Comparison between nobilities. " nobility. The whole lesson is lost if the words "patrician and " plebeian are used in any but their strict sense. The Catuli and Metelli, among the proudest nobles of Rome, were plebeians, and as such could not have been chosen to the purely patrician office of interrex, or flamen of Jupiter. Yet even in good writers on Roman history the words "patrician" and "plebeian" are often misapplied by being transferred to the later disputes at Rome, in which they are quite out of place. We may now compare the history of nobility at Rome with its history in some other of the most famous city-commonwealths. Thus at Athens its history is in its main outlines very much the same as its history at Rome up to a certain point, while there is nothing at Athens which Roman and at all answers to the later course of things at Rome. Athenian At Athens, as at Rome, an old patriciate, a nobility of older settlement, a nobility which had once been the whole people, was gradually shorn of all exclusive privilege, and driven to share equal rights with a new people which had grown up around it. The reform of Cleisthenes (q.v.) answers in a general way to the reform of Licinius, though the different circumstances of the two cities hinder us from carrying out the parallel into detail. But both at Rome and at Athens we see, at a stage earlier than the final reform, an attempt to set up a standard of wealth, either instead of or alongside of the older standard of birth. This same general idea comes out both in the constitution of Servius and in the constitution of Solon, though the application of the principle is different in the two cases. Servius made voting power depend on income; by Solon the same rule was applied to qualification for office. By this change power is not granted to every citizen, but it is put within the reach of every citizen. No man can change his forefathers, but the poor man may haply become richer. The Athenian earpidal, who were thus gradually brought down from their privileged position, seem to have been quite as proud and exclusive as the Roman patricians; but when they lost their privileges they lost them far more thoroughly, and they did not, as at Rome, practically hand on many of them to a new nobility, of which they formed part, though not the whole. While at Rome the distinction of patrician and plebeian waş never wiped out, while it remained to the last a legal distinction even when practical privilege had turned the other way, at Athens, after the democracy had reached its full growth, the distinction seems to have had no legal existence whatever. At Rome down to the last it made a differere whether the candidate for office was patrician or plebeian, though the difference was in later times commonly to the advantage of the plebeian. At Athens, at any rate after Aristides, the eupatrid was neither better nor worse off than another man. But, what is of far greater importance, there never arose at Athens any body of men which at all answered to the nobilitas of Rome. We see at Athens strong signs of social distinctions, even at a late period of the democracy; we see that, though the people might be led by the low-born demagogue-using that word in its strict and not necessarily dishonourable meaningtheir votes most commonly fell on men of ancient descent. We see that men of birth and wealth often allowed themselves a strange licence in dealing with their low-born fellow-citizens. But we see no sign of the growth of a body made up of patricians and leading plebeians who contrived to keep office to themselves by a social tradition only less strong than positive law. We have at Athens the exact parallel to the state of things when Appius Claudius shrank from the thought of the consulship of Gaius Licinius; we have no exact parallel to the state of things when Quintus Metellus shrank from the thought of the consulship of Gaius Marius. The cause of the difference seems to be that, while the origin of the patriciate was exactly the same at Rome and at Athens, the origin of the commons was different. The four Ionic tribes at Athens seem to have answered very closely to the three patrician tribes at Rome; but the Athenian demos grew up in a different way from the Roman plebs. If we could believe that the Athenian demos arose out of the union of the 1 See further ATHENS: History, and EUPATRIDAE. other Attic towns with Athens, this would be an exact analogy to the origin of the Roman plebs; the evrarpidai would be the Athenians and the demos the Atticans ('ATTIKOί). But from such glimpses of early Attic history as we can get the union of the Attic towns would seem to have been completed before the constitutional struggle began. That union would answer rather to the union of the three patrician tribes of Rome. Such hints as we have, while they set before us, just as at Rome, a state of things in which small landed proprietors are burthened with debt, also set before us the Attic demos as, largely at least, a body of various origins which had grown up in the city. Cleisthenes, for instance, enfranchised many slaves and strangers, a course which certainly formed no part of the platform of Licinius, and which reminds us rather of Gnaeus Flavius somewhat later. On the