Peninsula with his family in 1812. In 1817 Larra returned to Spain, knowing less Spanish than French. His nature was disorderly, his education was imperfect, and, after futile attempts to obtain a degree in medicine or law, he made an imprudent marriage at the age of twenty, broke with his relatives and became a journalist. On the 27th of April 1831 he produced his first play, No más mostrador, based on two pieces by Scribe and Dieulafoy. Though wanting in originality, it is brilliantly written, and held the stage for many years. On the 24th of September 1834 he produced Macías, a play based on his own historical novel, El Doncel de Don Enrique el Doliente (1834). The drama and novel are interesting as experiments, but Larra was essentially a journalist, and the increased liberty of the press after the death of Ferdinand VII. gave his caustic talent an ampler field. He was already famous under the pseudonyms of “Juan Pérez de Munguía” and “Figaro” which he used in El Pobrecito Hablador and La Revista Española respectively. Madrid laughed at his grim humour; ministers feared his vitriolic pen and courted him assiduously; he was elected as deputy for Ávila, and a great career seemed to lie before him. But the era of military pronunciamientos ruined his personal prospects and patriotic plans. His writing took on a more sombre tinge; domestic troubles increased his pessimism, and, in consequence of a disastrous love-affair, he committed suicide on the 13th of February 1837. Larra lived long enough to prove himself the greatest prose-writer that Spain can boast during the 19th century. He wrote at great speed with the constant fear of the censor before his eyes, but no sign of haste is discernible in his work, and the dexterity with which he aims his venomous shafts is amazing. His political instinct, his abundance of ideas and his forcible, mordant style would have given him a foremost position at any time and in any country; in Spain, and in his own period, they placed him beyond all rivalry. (J. F.-K.)
LARSA (Biblical Ellasar, Gen. xiv. 1), an important city
of ancient Babylonia, the site of the worship of the sun-god,
Shamash, represented by the ancient ruin mound of Senkereh
(Senkera). It lay 15 m. S.E. of the ruin mounds of Warka
(anc. Erech), near the east bank of the Shatt-en-Nil canal.
Larsa is mentioned in Babylonian inscriptions as early as the
time of Ur-Gur, 2700 or 2800 B.C., who built or restored the
ziggurat (stage-tower) of E-Babbar, the temple of Shamash.
Politically it came into special prominence at the time of the
Elamite conquest, when it was made the centre of Elamite
dominion in Babylonia, perhaps as a special check upon the
neighbouring Erech, which had played a prominent part in the
resistance to the Elamites. At the time of Khammurabi’s
successful struggle with the Elamite conquerors it was ruled
by an Elamite king named Eriaku, the Arioch of the Bible,
called Rim-Sin by his Semitic subjects. It finally lost its independence
under Samsu-iluna, son of Khammurabi, c. 1900 B.C.,
and from that time until the close of the Babylonian
period it was a subject city of Babylon. Loftus conducted
excavations at this site in 1854. He describes the ruins as
consisting of a low, circular platform, about 412 m. in circumference,
rising gradually from the level of the plain to a central
mound 70 ft. high. This represents the ancient ziggurat of the
temple of Shamash, which was in part explored by Loftus.
From the inscriptions found there it appears that, besides the
kings already mentioned, Khammurabi, Burna-buriash (buryas)
and the great Nebuchadrezzar restored or rebuilt the temple
of Shamash. The excavations at Senkereh were peculiarly
successful in the discovery of inscribed remains, consisting
of clay tablets, chiefly contracts, but including also an important
mathematical tablet and a number of tablets of a
description almost peculiar to Senkereh, exhibiting in bas-relief
scenes of everyday life. Loftus found also the remains
of an ancient Babylonian cemetery. From the ruins it would
appear that Senkereh ceased to be inhabited at or soon after
the Persian conquest.
See W. K. Loftus, Chaldaea and Susiana (1857). (J. P. Pe.)
LARTET, EDOUARD (1801–1871), French archaeologist, was born in 1801 near Castelnau-Barbarens, department of Gers, France, where his family had lived for more than five hundred years. He was educated for the law at Auch and Toulouse, but having private means elected to devote himself to science. The then recent work of Cuvier on fossil mammalia encouraged Lartet in excavations which led in 1834 to his first discovery of fossil remains in the neighbourhood of Auch. Thenceforward he devoted his whole time to a systematic examination of the French caves, his first publication on the subject being The Antiquity of Man in Western Europe (1860), followed in 1861 by New Researches on the Coexistence of Man and of the Great Fossil Mammifers characteristic of the Last Geological Period. In this paper he made public the results of his discoveries in the cave of Aurignac, where evidence existed of the contemporaneous existence of man and extinct mammals. In his work in the Périgord district Lartet had the aid of Henry Christy (q.v.). The first account of their joint researches appeared in a paper descriptive of the Dordogne caves and contents, published in Revue archéologique (1864). The important discoveries in the Madeleine cave and elsewhere were published by Lartet and Christy under the title Reliquiae Aquitanicae, the first part appearing in 1865. Christy died before the completion of the work, but Lartet continued it until his breakdown in health in 1870. The most modest and one of the most illustrious of the founders of modern palaeontology, Lartet’s work had previously been publicly recognized by his nomination as an officer of the Legion of Honour; and in 1848 he had had the offer of a political post. In 1857 he had been elected a foreign member of the Geological Society of London, and a few weeks before his death he had been made professor of palaeontology at the museum of the Jardin des Plantes. He died at Seissan in January 1871.
LARVAL FORMS, in biology. As is explained in the article
on Embryology (q.v.), development and life are coextensive,
and it is impossible to point to any period in the life of an
organism when the developmental changes cease. Nevertheless
it is customary to speak of development as though it were
confined to the early period of life, during which the important
changes occur by which the uninucleated zygote acquires
the form characteristic of the species. Using the word in this
restricted sense, it is pointed out in the same article that the
developmental period frequently presents two phases, the embryonic
and the larval. During the embryonic phase the
development occurs under protection, either within the egg
envelopes, or within the maternal body, or in a brood pouch.
At the end of this phase the young organism becomes free
and uses, as a rule, its own mouth and digestive organs. If
this happens before it has approximately acquired the adult
form, it is called a larva (Lat. larva, ghost, spectre, mask), and
the subsequent development by which the adult form is acquired
constitutes the larval phase. In such forms the life-cycle
is divided into three phases, the embryonic, the larval and the
adult. The transition between the first two of these is always
abrupt; whereas the second and third, except in cases in which
a metamorphosis occurs (see Metamorphosis), graduate into
one another, and it is not possible to say when the larval stage
ends and the adult begins. This is only what would be expected
when it is remembered that the developmental changes never
cease. It might be held that the presence of functional reproductive
organs, or the possibility of rapidly acquiring them,
marks off the adult phase of life from the larval. But this
test sometimes fails. In certain of the Ctenophora there is
a double sexual life; the larva becomes sexually mature and
lays eggs, which are fertilized and develop; it then loses its
generative organs and develops into the adult, which again
develops reproductive organs (dissogony; see Chun, Die Ctenophoren
des Golfes von Neapel, 1880). In certain Amphibia the
larva may develop sexual organs and breed (axolotl), but in
this case (neoteny) it is doubtful whether further development
may occur in the larva. A very similar phenomenon is found
in certain insect larvae (Cecidomyia), but in this case ova alone
are produced and develop parthenogenetically (paedogenesis).
Again in certain Trematoda larval stages known as the sporocyst
