designed by Lodovico Vanvitelli, and constructed between 1753 and 1759.
MADDEN, SIR FREDERIC (1801–1873), English palaeographer,
the son of an officer of Irish extraction, was born at Portsmouth
on the 16th of February 1801. From his earliest years he displayed
a strong bent to linguistic and antiquarian studies. In
1826 he was engaged by the British Museum to assist in the preparation
of the classified catalogue of printed books then contemplated,
and in 1828 he became assistant keeper of manuscripts.
In 1833 he was knighted, and in 1837 succeeded Josiah Forshall as
keeper of manuscripts. He was not entirely successful in this
office, partly owing to want of harmony with his colleagues; he
retired in 1866. He edited for the Roxburghe Club Havelok the
Dane (1828), discovered by himself among the Laudian MSS. in
the Bodleian, William and the Werwolf (1832) and the old English
versions of the Gesta Romanorum (1838). In 1839 he edited the
ancient metrical romances of Syr Gawayne for the Bannatyne
Club, and in 1847 Layamon’s Brut, with a prose translation, for
the Society of Antiquaries. In 1850 the magnificent edition, in
parallel columns, of what are known as the “Wycliffite” versions
of the Bible, from the original MSS., upon which he and his
coadjutor, Forshall, had been engaged for twenty years, was
published by the university of Oxford. In 1866–1869 he edited
the Historia Minor of Matthew Paris for the Rolls Series. In
1833 he wrote the text of Henry Shaw’s Illuminated Ornaments
of the Middle Ages; and in 1850 edited the English translation
of Silvestre’s Paléographie universelle. He died on the 8th of
March 1873, bequeathing his journals and other private papers
to the Bodleian Library, where they were to remain unopened
until 1920.
Madden was perhaps the first palaeographer of his day. He was an acute as well as a laborious antiquary, but his ignorance of German prevented his ranking high as a philologist, although he paid much attention to the early dialectical forms of French and English. His minor contributions to antiquarian research were exceedingly numerous: the best known, perhaps, was his dissertation on the orthography of Shakespeare’s name, which, mainly on the strength of the Florio autograph, he contended should be “Shakspere.”
MADDER, or Dyers’ Madder, the root of Rubia tinctorum
and perhaps also of R. peregrina, both European, R. cordifolia, a
native of the hilly districts of India and of north-east Asia and
Java, supplying the Indian madder or manjit. Rubia is a genus
of about thirty-five species of the tribe Galieae of the order
Rubiaceae, and much resembles the familiar Galiums, e.g. lady’s
bedstraw (G. verum) and the cleavers (G. aparine) of English
hedges, having similarly whorled leaves, but the parts of the
flowers are in fives and not fours, while the fruit is somewhat
fleshy. The only British species is R. peregrina, which is found
in Wales, the south and west of England, and in east and south
Ireland. The use of madder appears to have been known from
the earliest times, as cloth dyed with it has been found on the
Egyptian mummies. It was the ἐρευθέδανον used for dyeing the
cloaks of the Libyan women in the days of Herodotus (Herod. iv.
189). It is the ἐρυθρόδανον of Dioscorides, who speaks of its cultivation
in Caria (iii. 160), and of Hippocrates (De morb. mul. i.),
and the Rubia of Pliny (xix. 17). R. tinctorum, a native of
western Europe, &c., has been extensively cultivated in south
Europe, France, where it is called garance, and Holland, and to a
small extent in the United States. Large quantities have been
imported into England from Smyrna, Trieste, Leghorn, &c. The
cultivation, however, decreased after alizarin, the red colouring
principle of madder, was made artificially. Madder was employed
medicinally by the ancients and in the middle ages. Gerard, in
1597, speaks of it as having been cultivated in many gardens in
his day, and describes its supposed many virtues (Herball, p. 960);
but any pharmacological or therapeutic action which madder
may possess is unrecognizable. Its most remarkable physiological
effect is that of colouring red the bones of animals fed
upon it, as also the claws and beaks of birds. This appears to be
due to the chemical affinity of phosphate of lime for the colouring
matter (Pereira, Mat. med., vol. ii. pt. 2, p. 52). This property
has been of much use in enabling physiologists to ascertain the
manner in which bones develop, and the functions of the various
types of cells found in growing bone. R. chilensis has been used
for dyeing red from time immemorial. The chay-root, which
furnishes a red dye in Coromandel and other parts of India, is the
root-bark of Oldenlandia umbellata, a low-growing plant of the
same family as madder.