whole it seems most likely that, while the kernel of the Roman plebs was rural or belonged to the small towns admitted to the Roman franchise, the Attic demos, largely at least, though doubtless not wholly, arose out of the mixed settlers who had come together in the city, answering to the péroko Of later times. If so, there would be no place in Athens for those great plebeian houses, once patrician in some other commonwealth, out of which the later Roman nobilitas was so largely formed. Thus the history of nobility at Athens supplies a close analogy to the earlier stages of its history at Rome, but it has nothing answering to its later stages. At Sparta we have a third instance of a people shrinking up into a nobility, but it is a people whose position differs altogether from anything either at Rome or at Athens. Sparta is the best case of a nobility of conquest. This is true, whether we look on the Teploukol as Achaeans or as Dorians, or as belonging some to one race and some to the other (see PERIOECI). In any case the Spartans form a ruling body, and a body whose privileged position in the land is owing to conquest. The Spartans answer to the patricians, the Tepioikot to the plebs; the helots are below the position of plebs or demos. The only difference is that, probably owing to the fact that the distinction was due to conquest, the local character of the distinction lived on much longer than it did at Rome. We hardly look on the Spartans as a nobility among the other Lacedaemonians; Sparta rather is a ruling city bearing sway over the other Lacedaemonian towns. But this is exactly what the original Roman patricians, the settlers on the three oldest hills, were in the beginning. The so-called cities (Tóλes) of the Teploko answered pretty well to the local plebeian tribes; the difference is that the Teplouкo never became a united corporate body like the Roman plebs. Sparta to the last remained what Rome was at the beginning, a city with a populus (oñμos) but no plebs. And, as at Rome in early times, there were at Sparta distinctions within the populus; there were oμoto and inoueioves, like the majores and minores gentes at Rome. Only at Rome, where there was a plebs to be striven against, these distinctions seem to have had a tendency to die out, while at Sparta they seem to have had a tendency to widen. The Spartan patriciate could afford to disfranchise some of its own members. The other old Greek cities, as well as those of medieval Italy and Germany, would supply us with endless examples of the various ways in which privileged orders arose. Venice, a city not exactly belonging to any of these classes, essentially a city of the Eastern empire and not of the Western, gives us an example than which none is more instructive. The renowned patriciate of Venice was as far removed as might be from the character either of a nobility of conquest or of a nobility of older settlement. Nor was it strictly a nobility of office, though it had more in common with that than with either of the other two. As Athens supplies us with a parallel to the older nobility of Rome without any parallel to the later, so Venice supplies us with a parallel to the later nobility of Rome without any parallel to the earlier. Athens has Fabii and Claudii, but no Catuli or Metelli; Venice has Catuli and Metelli, but no Fabii or Claudii. In one point, however, the Venetian nobility differed from either the older or the newer nobility of Rome, and also from the older nobilities of the medieval Italian cities. Nowhere else did nobility so distinctly rise out of wealth, and that wealth gained as far as the privileged class was concerned, though rigidly oligarchic as regarded the excluded classes. But, close as the likeness is, it is merely a superficial likeness, because it is the result of opposite causes working in opposite directions. It is like two men who are both for a moment in the same place, though their faces are turned in opposite ways. If the later nobilitas of Rome had established an assembly in which every one who had the jus imaginum had a vote and none other, that would have been a real parallel to the shutting of the Venetian Great Council, for it would have come about through the working of causes which are essentially the same. by commerce. In the original island territory of Venice there | had a right to a place, an assembly which might be called popular could be no such thing as landed property. The agricultural plebeian of old Rome and the feudal noble of contemporary Europe were both of them at Venice impossible characters. The Venetian nobility is an example of a nobility which gradually arose out of the mass of the people as certain families step by step drew all political power into their own hands. The plebs did not gather round the patres, neither were they conquered by the patres; the patres were developed by natural selection out of the plebs, or, more strictly, out of the ancient populus. The commune of Venice, the ancient style of the commonwealth, changed into the seigniory of Venice. Political power was gradually confined to those whose forefathers had held The nobility which was thus formed at Venice is the very political power. This was what the later nobility of Rome model of a