was carried across the river at either end or along the parallel embankments so as to make two separate enclosures. There must have been, in all probability, a bridge to connect the two halves of the city, but the foundations seen by Leake and others, and commonly supposed to belong to such a bridge, proved to be only the substructures of the precinct of Zeus Soter. The buildings north of the river were municipal and were grouped round the square agora. One, of which the complete plan has been recovered, is the portico of Philip, a splendid building, which bounded the agora on the north; it was 300 ft. long, with three rows of columns running its whole length, three in the outer line to each one in the two inner lines; it had a slightly projecting wing at either end. At the south-west of the agora was found the precinct of Zeus Soter: it consists of a square court surrounded by a double colonnade, and faced on the west side by a small temple; on the east side was an entrance or propylaeum approached by a ramp. In the midst of the court was a substructure which has been variously interpreted as an altar or as the base of the great group of Zeus and Megalopolis, which is recorded to have stood here. North of this was the Stoa Myropolis, forming the east boundary of the agora, and, between this and the Stoa of Philip, the Archeia or municipal offices. These buildings were of various dates, but seem all to fit into an harmonious plan. The buildings on the south and west of the agora have been almost entirely destroyed by the Helisson and a tributary brook. On the south bank of the river were the chief federal buildings, the theatre (noted by Pausanias as the largest in Greece), and the Thersilion or parliament hall of the ten thousand Arcadians. These two buildings form part of a common design, the great portico of the Thersilion facing the orchestra of the theatre. As a consequence of this arrangement, the plan of the theatre is abnormal. The auditorium has as its lowest row of seats a set of “thrones” or ornamental benches, which, as well as the gutter in front, were dedicated by a certain Antiochus; the orchestra is about 100 ft. in diameter; and in place of the western parados is a closed room called the Scanotheca. The chief peculiarity, however, lies in the great portico already mentioned, which has its base about 4 ft. 6 in. above the level of the orchestra. It was much too lofty to serve as a proscenium; yet, if a proscenium of the ordinary Greek type were erected in front, it would hide the lower part of the columns. Such a proscenium was actually erected in later times; and beneath it were the foundations for an earlier wooden proscenium, which was probably erected only when required. In later times steps were added, leading from the base of the portico to the level of the orchestra. The theatre was probably used, like the theatre at Athens, for political assemblies; but the adjoining Thersilion provided covered accommodation for the Arcadian ten thousand in wet weather. It is a building unique in plan, sloping up from the centre towards all sides like a theatre. The roof was supported by columns that were placed in lines radiating from the centre, so as to obscure as little as possible the view of an orator in this position from all parts of the building; there were two entrances in each side.
See Excavations at Megalopolis (E. A. Gardner, W. Loring, G. C. Richards, W. J. Woodhouse; Architecture, by R. W. Schultz); Supplementary Paper issued by the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, 1892; Journal of Hellenic Studies, xiii. 328, A. G. Bather; p. 319, E. F. Benson (“Thersilion”); 1898, p. 15, J. B. Bury (“Double City”); W. Dörpfeld (“Das griechische Theater”); O. Puchstein, “Griechische Bühne” (Theatre). (E. Gr.)
MEGANUCLEUS (also called Macronucleus), in Infusoria
(q.v.), the large nucleus which undergoes direct (amitotic)
division in fission, and is lost during conjugation, to be
replaced by a nucleus, the result of the karyogamy of the
micronuclei.
