Encyclopædia Britannica Australia -

Encyclopedias since 1768

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Lenormand, Louis-Sebastien ... Leon, Luis de

Lenormand, Louis-Sebastien: French aeronaut, generally recognized as the first person to make a parachute descent. He was not the inventor of the parachute; the ancient Chinese may have devised one, and it was known to medieval Europe in the form of a ...
Lenormant, Francois: French Assyriologist and numismatist who recognized, from cuneiform inscriptions, a language now known as Akkadian that proved valuable to the understanding of Mesopotamian civilization 3,000 years before the Christian era. He published his first archaeological paper at 14 and went ...
Lenox: town (township), Berkshire county, western Massachusetts, U.S. It lies in the Berkshire Hills, just south of Pittsfield. Settled about 1750 and originally called Yokuntown, it was set off from Richmond in 1767 and was probably named for Charles Lennox, 3rd ...
Lenox, James: American philanthropist and pioneer book collector.
lens: in anatomy, a colourless, nearly transparent biconvex structure suspended behind the iris of the eye, the sole function of which is to focus light rays onto the retina. The lens is made up of unusual elongated cells that have no ...
lens: in optics, piece of glass or other transparent substance that is used to form an image of an object by focusing rays of light from the object. A lens is a piece of transparent material, usually circular in shape, with ...
Lens: industrial town, Pas-de-Calais departement, Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, northern France, south-southwest of Lille. It is the chief urban centre of the Pas-de-Calais coal basin (a portion of which was scheduled to be abandoned after 1983); the urban agglomeration includes the mining settlements ...
lens dislocation: abnormal position of the crystalline lens of the eye. The dislocation, which may be congenital or acquired, has as its immediate cause weakness or loss of a portion of the ligaments that anchor the lens to the ciliary muscle.
Lent: in the Christian church, a period of penitential preparation for Easter. In Western churches it begins on Ash Wednesday, 612 weeks before Easter, and provides for a 40-day fast (Sundays are excluded), in imitation of Jesus Christ's fasting in the ...
Lenthall, William: English Parliamentarian who, as speaker of the House of Commons, was at the centre of repeated struggles between the Parliamentarians and Royalists during the English Civil Wars. His later cooperation with the Royalists earned him a reputation as a political ...
lentil: (species Lens esculenta), small annual legume of the pea family (Leguminosae) and its lens-shaped edible seed, which is rich in protein and one of the most ancient of cultivated foods. Of unknown origin, the lentil is widely cultivated throughout Europe, ...
Lentulus Crus, Lucius Cornelius: Roman politician, a leading member of the senatorial party that vigorously opposed Julius Caesar.
Lentulus Spinther, Publius Cornelius: a leading supporter of the Roman general Pompey the Great during the Civil War (49-45 BC) between Pompey and Julius Caesar.
Lentulus, Publius Cornelius: a leading figure in Catiline's conspiracy (63 BC) to seize control of the Roman government.
Lenya, Lotte: Austrian actress-singer who popularized much of the music of her first husband, the composer Kurt Weill, and appeared frequently in the musical dramas of Weill and his longtime collaborator Bertolt Brecht.
Lenz's law: in electromagnetism, statement that an induced electric current flows in a direction such that the current opposes the change that induced it. This law was deduced in 1834 by the Russian physicist Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lenz (1804-65).
Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold: Russian-born German poet and dramatist of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) period, who is considered an important forerunner of 19th-century Naturalism and of 20th-century Expressionistic theatre.
Leo: (Latin: Lion), in astronomy, zodiacal constellation lying between Cancer and Virgo, at about 10 hours 30 minutes right ascension (the coordinate of the celestial sphere analogous to longitude on the Earth) and 15° north declination (angular distance north of the ...
Leo Africanus: traveller whose writings remained, for some 400 years, one of Europe's principal sources of information about Islam.
Leo I: Eastern Roman emperor from AD 457 to 474.
Leo I, Saint: pope from 440 to 461, master exponent of papal supremacy. His pontificate-which saw the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the West and the formation in the East of theological differences that were to split Christendom-was devoted to safeguarding orthodoxy ...
Leo II: Roman emperor of the East, grandson of Leo I, and son of Zeno. His grandfather, growing ill, felt compelled to name a successor but, deciding that his son Zeno, an Isaurian, was unpopular, made his grandson co-emperor, as Caesar and ...
Leo II, Saint: pope from 682 to 683.
Leo III: Byzantine emperor (717-741), who founded the Isaurian, or Syrian, dynasty, successfully resisted Arab invasions, and engendered a century of conflict within the empire by banning the use of religious images (icons).
