which is left to the women; the cattle are called by means of drums. Save under stress of famine cattle are never killed for food, the people subsisting largely on durra. The Dinkas reverence the cow, and snakes, which they call “brothers.” Their folklore recognizes a good and evil deity; one of the two wives of the good deity created man, and the dead go to live with him in a great park filled with animals of enormous size. The evil deity created cripples. The Dinka came, in 1899, under the control of the Sudan government, justice being administered as far as possible in accord with tribal custom. A compendium of Dinka laws was compiled by Captain H. D. E. O’Sullivan.
See G. A. Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa (1874); W. Junker, Travels in Africa, Eng. edit. (London, 1890–1892); The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, edited by Count Gleichen (London, 1905).
DINKELSBÜHL, a town of Germany, in the kingdom of Bavaria, on the Wörnitz, 16 m. N. from Nördlingen, on the railway to Dombühl. Pop. 5000. It is an interesting medieval town, still surrounded by old walls and towers, and has an Evangelical and two Roman Catholic churches. Notable is the so-called Deutsches Haus, the ancestral home of the counts of Drechsel-Deufstetten, a fine specimen of the German renaissance style of wooden architecture. There are a Latin and industrial school, several benevolent institutions, and a monument to Christoph von Schmid (1768–1854), a writer of stories for the young. The inhabitants carry on the manufacture of brushes, gloves, stockings and gingerbread, and deal largely in cattle.
Fortified by the emperor Henry I., Dinkelsbühl received in 1305 the same municipal rights as Ulm, and obtained in 1351 the position of a free imperial city, which it retained till 1802, when it passed to Bavaria. Its municipal code, the Dinkelsbuhler Recht, published in 1536, and revised in 1738, contained a very extensive collection of public and private laws.
DINNER, the chief meal of the day, eaten either in the middle of the day, as was formerly the universal custom, or in the evening. The word “dine” comes through Fr. from Med. Lat. disnare, for disjejunare, to break one’s fast (jejunium); it is, therefore, the same word as Fr. déjeuner, to breakfast, in modern France, to take the midday meal, dîner being used for the later repast. The term “dinner-wagon,” originally a movable table to hold dishes, is now used of a two-tier sideboard.
DINOCRATES, a great and original Greek architect, of the age of Alexander the Great. He tried to captivate the ambitious fancy of that king with a design for carving Mount Athos into a gigantic seated statue. This plan was not carried out, but Dinocrates designed for Alexander the plan of the new city of Alexandria, and constructed the vast funeral pyre of Hephaestion. Alexandria was, like Peiraeus and Rhodes (see Hippodamus), built on a regular plan; the streets of most earlier towns being narrow and confused.
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After F. Schutt in Engler and Prantl’s Pflanzenfamilien, by permission of Wm. Engelmann. |
DINOFLAGELLATA, so called by O. Bütschli (= the Cilioflagellata of E. Claparide and H. Lachmann), a group of Protozoa, characterized as Mastigophora, provided with two flagella, the one anterior extended in locomotion, the other coiled round its base, or lying in a transverse groove. The body is bounded by a firm pellicle, often supplemented by an armour (“lorica”) of cuticular cellulose plates, with usually a marked longitudinal groove from which the anterior flagellum springs, and an oblique or spiral transverse groove for the second flagellum. In Polykrikos (fig. 2, 9) there are eight transverse grooves each with its flagellum. The armour-plates are often exquisitely sculptured, and may be produced into spines or perpendicular plates to give greater surface extension, as we find in other plankton organisms. The cortical plasma may protrude pseudopodia in the longitudinal groove; it contains trichocysts in several species, true nematocysts in Polykrikos. It contains chromatophores in many species, coloured by a mixed lipochrome pigment which appears to be distinct from diatomin. The endoplasm is ramified between alveoli; it contains a large nucleus (in Polykrikos there are eight nuclei, accompanied by smaller, more numerous bodies regarded by O. Butschli as micro-nuclei). Besides the other spaces are definite rounded or oval vacuoles with a permanent pellicular wall termed by Schutt “pusules”; these open by a duct or ducts into the longitudinal groove. They enlarge and diminish, and are possibly excretory like the “contractile vacuoles” of other Protista; though it has been suggested that by their communication with the medium they subserve nutrition. Nutrition is of course holozoic or
