactures include vehicles, chemicals, paper, photographic materials, clocks, clothing, ...
Forest: county, northwestern Pennsylvania, U.S. It consists of a hilly region on the Allegheny Plateau drained by the Allegheny and Clarion rivers and Tionesta, Salmon, and Spring creeks. Forest county contains portions of Allegheny National Forest and Cook Forest State Park.