A C Q U I — ACTS account of Helmholtz’s Theory of Consonance and Dissonance (briefly stated in 0. A. § 106, but not discussed in this supplement).—Poynting and Thomson, Sound, London, 1899, is an elementary mathematical account of the phenomena of Acoustics. • (j. H. P.*) Acqui, a town and episcopal see of the province of Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy, 21 miles S.S.W. from Alessandria by rail. The castle of the Palseologi is now converted into a prison. Here is a technical school. Its sulphur baths attract annually about 4000 visitors. Population (1901), 13,786. Acre (Arab. Akka), a survival of the Biblical Acco, and ancient Ake, the chief town of a Palestine sanjak which includes Haifa, Nazareth, and Tiberias. From its commanding position on the sea-shore of a broad fertile plain over which the coast road from Syria to Egypt has always passed, and whence there is easy access to the rich lands of Galilee and the Trans-Jordanic countries, it has been called “ the Key of Palestine,” and its history is principally that of its many sieges. It was occupied in turn by Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks, but never by the Hebrews, and was assigned on the division of Alexander’s kingdom to Ptolemy Soter, after whom it was called Ptolemais. One of its mediaeval names, Aeon, has been preserved in that of the church of St Nicholas Aeons, in Lombard Street, London. It exports wheat, maize, olive oil, cotton, &c., but the trade is gradually passing to Haifa, where there is a safer roadstead. The town will be connected by a branch line with the Haifa-Damascus railway now being constructed. Population, 11,000 (Moslems, 8000; Christians, Jews, and others, 3000). Actinozoa. See Anthozoa. ActOll, a parish and urban district (coextensive) in the suburbs of London, in the Ealing parliamentary division of Middlesex, about 7 miles W. of St Paul’s, with three railway stations. Many distinguished persons have lived there, among them Richard Baxter, Sir Matthew Hale, Henry Fielding, and Bindley the botanist. A recreation ground of 21 acres was opened in 1887, and there are a cottage hospital, a free library (1900), and a Thomas Aske girls’ school (1901). Area, 2305 acres. Population (1881), 17,110; (1891), 24,206; (1901), 37,744. Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalherg Acton, 1st Baron (1834 ), son of Sir Ferdinand Acton, Bart., was born at Naples, 10th January 1834. His mother, who after her husband’s death in 1837 married Earl Granville, was the daughter of the duke of Dalberg, which caused Lord Acton, after studying under Cardinal Wiseman at the Roman Catholic college at Oscott, to receive the most valuable part of his education in Bavaria. Under the inspiration of Dollinger, in whose house he lived for a considerable time, he imbibed not only that love of history, but that disposition to treat history as a science in a thoroughly impartial spirit, and to render a profound investigation of canon and of international law auxiliary to historical research, which have ever since distinguished him. Such a spirit must be one of especial hostility to ultramontane pretensions ; and Lord Acton, although a sincere Catholic, made it for a time his especial mission to combat these in the Home and Foreign Review, which he conducted from 1862 to 1864 with a vigour insuring its condemnation and virtual suppression by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Nothing daunted, Lord Acton and his friends acquired the North British Review, hitherto an organ of the Free Church of Scotland, and carried it on actively for several years in the interest of a high-class Liberalism both in temporal and in ecclesiastical matters. Lord Acton contributed several valuable
57
articles, and in 1870 proceeded to Rome to take such part as was possible to a layman in opposing the promulgation of the dogma of papal infallibility. He was active as a writer under his own name and as an inspirer of the writings of others, but the calamity so much dreaded by Liberal Catholics was not to be averted. The Old Catholic separation followed, but Lord Acton held aloof. He had been raised to the peerage in 1869, but his great knowledge and breadth of view have been too little enlisted in the service of the House of Lords. In 1874, however, he came forward conspicuously as a supporter of Mr Gladstone in the controversy on “ Vaticanism,” pointing out in a series of letters to the Times various actions and characteristics of individual popes by no means easy to reconcile with the doctrine of papal infallibility. For many years little came from his pen except an article on the divorce of Henry VIII. in the Quarterly Review for 1877, and an essay on modern German historians, contributed to the first number of the English Historical Review in 1886. In 1895, however, his acceptance of the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge, vacant by the death of Sir John Seeley, drew from him an inaugural lecture on “ The Study of History,” with notes displaying a vast erudition, by no means merely historical. Lord Acton has since continued to lecture regularly, and, at the instance of the university, undertook the editorship of a great modern history by various writers from the middle of the 15th century to the present day. Lord Acton is an Honorary Fellow of All Souls’ college, Oxford, and was a lord-in-waiting from 1892 to 1895. Acts of the Apostles.—In this article we shall deal with such additions to our knowledge as have been made since 1875, when the article in the ninth edition of this work was published. Text.—The apparatus criticus of Acts has grown considerably of recent years; yet mainly in one direction, that of the so-called “ Western ” text. This term, which our growing knowledge, especially of the Syriac and other Eastern versions, is rendering more and more unsatisfactory, stands for a text which used to be connected almost exclusively with the “ eccentric ” Aezoe. But it is now recognized to have been very widespread, both in east and west, for some 200 years or more from about the middle of the 2nd century. The process, however, of sifting out the readings of all our present witnesses— MSS., versions, fathers—has not yet gone far enough to yield any sure or final result as to the history of this text, so as to show wRat in its extant forms is primary, secondary, and so on. Beginnings have been made towards grouping our authorities; but the work must go on much further before a solid basis for the reconstruction of its primitive form can be said to exist. The attempts so far made at such a reconstruction, as by Blass (1895, 1897) and Hilgenfeld (1899), are quite arbitrary. And the like must be said of the most recent contribution to the problem, that of August Pott,1 though he has helped to define one condition of success—the classification of the strata in “Western” texts—and has taken some steps in the right direction, in connexion with the complex phenomena of one witness, the Harklean Syriac. Assuming, however, that the original form of the “ Western ” text had been reached, the question of its historical value, i.e., its relation to the original text of Acts, yet remains. On this point the highest claims have recently been made by Blass. Ever since 1894 he has held that both the “ Western ” text of Acts (which he styles the /3 text) and its rival, the text of the great uncials 1 Der abendlandische Text der Aposteigeschichte u. die Wir-quelle. Leipzig, 1900. S. I. — 8