MEGAPODE (Gr. μέγας, great and πούς, foot), the name given generally to a small but remarkable family of birds, characteristic of some parts of the Australian region, to which it is almost peculiar. The Megapodiidae, with the Cracidae and Phasianidae, form that division of the sub-order Galli named by Huxley Peristeropodes (Proc. Zool. Soc., 1868, p. 296). Their most remarkable habit is that of leaving their eggs to be hatched without incubation, burying them in the ground (as many reptiles do), or in a mound of earth, leaves and rotten wood which they scratch up. This habit attracted attention nearly four hundred years ago,[1] but the accounts given of it by various travellers were generally discredited, and as examples of the birds, probably from their unattractive plumage, appear not to have been brought to Europe, no one of them was seen by any ornithologist or scientifically described until near the end of the first quarter of the 19th century. The first member of the family to receive authoritative recognition was one of the largest, inhabiting the continent of Australia, where it is known as the brush-turkey, and was originally described by J. Latham in 1821 under the misleading name of the New Holland vulture. It is the Catheturus lathami of modern ornithologists, and is nearly the size of a hen turkey. This East Australian bird is of a sooty-brown colour, relieved beneath by the lighter edging of some of the feathers, but the head and neck are nearly bare, beset with fine bristles, the skin being of a deep pinkish-red, passing above the breast into a large wattle of bright yellow. The tail is commonly carried upright and partly folded, something like that of a domestic fowl. Allied to it are three or four species of Talegallus, from New Guinea and adjacent islands.
Another form, an inhabitant of South and West Australia, commonly known in England as the mallee-bird, but to the colonists as the “native pheasant”—the Lipoa ocellata, as described by J. Gould in the Proc. Zool. Soc. (1840), p. 126, has much shorter tarsi and toes, the head entirely clothed, and the tail expanded. Its plumage presents a combination of greys and browns of various tints, interspersed with black, white and buff, the wing-coverts and feathers of the back bearing each near the tip an oval or subcircular patch, whence the scientific name of the bird is given, while a stripe of black feathers with a median line of white extends down the front of the throat from the chin to the breast. There is but one species of this genus known, as is also the case with the next to be mentioned, a bird long known to inhabit Celebes, but not fully
- ↑ Antonio Pigafetta, one of the survivors of Magellan’s voyage, records in his journal, under date of April 1521, among the peculiarities of the Philippine Islands, then first discovered by Europeans, the existence of a bird there, about the size of a fowl, which laid its eggs, as big as a duck’s, in the sand, and left them to be hatched by the heat of the sun (Premier voyage autour du monde, ed. Amoretti, Paris, A.R. ix. 88). More than a hundred years later the Jesuit Nieremberg, in his Historia naturae, published at Antwerp in 1635, described (p. 207) a bird called “Daie,” and by the natives named “Tapun,” not larger than a dove, which, with its tail (!) and feet excavated a nest in sandy places and laid therein eggs bigger than those of a goose. The publication at Rome in 1651 of Hernandez’s Hist. avium novae Hispaniae shows that his papers must have been accessible to Nieremberg, who took from them the passage just mentioned, but, as not unusual with him, misprinted the names which stand in Hernandez’s work (p. 56, cap. 220) “Daic” and “Tapum” respectively, and omitted his predecessor’s important addition “Viuit in Philippicis.” Not long after, the Dominican Navarrete, a missionary to China, made a considerable stay in the Philippines, and returning to Europe in 1673 wrote an account of the Chinese empire, of which Churchill (Collection of Voyages and Travels, vol. i.) gave an English translation in 1704. It is therein stated (p. 45) that in many of the islands of the Malay Archipelago “there is a very singular bird call’d Tabon,” and that “What I and many more admire is, that it being no bigger in body than an ordinary chicken, tho’ long legg’d, yet it lays an egg larger than a gooses, so that the egg is bigger than the bird itself. . . . In order to lay its eggs, it digs in the sand above a yard in depth; after laying, it fills up the hole and makes it even with the rest; there the eggs hatch with the heat of the sun and sand.” Gemelli Careri, who travelled from 1663 to 1699, and in the latter year published an account of his voyage round the world, gives similar evidence respecting this bird, which he calls “tavon,” in the Philippine Islands (Voy. du tour du monde, ed. Paris, 1727, v. 157, 158). The megapode of Luzon is fairly described by Camel or Camelli in his observations on the birds of the Philippines communicated by Petiver to the Royal Society in 1703 (Phil. Trans. xxiii. 1398). In 1726 Valentyn published his elaborate work on the East Indies, wherein (deel iii. bk. v. p. 320) he correctly describes the megapode of Amboina under the name of “malleloe,” and also a larger kind found in Celebes.
