Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/263

P A R P A E 245 was applied not only to the country between Rio Paraguay and Rio Parana, but to the whole Spanish territory, which now comprises parts of Brazil, the republic of Uruguay, and the Argentine provinces of Buenos Ayres, Entre Rios, Corrientes, Misiones, and part of Santa Fe It was not till 1620 that Paraguay proper and Rio de la Plata or Buenos Ayres were separated from each other as distinct governments, and they were both dependent on the vice -royalty of Peru till 1776, when Buenos Ayres was erected into a vice-royalty, and Paraguay placed under its jurisdiction. In the history of Paraguay down to the latter part of the 18th century, the interest develops along two main lines, which from time to time get entangled with each other the struggle between Spaniard and Portuguese for the possession of the border region between the Brazils and the country of the plains, and the formation and defence of a great philanthropic despotism by the Jesuits. The first Christian mis sions in Paraguay were established by the Franciscans Armenta, Lebron, Solano (who was afterwards canonized as the apostle of Paraguay), and Bolanos between 1542 and 1560 ; but neither they nor the first Jesuit missionaries, Salonio, Field, and Ortega, were allowed to make their enterprise a permanent success. This fell to the lot of the second band of Jesuits, Cataldino, Mazeta, and Lorenzana, who began work in 1605. The methods by which they controlled and disciplined the Guaranis have been described in the article AMERICA. 1 The greater number of the Jesuit "reductions" lay outside of the present limits of the republic, in the country south of the Parana, which now forms the two Argentine provinces of Corrientes and Misiones. La Guayra, one of the most celebrated, is in the Brazilian province of Parana. Though they succeeded in establishing a kind of imperium in imperio, and were allowed to drill the natives to the use of arms, the Jesuits never held rule in the government of Paraguay ; indeed they had nearly as often to defend themselves from the hostility of the governor and bishop at Asuncion as from the actual invasions of the Paulistas or Portu guese settlers of Sao Paulo. It was only by the powerful assistance of Zabala, governor of Buenos Ayres that the Anti-Jesuit and quasi- national party which had been formed under Antequera was crushed in 1735. In 1750 Ferdinand VI. of Spain ceded to the Portuguese, in exchange for the fortified village of Colonia del Sacramento (Uruguay), both the district of La Guayra and a territory of some 20,000 square miles to the east of the Uruguay. Seven of their reductions being included in this area, the Jesuits determined to resist the transference, and it was only after several engagements that they were defeated by the combined forces of Spain and Portu gal. The treaty which they thus opposed was revoked by Spain in 1761, but the missions never recovered their prosperity, and the Jesuits were finally expelled the country in 1767. In 1811 Paraguay declared itself independent of Spain ; by 1814 it was a despotism in the hands of Dr FRANCIA (q.v.). On Francia s death in 1840, the chief power passed to his nephew Carlos Antonio LOPEZ (q.v.), and he was in 1862 succeeded by his son Francisco Solano Lopez, whose ambitious schemes of conquest resulted in the almost total extinction of Paraguayan nationality. The three allies, Uruguay, Brazil, and the Argentine Republic, which united against him, bound themselves by the treaty of 1865 to respect and guaran tee for five years the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Paraguay, and at the close of the war in 1870 a new constitution was established, and a president, Jovellanos, appointed under their protection. Reduced to utter helplessness, the country owes its continued existence to the jealousy and balance of power existing between its neighbours. By a separate treaty with Brazil in 1872 it undertook to pay the cost of the Avar 40,000,000 to Brazil, 7,000,000 to the Argentine Republic, and 200,000 to Uruguay, or more than 136 per head of the population. An attempt made in 1873 by Messrs Robinson and Fleming to establish an English colony of so-called Lincolnshire farmers ended in disaster. Somewhat better success has as yet attended the German colony of San Bernardino on Lake Ipacanay (414 colonists in 1879). The Brazilian army of occupation was withdrawn only in 1876. Of older woflts on Paraguay the most important are Azara s Voyages dans / Amerique Meridionals, Paris, 1809; and Chnrlevoix, Histoire, already referred to. As commissioner for the settlement (in 1781) of the frontier between Spanish and Portuguese territory, Azara enjoyed exceptional opportunities of informa tion. Lozano s Hist, de la Conquista del Paraguay (used in MS. by Azara) was first printed at liuenos Ayres, 1873-74. Ulrich Schmidt (often, even in editions of his work, called Schmidel or Sohmidels), a German adventurer, left a narrative of the first Spanish expeditions, which was published at Frankfort in 1563. Like much else of the older literature it is included in Pedro de Angelis, Coleccion de (locum, hist, del Rio de la Plata, 1835, <fcc., and in De Bry s similar collection, as well as in Barcia s ffistoriadores. A systematic narrative of events in the Spanish period is given in Gregorio Funes, Ensayo de la hist, civil del Paraguay, Jlnenos Aires, y Tucuman. 