Encyclopædia Britannica Australia -

Encyclopedias since 1768

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Nelson, Horatio Nelson, Viscount ... Neogene Period

Nelson, Horatio Nelson, Viscount: British naval commander in the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, who won crucial victories in such battles as those of the Nile (1798) and of Trafalgar (1805), where he was killed by enemy fire on the HMS Victory. In ...
Nelson, Rick: American singer and actor, one of rock music's first teen idols. Nelson gained fame on his parents' television series, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which embodied middle-American values in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Nelson, Samuel: associate justice of the United States Supreme Court (1845-72).
Nelson, William Rockhill: American journalist, editor, and publisher who helped found The Kansas City Star (1880). Among American publishers he was a pioneering advocate of focusing investigative reporting on local municipal corruption instead of merely printing the exposes of nationally ...
Nelson, Willie: American songwriter and guitarist, one of the most popular country music singers of the late 20th century.
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: art museum in Kansas City, Mo., that ranks among the 10 largest in the United States.
Nelspruit: town, capital of Mpumalanga province, South Africa. It lies along the Krokodil (Crocodile) River, among domed granite hills. In 1891 the railway from Delagoa Bay (site of modern Maputo, Mozambique) reached a farm owned by the Nel family known as ...
Nelumbonaceae: the lotus-lily family of the water-lily order (Nymphaeales), consisting of two species of attractive aquatic plants. One of these species is the sacred lotus of the Orient (Nelumbo nucifera) and is found in tropical and subtropical Asia. The other species ...
Neman River: river in Belarus and Lithuania. The Neman River is 582 miles (937 km) long and drains about 38,000 square miles (98,000 square km). It rises near Minsk in the Minsk Upland and flows west through a broad, swampy basin; it ...
Nemanjic Dynasty: ruling Serbian family that from the late 12th to the mid-14th century developed the principality of Raska into a large empire.
nematocyst: minute, elongated or spherical capsule that is found chiefly in members of the phylum Cnidaria (e.g., jellyfish, corals, sea anemones). The capsule, which occurs on the body surface, is produced by a special cell called a cnidoblast and contains a ...
nematode: any worm of the class Nematoda (phylum Aschelminthes, though many authorities consider the Nematoda to be a distinct phylum). Nematodes are among the most abundant animals, occurring as parasites in animals and plants or as free-living forms in soil, freshwater, ...
Nemea, Battle of: (394 BC), battle in the Corinthian War (395-387 BC) in which a coalition of Greek city-states sought to destroy the ascendancy of Sparta after its victory in the Peloponnesian War. The Spartans' defeat of the troops from Thebes, Corinth, Athens, ...
Nemean Games: in ancient Greece, athletic and musical competitions held in honour of Zeus, in July, at the great Temple of Zeus at Nemea, in Argolis. They occurred biennially, in the same years as the Isthmian Games, i.e., in the second and ...
Nemerov, Howard: American poet, novelist, and critic whose poetry, marked by irony and self-deprecatory wit, is often about nature. In 1978 Nemerov received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov, which appeared in 1977.
Nemesianus, Marcus Aurelius Olympius: Roman poet born in Carthage who wrote pastoral and didactic poetry.
Nemesis: in Greek religion, two divine conceptions, the first an Attic goddess and the second an abstraction of indignant disapproval, later personified. Nemesis the goddess (perhaps of fertility) was worshiped at Rhamnus in Attica and was very similar to Artemis (a ...
Nemesius Of Emesa: Christian philosopher, apologist, and bishop of Emesa (now Hims, Syria) who was the author of Peri physeos anthropou (Greek: "On the Nature of Man"), the first known compendium of theological anthropology with a Christian orientation. The treatise considerably influenced later ...
Nemi, Lake: crater lake in Lazio (Latium) regione, central Italy. It lies in the outer ring of the ancient Alban crater, in the Alban Hills, east of Lake Albano and 15 miles (24 km) southeast of Rome. About 3.5 miles (5.5 km) ...
Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir Ivanovich: Russian playwright, novelist, producer, and cofounder of the famous Moscow Art Theatre.
Nemophila: genus of annual herbs of the family Hydrophyllaceae. The about 13 species, most of which bear blue or white, bell-like blooms, are North American, mostly Pacific coast in origin. Baby blue-eyes (N. menziesii) often blooms conspicuously along the borders of ...
Nemours: town, Seine-et-Marne departement, Ile-de-France region, north central France, south of Fontainebleau, and south-southeast of Paris. Called Nemoracum in Roman times, the locality, pleasantly situated on the Loing River, derived its name from the woods (Latin nemora) surrounding it. Fortified in ...
Nemours, Charles-Amedee de Savoie, Duke de: son of Henri I de Savoie and ducal successor to his short-lived brother, Louis de Savoie.
Nemours, Charles-Emmanuel de Savoie, duc de, Prince De Genevois: eldest son of the former duke, Jacques de Savoie.
Nemours, Henri I de Savoie, duc de: brother and successor of the former duke, Charles-Emmanuel.
Nemours, Henri II de Savoie, Duke de: younger brother of Charles-Amedee de Savoie, whom he succeeded as duke in 1652.
Nemours, Jacques d'Armagnac, duc de: peer of France who engaged in conspiracies against Louis XI. He was the first of the great dukes of Nemours.
