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Saint Brendan
Saint Brendan d. 577?, Irish abbot of Clonfert, Co. Galway. A popular medieval story told how he traveled westward to wonderful islands—an Irish version of a widespread legend. His feast is May 16. A perhaps different St. Brendan (d. 573) was a friend of St. Columba and founder of the monas...
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Pharos
Pharos , peninsula, extending into the Mediterranean Sea, N Egypt, NE Africa, forming two harbors at Alexandria. Originally an island, it was joined to the mainland by a mole, constructed by order of Alexander the Great. On Pharos stood the celebrated lighthouse completed (c.280 BC) by Ptolemy II, w...
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Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre , 1737-1814, French naturalist and author. He was a friend of Rousseau, by whom he was strongly influenced. His chief work, Études de la nature (1784), sought to prove the existence of God from the wonders of nature; it is rich in descriptive passages...
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Robert Calef
Robert Calef , 1648-1719, known primarily as author of More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700). A Boston cloth merchant, probably born in England, he bitterly attacked Cotton Mather for his part in the Salem, Mass., witchcraft trials. The book, published in London because Boston printers wo...
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Walter Crane
Walter Crane 1845-1915, English designer, illustrator, and painter. As a painter he is grouped with the later Pre-Raphaelites, but he is better known for his illustrations of the works of Spenser and of Hawthorne's Wonder Book and Grimm's Fairy Tales. Seeking with William Morris to ally art w...
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Seven Wonders of the World
Seven Wonders of the World in ancient classifications, were the Great Pyramid of Khufu (see pyramid ) or all the pyramids with or without the sphinx ; the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, with or without the walls; the mausoleum at Halicarnassus; the Artemision at Ephesus ; the Colossus of Rhodes ...
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Halicarnassus
Halicarnassus , ancient city of Caria, SW Asia Minor, on the Ceramic Gulf (now the Gulf of Kos) and on the site of the modern city of Bodrum, Turkey. Halicarnassus was Greek in origin, but there were Carian inhabitants. Except for a brief period in the 5th cent. BC, the city was not intimately conce...
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sphinx
sphinx , mythical beast of ancient Egypt, frequently symbolizing the pharaoh as an incarnation of the sun god Ra . The sphinx was represented in sculpture usually in a recumbent position with the head of a man and the body of a lion, although some were constructed with rams' heads and others with h...
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engraving
engraving in its broadest sense, the art of cutting lines in metal, wood, or other material either for decoration or for reproduction through printing . In its narrowest sense, it is an intaglio printing process in which the lines are cut in a metal plate with a graver, or burin. Furrows are cle...
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George Abbott
George Abbott 1887-1995, American theatrical producer, director, and playwright, b. Forestville, N.Y. He began (1913) in the theater as an actor and, during a career that spanned eight decades, was celebrated as a coauthor, director, or producer of more than 100 Broadway plays, including The Fall ...
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