there was also a Manius Egerius, a male counterpart of Egeria. Her connexion with Diana Nemorensis, herself a birth goddess, is confirmed by the fact that her aid was invoked by pregnant women. She also possessed the gift of prophecy; and the statement (Dion. Halic. ii. 60) that she was one of the Muses is due to her connexion with the Camenae, whose worship was displaced by them.
EGERTON, SIR PHILIP DE MALPAS GREY, Bart. (1806–1881), English palaeontologist, was born on the 13th of November 1806, the son of the 9th baronet. He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. in 1828. While at college his interest in geology was aroused by the lectures of W. Buckland, and by his acquaintance with W. D. Conybeare. Subsequently when travelling in Switzerland with Lord Cole (afterwards 3rd earl of Enniskillen) they were introduced to Prof. L. Agassiz at Neufchatel, and determined to make a special study of fossil fishes. During the course of fifty years they gradually gathered together two of the largest and finest of private collections—that of Sir Philip Grey Egerton being at Oulton Park, Tarporley, Cheshire. He described the structure and affinities of numerous species in the publications of the Geological Society of London, the Geological Magazine and the Decades of the Geological Survey; and in recognition of his services the Wollaston medal was awarded to him in 1873 by the Geological Society. He was elected F.R.S. in 1831, and was a trustee of the British Museum. As a member of Parliament he represented the city of Chester in 1830, the southern division of Cheshire from 1835 until 1868, and the western division from 1868 to 1881. He died in London on the 6th of April 1881. His collection of fossil fishes is now in the British Museum.
EGG, AUGUSTUS LEOPOLD (1816–1863), English painter, was born on the 2nd of May 1816 in London, where his father carried on business as a gun-maker. He had some schooling at Bexley, and was not at first intended for the artistic profession; but, developing a faculty in this line, he entered in 1834 the drawing class of Mr Sass, and in 1836 the school of the Royal Academy. His first exhibited picture appeared in 1837 at the Suffolk Street gallery. In 1838 he began exhibiting in the Academy, his subject being a “Spanish Girl”; altogether he sent twenty-seven works to this institution. In 1848 he became an associate and in 1860 a full member of the Academy: he had considerable means, apart from his profession. In 1857 he took a leading part in selecting and arranging the modern paintings in the Art-Treasures Exhibition in Manchester. His constitution being naturally frail, he went in 1853, with Dickens and Wilkie Collins, to Italy for a short trip, and in 1863 he visited Algeria. Here he benefited so far as his chronic lung-disease was concerned; but exposure to a cold wind while out riding brought on an attack of asthma, from which he died on the 26th of March 1863 at Algiers, near which city his remains were buried.
Egg was a gifted and well-trained painter of genre, chiefly in the way of historical anecdote, or of compositions from the poets and novelists. Among his principal pictures may be named: 1843, the “Introduction of Sir Piercie Shafton and Halbert Glendinning” (from Scott’s Monastery); 1846, “Buckingham Rebuffed”; 1848, “Queen Elizabeth discovers she is no longer young”; 1850, “Peter the Great sees Catharine for the first time”; 1854, “Charles I. raising the Standard at Nottingham” (a study); 1855, the “Life and Death of Buckingham”; 1857 and 1858, two subjects from Thackeray’s Esmond; 1858, “Past and Present, a triple picture of a faithless wife”; 1859, the “Night before Naseby”; 1860, his last exhibited work, the Dinner Scene from The Taming of the Shrew. The Tate Gallery contains one of his earlier pictures, Patricio entertaining two Ladies, from the Diable boiteux; it was painted in 1844.
Egg was rather below the middle height, with dark hair and a handsome well-formed face; the head of Peter the Great (in the picture of Peter and Catharine, which may be regarded as his best work, along with the Life and Death of Buckingham) was studied, but of course considerably modified, from his own countenance. He was manly, kind-hearted, pleasant, and very genial and serviceable among brother-artists; social and companionable, but holding mainly aloof from fashionable circles. As an actor he had uncommon talent. He appeared among Dickens’s company of amateurs in 1852 in Lord Lytton’s comedy Not so Bad as we Seem, and afterwards in Wilkie Collins’s Frozen Deep, playing the humorous part of Job Want.
EGG (O.E. aeg, cf. Ger. Ei, Swed. aegg, and prob. Gr. ὠόν, Lat. ovum), the female reproductive cell or ovum of animals, which gives rise generally only after fertilization to the young. The largest eggs are those of birds; and this because, to the minute essential portion of the egg, or germ, from which the young bird grows, there is added a large store of food-material—the yolk and white of the egg—destined to nourish the growing embryo while the whole is enclosed within a hard shell.
The relative sizes of eggs depend entirely on the amount of the food-yolk thus enclosed with the germ; while the form and texture of the outer envelope are determined by the nature of the environment to which the egg is exposed. Where the food material is infinitesimal in quantity the egg is either not extruded—the embryo being nourished by the maternal tissues,—or it passes out of the parental body and gives rise at once to a free-living organism or “larva” (see Larval Forms), as in the case of many lowly freshwater and marine animals. In such cases no “egg” in the usual sense of the term is produced.
The number of eggs periodically produced by any given individual depends on the risks of destruction to which they, and the young to which they give rise, are exposed: not more than a single egg being annually laid by some species, while with others the number may amount to millions.
Birds’ Eggs.—The egg of the bird affords, for general purposes, the readiest example of the modifications imposed on eggs by the external environment. Since it must be incubated by the warmth of the parent’s body, the outer envelope has taken the form of a hard shell for the protection of the growing chick from pressure, while the dyes which commonly colour the surface of this shell serve as a screen to hide it from egg-eating animals.
Carbonate of lime forms the principal constituent of this shell; but in addition phosphate of lime and magnesia are also present. In section, this shell will be found to be made up of three more or less distinct crystalline layers, traversed by vertical canals, whereby the shell is made porous so as to admit air to the developing chick.
The outermost, or third, layer of this shell often takes the form of a glaze, as of porcelain, as for example in the burnished egg of the ostrich: or it may assume the character of a thick, chalky layer as in some cuckoos (Guira, Crotophaga ani), cormorants, grebes and flamingoes: while in some birds as in the auks, gulls and tinamous, this outer layer is wanting; yet the tinamous have the most highly glazed eggs of all birds, the second layer of the shell developing a surface even more perfectly burnished than that formed by the outermost, third layer in the ostrich.
While the eggs of some birds have the shell so thin as to be translucent, e.g. kingfisher, others display considerable thickness, the maximum being reached in the egg of the extinct Aepyornis.
Though in shape differing but little from that of the familiar hen’s egg, certain well-marked modifications of form are yet to be met with. Thus the eggs of the plover are pear-shaped, of the sand-grouse more or less cylindrical, of the owls and titmice spherical and of the grebes biconical.
In the matter of coloration the eggs of birds present a remarkable range. The pigments to which this coloration is due have been shown, by means of their absorption spectra (Sorby, Proc. Zool. Soc., 1875), to be seven in number. The first of these, oorhodeine, is brown-red in tone, and rarely absent: the second and third, oocyanin, and banded oocyanin, are of a beautiful blue, and though differing spectroscopically give rise to the same product when oxidized: the fourth and fifth are yellow, and rufous ooxanthine, the former combining with oocyanin gives rise to the wonderful malachite green of the emu’s egg, while the latter occurs only in the eggs of tinamous: the sixth is lichenoxanthine, a pigment not yet thoroughly known but present in the shells of all eggs having a peculiar brick-red colour. Still less is known of
