Leo the Isaurian, afterwards emperor, to induce the Alans to attack the Abasgi. The Alans, having gained knowledge of the district by a trick, invaded Lazica, and, probably in 712, a Roman and Armenian army laid siege to Archaeopolis. On the approach of a Saracen force they retired, but a small plundering detachment was cut off. Ultimately Leo joined this band and aided by the Apsilian chief Marinus escaped with them to the coast.
From the beginning of the 14th to the end of the 17th century the district under the name Mingrelia (q.v.) was governed by an independent dynasty, the Dadians, which was succeeded by a semi-independent dynasty, the Chikovans, who by 1838 had submitted to Russia, though they retained a nominal sovereignty. In 1866 the district was finally annexed by Russia.
For the kings see Stokvis, Manuel d’histoire, i. 83. (J. M. M.)
COLCOTHAR (adapted in Romanic languages from Arabic
golgotar, which was probably a corruption of the Gr. χάλκανθος,
from χαλκός, copper, ἄνθος, flower, i.e. copper sulphate), a name
given to the brownish-red ferric oxide formed in the preparation
of fuming sulphuric (Nordhausen) acid by distilling ferrous
sulphate. It is used as a polishing powder, forming the rouge of
jewellers, and as the pigment Indian red. It is also known as
Crocus Martis.
(in O. Eng. cald and ceald, a word coming ultimately
from a root cognate with the Lat. gelu, gelidus, and common in
the Teutonic languages, which usually have two distinct forms
for the substantive and the adjective, cf. Ger. Kälte, kalt, Dutch
koude, koud), subjectively the sensation which is excited by contact
with a substance whose temperature is lower than the normal;
objectively a quality or condition of material bodies which gives
rise to that sensation. Whether cold, in the objective sense, was
to be regarded as a positive quality or merely as absence of heat
was long a debated question. Thus Robert Boyle, who does not
commit himself definitely to either view, says, in his
New Experiments and Observations touching Cold, that “the dispute which is
the primum frigidum is very well known among naturalists,
some contending for the earth, others for water, others for the air,
and some of the moderns for nitre, but all seeming to agree that
there is some body or other that is of its own nature supremely
cold and by participation of which all other bodies obtain that
quality.” But with the general acceptance of the dynamical
theory of heat, cold naturally came to be regarded as a negative
condition, depending on decrease in the amount of the molecular
vibration that constitutes heat.
The question whether there is a limit to the degree of cold possible, and, if so, where the zero must be placed, was first attacked by the French physicist, G. Amontons, in 1702–1703, in connexion with his improvements in the air-thermometer. In his instrument temperatures were indicated by the height at which a column of mercury was sustained by a certain mass of air, the volume or “spring” of which of course varied with the heat to which it was exposed. Amontons therefore argued that the zero of his thermometer would be that temperature at which the spring of the air in it was reduced to nothing. On the scale he used the boiling-point of water was marked at 73 and the melting-point of ice at 512, so that the zero of his scale was equivalent to about –240° on the centigrade scale. This remarkably close approximation to the modern value of –273° for the zero of the air-thermometer was further improved on by J. H. Lambert (Pyrometrie, 1779), who gave the value –270° and observed that this temperature might be regarded as absolute cold. Values of this order for the absolute zero were not, however, universally accepted about this period. Laplace and Lavoisier, for instance, in their treatise on heat (1780), arrived at values ranging from 1500° to 3000° below the freezing-point of water, and thought that in any case it must be at least 600° below, while John Dalton in his Chemical Philosophy gave ten calculations of this value, and finally adopted –3000° C. as the natural zero of temperature. After J. P. Joule had determined the mechanical equivalent of heat, Lord Kelvin approached the question from an entirely different point of view, and in 1848 devised a scale of absolute temperature which was independent of the properties of any particular substance and was based solely on the fundamental laws of thermodynamics (see Heat and Thermodynamics). It followed from the principles on which this scale was constructed that its zero was placed at –273°, at almost precisely the same point as the zero of the air-thermometer.
In nature the realms of space, on the probable assumption that the interstellar medium is perfectly transparent and diathermanous, must, as was pointed out by W. J. Macquorn Rankine, be incapable of acquiring any temperature, and must therefore be at the absolute zero. That, however, is not to say that if a suitable thermometer could be projected into space it would give a reading of –273°. On the contrary, not being a transparent and diathermanous body, it would absorb radiation from the sun and other stars, and would thus become warmed. Professor J. H. Poynting (“Radiation in the Solar System,” Phil. Trans., A, 1903, 202, p. 525) showed that as regards bodies in the solar system the effects of radiation from the stars are negligible, and calculated that by solar radiation alone a small absorbing sphere at the distance of Mercury from the sun would have its temperature raised to 483° Abs. (210° C), at the distance of Venus to 358° Abs. (85° C), of the earth to 300° Abs. (27° C), of Mars to 243° Abs. (–30° C), and of Neptune to only 54° Abs. (–219° C.). The French physicists of the early part of the 19th century held a different view, and rejected the hypothesis of the absolute cold of space. Fourier, for instance, postulated a fundamental temperature of space as necessary for the explanation of the heat-effects observed on the surface of the earth, and estimated that in the interplanetary regions it was little less than that of the terrestrial poles and below the freezing-point of mercury, though it was different in other parts of space (Ann. chim. phys., 1824, 27, pp. 141, 150). C. S. M. Pouillet, again, calculated the temperature of interplanetary space as –142° C. (Comptes rendus, 1838, 7, p. 61), and Sir John Herschel as –150° (Ency. Brit., 8th ed., art. “Meteorology,” p. 643).
To attain the absolute zero in the laboratory, that is, to deprive a substance entirely of its heat, is a thermodynamical impossibility, and the most that the physicist can hope for is an indefinitely close approach to that point. The lowest steady temperature obtainable by the exhaustion of liquid hydrogen is about –262° C. (11° Abs.), and the liquefaction of helium by Professor Kamerlingh Onnes in 1908 yielded a liquid having a boiling-point of about 4.3° Abs., which on exhaustion must bring us to within about 212 degrees of the absolute zero. (See Liquid Gases.)
For a “cold,” in the medical sense, see Catarrh and Respiratory System: Pathology.
COLDEN, CADWALLADER (1688–1776), American physician and colonial official, was born at Duns, Scotland, on the 17th of February 1688. He graduated at the university of Edinburgh in 1705, spent three years in London in the study of medicine, and emigrated to America in 1708. After practising medicine for ten years in Philadelphia, he was invited to settle in New York by Governor Hunter, and in 1718 was appointed the first surveyor-general of the colony. Becoming a member of the provincial council in 1720, he served for many years as its president, and from 1761 until his death was lieutenant-governor; for a considerable part of the time, during the interim between the appointment of governors, he was acting-governor. About 1755 he retired from medical practice. As early as 1729 he had built a country house called Coldengham on the line between Ulster and Orange counties, where he spent much of his time until 1761. Aristocratic and extremely conservative, he had a violent distrust of popular government and a strong aversion to the popular party in New York. Naturally he came into frequent conflict with the growing sentiment in the colony in opposition to royal taxation. He was acting-governor when in 1765 the stamped paper to be used under the Stamp Act arrived in the port of New York; a mob burned him in effigy in his own coach in Bowling Green, in sight of the enraged acting-governor and of General Gage; and Colden was compelled to surrender the stamps to the city council, by whom they were
