Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/557

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NIN—NIO
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NING-PO, or Ning-po-foo (i.e., City of the Hospitable Waves), a great city of China, one of the five seaports thrown open to foreign trade in 1842 by the treaty of Nanking, and the principal emporium of the province of Chekeang, stands in a fine plain bounded by mountains towards the west, on the left bank of the Takia or Ning-po river, about 16 miles from its mouth, in 29° 51′ N. lat. and 121° 32′ E. long. It is surrounded by a fine old wall, 25 feet high and 16 feet broad, pierced by six gates and two passages for ships in its circuit of 4 to 5 miles. Just within the walls there is a considerable belt of open ground, and in many places the ramparts are thickly covered with jasmine and honeysuckle. In ascending the river a stranger’s eye is first caught by the numerous huge ice-houses with high thatched roofs and by a tall white tower—the Tien-fung-tah or Ning-po pagoda or obelisk—which rises to a height of 160 feet, and has fourteen stories and seven tiers of windows, but has unfortunately been stripped of its galleries and otherwise damaged. Another striking structure in the heart of the city is the Drum Tower, dating from before the 15th century. As is natural in a place long celebrated for its religious and educational pre-eminence, there is no lack of temples, monasteries, and colleges, but few of these are of any architectural significance. Brick is the ordinary building material, and the dwelling-houses are mostly of one story. Silks, cottons, carpets, furniture, white-wood carvings, and straw hats are the chief products of the local industry. Large salt-works are carried on in the vicinity, and thousands of fishermen are engaged, mainly between April and July, in catching the cuttle-fish. In spite of the powerful competition of Shanghai, Ning-po has a valuable foreign trade. It is regularly visited by the vessels of the China Navigation Company and the Chinese Merchants Steam Navigation Company. From 216,191 register tons in 1873 the tonnage of the port had increased to 303,109 in 1880,—British shipping having advanced from 18,592 tons to 86,175, and Chinese shipping from 17,972 to 209,487, though on the other hand the American total had sunk from 170,351 to 2100. The principal import is opium, £982,507 being the average value of the annual quantity between 1876 and 1880. Lead for packing tea was formerly a leading item, but it now enters mainly by other ports. Straw or grass hats, straw mats, samshu (from the Shaou-hing district), Chinese drugs, vegetable tallow, and fish are among the chief exports; in 1877 (the maximum year) the hats numbered 13,724,822, though in 1863 they had only amounted to 40,000, and the mats, mainly despatched to South China, average from 500,000 to 1,000,000. After the storming of Chinhai—the fortified town at the mouth of the river on October 10, 1841, the British forces quietly took possession of Ning-po on the 12th. In 1864 the Taipings held the town for six months. Missions are maintained in Ning-po by the Romish Church, by the Church Missionary Society (1848), the American Presbyterians, the Reformed Wesleyans, the China Inland Mission (1857), &c. A mission hospital was instituted in 1843. The population of the city and suburbs is estimated at from 400,000 to 500,000.

NINIAN (Ninianus or Nynias), St, was, according to the earliest account of him we possess, that of Bede (H. E., iii. 4), a bishop of the nation of the Britons who had been trained at Rome in the doctrine and discipline of the Western Church, and who built at Leukopibia (a town of Ptolemy’s Novantae, on the west side of Wigtown Bay, the modern Whithorn) a stone church, called Candida Casa, dedicated to St Martin of Tours. He is said to have converted the Picts to the south of the Grampians. An old Irish account mentions that he spent his last years in Ireland, where he founded a church in Leinster called Cluain Conaire; he was afterwards commemorated there under the name of Monenn (“Nenn” being simply “Ninian” with the Irish mo, or “my,” prefixed). There is some evidence that the founding of Candida Casa took place in the year of the death of Martin of Tours (397). The date of Ninian’s own death is unknown; he is commemorated in the Roman martyrology on September 16. See Skene, Celtic Scotland, vol. ii. A Life of St Ninian, compiled in the 12th century by St Ailred of Rievaux, and edited by the late Bishop Forbes, is given in the fifth volume of The Historians of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1874.

NIOBE is a figure who appears in the legends of many parts of Greece, especially Thebes, Argos, and the Hermus valley. Proud of her numerous family, she scoffed at Leto as the mother of only two children. Apollo and Artemis, the children of Leto, slew all her children with their arrows; and Niobe, after vainly trying to defend them, wept over them till she became a rock which still weeps incessantly. It is probable that this tale was in its simplest form a myth of the annual destruction of the bloom of earth by the shafts of the cruel sun-god, and that Niobe was a form of the mother-goddess, the goddess of all earthly life, whose progeny is thus slain every summer. The tragedians read in this tale a moralized myth of the instability of human bliss: Niobe became a representative of human nature, ever liable to become proud in prosperity and to forget the submission and respect due to the gods. In this form the legend has found permanent acceptance in literature and art. The metamorphosis of Niobe was adopted from the local legends of the Smyrna district; here it is probable that Niobe was originally a title of the Meter Sipylene, the deity worshipped all round the sacred mountain of Sipylus. An archaic figure of the goddess, carved in the northern side of the mountain near Magnesia, gave rise to the tales current in this district, that Niobe had thrown herself down from the rock, or that she had been turned into stone. It seems necessary to distinguish from this archaic figure, which is still visible, the “Niobe” described by Pausanias and Quintus Smyrnæus, both natives of the district. This was an appearance assumed by a cliff in Sipylus when seen from a distance and from the proper point of view. In these later writers the genuine old local legend had been replaced by a new form, founded on the myth as developed by the tragedians; the archaic figure carved in the cliff was known by the natives to be an image of the mother-goddess, whom they worshipped there year by year. But, as with every other point in the legend in its most developed form, the natives had a local representative, of the Niobe, the weeping rock, which they saw in the heart of Sipylus.

On the myth of Niobe and its artistic representation, especially on the famous group thought to be the work of Praxiteles or Scopas, copies of most of the figures in which are preserved at Florence, see Stark, Niobe und die Niobiden. On the “Niobe” in Mount Sipylus, see Hirschfield in Curtius, Beiträge zur Gesch. u. Topogr. Kleinasiens; Stark, Nach dem griechischen Orient; Ramsay, “Sipylos and Cybele,” in Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1882.

NIOBIUM, a very rare chemical element which was discovered by H. Rose in 1846 as a component of the columbite of Bodenmais. In it, as also in tantalite, pyrochlore, yttro-tantalite, and a few other rare minerals, it is constantly associated with tantalum, which was discovered by Ekkeberg in 1802. Both metals, with vanadium, form a kind of appendage to the nitrogen group of elements. Like these they are capable of forming acid pentoxides and corresponding chlorides and oxychlorides. The oxychlorides and oxyfluorides, NbOCl₃ and NbOF₃, were originally thought by Rose to be peculiar (unmixed) chlorides and fluorides of niobium, until Blomstrand ascertained their true nature. The atomic weights of the two elements are Ta=182 and Nb=94.