Encyclopædia Britannica Australia -

Encyclopedias since 1768

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Haridwar ... Harnett, William

Haridwar: city, northwestern Uttar Pradesh state, northern India. Haridwar lies along the Ganges River, at the boundary between the Indo-Gangetic Plain (south) and the Himalayan foothills (north). It is the site of the headworks of the Ganges Canal system. Haridwar is ...
Harihara: in Hinduism, a syncretic deity, combining the two major gods, Vishnu (Hari) and Siva (Hara). Images of Harihara (also known as Sambhu-Visnu and Sankara-Narayana, variants of the names of the two gods) began to appear in the classical period after ...
Harimandir: the chief gurdwara, or house of worship, of the Sikhs of India and their most important pilgrimage site; it is located in the city of Amritsar, in Punjab state. The Harimandir was built in 1604 by Guru Arjun, who symbolically ...
Haring River: freshwater channel, Zuid-Holland provincie, southwestern Netherlands. A distributary of the Hollandsch Canal, it ultimately (through other streams) has its origin in the Lower Rhine (Neder Rijn) River. The Haring flows for about 20 miles (32 km) between the joined islands ...
Haringey: inner borough of London, part of the historic county of Middlesex. It is located north of Islington and Hackney and south of Enfield. Haringey was established in 1965 by the amalgamation of the former boroughs of Hornsey, Tottenham, and Wood ...
Harington, Sir John: English Elizabethan courtier, translator, author, and wit who also invented the flush toilet.
Haripunjaya: an ancient Mon kingdom centred in the Mae Nam (river) Ping Valley in northwestern Thailand. It was founded in the mid-7th century by a queen of Lopburi, the capital of the Mon Dvaravati kingdom to the south. Although originally established ...
Hariri, al-: scholar of Arabic language and literature and government official who is primarily known for the refined style and wit of his collection of tales, the Maqamat, published in English as The Assemblies of al-Hariri ...
Harirud: river, Central Asia. It rises on the western slopes of the rugged Selseleh-ye Kuh-e Baba range, an outlier of the Hindu Kush mountains, in central Afghanistan. Flowing west past Chaghcharan and the ancient city of Herat (whence its name is ...
Harischandra Range: eastward-extending spur of the Western Ghats, in west central India. The range lies between the Godavari and the Bhima rivers in the northwestern Deccan Plateau. With an average elevation of about 2,000 feet (600 m), its peaks decrease in height ...
Harishchandra: also called Bhartendu Indian poet, dramatist, critic, and journalist, commonly referred to as the "father of modern Hindi." His great contributions in founding a new tradition of Hindi prose were recognized even in his short lifetime, and he was admiringly ...
Hariti: in Buddhist mythology, a child-devouring ogress who is said to have been converted from her cannibalistic habits by the Buddha to become a protectress of children. He hid the youngest of her own 500 children under his begging bowl, and ...
Harizi, Judah ben Solomon: man of letters, last representative of the golden age of Spanish Hebrew poetry. He wandered through Provence and also the Middle East, translating Arabic poetry and scientific works into Hebrew.
Harjedalen: landskap (province), northern Sweden, comprising the upper valley of the Ljusnan (river) in Norrland region. It is bounded by Norway on the west, the landskap of Jamtland on the north, those of Medelpad and Halsingland on the east, and that ...
Harjo, Joy: American poet, writer, academic, musician, and Native American activist.
Harkhuf: governor of southern Upper Egypt who journeyed extensively throughout Nubia (the modern Sudan).
Harkins, William Draper: American chemist whose investigations of nuclear chemistry, particularly the structure of the nucleus, first revealed the basic process of nuclear fusion, the fundamental principle of the thermonuclear bomb.
Harkness, Anna M. Richardson: American philanthropist, perhaps best remembered for establishing the Commonwealth Fund, which continues as a major foundation focusing largely on health services and medical education and research.
Harlan: city, seat of Harlan county, southeastern Kentucky, U.S., in the Cumberland Mountains, on the Clover Fork Cumberland River. It was settled in 1819 by Virginians led by Samuel Howard and was known as Mount Pleasant until renamed in 1912 for ...
Harlan, John Marshall: U.S. Supreme Court justice from 1955 to 1971.
Harlan, John Marshall: associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1877 until his death and one of the most forceful dissenters in the history of that tribunal. His best known dissents favoured the rights of blacks as guaranteed, in his view, ...
Harlech: castle and village, Gwynedd county, historic county of Merioneth (Meirionnydd), Wales, on the coast of Cardigan Bay. In 1283, after defeating Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the English king Edward I began construction of a fortress there on the edge of a ...
Harlem: district of New York City, U.S., occupying a large part of northern Manhattan Island and Borough. Harlem as a neighbourhood has no fixed boundaries; it may generally be said to lie between 155th Street on the north, the East and ...
Harlem Globetrotters: predominantly black professional U.S. basketball team that plays exhibition games all over the world, drawing crowds as large as 75,000 to see the players' spectacular ball handling and humorous antics.
Harlem Renaissance: period of outstanding literary vigour and creativity that took place in the 1920s, changing the character of literature created by black Americans, from quaint dialect works and conventional imitations of white writers to sophisticated explorations of black life and culture ...
Harlequin: one of the principal stock characters of the Italian commedia dell'arte; often a facile and witty gentleman's valet and a capricious swain of the serving maid. In the early years of the commedia (mid-16th century), the Harlequin was a zanni ...
harlequin beetle: large tropical American beetle with an elaborate variegated pattern of black with muted red and greenish yellow markings on its wing covers.
