Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/872

810 M E L M E L auditorship at Valladolid. In 1797 the publication of a new and greatly enlarged edition of his works, dedicated to the prince of the peace, was followed by his removal to Madrid to a high post in connexion with the treasury. The new poems included somewhat heavy philosophical epistles written after the manner of Young, and an unmistakably dull epic canto entitled Caida de Luzbel (" The Fall of Lucifer "), suggested by Milton, as well as an Ode to Winter, which showed how well the author had made himself acquainted with Thomson. On the fall of his friend Jovellanos in 1798 Melendez was ordered away from Madrid, first to Medina del Campo and afterwards to Zamora, and it was not till 1802 that he was permitted to settle in Salamanca. For the next six years his literary activity was but slight, being limited to the production of a short poem on " Creation" and the preparation of an unfinished translation of the JEneid. After the revolution of Aranjuez (1808) Melendez accepted from King Joseph the post of councillor of state and afterwards that of minister of public instruction, a failure of patriotism which invoked him in many indignities and even dangers; in 1813 he was of course compelled to quit his country, and, after sojourning successively at Alais, Nimes, and Toulouse, he died in considerable poverty and neglect at Montpellier, on May 24, 1817. During his exile he employed himself in the preparation of a complete edition of his works, with numerous additions and corrections ; this was afterwards published, along with a life of the author by Quintana, at the expense of the Government (4 vols. 8vo, Madrid, 1820 ; reprinted at Paris, 1832, and at Barcelona, 1838). MELFI, a city of Italy, in the province of Potenza, 30 miles N. of Potenza, on the road and railway between that city and Foggia, is built on a small hill on the lower slopes of Monte Volture. The castle was originally erected by Robert Guiscard, but as it now stands it is mainly the work of the Doria family, who have possessed it since the time of Charles V. ; and the noble cathedral which was founded in 1155 by Robert s son and successor, Roger, has had to be subjected to a modern restoration inconsequence of the earthquake of 1851. In 1871 the city had 10,945 inhabitants; the communs had 9803 in 1861 and 12 657 in 1881. Melft is of doubtful origin, but appears to have existed at least as early as the 4th century. By the Normans it was made the capital of Apulia in 1041, and provided with fortifications. The council held by Nicholas I. in 1059, that of Urban II. in 1090, the rebellion against Roger in 1133 and the subsequent punishment, the plunder of the town by Barbarossa in 1167, the attack by Richard, count of Acerra in 1190, and the parliament of 1223, in which Frederick II. established the constitution of the kingdom of Naples, form the principal points of interest in the annals of Melfi during the more eventful period of its history. In 1348 Joanna L of Naples bestowed the city on Niccolo Acciajuoli ; but it was shortly after wards captured, after a six months siege, by the king of Hungary, who transferred it to Conrad the Wolf. In 1392 Goffredo Marzano was made count of Melfi ; but Joanna II. granted the lordship to the Caracciolo family, and they retained it for one hundred and seven years till the time of Charles V. An obstinate resistance was offered by the city to Lautrcc de Foix in 1528 ; and his entrance within its walls was followed by the massacre, it is said, of 18,000 of its citizens. As a bishopric Melfi is directly dependent on the Holy See. MELITA (MeAiTT?), the classical name for MALTA (q.v.),. was also the name borne by the modern Meleda, one of the Dalmatian islands, situated immediately to the south of Sabbioncello and to the north of Ragusa. It is about 24 miles in length, averaging about 1 in breadth, and has a good harbour. At one time it was supposed by some authois to have been the scene of the shipwreck of St Paul, but this point has now for some time been conclu sively settle! in favour of Malta. See Smith, Voyage and Shipwreck of St Paul, 1848. MELITO, bishop of Sardes, a Christian writer of the 2d :entury, is mentioned by Eusebius (77. E., iv. 21) along with Hegesippus, Dionysius of Corinth, Apollinaris of Hierapolis, Irenseus, and others, his contemporaries, as a champion of orthodoxy and upholder of apostolic tradition. Of his personal history nothing is known, and of- his numerous works (which are enumerated by Eusebius) only