Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/575

N O D N I 531 NODDY, the name applied, originally by sailors, to a sea-bird from its showing so little fear of man as to be accounted stupid. It is the Sterna stolida of Linnaeus, and the Anous stolidus of modern ornithology, having the figure of a TERN (q.v.), and belonging to the sub-family Sterninse, but is heavier in flight, with shorter wings and the tail less deeply forked. The plumage is of a uniform sooty hue, excepting the crown of the head, which is light grey. The Noddy is very generally distributed through out the tropical or nearly tropical oceans, but occasionally wanders into colder climates, and has been met with even in the Irish Sea. It breeds, often in astounding numbers, on low cays and coral-islets, commonly making a shallow nest of sea-weed or small twigs, which may be placed on the ground, on a tuft of grass, or in the fork of a tree, while sometimes it lays its eggs on a bare rock. Mr Saunders (Proc. Zool. Society, 1876, pp. 669-672) admits four other species of the genus : Anous tenuirostris, supposed to be confined to the southern part of the Indian Ocean, from Madagascar to West Australia ; A. melanogenys, often con founded with the last, but having nearly as wide a range as the first; and A. leucocapillus, hitherto known only from Torres Strait and the Southern Pacific. These three have much resemblance to A. stolidus, but are smaller in size, and the two latter have the crown white instead of grey. The fourth species, A. cseruleus (with which he in cludes the A. cinereus of some authors), differs not incon siderably, being of a dove-colour, lighter on the head and darker on the back, the wings bearing a narrow white bar, with their quill-feathers blackish-brown, while the feet are reddish and the webs yellow. Three more species A. mperdliosus from the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, A. plumbeigularis from the Red Sea, and A. galapagensis from the Galapagos have been added by Mr. Sharpe (Philos. Transactions, clxviii. pp. 468, 469), who also con siders (Proc. Zool. Society, 1878, p. 272) A. cinereus of the Eastern Pacific to be distinct from A. c&ruleus of Australia and the "Western Pacific. (A. N.) NODIER, CHARLES (c. 1780-1844), a writer of greater intrinsic merit and more importance in the history of French literature than is generally recognized, was born at Besancon somewhat less than ten years before the outbreak of the Revolution, but the exact date is strangely uncertain. Besancon for the place and the 29th of April for the day of the month appear to be agreed upon, but the year is some times given as 1780, sometimes as 1781, and sometimes as 1783. The earliest seems the most probable. His father was a lawyer of some distinction and had been a- teacher of law, and after the outbreak of the Revolution he was appointed mayor of Besangon and consequently chief police magistrate. He seems, from some euphemistic expressions of his friends, to have rather lent himself as an instrument to the tyranny of the Jacobins than to have shared their principles ; but his son was for a time an ardent citizen, and is said to have been a club member when he could at the most have been twelve years old. His education in these troublesome times was necessarily haphazard, but appears to have been sufficient. His love of books began very early, and he combined with it, what is not perhaps very often character istic of the bibliophile proper, a strong interest in natural science. The dates of his early life are given very sparingly, and the chief authority for the details of it is his own Souvenirs, a not very trustworthy source. Having obtained and then lost the post of librarian in his native town, he went to Paris and plunged into literature. He had pub lished a dissertation on the antennae in insects as early as 1 798 at Besangon. Entomology continued to be a favourite study with him, but he varied it with philology and pure literature Le Peintre de Salzbourg dates from this early period and even political writing. A " skit " on Napoleon in 1803 got him into trouble, which was not very serious. He was obliged, or thought himself obliged, to quit Paris, and for some years lived a very unsettled life at Besangon, Dole (where he married), and other places. In 1811 he appears at Laibach in the singular character of editor of a polyglot journal, the Illyrian Telegraph, published in French, German, Italian, and Slav. Then he returned to Paris, and the restoration found him, or made him, an ardent royalist. Literary and journalistic work of all kinds filled up his time, until in 1823 he was appointed to the librarian- ship of the Bibliotheque de 1 Arsenal. He was not dis turbed in this post by the revolution of July, but, on the contrary, was elected a member of the Academy in 1833, and made a member of the Legion of Honour in 1843, a year before his death, which happened on 27th January 1844. These twenty years at the arsenal were by far the most im portant and fruitful of Nodier s life. He had much of the Bohemian in his composition, and the wandering and un settled life that he had led was more favourable to the cultivation of this feature of his character than to the pro duction of solid work. His post at the arsenal was not very lucrative, and even after his appointment his way of life is said by some chroniclers not to have been extraordinarily regular. But he had the advantage of a settied home in which to collect rare books (for which he had a real vocation), and to study them ; and, what was of still more importance, he was able to supply a centre and rallying place to a knot of young literary men of greater individual talent than him self the so-called Romantics of 1 830 and to colour their tastes and work very decidedly with his own predilections. Much older than most of them, possessing a literary reputa tion already formed, though resting on no single work of great importance, with very decided idiosyncrasies and a considerable power of personally influencing his associates, Nodier must be credited with no small part in the making of the men of 1830. His own literary work is abundant, but much of it is obsolete, much more mere miscellanies, much injured by hasty production, and some, it is said, is not due to himself. His best and most characteristic work, some of which is exquisite in its kind, consists partly of short tales of a more or less fantastic character, partly of nondescript articles, half bibliographic, half narrative, the nearest analogue to which in English is to be found in some of the papers of De Quincey. The best examples of the latter are to be found in the volume entitled Melanges tires d une Petite Bibliotheque, pub lished in 1829 and afterwards continued. Of his tales the best are Smarra (1821), Histoire du Eoi de Boheme et de ses sept Chateaux (1830), La Fee aux Miettes (1832), hies de las Sierras (1837), Legende de Sceur Beatrix (1838), together with some fairy stories published in the year of his death, and Franciscus Columna, which appeared after it. The Souvenirs de Jeunessc (1832), already referred to, are in teresting but untrustworthy, and the Dictionnaire Universel de la Lang ue Franqaisc (1823), a book of considerable merit, which, in the days before Littre, was one of the most useful of its kind, is said to have been not wholly or mainly Nodier s. His chief tales are acces sible in three or four volumes of the Bibliotheque Charpentier, and the best yield to few things in French for charm of style and especi ally for the rendering of fantastic and picturesque sentiment, but they are very unequal. There is a so-called collection of (Euvrcs Completes, in 12 vols., 1832, "but at that time much of the author s best work had not appeared, and it included but a part of what was actually published. NOETUS, a presbyter of the church of Asia Minor about 230 A.D., was a native of Smyrna, where (or perhaps in Ephesus) he became a prominent representative of the particular type of Christology which is now technically called modalistic monarchianism (see vol. xvi. p. 719). His views, which led to his excommunication from the Asiatic church, are known to us chiefly through the con troversial writings of Hippolytus, his contemporary. NOIRMOUTIER, an island of France belonging to the department of Vendee, and protecting the Bay of Bourgneuf on the south-west. Between the island and the mainland is a sandbank laid bare at low water, and crossed by an embankment and carriage road, which is continually kept