Nemours, Jacques de Savoie, duc de,, Comte De Genevois, Marquis De Saint-sorlin: noted soldier and courtier during the French wars of religion.
Nemours, Louis d'Armagnac, duc de: third son of Jacques d'Armagnac, duc de Nemours, and last of the ducal House of Armagnac.
Nemours, Louis-Charles-Philippe-Raphael d'Orleans, Duke de: second son of King Louis-Philippe. After the abdication of his father in 1848 he tried until 1871 to unite exiled royalists and restore the monarchy.
Nemours, Marie d'Orleans-Longueville, Duchess de: sovereign princess of Neuchatel (from 1699), best known for her Memoires (1709).
Nemuro: city, eastern Hokkaido, Japan. It was founded as a post town in 1869 by a resident commissioner with 130 administrative staff members and their families. In 1880 it gained municipal status as a machi (township). Hanasaki, its port on the ...
Nen River: river in northeastern China. The Nen River is the principal tributary of the Sungari River, which is itself a tributary of the Amur River. The Nen River proper rises in the area where the Greater and Lesser Khingan ranges come ...
Nenadovic, Matija: Serbian priest and patriot, the first diplomatic agent of his country in modern times. He is often called Prota Matija, because, as a boy of 16, he was made a priest and, a few years later, became archpriest (prota) of ...
nene: (Branta sandvicensis), endangered species of goose of the family Anatidae (order Anseriformes). The nene is a relative of the Canada goose that evolved in the Hawaiian Islands into a nonmigratory, nonaquatic species with shortened wings and half-webbed feet. The nene ...
Nenets: ethnolinguistic group inhabiting northwestern Russia, from the White Sea on the west to the base of the Taymyr Peninsula on the east and from the Sayan Mountains on the south to the Arctic Ocean on the north. At present the ...
Nenets: autonomous okrug (district), Arkhangelsk oblast (province), northwestern Russia. The okrug extends along the northern coast of European Russia, from Mezen Bay to Baydarata Bay. The surface is a level plain, broken ...
Nenni, Pietro Sandro: journalist and politician who was leader of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), twice foreign minister, and several times vice-premier of Italy.
Nennius: Welsh antiquary who between 796 and about 830 compiled or revised the Historia Brittonum, a miscellaneous collection of historical and topographical information including a description of the inhabitants and invaders of Britain and providing the earliest-known reference to the British ...
Neo-Confucianism: in Japan, the official guiding philosophy of the Tokugawa period (1603-1867). This philosophy profoundly influenced the thought and behaviour of the educated class. The tradition, introduced into Japan from China by Zen Buddhists in the medieval period, provided a heavenly ...
Neo-Confucianism: in China, a rationalistic revival of Confucian philosophy in the 11th century AD that exercised profound influence on Chinese thought for the next 800 years. See Confucianism.
Neo-Expressionism: diverse art movement (chiefly of painters) that dominated the art market in Europe and the United States during the early and mid-1980s. Neo-Expressionism comprised a varied assemblage of young artists who had returned to portraying the human body and other ...
Neo-Hegelianism: the doctrines of an idealist school of philosophers that was prominent in Great Britain and in the United States between 1870 and 1920. The name is also sometimes applied to cover other philosophies of the period that were Hegelian in ...
Neo-Impressionism: movement in French painting of the late 19th century that reacted against the empirical realism of Impressionism by relying on systematic calculation and scientific theory to achieve predetermined visual effects. Whereas the Impressionist painters spontaneously recorded nature in terms of ...
Neo-Paganism: any of several spiritual movements that attempt to revive the ancient polytheistic religions of Europe and the Middle East. These movements have a close relationship to ritual magic and modern witchcraft. Neo-Paganism differs from them, however, in striving to revive ...
neo-Sinaitic alphabet: writing system used in many short rock inscriptions in the Sinai Peninsula, not to be confused with the Sinaitic inscriptions, which are of much earlier date and not directly related. Neo-Sinaitic evolved out of the Nabataean alphabet in the 1st ...
neo-Thomism: modern revival of the philosophical and theological system known as Thomism (q.v.).
Neo-Volcanica, Cordillera: (Spanish: "Volcanic Axis"), volcanic mountain range traversing central Mexico from Cape Corrientes on the west coast, southeast to Jalapa and Veracruz on the east coast. The nation's cultural-historical centre, the Cordillera forms the southern boundary of Mexico's Mesa Central and ...
neodymium: (Nd), chemical element, rare-earth metal of transition Group IIIb of the periodic table. Neodymium is silvery-white colour and tarnishes in air to form an oxide which chips, exposing the metal to further oxidation. The metal must be sealed in a ...
neoevolutionism: school of anthropological thought concerned with long-term, directional, "evolutionary" culture change and with the regular patterns of development that may be seen in unrelated, widely separated cultures. Neoevolutionist anthropology, a development of the mid-20th century, addresses the relation between the ...
Neogene Period: latest of the two divisions of the Cenozoic Era (66.4 million years ago to the present). The Neogene includes the Miocene and Pliocene epochs (23,700,000 to 1,600,000 years ago) and is considered by some to encompass the time up to ...