Aseroe ( as aro)

(Bot.) A gen. of phalloid Fungi, distinguished by the bifid rays of the receptacle (Fig. 2679). The species, which may probably be reduced to three, are of a delicate pink or green. They vary greatly in the degree to which the rays are divided. Like others of the group, they are very fetid when fresh. They are confined to the islands of the Southern hemisphere. Ash Grove, a town of Mi ouri. Pop. in 1890, 1,350. Ash'land, a town of New Hampshire. Pop. in 1890, 1,193. Ash'land, in Oregon , a town of Jackson co. Numerous mineral springs are here and in the vicinity. Pop . in 1890, 1,784. Ash'ley, in Pennsylvania, a borough of Luzerne co., 3 miles from Wilkesbarre. Pop. (1890) 3,192. As'pen, in Colorado , a city, cap. of Pitkin co. It is situated at an elevation of 7,700 feet, and is in the vicinity of some of the most productive silver and lead mines of the State, About $10,000,000 worth of silver is produced here annually. Pop . (1890) 5,108; (1897) est. at 8,000. As'phalt, Asphaltum, -Continued from SEC. I. Asphalt occurs in America in an immense number of places. The asphalts from the various localities are without exception the more or le perfectly solidified residual products of the spontaneous evaporation of petroleum, but exhibit great diversity of physical character, and some of chemical composition. These differences are, doubtle , in part due to differences in the petroleums from which they have been derived. The greatest noticeable diversity is, however, probably due to difference of age, and is a record of the slow but constant changes which time effects in these, as in other organic compounds. Among the most important of our asphaltic minerals are the Albertite and Grahamite. The first from New Brunswick, the second from W. Virginia. Both these are found filling fi ures, opened, acro their bedding, in strata of carboniferous age; which fi ures mark lines of disturbance, where the strata are more or le tilted and broken, and where oil-springs abound. There is little room for doubt that in each instance, the fi ures which contain the A. have afforded convenient reservoirs into which petroleum has flowed, and from which all the lighter parts have been removed by evaporation. A large number of similar deposits, though of le magnitude, are known, all presenting the same general features. Among these may be mentioned a nearly vertical bed in the mountains W. of Denver, in Colorado. On the banks of the Arkansas, S. from Denver City, a number of smaller fi ures cutting cretaceous rocks, are filled with a similar asphaltic mineral. In the great Devonian black shale of Ohio and Kentucky (Huron Shale) fi ures cutting acro the bedding of the formation filled with Albertite, occur near Avon Point, Lorain co., Ohio, and Liberty, Casey co., Kentucky. Petro leum flows from this formation nearly everywhere along its line of outcrop. The A. from all the above localities is hard, bright, and brittle, and seems to be the product of very long continued and complete spontaneous distillation and oxidation. In Butler co., Kentucky, the central member of the Lower carboniferous group is saturated with petroleum. This flows out from the cut edges of the formation in the valley of Green River and its branches, forming sheets of mineral tar and ultimately asphaltum which cover the exposed surfaces on the rock. The quantity of asphaltic material in this vicinity is large, and it may sometimes be utilized for road-making in the same manner as the Sy el A. In S. California, the accumulations of A. on the coast at Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, ., have attracted the notice of all travellers who have visited that region. The A. is here plainly inspi ated petroleum. It drips from the cliffs at many points and forms a scum on the ocean off the coast. There it is evaporated and oxidized, then thrown upon the beach by the waves, where it accumulates in large ma es, generally mingled with sand and other foreign matter. When pure, the A. of California resembles that from Trinidad, and is beginning to be used for the same purposes, roofing, paving, lining of cisterns, . The wants of the entire W. coast can be easily supplied from this source. About Chicago, Illinois, the Niagara limestone is in some localities completely saturated with a thick petroleum, which on exposure is converted by evaporation into A. There are no important asphaltic accumulations here, and it is perhaps a little doubtful whether the hydrocarbon which fills the limestone is not too oily to serve the same purposes as the bitumen in the limestone of Val de Travers. The above list includes all the most important deposits of A. in our country of which anything definite is known. At various points in the far West occur what are known as "tar springs," really oil-springs, around which more or le asphaltum accumulates as the result of evaporation. In Texas, S. from Shreveport, a pitch lake is spoken of, in which are said to occur large quantities of bitumen; but of this almost nothing is known. A., supposed to have originated in petroleum, is also found in enormous deposits in Mexico, the most noted being at Tamaulipas, on both sides of the river Thamesi. A small mountain near the village of Moloasan, Vera Cruz, is largely composed of asphalt. A. is found in many other parts of the world, and lakes of it occur near San Timolis, Venezuela, and