civic nobility, a nobility which is also an aristocracy. was always striving at, and what they did to a great extent In a monarchy, despotic or constitutional, there The practically establish. But, as the exclusive privileges of the cannot in strictness be an aristocracy, because the nobility of nobility were never recognized by any legal or formal act, men whole political power cannot be vested in the noble Venice like Gaius Marius would ever and anon thrust themselves in. class. But in the Venetian commonwealth the nobility and aristoThe privileges which the Venetian nobility took to themselves was a real aristocracy. All political power was vested cracy. were established by acts which, if not legal, were at least formal. in the noble class; the prince sank to a magistrate, keeping The Roman nobility, resting wholly on sufferance, was over-only some of the outward forms of sovereignty; the mass of thrown by the ambition of one of its own members. The Venetian the people were shut out altogether. And, if no government nobility, resting also in its beginnings on sufferance, but on on earth ever fully carried out the literal meaning of aristocracy sufferance which silently obtained the force of law, lasted as long as the rule of the best, these civic nobilities come nearer to it as Venice remained a separate state. than any other form of government. They do really seem to engender a kind of hereditary capacity in their members. Less favourable than either monarchy or democracy to the growth of occasional great men, they are more favourable than either to the constant supply of a succession of able men, qualified to carry on the work of government. Their weak point lies in their necessary conservatism; they cannot advance and adapt themselves to changed circumstances, as either monarchy or democracy can. When, therefore, their goodness is gone, their corruption becomes worse than the corruption of either of the other forms of government. The hereditary oligarchy of Venice was established by a series of changes which took place between the years 1297 and 1319. All of them together really go to make up the "Shutting of the Great Council," a name which is formally given to the act of the first of those years. In 1172 the Great Council began as an elective body; it gradually ousted the popular assembly from all practical power. It was, as might be looked for, commonly filled by members of distinguished families, descendants of ancient magistrates, who were already beginning to be looked on as noble. The series of revolutions already spoken of first made descent from former councillors a necessary qualification for election to the council; then election was abolished, and the council consisted of all descendants of its existing members who had reached the age of twenty-five. Thus the optimates of Venice did what the optimates of Rome strove to do: they established a nobility whose one qualification was descent from those who had held office in past times. This is what the nobility of office, if left unchecked, naturally grows into. But the particular way in which oligarchy was finally established at Venice had some singular results. Some of the great families which were already looked on as noble were not represented in the council at the time of the shutting; of others some branches were represented and others not. These families and branches of families, however noble they might be in descent, were thus shut out from all the political privileges of nobility. When one branch of The Roman Curiae and a family was admitted and one shut out we have an analogy to the patrician and plebeian Claudii, though the distinction had come about in quite another way. And in the Great Council itself we have the lively image of the aristocratic popular assembly of Rome, the assembly of the populus, that of the curiae, where every man of patrician birth had his place. The two institutions are the same, only the way in which they came about is exactly opposite. The assembly of curiae at Rome, originally the democratic assembly of the original people, first grew into an aristocratic assembly, and then died out altogether as a new Roman people, with its own assembly, grew up by its side. It was a primitive institution which gradually changed its character by force of circumstances. It died out, supplanted by other and newer powers, when it became altogether unsuited to the times. The Great Council of Venice was anything but a primitive institution; it was the artificial institution of a late age, which grew at the expense of earlier institutions, of the prince on the one side and of the people on the other. But the two different roads led to the same result. The Great Council of Venice, the curiae of Rome, were each of them the assembly of a privileged class, an assembly in which every member of that class the Great Council of Venice. Civic aristo All this is signally shown in the history both of Venice and of other aristocratic cities. But we are concerned with them now only as instances of one form of nobility. The civic aristocracies did not all arise in the same way. Venice is the best type of one way in which they rose; but cracies. it is by no means the only way. In not a few of the Italian cities nobility had