Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XII.djvu/735

OSNABRtfCK it forms a showy panicle. This species is also found in Europe, where it attains a much greater size than with us ; here it is rarely over 5 ft. high, but in favorable situations in Eng- land it not unfrequently grows to 8 or 10 ft., and specimens as high as 11 ft. have been OSSIAN 721 Eoyal Fern (Osmunda regalis). found. The other two species have their sterile fronds once pinnate. Clayton's flowering fern (0. Claytoniana) rarely exceeds 3 ft.; from two to five pairs of the divisions in the middle of the frond are fertile, and being covered with spore cases have a very different appearance from the rest of the frond. The third species is the cinnamon fern {0. cinnamomea), which differs from the others in having some of its fronds entirely fertile and the others, from the same rootstock, entirely sterile. This is very common in swamps and wet places, and in early spring the unfolding sterile fronds, clothed with a rusty wool, are conspicuous ; they become smooth when full-grown ; the fer- tile fronds are in the centre, 1 to 2 ft. long, and covered with bright cinnamon-colored spore cases ; these decay early, and the sterile fronds grow to a length of 4 or 5 ft. OSNABRUCK (commonly called in English Os- nciburg), a city of Prussia, in the province of Hanover, capital of a district, on the Hase, 71 m. W. of Hanover ; pop. in 1871, 23,308. It is surrounded with old walls, and the streets are crooked and narrow. Its cathedral was built in the 12th century. The final conference on the peace of Westphalia was held in the town hall in 1648. There are two gymnasia, two normal schools, and a school of midwifery. The manufactures consist of leather, linejns, woollens, iron, machinery, and especially to- bacco ; all of which have recently been stimu- lated by increased railway facilities. Osna- briick, with a considerable territory on both sides of the Hase, was until 1803 a bishopric, which owed its foundation to Charlemagne. By the terms of the peace of Westphalia it was agreed that it should be alternately gov- erned by a Roman Catholic and a Protestant bishop. The last bishop, Frederick of York, ceded the country to Hanover, in which it was designated a principality, and with Meppen, Lingen, and other territories formed the Land- drostei of its name. It afterward became part of the kingdom of Westphalia, then of the French empire, and after the fall of Napoleon reverted to Hanover. The inhabitants are of Saxon descent. The present diocese of Osna- briick embraces the entire district and East Friesland. OSNABURG. See OSBTABKUCK:. OSORIO, Hieronymo, a Portuguese author, born in Lisbon in 1506, died in Tavira, Aug. 20, 1580. He studied at Salamanca, Paris, and Bologna, and became archdeacon of Evora, and subsequently bishop of Silves. At the re- quest of Cardinal Henrique he wrote in Latin a history of the reign of King Emanuel (trans- lated into English by James Gibbs, 2 vols. 8vo, London, 1752). Among his other works is a treatise De Gloria Lilri V, so much admired for its pure Latinity that he has been called the Cicero of Portugal. A complete collection of his works was published in Rome by his nephew (4 vols. fol., 1592). His library was taken from Cadiz by Lord Essex in 1596, and added to the Bodleian library. OSPREY. See FISH HAWK. OSSIAtf, a Celtic bard, who is supposed to have flourished in the 2d or 3d century of the Christian era, and whose compositions in the Celtic language were for many ages preserved among the Scottish and Irish peasantry. His father Fingal was one of the most famous of the Celtic legendary heroes. Public attention was first called to the Celtic poetry of Scot- land by Alexander McDonald, who published in 1751 a volume of his own songs in Gaelic, in the English preface to which he proposed to make a collection of Gaelic poems still in existence in the highlands of Scotland, and, as he asserted, of great excellence. He is con- sidered the ablest of the modern Gaelic poets, and was a man of good character and of much general culture ; but the highlanders were at that time, in consequence of their recent re- bellion, very unpopular in the rest of Great Britain, and his project met with no encourage- ment. Jerome Stone, a person of Saxon de- scent, who was principal of an academy in a Gaelic district, and had mastered the language, published in the "Scots Magazine" in No- vember, 1755, a letter in which he said of the Gaelic : " There are compositions in it which for sublimity of sentiment, nervousness of ex- pression, and high-spirited metaphor are hardly to be equalled among the chief productions of the most cultivated nations." This letter at- tracted the attention of John Home, then cele- brated for his tragedy of "Douglas," and he consulted on the subject Prof. Ferguson of Edinburgh, a good Gaelic scholar, who con-