The Nuttall Encyclopaedia Part 398

SELWYN, GEORGE AUGUSTUS, the first bishop of New Zealand, in which capacity he wrought so zealously, that his diocese, by his extension of Episcopacy, was subdivided into seven; on his return to England he was made bishop of Lichfield (1809-1878).

SEMAPh.o.r.e, a name applied to the mechanism employed for telegraphing purposes prior to the discovery of the electric telegraph; invented in 1767 by Richard Edgeworth, but first extensively used by the French in 1794, and afterwards adopted by the Admiralty in England; consisted at first of six shutters set in two rotating circular frames, which, by opening and shutting in various ways, were capable of conveying sixty-three distinct signals; these were raised on the tops of wooden towers erected on hills; later a different form was adopted consisting of a mast and two arms worked by winches. The speed at which messages could be transmitted was very great; thus a message could be sent from London to Portsmouth and an answer be received all within 45 seconds. The railway signal now in use is a form of semaph.o.r.e.

SEMELE, in the Greek mythology the daughter of Cadmus and the mother of Dionysus by Zeus, was tempted by Hera to pray Zeus to show himself to her in his glory, who, as pledged to give her all she asked, appeared before her as the G.o.d of thunder, and consumed her by the lightning. See DIONYSUS.

SEMINOLES, a nomadic tribe of American Indians who from 1832 to 1839 offered a desperate resistance to the Americans before yielding up their territory SE. of the Mississippi (Florida, etc.); finally settled in the Indian Territory, where they now number some 3000, and receive an annuity from the American Government; missionary enterprise among them has been successful in establis.h.i.+ng schools and churches.

SEMIPALATINSK (586), a mountainous province of Asiatic Russia, stretching between Lake Balkash (S.) and Tomsk; encloses stretches of steppe-land on which cattle and horses are reared; some mining of silver, lead, and copper is also done. Semipalatinsk, the capital (18), stands on the Irtish; has two annual fairs, and is an important trading mart.

SEMI-PELAGIANISM. See PELAGIUS.

SEMIRAMIS, legendary queen of a.s.syria, to whom tradition ascribes the founding of Babylon with its hanging gardens, and is said to have surpa.s.sed in valour and glory her husband Ninus, the founder of Nineveh; she seems to have in reality been the Venus or Astarte of the a.s.syrian mythology. The story goes that when a child she was deserted by her mother and fed by doves.

SEMIRAMIS OF THE NORTH, a name given to Margaret, Queen of Denmark; also to Catharine II. of Russia.

SEMIRETCHINSK (758), a mountainous province of Asiatic Russia, stretches S. of Lake Balkash to East Turkestan and Ferghana on the S.; is traversed E. and W. by the lofty ranges of the Alatau and Tian-Shan Mountains; the vast bulk of the inhabitants are Kirghiz, and engaged in raising horses, camels, and sheep.

SEMITIC RACES, races reputed descendants of Shem, including the Jews, the a.s.syrians, the Chaldeans, the Syrians, the Phoenicians, and the Arabs, and are "all marked," as the editor has observed elsewhere, "by common features; such appear in their language, their literature, their modes of thinking, social organisation, and religious belief. Their language is poor in inflection, has few or no compound verbs or substantives, has next to no power of expressing abstract ideas, and is of simple primitive structure or syntax. Their literature has neither the breadth nor the flow of that of Greece or Rome, but it is instinct with a pa.s.sion which often holds of the very depths of being, and appeals to the ends of the earth. In their modes of thinking they are taken up with concrete realities instead of abstractions, and hence they have contributed nothing to science or philosophy, much as they have to faith.

Their social order is patriarchal, with a leaning to a despotism, which in certain of them, such as the Jews and Arabs, goes higher and higher till it reaches G.o.d; called, therefore, by Jude 'the Only Despot.'"

SEMMERING, a mountain of Styria, Austria, 60 m. SW. of Vienna, 4577 ft. above sea-level; is crossed by the Vienna and Trieste railway, which pa.s.ses through 15 tunnels and over 16 viaducts.

SEMPACH (1), a small Swiss town, 9 m. NW. of Lucerne, on the Lake of Sempach; here on the 9th of July 1386 a body of 1500 Swiss soldiers completely routed the Austrians, 4000 strong, under Leopold, Duke of Austria.

SEN, CHUNDER. See CHUNDER SEN.

SeNANCOUR, eTIENNE PIVERT DE, French writer, born at Paris; delicate in his youth; was driven by an unsympathetic father to quit his home at 19, and for some time lived at Geneva and Fribourg, where a brief period of happy married life was closed by the death of his young wife; returned to Paris in 1798; supported himself by writing, and latterly by a small Government pension granted by Louis Philippe; is best known as the author of "Obermann," a work of which Matthew Arnold wrote, "The stir of all the main forces by which modern life is and has been impelled, lives in the letters of Obermann.... To me, indeed, it will always seem that the impressiveness of this production can hardly be rated too high"

(1770-1846).

SENATE (i. e. "an a.s.sembly of elders"), a name first bestowed by the Romans on their supreme legislative and administrative a.s.sembly; its formation is traditionally ascribed to Romulus; its powers, at their greatest during the Republic, gradually diminished under the Emperors; in modern times is used to designate the "Upper House" in the legislature of various countries, e. g. France and the United States of America; is also the t.i.tle of the governing body in many universities.