an origin and ran a course quite unlike the origin and the course which were its lot at Venice. The nobles of many cities were simply the nobles of the surrounding country changed, sometimes greatly against their will, into citizens. Such a nobility differed far more widely from either the Roman or the Venetian patriciate than they differed from one another. It wanted the element of legality, or at least of formality, which distinguished both these bodies. The privileges of the Roman patriciate, whatever we may call them, were not usurpations; and, if we call the privileges of the Venetian nobility usurpations, they were stealthy and peaceful usurpations, founded on something other than mere violence. But in many Italian cities the position of the nobles, if it did not begin in violence, was maintained by violence, and was often overthrown by violence. They remained, in short, as unruly and isolated within the walls of the cities as they had ever been without. A nobility of this kind often gave way to a democracy which either proved as turbulent as itself, or else grew into an oligarchy ruling under democratic forms. Thus at Florence the old nobles became the opposite to a privileged class. The process which at Rome gradually, gave the plebeian a political advantage over the patrician was carried at Florence to a far greater length at a single blow. The whole noble order was disfranchised; to be noble was equivalent to being shut out from public office. But something like a new nobility presently grew up among the commons themselves; there were popolani grossi at Florence just as there were noble plebeians at Rome. Only the Roman commons, great and small, never shut out the patricians from office; they were satisfied to share office with them. In short, the shutting out of the old nobility was, if not the formation of a new nobility, at least the formation of a new privileged class. For a certain class of citizens to be con- | In other words, the king or other prince can ennoble. We have demned, by virtue of their birth, to political disfranchisement seen how much this takes away from the true notion of nobility is as flatly against every principle of democracy as for a certain class of citizens to enjoy exclusive rights by reason of birth. The Florentine democracy was, in truth, rather to be called an oligarchy, if we accept the best definition of democracy (see Thucydides vi. 39), namely, that it is the rule of the whole, while oligarchy is the rule of a part only. as understood in the aristocratic commonwealths. The nobility is no longer all-powerful; it may be constrained to admit within its own body members for whose presence it has no wish. Where this power exists the nobility is no longer in any strictness an aristocracy; it may have great privileges, great influence, even great legal powers, but it is not the real ruling body, like the true aristocracy of Venice. In the modern states of western Europe the existing nobility seems to have for the most part had its origin in personal service to the prince. And this nobility by personal service Nobilities seems commonly to have supplanted an older nobility, in early the origin of which was, in some cases at least, strictly Western immemorial. In this way the later nobility of the Europe. It is in these aristocractic cities, of which Venice was the most fully developed model, that we can best see what nobility really is. It is in these only that we can see nobility in its purest form-nobility to which no man can rise and from which no man can come down except by the will of the noble class itself. In a monarchy, where the king can ennoble, this ideal cannot be kept. Nor could it be kept in the later nobility of Rome. The new man had much to strive against, but he could some-thegns was in England substituted for the older nobility times thrust himself through, and when he did his descendants had their jus imaginum. But at Venice neither prince nor people could open the door of the Great Council; only the Great Council itself could do that. That in the better times of the aristocracy nobility was not uncommonly granted to worthy persons, that in its worse times it was more commonly sold to unworthy persons, was the affair of the aristocratic body itself. That body, at all events, could not be degraded save by its own act. But these grants and sales led to distinctions within the ranks of the noble order, like those of which we get faint glimpses among the Roman patricians. The ducal dignity rarely passed out of a circle of specially old and distinguished families. But this has often been the case with the high magistracies of commonwealths whose constitutions were purely democratic. From this purest type of nobility, as seen in the aristocratic commonwealths, we may pass to nobility as seen in states of greater extent that is, for the most part in monarchies. Rural There are two marked differences between the two. nobility. They are differences which seem to be inherent in the difference between a republic and a monarchy, but which it would be truer to say are inherent in the difference between a body of men packed close together within the walls of a city and a body of men-if we can call them a bodyscattered over a wide territory. The