Leo III, Saint: pope from 795 to 816.
Leo IV: Byzantine emperor whose reign marked a transition between the period of Iconoclasm and the restoration of the icons.
Leo IV, Saint: pope from 847 to 855.
Leo IX, Saint: original name Bruno, Graf (count) Von Egisheim Und Dagsburg head of the medieval Latin Church (1049-54), during whose reign the papacy became the focal point of western Europe, and the great East-West Schism of 1054 became inevitable.
Leo V: pope from July to September 903. Elected while a priest to succeed Pope Benedict IV, Leo assumed the pontificate in a dark period of papal history. He was deposed and imprisoned by the antipope Christopher. Leo was perhaps murdered, either ...
Leo V: ( b. Armenia-d. Dec. 25, 820, Constantinople), Byzantine emperor responsible for inaugurating the second Iconoclastic period in the Byzantine Empire.
Leo VI: pope from May to December 928. He was Pope John VIII's prime minister and later a cardinal priest when elected by the senatrix Marozia, then head of the powerful Roman Crescentii family, who deposed and imprisoned Leo's predecessor, Pope John ...
Leo VI: Byzantine coemperor from 870 and emperor from 886 to 912, whose imperial laws, written in Greek, became the legal code of the Byzantine Empire.
Leo VII: pope from 936 to 939. Leo was probably a Benedictine monk when he succeeded John XI, who had been imprisoned by Duke Alberic II of Spoleto. In 936 he invited Abbot St. Odo of Cluny (then one of the most ...
Leo VIII: pope, or antipope, from 963 to 965.
Leo X: one of the leading Renaissance popes (reigned 1513-21). He made Rome a cultural centre and a political power, but he depleted the papal treasury, and, by failing to take the developing Reformation seriously, he contributed to the dissolution of the ...
Leo XI: original name Alessandro Ottaviano De' Medici pope from April 1-27, 1605. Pope Gregory XIII made him bishop of Pistoia, Italy, in 1573, archbishop of Florence in 1574, and cardinal in 1583. Elected to succeed Clement VIII on April 1, 1605, ...
Leo XII: original name Annibale Sermattei Della Genga pope from 1823 to 1829.
Leo XIII: original name Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci head of the Roman Catholic Church (1878-1903) who brought a new spirit to the papacy, manifested in more conciliatory positions toward civil governments, by care taken that the church not be opposed to scientific progress ...
Leo, Heinrich: Prussian conservative historian.
Leo, Leonardo: composer who was noted for his comic operas and who was instrumental in forming the Neapolitan style of opera composition.
Leoben: town, Bundesland (federal state) Steiermark, southeast-central Austria, on the Mur River, northwest of Graz. An ancient settlement, it was reestablished as a town by Ottokar II of Bohemia about 1263. Medieval buildings include the Maria am Waasen ...
Leochares: Greek sculptor to whom the "Apollo Belvedere" (Roman copy, Vatican Museum) is often attributed. About 353-c. 350 BC Leochares worked with Scopas on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Most of his attributions are ...
Leofric: Anglo-Saxon earl of Mercia (from some date prior to 1032), one of the three great earls of 11th-century England, who took a leading part in public affairs. On the death of King Canute in 1035, Leofric supported the claim of ...
Leominster: town ("parish"), unitary authority and historic county of Herefordshire, England, situated on the River Lugg, a tributary of the Wye. A religious house was founded on the site in 660, and the parish church of Saints Peter and Paul was ...
Leominster: city, Worcester county, north-central Massachusetts, U.S. It lies on the Nashua River, just southeast of Fitchburg and about 40 miles (64 km) northwest of Boston. The site, purchased from the Nashua Indians in 1701, was originally part of Lancaster. It ...
Leon: provincia, in the Castile-Leon comunidad autonoma ("autonomous community"), northwestern Spain, consisting of the northern part of the former Kingdom of Leon. It has an area of 5,972 square miles (15,468 square km). In the north are the lofty Cantabrian Mountains, ...
Leon: city situated in western Nicaragua. The city of Leon was founded on the edge of Lake Managua in 1524, but after an earthquake it was moved in 1610 to the site of the old Indian capital and shrine of Sutiaba. ...
Leon: city, capital of Leon provincia, in the Castile-Leon (Castilla y Leon) comunidad autonoma ("autonomous community"), northwestern Spain. It lies on the northwestern part of the Meseta Central (plateau), at the confluence of the Bernesga and Torio rivers.
Leon: medieval Spanish kingdom. Leon proper included the cities of Leon, Salamanca, and Zamora-the adjacent areas of Vallodolid and Palencia being disputed with Castile, originally its eastern frontier. The kings of Leon ruled Galicia, Asturias, and much of the county of ...
Leon: city, northwestern Guanajuato estado ("state"), central Mexico. It stands in a fertile plain on the Turbio River, 6,182 feet (1,884 metres) above sea level. Although Leon was first settled in 1552, it was not formally founded until ...
Leon, Luis de: mystic and poet who contributed greatly to Spanish Renaissance literature.