Hungary, with four allegorical groups, and medallions of the executed generals. Arad is an important railway junction, and has become the largest industrial and commercial centre of south-eastern Hungary. Its principal industries are: distilling, milling, machinery-making, leather-working and saw-milling. A large trade is carried on in grain, flour, alcohol, cattle and wood. Arad was a fortified place, and was captured by the Turks during the wars of the 17th century, and kept by them till the end of that century. The new fortress, built in 1763, although small, was formidable, and played a great rôle during the Hungarian struggle for independence in 1849. Bravely defended by the Austrian general Berger until the 1st of July 1849, it was then captured by the Hungarian rebels, who made it their headquarters during the latter part of the insurrection. It was from it that Kossuth issued his famous proclamation (11th August 1849), and it was here that he handed over the supreme military and civil power to Görgei. The fortress was recaptured shortly after the surrender of Görgei to the Russians at Világos. The fortress is now used as an ammunition depot.
The town of Uj-Arad, i.e. New Arad (pop. 6124), situated on the opposite bank of the Maros, is practically a suburb of Arad, with which it is connected by a bridge. The town was founded during the Turkish wars of the 17th century. The works erected by the Turks for the capture of the fortress of Arad formed the nucleus of the new town.
Világos, the town where the famous capitulation of Görgei to the Russians took place on the 13th of August 1849, lies 21 m. by rail north-east of Arad.
ARAEOSTYLE (Gr. ἀραιός, weak or widely spaced, and στῦλος, column), an architectural term for the intercolumniation (q.v.) given to those temples where the columns had only timber architraves to carry.
ARAEOSYSTYLE (Gr. ἀραιός, widely spaced, and σύστυλος, with columns set close together), an architectural term applied to a colonnade, in which the intercolumniation (q.v.) is alternately wide and narrow, as in the case of the western porch of St Paul’s cathedral and the east front of the Louvre by Perrault.
ARAGO, DOMINIQUE FRANÇOIS JEAN (1786–1853), French physicist, was born on the 26th of February 1786, at Estagel, a small village near Perpignan, in the department of the eastern Pyrenees. He was the eldest of four brothers. Jean (1788–1836) emigrated to America and became a general in the Mexican army. Jacques Étienne Victor (1799–1855) took part in L. C. de S. de Freycinet’s exploring voyage in the “Uranie” from 1817 to 1821, and on his return to France devoted himself to journalism and the drama. The fourth brother, Étienne Vincent (1802–1892), is said to have collaborated with H. de Balzac in the Héritière de Birague, and from 1822 to 1847 wrote a great number of light dramatic pieces, mostly in collaboration. A strong republican, he was obliged to leave France in 1849, but returned after the amnesty of 1859. In 1879 he was nominated director of the Luxembourg museum.
Showing decided military tastes François Arago was sent to the municipal college of Perpignan, where he began to study mathematics in preparation for the entrance examination of the polytechnic school. Within two years and a half he had mastered all the subjects prescribed for examination, and a great deal more, and, on going up for examination at Toulouse, he astounded his examiner by his knowledge of Lagrange. Towards the close of 1803 he entered the polytechnic school, with the artillery service as the aim of his ambition, and in 1804, through the advice and recommendation of S. D. Poisson, he received the appointment of secretary to the Observatory of Paris. He now became acquainted with Laplace, and through his influence was commissioned, with J. B. Biot, to complete the meridional measurements which had been begun by J .B. J. Delambre, and interrupted since the death of P. F. A. Méchain (1744–1804). The two left Paris in 1806 and began operations among the mountains of Spain, but Biot returned to Paris after they had determined the latitude of Formentera, the southernmost point to which they were to carry the survey, leaving Arago to make the geodetical connexion of Majorca with Ivica and with Formentera.
The adventures and difficulties of the latter were now only beginning. The political ferment caused by the entrance of the French into Spain extended to these islands, and the ignorant populace began to suspect that Arago’s movements and his blazing fires on the top of Mount Galatzo were telegraphic signals to the invading army. Ultimately they became so infuriated that he was obliged to cause himself to be incarcerated in the fortress of Belver in June 1808. On the 28th of July he managed to escape from the island in a fishing-boat, and after an adventurous voyage he reached Algiers on the 3rd of August. Thence he procured a passage in a vessel bound for Marseilles, but on the 16th of August, just as the vessel was nearing Marseilles, it fell into the hands of a Spanish corsair. With the rest of the crew, Arago was taken to Rosas, and imprisoned first in a windmill, and afterwards in the fortress of that seaport, until the town fell into the hands of the French, when the prisoners were transferred to Palamos. After fully three months’ imprisonment they were released on the demand of the dey of Algiers, and again set sail for Marseilles on the 28th of November, but when within sight of their port they were driven back by a northerly wind to Bougie on the coast of Africa. Transport to Algiers by sea from this place would have occasioned a weary stay of three months; Arago, therefore, set out for it by land under conduct of a Mahommedan priest, and reached it on Christmas day. After six months’ stay in Algiers he once again, on the 21st of June 1809, set sail for Marseilles, where he had to undergo a monotonous and inhospitable quarantine in the lazaretto, before his difficulties were over. The first letter he received, while in the lazaretto, was from A. von Humboldt; and this was the origin of a connexion which, in Arago’s words, “lasted over forty years without a single cloud ever having troubled it.”
Through all these vicissitudes Arago had succeeded in preserving the records of his survey; and his first act on his return home was to deposit them in the Bureau des Longitudes at Paris. As a reward for his adventurous conduct in the cause of science, he was in September 1809 elected a member of the Academy of Sciences, in room of J. B. L. Lalande, at the remarkably early age of twenty-three, and before the close of the same year he was chosen by the council of the polytechnic school to succeed G. Monge in the chair of analytical geometry. About the same time he was named by the emperor one of the astronomers of the Royal Observatory, which was accordingly his residence till his death, and it was in this capacity that he delivered his remarkably successful series of popular lectures on astronomy, which were continued from 1812 to 1845.
In 1816, along with Gay-Lussac, he started the Annales de chimie et de physique, and in 1818 or 1819 he proceeded along with Biot to execute geodetic operations on the coasts of France, England and Scotland. They measured the length of the seconds-pendulum at Leith, and in Unst, one of the Shetland isles, the results of the observations being published in 1821, along with those made in Spain. Arago was elected a member of the Board of Longitude immediately afterwards, and contributed to each of its Annuals, for about twenty-two years, important scientific notices on astronomy and meteorology and occasionally on civil engineering, as well as interesting memoirs of members of the Academy.
In 1830, Arago, who always professed liberal opinions of the extreme republican type, was elected a member of the chamber of deputies for the Lower Seine, and he employed his splendid gifts of eloquence and scientific knowledge in all questions connected with public education, the rewards of inventors, and the encouragement of the mechanical and practical sciences. Many of the most creditable national enterprises, dating from this period, are due to his advocacy—such as the reward to L. J. M. Daguerre for the invention of photography, the grant for the publication of the works of P. Fermat and Laplace, the acquisition of the museum of Cluny, the development of railways and electric telegraphs, the improvement of the
