Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 01.djvu/251

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AGENT.
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AGGREGATION.

interests, and rendering full and true accounts of all transactions. An agent cannot delegate his authority to another, so as to escape responsibility to the principal for that other's acts, without the express or implied assent of the principal. Nor, ordinarily, will a principal be bound by the acts of a sub-agent whose employment he has not authorized or ratified.

(5.) Agency may be terminated by the agreement of the parties, or by the principal's revocation of the appointment, or by operation of law. If terminated in either of the first two ways, notice must be given to those who have been accustomed to deal with the agent, or the latter will still be able to subject the principal to liability to such persons; for, until notice of revocation, these have a right to suppose that the relation of principal and agent continues. The death of either principal or agent, and the bankruptcy of the principal, furnish the most common examples of termination of agency by operation of law, and such termination is effective without notice. An agency which is "coupled with an interest" (i.e., a vested property right) in the subject-matter of the agency is revocable only by the mutual assent of both parties.

Doctrines peculiar to special classes of agents are dealt with under the appropriate headings, e.g., Attorney; Auction; Broker; Partnership; Factor; Crime. Consult: Parsons, Law of Contracts (New York, 1895); Wharton, Criminal Law (Philadelphia, 1896); Cooley, Treatise on the Law of Torts (Chicago, 1888); Pollock, Law of Torts (London, 1901).


AGE OF IN'NOCENCE. A celebrated painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds in the National Gallery, London. It depicts a little girl sitting on the ground before a group of trees.


AGE OF REA'SON. The name given to a certain phase and period of the French Revolution when Christianity was decried, Reason proclaimed as the only true deity, and bishops exchanged their mitres for liberty caps. This movement was fomented by Hébert (q.v.) and his followers, professed atheists, who succeeded in persuading many Christians to renounce their faith. The worship of Reason centred around the ceremonies held in her honor at Notre Dame, November 10, 1793. The Goddess of Reason, typified by a painted harlot, was placed on the altar and received the homage of her adorers. A schism in the party of the Montagnards, to which the atheists belonged, led to their execution, March 24, 1794. However, it was not till June 8, 1794, that France, in the Feast of the Supreme Being, officially received again religion, at the hands of Maximilian Robespierre.


AG'ESAN'DER (Gk. Ἀγήσανδρος, Agēsandros). A Greek artist of the school of Rhodes. In conjunction with Athenodorus and Polydorus he executed the celebrated group of Laocoön, which was discovered near the baths of Titus in the sixteenth century. The time of Agesander is unknown, but there is reason to believe that he was a contemporary of Vespasian.


AGES'ILAN OF COL'CHOS. The title and hero of one of the romances in Amadis of Gaul (q.v.). Books XI. and XII.


AGESILAUS (Gk. Ἀγησίλαος, Agēsilaos) (c.444-360 B.C.. King of Sparta about 401-360 B.C. He was the son of Archidamus II. and succeeded Agis II., Leotychides, the son of Agis, being set aside through the influence of Lysander, on the ground of illegitimate birth. In 397 B.C. he was sent to Asia Minor as commander-in-chief of the Spartan forces in the war with Persia. He cariied on the war with success, and was prepaiing to advance into the interior of the country, when in 394 B.C. he was called back to Greece to make head against the coalition which had been formed by Thebes, Athens, and other Grecian States against the power of Sparta. Proceeding by land, he arrived in Greece about a month later, and in the same year defeated the allies at Coronea. In the years that followed, Agesilaüs took an important part in his country's polities and campaigns. In 361 B.C. he undertook an expedition to Egypt, but while on his way home died, in the winter of 361-360, in his eighty-fourth year and the forty-first year of his reign. Agesilaüs was small of stature and lame. He was simple in dress and in his way of living; blameless in public and private life alike; a patriot, though a party man: a conservative in politics; a successful, though not a great, general.


AGGLU'TINATE LAN'GUAGES (Lat. ad, to + gluten, glue, paste). The name given to the Turanian tongues. The grammatical relations, more than in any other class of languages, are expressed by postpositional elements or suffixes, pronouns being attached (glued) to substantives (to indicate possession), as well as to verbs, and all kinds of prepositions being suffixed to substantives. In the Magyar (Hungarian) language, for example: Anya, mother, anyam, my mother; kés, knife, késel, with a knife; szoba, room, szobaban, in the room. See Philology; Turanian Languages.


AG'GREGA'TION, States of (Lat. ad, to + gregare, to collect into a flock). The three states, gaseous, liquid, and solid, in which matter occurs. Many substances are capable, under certain conditions of temperature and pressure, of existing in any of the three states. Water, for instance, may be gaseous (steam, or water vapor), liquid (as ordinarily), or solid (ice). Other substances, on the contrary, could. by the means at our disposal, be obtained in only one of the states of aggregation; thus, the element carbon remains solid even at the highest temperatures that can be produced at present, and many of its compounds undergo chemical decomposition before reaching the point at which they might melt.

Under certain conditions matter has been assumed to be capable of existing in other states besides the above three. Thus, Boutigny thought that liquids, when thrown upon glowing hot surfaces, pass into what he called the spheroidal state. Crookes thought that, at the instant of the electric discharge, the gases inclosed within a Crookes tube pass into a radiant state, which is characterized by certain properties not found in the other states of aggregation. When under the critical pressure and temperature (see Critical Point) , substances are sometimes said to be in the critical state. In this article, however, only the three states of aggregation that are generally recognized may be briefly characterized.

1. A gas (or vapor) occupies the volume and assumes the shape of the vessel within which it is inclosed, and its resistance to a change of shape