Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/832

772 O M A N E Omar s fascinating rhapsodies in praise of wine, love, and all earthly joys, to the fervent effusions of his heart so full of the most tender feelings and affections, and his passionate denunciations of a malevolent and inexorable fate which dooms to slow decay or sudden death and to eternal oblivion all that is great, good, and beautiful in this world. There is a touch of Byron, Swinburne, and even of Schopenhauer in many of his ruba fs, Avhich clearly proves that the modern pessimist is by no means a novel creature in the realm of philosophic thought and poetical imagination. The Leyden copy of Omar Khayyam s work on algebra was noticed as far back as 1742 by Gerald Meerman in the preface to his Specimen calculi fluxionalis ; further notices of the same work by Sedillot appeared in the Nouv. Jour. As., 1834, and in vol. xiii. of the Notices et Extraits ales MSS. de la Bibl. roy. The complete text, together with a French translation (on the basis of the Leyden and Paris copies, the latter first discovered by M. Libii, see his Histoire des sciences mathtmatiques en Italic, i. 300) ; was edited by F. Woepcke, L algebre d Omar Alkhayydmi, Paris, 1851. Arti cles on Omar s life and works are found in Remand s Geographic d Aboulfeda, pref., p. 101 ; Notices et Extraits, ix. 143 sq. ; Garcin de Tassy, Note sur les Rubaiydt de Omar Khaiydm, Paris, 1857 ; and Rieu, Cat. Pers. MSS. in the Br. Mus.. ii. p. 546. The quatrains have been edited at Calcutta, 1836, and Teheran, 1857 and 1862; text and French translation by J. B. Nicolas, Paris, 1867 (very incorrect and misleading) ; a portion of the same, ren dered in English verse, by E. Fitzgerald, London, 1859, 1872, and 1879. A new English version was published in Triibner s "Orien tal Series, 1882, by E. H. Whinfield, and the first critical edition of the text, with translation, by the same, 1883. (H. E.) OMAYYADS. See MOHAMMEDANISM. OMEN. See AUGURS, DIVINATION, and MAGIC. OMSK, the chief town of the government of Akmolinsk and capital of western Siberia, stands at the junction of the Om with the Irtish, on the great highway of Siberia, 1795 miles east of Moscow. Distant as it is from the great line of steamboat communication leading to Tomsk, the true commercial capital of western Siberia, Omsk has a purely administrative importance; its "fortress," or old earthwork, is now almost entirely abandoned. The town, situated in a wide steppe, broken only by the gently-sloping hill occupied by the fort, is almost entirely of wood. It has a military school, a lyceum, several lower schools, and a small public library. A " West Siberian branch of the Russian Geographical Society," opened in 1877, issues valu able publications. Its industries (candlemaking, tanning, and the like) are insignificant ; but the trade, chiefly in cattle, skins, and furs imported from the Kirghiz Steppe, and partly also in tea, is of some importance. The popu lation, which is entirely Russian, numbers about 31,000, of whom about 5000 are military. The fort " of Omsk was erected in 1716 to protect the series of block-houses on the Russian frontier, and, as two lines of block housesthat of the Ishim and that of the Irtish met at this point, it became a military centre. In consequence of frequent incur sions of the Kirghiz about the end of the last century, a stronger earthwork, with bastions and a stone gate, was erected on the right bank of the Om. From being a district town of the government of Tobolsk, Omsk became in 1839 the seat of the administration of western Siberia in anticipation of a further advance of the Russians towards the south. Since the conquest of Turkestan it has lost even this strategic importance. ON, or HELIOPOLIS. See EGYPT, vol. vii. p, 769. ONEGA, next to Ladoga the largest lake in Europe, having according to Strelbitskiy an area of 3763 square miles, is situated in the heart of the government of Olonetz in European Russia, and, discharging its waters by the Svir into Lake Ladoga, belongs to the system of the Neva. ^ The lake basin lies north-west and south-east, the same direction which is common to the lakes of Finland and to the line of glacier-scoring observed in this region. A straight line drawn from the village of Lumbuzha at the head of Povyenets Bay on the north to Oshta in the south measures 145 miles, but a considerable portion of it lies across the Zaonezhe peninsula^ The greatest width is 50 miles. Between the northern and southern divisions of the lake there is a considerable difference : while the latter has a comparatively regular outline, and contains hardly any islands, the former splits up into a number of inlets and is full of islands and submerged rocks. It is thus the northern division which brings the coast -line up to 860 miles and causes the navigation of the lake to be so dan gerous that previous to 1874, when additional buoys and beacons were laid down, the loss of life from shipwreck was about eighty persons per annum. The north-western shore between Petrozavodsk and the mouth of the river Lum buzha consists of dark clay slates generally in horizontal strata and broken by raised parallel bands of diorite. These bands extend far into the lake and are locally known as " hogs backs." The eastern shore (as far as the mouth of the Andoma) is for the most part alluvial, with out- croppings of red granite and in one place (the mouth of the Pyalma) diorite and dolomite. To the south-east are sedimentary Devonian rocks, and the general level of the coast is broken by Mount Andoma and Cape Petropav- lovskii (160 feet above the lake); to the south-west a quartzy sandstone (well known as a building and monu mental stone in St Petersburg) forms a fairly bold rim. Onega lies 236 feet above the sea. Towards the centre of the southern section a considerable area is upwards of 165 feet deep, and at one place a depth of 738 feet has been reached. The most important affluents, the Vodka, the Andoma, and the Vuiterga, come from the east. The Kumsa, a northern tributary, is sometimes represented in maps as if it connected the lake with Lake Seg, but the latter drains to the White Sea, and proposals to restore by means of a canal the communication which formerly existed here between the Arctic and Baltic basins have not yet been carried out. Lake Onega remains free from ice for 209 days in the year (middle of May to second week of December). The water is at its lowest level in the beginning of March ; by June it has risen 2 feet. A considerable population is scattered along the shores of the lake, mainly occupied in the timber trade, fisheries, and mining industries. Salmon, palya (a kind of trout), bur bot, pike, perchpike, and perch are among the fish caught in the lake. Steamboats were introduced in 1832. It is to be noted that the river Onega, which after a course of about 260 miles reaches the Gulf of Onega, an inlet of the White Sea, has no connexion with Lake Onega. At the mouth of this river (on the right bank) stands the district town and port of Onega (2275), which dates from settlements made by the people of Novgorod in the 15th century, and known in history as the Ustenskaya or Ustyanskaya volost. It has a cathedral (St Michael and the Holy Trinity), erected in 1796. ONEIDA COMMUNITY, in Madison co., New York, is a society which has attracted wide interest on account of its pecuniary success and its peculiar religious and social principles. Its founder, organizer, and controlling mind was John H. Noyes, who in 1834, while a student and licentiate of the theological seminary of Yale College, was led by his study of the New Testament to believe that the gospel of Christ, when fully accepted, secures present salvation from sin, and that the second coming of Christ, instead of being a future event, took place, according to promise, within a single generation of His first coming. Other religious doctrines at variance with popular theology were developed by Mr Noyes, such as that God is a dual being, Father and Son ; that God is in no sense responsible for the existence of evil, but that the author of evil, as the author of good, was uncreated ; that, the second coining of Christ being past, we are now living in a new dispensation of grace ; that personal spiritual communication with Christ and His risen church is possible, and when perfected secures salvation from all evil, including disease and death itself. These doctrines found their practical expression in a