a few fragments are now extant. They included an Apologia addressed to Aurelius sometime between 169 and 180 A.D., two books relating to the paschal controversy, and a work entitled E/<Aoyat (selections from the Old Testament), which contained the well-known catalogue of "the books of the Old Covenant." The fragments have been edited with valuable notes by Routh (Reliquix Sacrse, vol. i., 1814). It seems more than doubtful whether the Apolorjia of Melito "the Philosopher," discovered in a Syriac translation by Tattam, and subsequently edited by Cureton and Renan, ought to be attributed to this writer and not rather to another of the same name. MELLON I, MACEDONIO (1798-1854), a distinguished physicist, was born at Parma on April 11, 1798. From 1S24 to 1831 he was professor at Parma, but in the latter year he was compelled to escape to France, having taken part in the revolution. In 1839 he went to Naples as director of the conservatory of arts and handicrafts. He was likewise director of the Vesuvius observatory, a post which he held until 1848. Melloni received the Rumford medal of the Royal Society in 1834. In 1835 he was elected correspondent of the Paris Academy, and in 1839 a foreign member of the Royal Society. He died from an attack of cholera on August 11, 1854. From the Royal Society catalogue of papers we find that Melloni produced eighty-six memoirs byjhimself, as well as three in connexion with other physicists. These embrace a wide range of subjects, but the reputation of Melloni as a physicist rests more especially npon his discoveries in radiant heat. Men of science were, in the early part of this century, very much in the dark with regard to the nature of the invisible heat rays. Leslie and others had indeed advanced the subject by means of the differential thermometer, but such an instrument was at the best a very poor substitute for the human eye. It was necessary to invent an instrument more nearly capable of doing for the dark rays what the eye does for those of light before any great increase in our knowledge of this subject could- be expected to take place. This step was taken (shortly after Seebeck s discovery of thermo-electricity) in the construction of the thermo-mnltiplier or combination of thermopile and galvanometer which formed the subject of a joint memoir by Nobili and Melloni in 1831. In this memoir, after describing their instrument, these physicists confirmed the experiments of Leslie and others. They tried screens of glass, sulphate of lime, mica, and ice, also of water, oil, alcohol, and nitric acid enclosed in glass, and found an instan taneous effect produced in the index of their instrument except for ice and water, the source of heat being an iron ball below redness. After finding that most substances when used as screens stopped a much larger proportion of dark heat than they did of light, Melloni set himself to discover some body that might be transparent for dark heat. In this search he was rewarded with complete success. Rock-salt was found to possess this property ; and he immediately proceeded to construct prisms and lenses of rock-salt with which he proved the refraction of dark beat, that is to say, of the heat proceeding from bodies below incandescence. Melloni was likewi.se very successful in studying the action upon dark heat of screens of various substances. His experiments in this and other directions are described by Baden Powell in his report to the British Association on lladiant Heat (1840). The rays of the lamp were thrown npon screens of various materials in such a manner that the effect transmitted from all the screens was of a certain uniform amount. This constant radiation was then inter cepted by a plate of alum, and it was found that very different quantities of heat were transmitted through the alum in the different cases. Melloni concludes that the calorific rays issuing from the various diaphanous screens are, therefore, of different qualities, and possess what may be termed the diathermancy peculiar to each of the substances through which they have passed. One of his screens was made of green glass, and he found that a piece of alum trans mitted only 1 per cent, of the heat which had passed through this screen. Green glass and alum form, therefore, an antagonistic combination. These experiments suggest naturally a new analogy between dark heat and light which could not fail to strike Melloni, and accordingly we soon find him describing an experiment with the solar rays

transmitted through green glass and then intercepted by other