member of a civic nobility is more than a member of an order; he is a member of a corporation; he has no powers, he has hardly any being, apart from the body of which he is a member. He has a vote in making the laws or in choosing those who make them; but when they are made he is, if anything, more strictly bound by them than the citizen of the non-privileged order. To be a fraction of the corporate sovereign, if it had its gains, had also its disadvantages; the Venetian noble was fettered by burthens, restrictions and suspicions from which the Venetian citizen was free. The noble of the large country, on the other hand, the rural noble, as he commonly will be, is a member of an order, but he is hardly a member of a corporation; he is isolated; he acts apart from the rest of the body and wins powers for himself apart from the rest of the body. He shows a tendency-a tendency whose growth will be more or less checked according to the strength of the central power-to grow into something of a lord or even a prince on his own account, a growth which may advance to the scale of a German elector or stop at that of an English lord of a manor. Now many of these tendencies were carried into those Italian cities where the civic nobility was a half-tamed country nobility; but they have no place in the true civic aristocracies. Let us take one typical example. In many parts of western Europe the right of private war long remained the privilege of every noble, as it had once been the privilege of every freeman. And in some Italian cities, the right, or at least the privilege, of private war was continued within the city walls. But no power of imagination can conceive an acknowledged right of private war in Rome, Venice or Bern. The other point of difference is that, whatever we take for the origin and the definition of nobility, in most countries it became something that could be given from outside, without the need of any consent on the part of the noble class itself. of the corls. Now the analogy between this change and the England. France. preposition; but it long lived on wherever Latin or French class in strictness takes in only the peers personally; at the was used. And before long nobility won for itself a distinguishing outside it cannot be stretched beyond those of their children outward badge. The device of hereditary coat-armour, a growth and grandchildren who bear the courtesy titles of lord and lady. of the 12th century, did much to define and mark out the noble No attempt has been here made to trace out the history of class throughout Europe. As it could be acquired by grant of nobility in the various countries and, we must add, cities of the sovereign, and as, when once acquired, it went on from Europe. All that has been attempted has been to point generation to generation, it answers exactly to the jus imaginum out some general truths, and to refer to some specially at Rome, the hereditary badge of nobility conferred by the striking instances. Once more, it must be borne in mind that, election of the people. Those who possessed the right of coat-while it is essential to the idea of nobility that it should carry armour by immemorial use, or by grant in regular form, formed the class of nobility or gentry, words which, it must again be remembered, are strictly of the same meaning. They held whatever privileges or advantages have attached in different times and places to the rank of nobility or gentry. In England indeed a variety of causes hindered nobility or gentry from ever obtaining the importance which they obtained, for instance, in France. But perhaps no cause was more important than the growth of the peerage. That institution at once set up a new standard of nobility, a new form of the nobility of office. The peer-in strictness, the peer in his own person only, not even his children-became the only noble; the ideas of nobility and gentry thus became divorced in a way in which they are not in any other country. Those who would elsewhere have been counted as the nobility, the bearers of coat-armour by good right, were hindered from forming a class holding any substantial privilege. In a word, the growth of the peerage hindered the existence in England of any nobility in the continental sense of the word. The esquires, knights, lesser barons, even the remote descendants of peers, that is, the noblesse of other countries, in England remained gentlemen, but not noblemen-simple commoners, that is, without legal advantage over their fellowcommoners who had no jus imaginum to boast of. There can be no doubt that the class in England which answers to the noblesse of other lands is the class that bears coat-armour, the gentry strictly so called. Had they been able to establish and to maintain any kind of privilege, even that of mere honorary precedence, they would exactly answer to continental nobility. That coat-armour has been lavishly granted and often assumed without right, that the word "gentleman" has acquired various secondary senses, proves nothing; that is the natural result of a state of things in which the status of gentry carries with it no legal advantage, and yet is eagerly sought after on social grounds. If coat-armour, and thereby the rank of gentry, has been lavishly