harlequin cabbage bug: (Murgantia histrionica), insect belonging to the stinkbug family (Pentatomidae) of the order Heteroptera. Though of tropical or subtropical origin this insect now ranges from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean in North America. Shield-shaped, about 1.25 centimetres (0.5 inch) ...
harlequinade: play or scene, usually in pantomime, in which Harlequin, a male character, has the principal role. Derived from the Italian commedia dell'arte, harlequinades came into vogue in early 18th-century England, with a standard plot consisting of a pursuit of the ...
Harlingen: city, Cameron county, southern Texas, U.S., 28 miles (45 km) northwest of Brownsville, with which it forms an industrial-agribusiness-port complex. Founded in the early 1900s and named after Harlingen, Netherlands, by its pioneer settler, Lon C. Hill, Sr., it became ...
Harlow: new town and coextensive district, administrative and historic county of Essex, England. It was designated by British planners in 1947 as one of London's eight post-World War II new towns to promote the decentralization of the metropolis. The planned growth ...
Harlow, Jean: American actress who was the original "Blonde Bombshell." Known initially for her striking beauty and forthright sexuality, Harlow developed considerably as an actress, but she died prematurely at the height of her career.
Harman, Martin Coles: English financier and one of the few private individuals-particularly, one of the few persons while alive-to have his portrait on coins.
harmattan: hot, dry wind that blows from the northeast or east in the southern Sahara, mainly in winter. It usually carries large amounts of dust, which it transports hundreds of kilometres out over the Atlantic Ocean; the dust often interferes with ...
harmine: hallucinogenic alkaloid found in the seed coats of a plant (Peganum harmala) of the Mediterranean region and the Middle East, and also in a South American vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) from which natives of the Andes Mountains prepared a drug for ...
Harmodius and Aristogiton: the tyrannoktonoi, or "tyrannicides," who according to popular, but erroneous, legend freed Athens from the Peisistratid tyrants. They were celebrated in drinking songs as the deliverers of the city, their descendants were entitled to free hospitality in the prytaneion ("town ...
Harmonia: in Greek mythology, the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, according to the Theban account; in Samothrace she was the daughter of Zeus and the Pleiad Electra. She was carried off by Cadmus, and all the gods honoured the wedding with ...
harmonic analysis: mathematical procedure for describing and analyzing phenomena of a periodically recurrent nature. Many complex problems have been reduced to manageable terms by the technique of breaking complicated mathematical curves into comparatively simple components.
harmonic construction: in projective geometry, determination of a pair of points C and D that divides a line segment AB harmonically (see ), that is, internally and externally in the same ratio, the internal ratio CA/CB being equal to the negative of ...
Harmonic Drive: mechanical speed-changing device, invented in the 1950s, that operates on a different principle from, and has capabilities beyond the scope of, conventional speed changers. It consists of a thin ring that deflects elastically as it rolls on the inside of ...
harmonic function: mathematical function of two variables having the property that its value at any point is equal to the average of its values along any circle around that point, provided the function is defined within the circle. An infinite number of ...
harmonica: either of two musical instruments, the friction-sounded glass harmonica (q.v.) and the mouth organ, a free-reed wind instrument produced by Friedrich Buschmann of Berlin in 1821 as the Mundaoline. It consists of free metal reeds set in slots in a ...
harmonium: free-reed keyboard instrument that produces sound when wind sent by foot-operated bellows through a pressure-equalizing air reservoir causes metal reeds screwed over slots in metal frames to vibrate through the frames with close tolerance. There are no pipes; pitch is ...
Harmony: borough (town), Butler county, western Pennsylvania, U.S., on Connoquenessing Creek, 25 miles (40 km) north of Pittsburgh. It is known as the first settlement in America of the Harmonist Society (Rappites) led by George Rapp, an immigrant from Wurttemberg, Germany, ...
harmony: in music, the sound of two or more notes heard simultaneously. In practice, this broad definition can also include some instances of notes sounded one after the other. If the consecutively sounded notes call to mind the notes of a ...
harmotome: hydrated barium aluminosilicate mineral, BaAl₂Si₆O₁₆·6H₂O, in the zeolite family. Harmotome is isostructural with the mineral phillipsite; that is, the three-dimensional structure of the aluminosilicate framework is the same in the two substances. Its glassy, crosslike twinned crystals vary in colour ...
Harmsworth Cup: motorboat racing award established in 1903 by the British publisher Sir Alfred Harmsworth (later Viscount Northcliffe), the first perpetual international event in the sport. A contest between boats representing nations, the trophy is open to challenge by any boat under ...
Harnack, Adolf von: German theologian and historian; he was recognized also for his scientific endeavours. In such seminal works as The History of Dogma (1886-89; 4th ed. 1909) and The History of Ancient Christian Literature (1893-1904), he ...
harness: the gear or tackle other than a yoke of a draft animal (as a horse, dog, or goat). The modern harness appears to have been developed in China some time before AD 500 and to have been in use in ...
harness racing: sport of driving at speed a Standardbred (q.v.) horse pulling a light two-wheeled vehicle called a sulky. Harness racing horses are of two kinds, differentiated by gait: the pacing horse, or pacer, moves both legs on one side of its ...
Harnett, William: U.S. still-life painter who was one of the masters of trompe l'oeil painting in the 19th century.