Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/701

P E E P E R 669 river, 31 57 10" S. lat., 115 52 20" E. long., 12 miles above Freemantle and 1700 west-north-west of Melbourne. The streets are wide and regular, and the houses are built chiefly of brick and stone. It is the seat of an Anglican and of a Roman Catholic bishop. In addition to the cathedrals the principal buildings are the town-hall, built entirely by convict labour, the mechanics institute, the governor s palace, and the high school. Perth was founded in 1829, received a municipal constitution in 1856, and was created a city in 1880. In the same year railway communication was opened up by means of the Eastern Railway. The population of the city, including the military, in 1871 was 5007, and in 1881 it was 5044. PERTHES, FRIEDRICH CHRISTOPH (1772-1843), German publisher, was born at Rudolstadt on 21st April 1772. At the age of fifteen he became an apprentice in the service of Bohme, a bookseller in Leipsic, with whom he remained about six years. In Hamburg, where he settled in 1793 as an assistant to the bookseller Hoffmann, he started in 1796 a bookselling business of his own, in developing which he soon gave evidence of remarkable tact, energy, and intelligence. In 1798 he entered into partnership with his brother-in-law, J. H. Besser, with whose aid he rapidly succeeded in forming an establishment which commanded universal confidence and respect. By his marriage with a daughter of the poet Matthias Claudius (in 1797) he was brought into intimate relation with a group of Protestant writers, who, although of a liberal tendency, retained a strong belief in the essential doctrines of Christianity ; and they exercised a powerful influence on the growth of his religious opinions. This, however, did not prevent him from being on friendly terms with a number of eminent Roman Catholic authors. Perthes was an ardent patriot ; and during the period of Napoleon s supremacy he distinguished himself by his steady resist ance to French pretensions. His zeal for the national cause led him to issue (in 1810-11) Das Deutsche Museum, to which many of the foremost publicists in Germany contributed. For some time the French made it impos sible for him to live in Hamburg; and when, in 1814, he returned, he found that his business had greatly fallen off and that it would have to be thoroughly reorganized. In 1821, his first" wife having died, he left Hamburg, trans ferring his business there to his partner, and went to Gotha, where he established what ultimately became one of the first publishing houses in Germany. Among other important works issued by him may be named the Theo- logische Studien und Kritiken and the Geschichte der europaischen Staaten, the latter conducted in the first instance by Heeren and Ukert, afterwards by Giesebrecht. Perthes died at Gotha on 18th May 1843. Of the three sons of Perthes, the youngest, A. H. T. Perthes, succeeded him as a publisher. The elder sons became authors of some eminence, and one of them, C. T. Perthes, wrote an excellent biography of his father, Friedrich Perthes Leben. In 1785 a pub lishing house was founded in Gotha by the uncle of F. C. Perthes, J. G. Justus Perthes, whose son Wilhelm became distinguished as a publisher of works relating to geography. Bernhard Wilhelm, "Wilhelm s son, who succeeded to the business in 1853 and died in 1857, greatly extended its operations. In 1854 he established a geographical institute, and the MMheilungcn aus Justus Perthes gcographischem Institut, conducted by A. Petermann, soon gained a European reputation. This house issues the Almanack de Gotha, and has published the maps and writings of many of the most eminent German geographers and travellers. PERTINAX, HELVIUS, Roman emperor, was the son of a charcoal-burner, and was born in 126 A.D. in Liguria, or at Villa Martis among the Apennines. From being a teacher of grammar he rose through many important offices, both civil and military, to the consulate, which he held twice. Chosen on 31st December 192 to succeed the murdered Commodus, he was himself assassinated in a mutiny of the soldiers after a reign of eighty-six days. PERTZ, GEORG HEINRICH (1795-1876), editor of the Monumental Germanise, Historica, was born at Hanover on 28th March 1795. From 1813 to 1818 he studied at Gottingen, chiefly under Heeren. His graduation thesis, published in 1819, on the history of the Merovingian mayors of the palace, attracted the attention of Baron Stein, by whom he was engaged in 1820 to edit the Caro- lingian chroniclers of the newly-founded Historical Society of Germany. In search of materials for this purpose, Pertz made a prolonged tour through Germany and Italy, and on his return in 1823 he received at the instance of Stein the principal charge of the entire work of the society, which was to be the publication, under the title of Monumenta Germanise Historica, of accurate texts of all the more im portant historical writers on German affairs down to the year 1500, as well as of laws, imperial and regal archives, and other valuable documents, such as letters, falling within this period. In the discharge of this, the principal task of his life, Pertz made frequent journeys of exploration to the leading libraries and public record offices of Europe, pub lishing notes on the results of his explorations in the Arc/iiv der Gesellsch. f. Deutsche Geschichtskunde (1824-72). In 1823 he had been made secretary of the archives, and in 1827 principal keeper of the royal library at Hanover; from 1832 to 1837 he edited the Hannover- ische Zeitung, and more than once sat as a representative in the Hanoverian Second Chamber. In 1842 he was called as chief librarian to Berlin, where he shortly after wards was made a privy councillor and a member of the Academy of Sciences. Failing health and strength led to the resignation of all his appointments in 1874, and on 7th October 1876 he died at Munich while attending the sittings of the historical commission. The Monumenta, with which the name of Pertz is so closely asso ciated, began to appear in 1826, and at the date of his resignation 24 volumes ("Scriptores," "Leges," "Diplomata") had appeared. The work, which for the first time made possible the existence of the modern school of scientific historians of mediaeval Germany, continues to be carried on under Waitz, Wattenbach, Diimmler, and others. In connexion with the Monumenta Pertz also pub lished Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum Scliolarum ; among his other literary labours may be mentioned an edition of the GcsammcUe Werke of Leibnitz, and a life of Stein (Lcben des Ministers Freiherrn vom Stein, 6 vols., 1849-55; also, in an abridged form, Aus Stein s Leben, 2 vols., 1856), P E EU lelX. ~T)ERU has, in different periods, included areas of terri- _L tory of varying extent. The empire of the Yncas and the Spanish viceroyalty were not conterminous with the modern republic nor with each other. In the present article the sections relating to physical geography and the moral and material condition of the people will be confined to the limits of the republic, while in the historical section there will necessarily be references to events which took place beyond the existing limits of the country. Extent. The republic of Peru is situated between the Extent. equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, yet, owing to the differences of elevation, it includes regions with every variety of climate. It lies between the parallels of 3 21 S. and 19 10 S. and between 68 and 81 20 45" W. long., and has an area of about 480,000 square miles. 1 The 1 Before the war with Chili the southern limit of Peru was in 22 23 S. lat., the coast-line measured 1400 miles, and the area was 504,000 square miles (see p. 679 below).