in the island of Trinidad, each of which is about three miles in circumference. The depth of the Trinidad lake has been found to be 18 feet near the sides and 78 feet in the centre, and it is estimated to contain 6,000,000 tons. The A. of commerce is largely obtained from this lake; and also from Cuba, Dalmatia, and Syria; while asphaltic limestone of high quality is procured at Sey el and Val de Travers, Switzerland.Uses of Asphalt . A. is a dry solid, with a glo y black surface and conchoidal fracture. It is easily melted, is very inflammable, and leaves little residue. It is very brittle at low temperatures, and may be broken when warmed, but at the same time is soft enough to yield to the heat. It is largely used for various purposes, such as varnish-making, water-proofing, insulation, cementing, roofing, and paving, being very extensively employed for the last named purposes. Varnish into whose composition A. enters is known as black varnish , and used principally on structures of iron. A. is employed in the manufacture of mastics and cements which are chiefly used for the purpose of underground insulation. It is also used to make constructions waterproof, brick or stone foundations saturated with di olved A. being laid in asphaltic cement. Foundations of this character are highly durable. Its resistance to water is shown in the La Salle Street tunnel of Chicago, which continues dry, while tunnels finished with hydraulic cement all admit some water. Trinidad A. is very largely used in the manufacture of roofing materials, felt in several thickne es, saturated with a mixture of A. , coal-tar, pitch, and petroleum residue being laid on the roofs and covered with sharp sand or screened gravel. The use of A. for paving purposes has grown enormously of recent years, these being largely composed of Trinidad asphalt and sand, while in Europe the bituminous limestones of Switzerland are employed in connection with Trinidad asphalt. In most of the large modern cities many miles of streets of asphalt pavement now exist. In the U. S. more than, 200 miles of such street pavement existed in 1890, and since then this has been very greatly increased, the streets of some of our cities, as Philadelphia and Washington for example, being largely laid with this admir able material for light driving use. A in'iboia. ( Geog .) A district of the Northwest Territories of Canada, bounded by Saskatchewan on the N.. Manitoba on the E., Alberta on the W., and North Dakota and Montana on the S. It forms part of the great plains east of the Rocky Mountains, but has many hills. It is well-watered and po e es numerous IMG:content-0477.jpg:[graphic][merged small] small lakes. The climate is severe, though chinook winds often soften the winter temperature. Most of the cold waves of the U. S. come from this district. Wheat is extensively grown, and large numbers of cattle, swine, ., are raised. Area-9,500 square miles. Pop. in 1890, 30,285. A ociation of Ideas. ( Psychol .) A natural ten dency of the mind, in the event of its becoming conscious of any thought, idea or new sensation, to call up into consciousne , through the principle of a ociation, something that has previously been connected with it, either in nature or in the mind. A yrian Explorations. Modern exploration in the ruins of the great cities of As syria has yielded abundant and highly valuable information in regard to the arts, customs, and history of that interesting country, of which little was known previous to the time of Layard, but concerning which we now po e an extensive store of information. The former conceрtions of A yrian history, as derived from Greek history and other sources, we have given under AS SYRIA (q.v.). We may say here that records reaching back to nearly 2000 B. C., are now known and the list of kings and the story of their doings have been corrected and extended until it is somewhat complete from the 16th century, B. C., down to the fall of the A yrian empire. A hurbanipal (the misconceived Sardana pal us of cla ic trad i tion), the most eminent of the rulers of As syria, was a great patron of letters, and gathered in his palace at Nineveh a large library of clay books, which, fortunately, has been in great measure recovered, and which has yielded highly important information of the most varied character concerning this once almost unknown empire of the past. A yrian exploration began with excavations into the ruins of Nineveh, the former great capital of the empire, by P. E. Botta, French consul at Mosul, on the Tigris, in 1842. He discovered at Khors a bad, a few miles from Nineveh, the ruins of the palace of Sargon, a great A yrian king, and obtained from it many interesting antiquities. His results led A. H. Layard, an English investigator, to take up this important work, which he prosecuted with the greatest energy and succe , far surpa ing Botta in the value of his results, and enriching the British Museum with stupendous and very numerous examples of A yrian art. His explorations, extending from 1845 to 1847, and resumed in 1849, are very interestingly described in his Nineveh and its Remains , and Nineveh and Babylon . Many other explorers followed, but their work was largely given to the ruins of the older kingdoms of Babylonia, and will be described under that heading. Among them may be particularly mentioned George Smith, of the British Museum, who was particularly succe ful in reaching the clay tablets recovered from the library of A hurbanipal, and discovered on them a traditional record of the deluge sufficiently similar to that of the Scriptures to excite the greatest attention.