MADEC, RENÉ-MARIE (1736–1784)—called Medoc in Anglo-Indian
writings—French adventurer in India, was born at
Quimper in Brittany on the 7th of February 1736, of poor parents.
He went out to India and served under Dupleix and Lally, but
being taken prisoner by the British he enlisted in the Bengal
army. Deserting with some of his companions shortly before
the battle of Buxar (1764), he became military instructor to
various native princes, organizing successively the forces of
Shuja-ud-Dowlah, nawab of Oudh, and of the Jats and Rohillas.
He took service under the emperor Shah Alam in 1772, and when
that prince was defeated at Delhi by the Mahrattas, Madec
rejoined his own countrymen in Pondicherry, where he took an
active part in the defence of the town (1778). After the capitulation
of Pondicherry he returned to France with a considerable
fortune, and died there in 1784. At one time he formed a scheme
for a French alliance with the Mogul emperor against the British,
but the project came to nothing.
See Émile Barbé, Le Nabab René Madec (1894).
MADEIRA, or The Madeiras, a group of islands in the North Atlantic Ocean, which belong to Portugal, and consist of two inhabited islands named Madeira and Porto Santo and two groups of uninhabited rocks named the Desertas and Selvagens. Pop. (1900), 150,574; area, 314 sq. m. Funchal, the capital of the archipelago, is on the south coast of Madeira Island, in 32° 37′ 45″ N. and 16° 54′ W. It is about 360 m. from the coast of Africa, 535 from Lisbon, 1215 from Plymouth, 240 from Teneriffe, and 480 from Santa Maria, the nearest of the Azores.
Madeira (pop. 1900, 148,263), the largest island of the group, has a length of 30 m., an extreme breadth of 12 m., and a coast-line of 80 or 90 m. Its longer axis lies east and west, in which direction it is traversed by a mountain chain, the backbone of the island, having a mean altitude of 4000 ft., up to which many deep ravines penetrate from both coasts and render travel by land very difficult. Pico Ruivo, the highest summit, stands in the centre of the island, and has a height of 6056 ft., while some of the adjacent summits are very little lower. The depth and narrowness of the ravines, the loftiness of the rugged peaks, often covered with snow, that tower above them, the bold precipices of the coast, and the proximity of the sea, afford many scenes of picturesque beauty or striking grandeur. The greater part of the interior is uninhabited, though cultivated, for the towns, villages and scattered huts are usually built either at the mouths of ravines or upon the lower slopes that extend from the mountains to the coast. The ridges between the ravines usually terminate in lofty headlands, one of which, called Cabo Girão, has the height of 1920 ft., and much of the seaboard is bound by precipices of dark basalt. The north coast, having been more exposed to the erosion of the sea, is more precipitous than the south, and presents everywhere a wilder aspect. On the south there is left very little of the indigenous forest which once clothed the whole island and gave it the name it bears (from the Portuguese madeira, Lat. materia, wood), but on the north some of the valleys still contain native trees of fine growth. A long, narrow and comparatively low rocky promontory forms the eastern extremity of the island; and here is a tract of calcareous sand, known as the Fossil Bed, containing land shells and numerous bodies resembling the roots of trees, probably produced by infiltration.
Porto Santo is about 25 m. N.E. of Madeira. Pop. (1900), 2311. It has a length of 613 m. and a width of 3 m. The capital is Porto Santo, called locally the villa or town. The island is very unproductive, water being scarce and wood wholly absent. Around the little town there is a considerable tract of pretty level ground covered by calcareous sand containing fossil land-shells. At each end of the island are hills, of which Pico do Facho, the highest, reaches the altitude of 1663 ft. Barley, but little else,
