16,600 sq. m. Throughout this area the rainfall is heavy (40 to 60 in. or more per annum), the volume of water entering Albert Nyanza by the Semliki when in flood being not less than 700 cubic metres per second. Of the water received by Albert Nyanza annually (omitting the Victoria Nile from the calculation) between 50 and 60% is lost by evaporation, whilst 24,265,000,000 cubic metres are annually withdrawn by the Bahr-el-Jebel. The “Albertine” system plays a comparatively insignificant part in the annual flood rise of the White Nile, but to its waters are due the maintenance of a constant supply to this river throughout the year.
Discovery and Exploration.—Albert Nyanza was first reached by Sir Samuel Baker on the 14th of March 1864 near Vacovia, a small village of fishermen and salt-makers on the east coast. From a granitic cliff 1500 ft. above the water he looked out over a boundless horizon on the south and south-west, and towards the west descried at a distance of 50 or 60 m. mountains about 7000 ft. high. Albert Nyanza was consequently entered on his map as a vast lake extending about 380 m. But the circumnavigation of the lake by Gessi Pasha (1876), and by Emin Pasha in 1884, showed that Baker had been deceived as to the size of the lake. By the end of the 19th century the topography of the lake region was known with fair accuracy. The lake forms part of the (British) Uganda Protectorate, but the north-west shores were leased in 1894 to the Congo Free State during the sovereignty of king Leopold II. of Belgium. Of this leased area a strip 15 m. wide, giving the Congo State a passage way to the lake, was to remain in its possession after the determination of the lease.
See Nile; Sir W. Garstin’s Report upon the Basin of the Upper Nile (Egypt, No. 2, 1904); Capt. H. G. Lyons’ The Physiography of the River Nile and its Basin (Cairo, 1906), and the authorities quoted in those works. (W. E. G.; F. R. C.)
ALBERTUS MAGNUS (Albert of Cologne, ?1206–1280), count of Bollstädt, scholastic philosopher, was born of the noble family of Bollstädt at Lauingen in Suabia. The date of his birth, generally given as 1193, is more probably 1206. He was educated principally at Padua, where he received instruction in Aristotle’s writings. In 1223 (or 1221) he became a member of the Dominican order, and studied theology under its rules at Bologna and elsewhere. Selected to fill the position of lecturer at Cologne, where the order had a house, he taught for several years there, at Regensburg, Freiburg, Strassburg and Hildesheim. In 1245 he went to Paris, received his doctorate and taught for some time, in accordance with the regulations, with great success. In 1254 he was made provincial of his order, and fulfilled the arduous duties of the office with great care and efficiency. During the time he held this office he publicly defended the Dominicans against the university of Paris, commented on St John, and answered the errors of the Arabian philosopher, Averroes. In 1260 the pope made him bishop of Regensburg, which office he resigned after three years. The remainder of his life he spent partly in preaching throughout Bavaria and the adjoining districts, partly in retirement in the various houses of his order; in 1270 he preached the eighth Crusade in Austria; almost the last of his labours was the defence of the orthodoxy of his former pupil, Thomas Aquinas. He died in 1280, aged seventy-four. He was beatified in 1622, and he is commemorated on the 16th of November. Albert’s works (published in twenty-one folios by the Dominican Pierre Jammy in 1651, and reproduced by the Abbé Borgnet, Paris, 1890, 36 vols.) sufficiently attest his great activity. He was the most widely read and most learned man of his time. The whole of Aristotle’s works, presented in the Latin translations and notes of the Arabian commentators, were by him digested, interpreted and systematized in accordance with church doctrine. Albert’s activity, however, was rather philosophical than theological (see Scholasticism). The philosophical works, occupying the first six and the last of the twenty-one volumes, are generally divided according to the Aristotelian scheme of the sciences, and consist of interpretations and condensations of Aristotle’s relative works, with supplementary discussions depending on the questions then agitated, and occasionally divergences from the opinions of the master. His principal theological works are a commentary in three volumes on the Books of the Sentences of Peter Lombard (Magister Sententiarum), and the Summa Theologiae in two volumes. This last is in substance a repetition of the first in a more didactic form. Albert’s knowledge of physical science was considerable and for the age accurate. His industry in every department was great, and though we find in his system many of those gaps which are characteristic of scholastic philosophy, yet the protracted study of Aristotle gave him a great power of systematic thought and exposition, and the results of that study, as left to us, by no means warrant the contemptuous title sometimes given him—the “Ape of Aristotle.” They rather lead us to appreciate the motives which caused his contemporaries to bestow on him the honourable surnames “The Great” and “Doctor Universalis.” It must, however, be admitted that much of his knowledge was ill digested; it even appears that he regarded Plato and Speusippus as Stoics. Albertus is frequently mentioned by Dante, who made his doctrine of free-will the basis of his ethical system. Dante places him with his pupil Aquinas among the great lovers of wisdom (Spiriti Sapienti) in the Heaven of the Sun.