- Art and Literature. The literature of As syria is written in pecu. IMG:content-0478.png:[graphic] system of the world, which, with a few modifications, is now universally acknowledged to be correct. His system did not, however, immediately meet with a gen- eral reception; and among his opponents was Tycho Brahe, a Dane, who a erted that the earth is immova- ble, in the centre of the universe, and that the whole heavens turn round it in 24 hours; an opinion which he supported principally by the literal sense of various pa ages in the Bible, where a total absence of motion is ascribed to the earth. His pupil and a istant Kep- ler, however, found that all the planets revolve in ellip- tical orbits, in one of the foci of which the sun is placed; and he moreover demonstrated that, in each elliptical revolution of the planets round the sun, an imaginary straight line, drawn from the latter to the former, called the radius vector , always describes equal areas in equal time, and, lastly, that in the revolutions of the planets and satellites, the squares of the times of revolution are as the cubes of the mean distances from the larger body. These great discoveries paved the way for views still more comprehensive. The Italian Galileo, в. 1564, in- vented the telescope, and his discovery of the value of the pendulum as a recorder of time, rendered also in- valuable services to A. To Newton belongs the glory of having established the law of universal gravitation in its entire generality, and applied it with demonstra- tive evidence to all the movements within the solar sys- tem. Des cartes had sought the cause of the motion of the planets around the sun, and of the satellites around the planets, in the rotatory motion of a subtile matter. But Newton and Kepler have rescued the laws of the material universe from the thraldom of a false philoso- phy, and left to later times merely the development of the truths which they established. Pa ing over the names, however illustrious, of Halley, Bradley, William Herschel (who discovered in 1781 the planet Uranus), Lacaille, Lalande, Delambre, Piazzi, Clairaut, D'Alem- bert, ., we come to Lagrange, who immortalized his name by several great discoveries, the most remarkable being that of the invariability of the mean distance of the planets from the sun (1776). With the name of Lagrange is a ociated that of Laplace, their rival labors dividing the admiration of the scientific world during half a century. The researches of Laplace embraced the whole theory of gravitation; and he had the high honor of perfecting what had been left incomplete by his predece ors. By the brilliant discoveries of La- place, the analytical solution of the great problem of physical astronomy was completed. The principle of gravitation, which had been found by Newton to con- fine the moon and the planets to their respective orbits, was shown to occasion every apparent irregularity, how- ever minute, in the motions of the planets and satel- lites; and those very irregularities, which were at first brought forward as objections to the hypothesis, have been ultimately found to afford the most triumphant proofs of its accuracy, and have placed the truth of the Newton i an law beyond the reach of all future cavil. The 19th century opened with the discovery of the four small planets-Ceres, in 1801, by Piazzi; Pallas (1802) and Vesta (1807), by Olbers; and Juno, by Harding, in 1804. In 1845, Hencke discovered the 5th of this group, revolving between Mars and Jupiter, to which the name of Astræa was given; and up to the present time (1897) upwards of 425 asteroids have been discov- ered. The great events of the century are, perhaps, the discovery by Leverrier of the planet Neptune in 1846, the application of photometric analysis to the measure- ment of the light of the sun and stars, and the use of the spectroscope in déterm in ing their composition with very promising results; but astronomical discoveries in recent times, both in Europe and America, have been so brilliant and numerous, and the progre in every department is so rapid, and involves so many details, that it would be impo ible to give here even a condensed account of that progre , to which. Young, Arago, Lever rier, Adams, Kirchoff, Huggins, Secchi, Zöllner, Lockyer, Respighi, Jan en, Rowland, Pick ering, Newcomb, Swift, Young, Gould, Burnham, Barnard and many others have contributed. But notwithstanding the relative perfec- tion to which the theory and other departments of astronomy have been brought, the science is still far from having reached the limit beyond which further refine- ment becomes superfluous, and numerous portions still remain to be discu ed, the solution of which will occupy and reward the future labors of astronomers, and in whh much progre has been made during the present cer ury by means of the powerful instruments now employed at the great observatories of every civilized country, and the improved methods of analysis brought to bear upon the results of observation. See ASTEROIDS, ATTRACTION, CIRCLE, COMET, CONSTELLATION, EQUATORIAL, FORCE, GRAVITATION, FRAUNHOFER'S LINES, KEPLER'S