3 vols., Buenos Aire s, 1816; Washburn s History of Paraguay, Boston, 1871, deals with later times. See also Dobrizhoffer, Hint, de Abiponibui; Page, La Plata, &c., New York. 1867; Mansfield, Paraguay, &c., London, 18.56; Burton, Letters from the Battlefield* of Paraguay, 1870; Mulhall, Handbook of the River Plate Republics, 1875; Mrs Mulhall, Between the Amazon and Andes, 1881 ; K. F. Knight, Cruise of the Falcon, 1883. (H. A. W.) 1 See Duran, Relation, 1638 ; Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista Espi- ritual del Paraguay, 1 639 ; Muratori s panegyrical II Cristianesimo Jelice, 1743 ; Charlevoix, Histoire de Paraguay, 1756; Davie, Letters Jrom Paraguay, 1805, &c. PARAGUAY RIVER. See PLATE RIVER. PARAHYBA, or PARAIBA, distinguished as Parahyba do Norte from Parahyba do Sul or S. Joao de Parahyba to the south of Rio de Janeiro, is a city of Brazil on the right bank of the river of the same name, 1 2 miles from the sea, at the terminus of a railway running 87 miles into the interior. It is divided into a lower commercial town and an upper town containing the governor s residence and other public buildings. From December to March the climate is not considered healthy. The harbour, ob structed by several reefs, has a depth of 15 feet, but vessels ground at low water; there is safe anchorage, however, at Cabedello at the mouth of the river. The population, which was 40,000 about 1845, has decreased to between 12,000 and 14,000, and direct trade with Europe has been given up since 1840. Sugar, cotton, and india-rubber are still exported. PARALLAX may be denned, generally, as the change produced in the apparent place of an object when it is viewed from a point other than that of reference. In astronomy, the places of the moon and planets are referred to the centre of the earth, those of the fixed stars to the centre of the sun. It is shown in ASTRONOMY (vol. ii. p. 775) that, the maximum or horizontal parallax of a celestial object being known, its parallax from any point of observation can be calculated. The present article will be restricted to an account of the methods employed for determining the solar and lunar parallaxes and those of the fixed stars. SOLAR PARALLAX. The sun s mean equatorial hori zontal parallax (termed briefly the " solar parallax ") is the angle which the equatorial radius of the earth would subtend to an observer at the sun when the earth is at mean distance from the sun. For its determination it would appear only necessary to observe the sun s apparent position simultaneously 2 from two widely different points on the earth s surface ; the difference of the apparent positions will be due to displacement by parallax, from which displacement the mean equatorial horizontal parallax can be readily deduced. The requirements of modern astronomy demand that the solar parallax shall be determined with an accuracy of YuW P ar ^ f i^ s amoun t that is, within less than y^ part of a second of arc. But measures in the neighbour hood of the sun cannot be made with any approach to this accuracy, not only on account of the effect of the sun s heat on the various parts of the instruments employed, but also of the atmospheric currents created by heat, which tend to destroy steady atmospheric definition and to render the solar image incapable of exact observation. It is thus hopeless to look for any solution of the problem by the most direct method. Two courses remain either to seek some method which affords a larger angle to measure, or one which permits a mode of observation affording a higher precision. There are many relations to the solar parallax which are well established. (1) The parallax of the moon is known with very consider able precision by direct determination. The proportion of this parallax to that of the sun is an important term in the lunar theory, and the constant of this term (the parallactic inequality 3 ) is a known function of the solar parallax. Hence, if the constant of the parallactic inequality is independently determined, the solar parallax becomes known. The elements of the orbits of Venus and 2 In using the word simultaneously the reader must understand that, though it is impossible for two widely separated observers to make precisely simultaneous observations, yet there is no difficulty (since the apparent motion of the sun is accurately known) in reducing the observations so as to represent the resiilt as if the two observations had been made at the same instant. 3 See ASTRONOMY, vol. ii. p. 796.