SENECA, ANNaeUS, rhetorician, born at Cordova; taught rhetoric at Rome, whither he went at the time of Augustus, and where he died A.D.

32.

SENECA, L. ANNaeUS, philosopher, son of the preceding, born at Cordova, and brought to Rome when a child; practised as a pleader at the bar, studied philosophy, and became the tutor of Nero; acquired great riches; was charged with conspiracy by Nero as a pretext, it is believed, to procure his wealth, and ordered to kill himself, which he did by opening his veins till he bled to death, a slow process and an agonising, owing to his age; he was of the Stoic school in philosophy, and wrote a number of treatises bearing chiefly on morals; _d_. A.D. 65.

SENEGAL, an important river of West Africa, formed by the junction, at Bafulabe, of two head-streams rising in the highlands of Western Soudan; flows NW., W., and SW., a course of 706 m., and discharges into the Atlantic 10 m. below St. Louis; navigation is somewhat impeded by a sand-bar at its mouth, and by cataracts and rapids in the upper reaches.

SENEGAL (136), a French colony of West Africa, lying along the banks of the Senegal River. See SENEGAMBIA.

SENEGAMBIA, a tract of territory lying chiefly within the basins of the rivers Senegal and Gambia, West Africa, stretching from the Atlantic, between Cape Blanco and the mouth of the Gambia, inland to the Niger; embraces the French colony of Senegal, and various ill-defined native States under the suzerainty of France; the interior part is also called the French Soudan; the vast expanse of the contiguous Sahara in the N., and stretches of territory on the S., extending to the Gulf of Guinea, are also within the French sphere of influence, altogether forming an immense territory (1,000), of which ST. LOUIS (q. v.) in Senegambia proper, is considered the capital; ground-nuts, gums, india-rubber, &c., are the chief exports.

SENESCHAL, an important functionary at the courts of Frankish princes, whose duty it was to superintend household feasts and ceremonies, functions equivalent to those of the English High Steward.

SENNAAR (8), capital of a district of the Eastern Soudan, which lies between the Blue and the White Nile, situated on the Blue Nile, 160 m.

SE. of Khartoum.

SENNACHERIB, a king of a.s.syria, whose reign extended from 702 to 681 B.C., and was distinguished by the projection and execution of extensive public works; he endeavoured to extend his conquests westward, but was baffled in Judea by the miraculous destruction of his army. See 2 Kings xix. 35.

SENS (14), an old cathedral town of France, on the Yonne, 70 m. SE.

of Paris; the cathedral is a fine Gothic structure of the 12th century; has also an archbishop's palace, and is still surrounded by ma.s.sive stone walls; does a good trade in corn, wine, and wool.

SENUSSI, a Mohammedan brotherhood in the Soudan, founded by Mohammed-es-Senussi from Mostaganem, in Algeria, who flourished between 1830 and 1860. The brotherhood, remarkable for its austere and fanatical zeal, has ramified into many parts of N Africa, and exercises considerable influence, fostering resistance to the encroachments of the invading European powers.

SEPOY, the name given to a native of India employed as a soldier in the British service in India.

SEPTEMBER, the ninth month of the year, so called as having been the seventh in the Roman calendar.

SEPTEMBER Ma.s.sACRES. An indiscriminate slaughter in Paris which commenced on Sunday afternoon, September 2, 1792, "a black day in the annals of men," when 30 priests on their way to prison were torn from the carriages that conveyed them, and ma.s.sacred one after the other, all save Abbe Secard, in the streets by an infuriated mob; and continued thereafter through horror after horror for a hundred hours long, all done in the name of justice and in mock form of law--a true Reign of Terror.

SEPTUAGINT, a version, and the oldest of any known to us, of the Hebrew Scriptures in Greek, executed at Alexandria, in Egypt, by different translators at different periods, commencing with 280 B.C.; it is known as the Alexandria version, while the name Septuagint, or LXX., was given to it on the ground of the tradition that it was the work of 70, or rather 72, Jews, who had, it is alleged, been Drought from Palestine for the purpose, and were fabled, according to one tradition, to have executed the whole in as many days, and, according to another, to have each done the whole apart from the rest, with the result that the version of each was found to correspond word for word with that of all the others; it began with the translation of the Pentateuch and was continued from that time till 130 B.C. by the translation of the rest, the whole being in reality the achievement of several independent workmen, who executed their parts, some with greater some with less ability and success; it is often literal to a painful degree, and it swarms with such p.r.o.nounced Hebraisms, that a pure Greek would often fail to understand it. It was the version current everywhere at the time of the planting of the Christian Church, and the numerous quotations in the New Testament from the Old are, with few exceptions, quotations from it.

SEPULVEDA, JUAN GINES, Spanish historian, born at Pozo-Blanco, near Cordova; in 1536 became historiographer to Charles V. and tutor to the future Philip II.; was subsequently canon of Salamanca; author of several historical works, of which a "History of Charles V." is the most important, a work characterised by broad humanistic proclivities unusual in his day and country; _d_. 1574.

SERAGLIO, in its restricted sense applied in the East to a harem or women's quarters in a royal household; the former residence of the sultan of Turkey, occupies a beautiful site on the E. side of Constantinople, on a projecting piece of land between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmora, enclosing within its 3 m. of wall government buildings, mosques, gardens, &c., chief of which is the harem, which occupies an inner enclosure.

SERAING (34), a manufacturing town of Belgium, on the Meuse, 4 m.