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PADUCAH PJEONY 785 paintings in 319 compartments, said to have been designed by Giotto, but entirely repainted after having been several times damaged by fire and water. The cathedral is said to have been designed by Michel Angelo, but it was not completed till 1754. It has some good paint- ings. The baptistery, a Lombard building of the 12th century, contains many interesting frescoes. The bishop's and governor's palaces are also worthy of notice, the latter having a remarkable clock tower. The church of Sant' Antonio, the adjoining school, and the church of Santa Giustina are rich in works of art. In front of the latter is the Prato della Valle, an oval surrounded by a small canal and decorated with about 80 statues, two of which are by Canova. In the midst of the Arena, the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre afterward converted into a fortress, is a chapel built by Giotto and adorned with some of his best paintings. The university of Padua, founded early in the 13th century, was a famous school of law and medi- cine, and is still the most celebrated seat of the latter science in Italy. It has also faculties of theology, law, and humanities, and in 1873 had 65 professors and 1,121 students. The present edifice was begun in 1493, and the interior court, by Palladio, has great beauty. The bo- tanic garden of Padua, established in 1543, is the oldest in Europe. The city has a celebra- ted society of arts and sciences, museums, an observatory, and extensive libraries, that of the university numbering 100,000 volumes. It manufactures silks, ribbons, leather, and wool- len cloth, and trades in wine, oil, cattle, and garden vegetables. Padua is one of the most ancient cities of Italy, and according to tradi- tion was founded by Antenor after the fall of Troy. In 1274 a skeleton enclosed in a marble sarcophagus and grasping a sword was dug up in Padua, and at once pronounced to be that of the Trojan founder. The sword was given to Alberto della Scala in 1334, and the sarcopha- gus now rests under a fialdacchino in one of the streets. The ancient Patavium was one of the most important cities of Venetia. Even after it fell under the power of the Romans it continued for some time to be one of the first cities of upper Italy. Livy was a native of it. Although sacked by Attila in 452 and by the Lombards in 601, it became in the 10th cen- tury once more an important place. In 1239 it became subject to Ezzelino, but after his defeat in 1259 was long independent. In the early part of the 14th century it passed into the hands of the house of Carrara, and in 1405 became subject to Venice, with which it was transferred to Austria by the treaty of Campo Formio in 1797. In 1866 it became, with the rest of Venetia, part of the kingdom of Italy. PADUCAH, a city and the capital of McCrack- en co., Kentucky, on the Ohio river, just below the mouth of the Tennessee, 47 m. above the Mississippi and 322 m. below Louisville, and on the Louisville, Paducah, and Southwestern, and the Paducah and Memphis railroads, 215 m. W. S. W. of Frankfort; pop. in 1850, 2,428; in 1860, 4,590; in 1870, 6,866, of whom 2,001 were colored; in 1875, about 12,000. Paducah is the shipping point of the surrounding country, the chief productions of which are tobacco, pork, and grain. It con- tains four tobacco warehouses, two tobacco stemmeries, a pork-packing house, two large flouring mills, two saw mills, two planing mills, a rolling mill, four shoe factories, two iron founderies, two tobacco factories, &c. There are four banks, a large county court house, a city court house, a female seminary, several public and private schools, two daily and four weekly newspapers, and 15 churches, viz. : Baptist (2), Christian (2), Episcopal, Jewish, Lutheran, Methodist (3), Presbyterian (2), Re- formed, Roman Catholic, and Universalist. Paducah was laid out in 1827, incorporated as a town in 1830, and as a city in 1856. PADUS. SeePo. PJEONIA. See MACEDONIA. PJilONY, or Peony (also written piony, and sometimes in popular language reduced to piny), the common name for plants of the genus Pceonia, which is said to have been so called in honor of Paeon or Paean, the Homeric physician of the gods of Olympus. The genus belongs to the ranunculacece, or crowfoot family; it consists of large herbs with tuberous roots, or of shrubs with roots somewhat fleshy, but not distinctly tuberous. The large leaves are com- pound or decompound, and in the herbaceous species nearly all radical. The very large regu- lar flowers have five persistent sepals, and five to ten broad, conspicuous petals ; stamens very numerous, inserted on a fleshy disk (a distin- guishing character in the genus), which sur- rounds the base of the two to five pistils ; these at maturity form as many leathery pods, often recurved when ripe, and containing several large seeds. A great many species are enumera- ted in the books, but they are all probably redu- cible to four or five ; they are natives of south- ern Europe and the temperate parts of Asia, and one species is found on our northwest coast. Pasonies were introduced into English gardens more than three centuries ago, and so great is the tendency of the species to vary that the named sorts form a very long list. Of the herbaceous species, some produce only a single flower to each stem, and have downy pods. One of this group is the common paeony (P. officinalis), the best known of all, a native of southern Europe; it is very smooth, with coarsely divided green leaves; the flowers are red in the wild state, when they are of course single, a condition in which they are sometimes seen in gardens, though the double-flowered is more common ; this has produced varieties of various shades of red and crimson, pink, and even white. Among the named varieties of this species are the anemoniflora, a double red, Sdbini, deep crimson, and aureo-limbata, in which the centre is filled with small crimson petals surrounded by a row of large outer