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238 ALARIO ALARM paid allies of the empire. On the death of Theodosius (395), who divided the empire be- tween his two sons, Alaric, profiting by the weakness resulting from the division, invaded Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly, and central Greece, without meeting resistance on the part of Eufinus, the lieutenant of the emperor Ar- cadius. Athens was obliged to pay a ransom. Alaric entered the Peloponnesus, where he was encountered in Elis by a powerful army under Stilicho, the lieutenant of Honorius, emperor of the West. Stilicho tried to surround the Goths on the banks of the Peneus, but Alaric broke through his army, escaped with his plunder and prisoners to Illyricum, concluded peace with Arcadius, and was made by him the commander of the eastern division of that country in 396. From Illyricum, in 402, Alaric invaded Italy. Honorius shut himself up in Ravenna, while Alaric, marching through northern Italy toward Gaul, was met and de- feated by Stilicho near Pollentia on the Tanaro (403) and obliged to retreat. He sustained a second defeat hi the same year near Verona, after which he returned to Illyricum, and con- cluded a treaty with Honorius, undertaking to invade the eastern empire and join his army with that of Stilicho in Epirus. This project being afterward abandoned by Honorius, Ala- ric claimed a compensation for the cost of his armaments and march, and was promised 4,000 pounds of gold. Stilicho, who made the prom- ise in the name of the emperor, being beheaded in 408, and the promise broken, Alaric invaded Italy, invested Rome, and received as ransom from the city 5,000 pounds of gold and 30,000 pounds of silver. Further negotiations for peace having proved unsuccessful, Alaric for the second time laid siege to Rome. Hunger obliged the city to conclude an arrangement, and in compliance with the will of the con- queror the senate elected as emperor the Ro- man general Attains. Shortly afterward, being dissatisfied with the incapacity of his nominee, Alaric ordered him to resign. Renewed nego- tiations with Honorius were unsuccessful, pend- ing which Alaric's army was treacherously attacked near Ravenna, and he undertook the siege of Rome for the third time. On August 24, 410, he took the city by assault, and it was plundered by the Goths for three days. After remaining there six days, Alaric marched out, intending to make the conquest of Sicily, but died soon after in Cosenza. The Goths, it is related, turned from its bed the stream of the Busento, to bury their chief there, with all his treasures ; and all the prisoners who performed the work of digging were killed, that the Ro- mans might never be able to find the place where the remains of the king were deposited. II. King of the Visigoths, succeeded his father Euric in 484, died in 507. His dominions extended S. from the Loire and Rh6ne over Hispania Tarraconensis and Bsetica, thus cov- ering the S. W. third of the present territory of France and nearly the whole of Spain. He was peaceful and tolerant, and, though an Arian in religion, granted many privileges to the orthodox Catholics. Clovis, king of the Franks, made religion a pretext for invading Gothia, and defeated Alaric at Vougl6, near Poitiers. Alaric fled, but was overtaken and killed. Theodoric, king of Italy, the father-in- law of the slam monarch, became regent during the minority of Alaric's son Amalaric, com- pelled the Franks to give up their conquests, and put down a rebellion of the supporters of Alaric's bastard son Gesalic. ALARM, an instrument to give notice by sound. In its most ordinary form it consists of a bell and a hammer, combined with an escapement that lets it free at the proper time, when a descending weight or a spring makes it strike the bell. Burglar alarms are of vari- ous forms. Some consist in an arrangement for firing a pistol, and are connected either with the lock or with the door. Some of them are so arranged as to shoot the thief at the same time that they wake up the inmates. An alarm for this purpose may always be put up at a moment's notice, by stretching a string across the hall, one end attached to the knob of a door and the other to the trigger of a pis- tol, or to some glass or brass vessel placed on the edge of a table or at the top of a flight of stairs, which will tumble down with a noise the moment the string is pulled by any one opening the door or crossing the hall. An alarm is easily made by arranging the wires in the circuit of a galvanic battery in such manner that the circuit may be broken when a door or window is opened; the falling of an elec- tro-magnet which was supported by the elec- trical current then gives the motive power for ringing a bell or other sound-producing instru- ment. An alarm clock is a clock for sleeping rooms, provided with an alarm that may be wound up to strike at any appointed time, and so awake the sleeper. It consists of an ordi- nary clock with an alarm attached, which re- quires to be wound up at a separate keyhole from that which winds the clock, and after each alarm requires rewinding to give it im- pulse for another. The alarm is commonly set, to go off at the required hour, by means of a disk which lies under the hour hand of the clock, revolving upon the same axis and with that hand. The disk has the 12 hours printed in the same order and position as on the clock face, and when this disk is brought into the same position as the clock face, that is, having the 12 on the disk at its highest point, the clock then by mechanism sets off the alarm. In order to cause the alarm to sound at 4 o'clock, for instance, the number 4 on the disk is brought under the hour hand, which latter carries the disk forward till 4 o'clock, and at this moment the 12 on the disk will be at its highest point and the alarm is set off. The fire-damp alarm is an important invention, due to M. Chuart fron France, and liberally given by him to the public. It consists of a small ball of glass or