granted, some may think that the rank of peerage has often been lavishly granted also. In short, there is no real nobility in England; for the class which answers to foreign nobility has so long ceased to have any practical privileges that it has long ceased to be looked on as a nobility, and the word nobility has been transferred to another class which has nothing answering to it out of the three British kingdoms. This last 1 This statement is mainly interesting as expressing the late Professor Freeman's view; it is, however, open to serious criticism. Coat-armour was in itself not necessarily a badge of nobility at all; it could be, and was, worn by people having no pretensions to be gentlemen," and this is true both of England and the continent. In its origin it was a mere personal mark of distinction, in the primary sense of this word. No "grant" was necessary; it was assumed by all and sundry who had occasion to use it, though a reasonable convention forbade one man to assume the device of another. Later arose the custom of granting arms as a mark of personal favour or gratitude. This again was not at the outset an exclusive right of the crown; it was common for a leader in battle to grant to some one not of his family, who had specially distinguished himself, the right to bear the whole or part of his coat of arms. differenced or undifferenced. On the other hand, many undoubted "gentlemen never assumed arms at all. The claim of the heralds to make "gentry " depend on the bearing of coat-armour, and the right to this depend on grant or recognition by themselves as officers of the crown, is of comparatively late growth. See further the article GENTLEMAN.-W. A. P. Compare e.g. the social conditions of Great Britain and Germany. In Germany there are two classes of nobility: (1) the hoher Adel, members of the mediatized, formerly sovereign families, who rank as the equals in blood (ebenbürtig) of the royal houses of Europe; (2) the niederer Adel, to which every one having the nobiliary prefix von belongs. In England "presentation at court" is the privilege of no particular class as such; and the wives of ministers of the with it some hereditary privilege, the nature and extent of that political view monarchy and nobility are strongly opposed. | the experimental work being largely carried on at Elswick, and Even the modified form of absolute monarchy which has existed in some Western countries, while it preserves, perhaps even strengthens, the social position of a nobility, destroys its political power. Under the fully-developed despotisms of the East a real nobility is impossible; the prince raises and thrusts down as he pleases. It is only in a commonwealth that a nobility can really rule; that is, it is only in a commonwealth that the nobility can really be an aristocracy. And even in a democratic commonwealth the sentiment of nobility may exist, though all legal | privilege has been abolished or has never existed. That is to say, traditional feeling may give the members of certain families a strong preference, to say the least, in election to office. We have seen that this was the case at Athens; it was largely the case in the democratic cantons of Switzerland; indeed the nobility of Rome itself, after the privileges of the patricians were abolished, rested on no other foundation. (E. A. F.) AUTHORITIES.-Selden's Titles of Honor (London, 1672) remains the best comparative account in the English language of the nobility of various countries up to his date. For England see E. P. Shirley, Noble and Gentle Men (1860); Gneist, Adel und Ritterschaft in England (Berlin, 1853); Sir George Sitwell, "The English Gentleman," in the Ancestor (No. 1, April 1902); and J. H. Round's works, passim. A. C. Fox-Davies's Armorial Families (Edinburgh, 1895, and subsequent editions) represents an unhistorical attempt to create the idea of a noblesse in the United Kingdom. For the origin and growth of the nobility in France, see A. Luchaire, Manuel des institutions françaises (Paris, 1892), and P. Guilhiermoz, Essai sur l'origine de la noblesse en France au moyen dge (1902); for their later status and privileges, A. de Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856 ff.), and H. A. Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine, pt. i., L'Ancien Régime (1875 ff.). For the German and Austrian nobility, see v. Strantz, Gesch. des deutschen Adels (2nd ed., Waldenburg, 1851); von Maurer, Über das Wesen des ältesten Adels der deutschen Stamme (Munich, 1846); Rose, Der Adel Deutschlands und seine Stellung im deutschen Reich (Berlin, 1883); G. Meyer, Lehrbuch des deutschen Staatsrechts (5th ed., Leipzig, 1899), and the Gotha Genealogische Taschenbücher. For the Italian nobility see the eight magnificent folio volumes of Count Pompeo Litta, Celebri famiglie italiane, continued by various editors (Milan, 1819-1907); for Spanish, Fernandez de Béthencourt, Hist. genealógica, t. i-vii. (18971907). The authoritative manual for the royal houses and the higher nobility" of Europe is the Almanach de Gotha, published yearly. See also the articles TITLES OF HONOUR, PEERAGE, FEUDALISM, GENTLEMAN, DUKE, COUNT, &c. NOBLE, SIR ANDREW (1832artillerist, was born at Greenock on the 15th of September 1832, ), British