See Paget Toynbee, “Some Obligations of Dante to Albertus Magnus” in Romania, xxiv. 400-412, and the Dante Dictionary by the same author. For Albert’s life see J. Sighart, Albertus Magnus, sein Leben und seine Wissenschaft (Regensburg, 1857; Eng. trans., Dixon, London, 1876); H. Finke, Ungedrückte Dominikanerbriefe des 13. Jahrh. (Paderborn, 1891). For his philosophy A. Stöckl, Geschichte d. scholastischen Philosophie; J. E. Erdmann, Grundriss d. Ges. d. Phil vol. i. 8. The histories of Hauréau, Ritter, Prantl and Windelband may also be consulted. See also W. Feiler, Die Moral d. A. M. (Leipzig, 1891); M. Weiss, Ueber mariologische Schriften des A. M. (Paris, 1898); Jos. Bach, Des A. M. Verhältniss zu d. Erkenntnisslehre d. Griechen, Römer, Araber u. Juden (Vienna, 1881); Herzog-Hauck, Realencyk. (1897); Vacant, Dict. Theol. Cathol. (s.v.); Ch. Jourdain in Dict. d. sciences philos. (s.v.); M. Joel, Das Verhältniss A. d. G. zu Moses Maimonides (Breslau, 1863).
ALBERUS, ERASMUS (c. 1500–1553), German humanist, reformer and poet, was a native of the village of Sprendlingen near Frankfort-on-Main, where he was born about the year 1500. Although his father was a schoolmaster, his early education was neglected. Ultimately in 1518 he found his way to the university of Wittenberg, where he studied theology. He had here the good fortune to attract the attention of Luther and Melanchthon, and subsequently became one of Luther’s most active helpers in the Reformation. Not merely did he fight for the Protestant cause as a preacher and theologian, but he was almost the only member of Luther’s party who was able to confront the Roman Catholics with the weapon of literary satire. In 1542 he published a prose satire to which Luther wrote the preface, Der Barfüsser Mönche Eulenspiegel und Alkoran, an adaptation of the Liber conformitatum of the Franciscan Bartolommeo Albizzi of Pisa (Pisanus, d. 1401), in which the Franciscan order is held up to ridicule. Of higher literary value is the didactic and satirical Buch von der Tugend und Weisheit (1550), a collection of forty-nine fables in which Alberus embodies his views on the relations of Church and State. His satire is incisive, but in a scholarly and humanistic way; it does not appeal to popular passions with the fierce directness which enabled the master of Catholic satire, Thomas Murner, to inflict such telling blows. Several of Alberus’s hymns, all of which show the influence of his master Luther, have been retained in the German Protestant hymnal. After Luther’s death, Alberus was for a time Diakonus in Wittenberg; he became involved, however, in the political conflicts of the time, and was in Magdeburg in 1550–1551, while that town was besieged by Maurice of Saxony. In 1552 he was appointed Generalsuperintendent at Neubrandenburg in Mecklenburg, where he died on the 5th of May 1553.
Das Buch von der Tugend und Weisheit has been edited by W. Braune (1892); the sixteen Geistliche Lieder by C. W. Stromberger (1857). Alberus’s prose writings have not been reprinted in recent times. See F. Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Erasmus Alberus (1894).
ALBERY, JAMES (1838–1889), English dramatist, was born in London on the 4th of May 1838. On leaving school he entered an architect’s office, and started to write plays. After many failures he at last succeeded in getting an adaptation—Dr Davy