physicist and and was educated at Edinburgh Academy and at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. In 1849 he entered the Royal Artillery, attaining the rank of captain in 1855, and in 1857 he became secretary to the Royal Artillery Institution. About this time the question of the supersession of the old smooth-bores by rifled guns was coming to the fore, and on the appointment of the Select Committee on Rifled Cannon in 1858 to report on the matter, he was chosen its secretary, a capacity in which he devised an ingenious method for comparing the probable accuracy of the shooting attainable with each type of gun. In 1859 he was appointed Assistant-Inspector of Artillery, and in the following year he became a member of the Ordnance Select Committee and of the Committee on Explosives, serving on the latter for twenty years, until its dissolution. About the same time he was prevailed upon by Sir William, afterwards Lord, Armstrong to leave the public service and take up a post at Elswick. Here, in the first instance, he was put in charge of the ordnance department, but it was not long before his organiz- | ing and administrative ability and scientific attainments enlarged the sphere of his influence, until finally he became chairman of the company. Immediately on his appointment he began a systematic investigation of the phenomena which occur when a gun is fired, some of his first experiments being designed to discover with accuracy the pressures attained in the largest guns of that time. About 1862 he invented his chronoscope for the measurement of exceedingly small intervals of time, and began to apply it in ballistic experiments for ascertaining the velocity with which the shot moves along the barrel of a gun with different powders and different charges. Then he joined Sir Frederick Abel in a classical research on " Fired Gunpowder," the conclusions they arrived at had a great effect on the progress to be attained without increased pressures in the gun. These of gunnery, for they showed how increased muzzle velocities were inquiries, in fact, enabled Elswick in 1877 to turn out the 6-in. and 8-in. guns, with velocities of over 2000 ft. per second, that obliged the British government finally to give up muzzle-loaders to which it had so obstinately adhered. Later, the antiquated Captain Noble was an early advocate of their advantages, and when the era of nitro or "smokeless" powders had begun, when at length the British government awoke to the necessity of selecting a powder of that character for the naval and military services of Great Britain, Elswick extended its hospitality to the committee that invented cordite, and gave the members facilities, which were not offered by the government, for the necessary experimental work. Even after the powder was innobody's official business to make, and which therefore were not vented and the committee dissolved, inquiries-which it was made officially-were continued at Elswick to ascertain how by suitable modifications in form, composition, &c., cordite might the better perform the varied duties required of it. Noble became a member of the committee appointed in 1900 by Lord Lansdowne to consider, among other things, the excessive erosion alleged by some of the powder's critics to be produced by it in the barrels of the guns in which it is used. He was made C.B. in 1881, promoted to be K.C.B. in 1893, and was created a baronet of many foreign decorations and scientific honours, including a Royal medal from the Royal Society in 1880, and the Albert among the Coronation honours in 1902; he was also the recipient medal of the Society of Arts in 1909. He published a number of his scientific papers in a collected form as Artillery and Explosives in 1906. county, Indiana, U.S.A., on the White river, about 20 m. N. by NOBLESVILLE, a city and the county-seat of Hamilton E. of Indianapolis. Pop. (1890) 3054; (1900) 4792 (226 negroes); (1910) 5073. It is served by the Lake Erie & Western, the Central Indiana and the Indiana Union (electric) Traction railways. It is in the natural gas region of the state, and has various manufactures. It was settled about 1825 and incorNuceria Alfaterna, q.v.), a town and episcopal see of Campania, porated as a town in 1851. NOCERA INFERIORE, formerly NOCERA DEI PAGANI (anc. Italy, in the province of Salerno, at the foot of Monte Albino, 23 m. E.S.E. of Naples by rail, 135 ft. above sea-level. Pop. (1901) 11,933 (town); 20,064 (commune). Nocera is connected with Codola on the line from Naples to Avellino by a branch railway (3 m.). In the old castle Helena, the widow of Manfred, died after the battle of Benevento, and here Urban VI. imprisoned the cardinals who favoured the antipope Clement VII. miles to the E. near the village of Nocera Superiore is the circular church of Sta Maria Maggiore, dating from the 4th century. Its chief feature is its dome, ceiled with stone internally, but covered externally with a false roof. It is supported by 40 ancient columns, and in its construction resembles S Stefano Rotondo in Rome. The walls are covered with frescoes of the 14th century. Two 12th century it sided with Innocent II. against Roger of Sicily, episcopal see in the province of Perugia, Italy, 12 m. by rail N. |