from all the movable parts terminate in rings in which are inserted the fingers of his other hand.
See also C. Magnin, Histoire des marionettes (1852; 2nd ed., 1862); L. de Neuville, Histoire des marionettes (1892).
MARIOTTE, EDME (c. 1620–1684), French physicist, spent
most of his life at Dijon, where he was prior of St Martin sous
Beaune. He was one of the first members of the Academy of
Sciences founded at Paris in 1666. He died at Paris on the
12th of May 1684. The first volume of the Histoire et mémoires
de l’Académie (1733) contains many original papers by him upon
a great variety of physical subjects, such as the motion of fluids,
the nature of colour, the notes of the trumpet, the barometer,
the fall of bodies, the recoil of guns, the freezing of water, &c.
His Essais de physique, four in number, of which the first three were published at Paris between 1676 and 1679, are his most important works, and form, together with a Traité de la percussion des corps, the first volume of the Œuvres de Mariotte (2 vols., Leiden, 1717). The second of these essays (De La nature de l’air) contains the statement of the law that the volume of a gas varies inversely as the pressure, which, though very generally called by the name of Mariotte, had been discovered in 1660 by Robert Boyle. The fourth essay is a systematic treatment of the nature of colour, with a description of many curious experiments and a discussion of the rainbow, halos, parhelia, diffraction, and the more purely physiological phenomena of colour. The discovery of the blind spot is noted in a short paper in the second volume of his collected works.
MARIPOSAN, or Yokuts, a linguistic stock of North American Indians, including some 40 small tribes. Its former territory was in southern California, around Tulare lake. The Mariposans were fishers and hunters. Their villages consisted of a single row of wedge-shaped huts, with an awning of brush along the front. In 1850 they numbered some 3000; in 1905 there were 154 on the Tule river reservation.
MARIS, JACOB (1837–1899), Dutch painter, first studied at
the Antwerp Academy, and subsequently in Hébert’s studio
during a stay in Paris from 1865 till 1871. He returned to
Holland when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and died
there in August 1899. Though he painted, especially in early
life, domestic scenes and interiors invested with deeply sympathetic
feeling, it is as a landscape painter that Maris will be
famous. He was the painter of bridges and windmills, of old
quays, massive towers, and level banks; even more was he the
painter of water, and misty skies, and chasing clouds. In all
his works, whether in water or oil colour, and in his etchings, the
subject is always subordinate to the effect. His art is suggestive
rather than decorative, and his force does not seem to depend
on any preconceived method, such as a synthetical treatment
of form or gradations of tone. And yet, though his means
appear so simple, the artist’s mind seems to communicate with
the spectator’s by directness of pictorial instinct, and we have
only to observe the admirable balance of composition and
truthful perspective to understand the sure knowledge of his
business that underlies such purely impressionist handling.
Maris has shown all that is gravest or brightest in the landscape
of Holland, all that is heaviest or clearest in its atmosphere—for
instance, in the “Grey Tower, Old Amsterdam,” in the
“Landscape near Dordrecht,” in the “Sea-weed Carts, Scheveningen,”
in “A Village Scene,” and in the numerous other
pictures which have been exhibited in the Royal Academy,
London, in Edinburgh (1885), Paris, Brussels and Holland,
and in various private collections. “No painter,” says M.
Philippe Zilcken, “has so well expressed the ethereal effects,
bathed in air and light through floating silvery mist, in which
painters delight, and the characteristic remote horizons blurred
by haze; or again, the grey yet luminous weather of Holland,
unlike the dead grey rain of England or the heavy sky of Paris.”
See Max Rooses, Dutch Painters of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1899); R. A. M. Stevenson, “Jacob Maris,” Magazine of Art (1900); Ph. Zilcken, Peintres Hollandais modernes (Amsterdam, 1893); Jan Veth, “Een Studie over Jacob Maris,” Onze Kunst (Antwerp, 1902).
MARITIME PROVINCE (Russ., Primorskaya Oblast), a
province of Russia, in East Siberia. It consists of a strip of
territory along the coast of the Pacific from Korea to the Arctic
Ocean, including also the peninsula of Kamchatka, part of the
island of Sakhalin, and several small islands along the coast.
Its western boundary stretches northwards from a point S.W.
of Peter the Great Bay (42° 40′ N.) by Lake Hanka or Khanka
and along the Usuri, then goes due north from the mouth of
the Usuri as far as 52° N., runs along the Stanovoi watershed,
crosses the spurs of this plateau through barren tundras, and
finally reaches the Arctic Ocean at Chaun Bay (70° N.). Area,
715,735 sq. m.
The northern part lies between the Arctic Ocean and the Seas of Bering and Okhotsk, and has the character of a barren plateau 1000 to 2000 ft. high, deeply indented by the rivers of the Anadyr basin and by long fiords, such as Kolyuchin Bay (the wintering-place of Nordenskjöld s “Vega”), the Gulf of Anadyr, and the Bays of Penzhina and Ghizhiga. To the north this plateau is bordered by a chain of mountains, several summits of which reach 8000 ft. (Makachinga peak), while the promontories by which the Asiatic continent terminates towards Bering Strait run up to 1000 to 2000 ft. Only lichens and mosses, with a few dwarf species of Siberian trees, grow in this district. The fauna, however, is far richer than might be expected. A few American birds and mammals cross the strait when it is frozen. This country, and the seas which surround it, have for the last two centuries supplied Siberian trade with its best furs. The blue fox and black sable have been nearly exterminated, and the whale has become very rare. The sea-otter is rapidly becoming extinct, as well as the sea-lion (Otaria stelleri); while the sea-cow (Rhytina stelleri) was completely extirpated in the course of forty years. The sea-bear (Otaria ursina), which at one time seemed likely to meet with the same fate, is now nearly domesticated, and multiplies rapidly. The middle part of the province is a narrow strip (40 to 60 m. wide) along the Sea of Okhotsk, including the basin of the Uda in the south. This area is occupied by rugged mountains, 4000 to 7000 ft. high, forming the eastern border of the high plateau of East Siberia. Thick forests of larch clothe the mountains half way up, as well as the deep valleys. The undulating hills of the basin of the Uda, which is a continuation to the south-west, between the Stanovoi and Bureya mountains, of the deep indentation of the Sea of Okhotsk, are covered with forests and marshes.
The southern part of the province includes two distinct regions. From the north-eastern extremity of the Bureya, or Little Khingan range, of which the group of the Shantar Islands is a continuation, a wide, deep depression runs south-west to the confluence of the Amur and the Usuri, and thence to the lowlands of the lower Sungari. This is for the most part less than 500 ft. above sea-level. The region on the right banks of the Amur and the Usuri, between these rivers and the coast, is occupied by several systems of mountains, usually represented as a single range, the Sikhota-alin. The summits reach 5150 ft. (Golaya Gora), and the average elevation of the few passes is about 2500 ft. There is, however, one depression occupied by Lake Kidzi, which may have been at one time an outflow of the Amur to the sea. The Sikhota-alin mountains are covered with impenetrable forests. The flora and fauna of this region (especially in the Usuri district) exhibit a striking combination of species of warm climates with those of subarctic regions; the wild vine clings to the larch and the cedar-pine, and the tiger meets the bear and the sable. The quantity of fish in the rivers is immense, and in August the Amur and the Usuri swarm with salmon.
The best part of the Maritime Province is at its southern extremity in the valley of the Suifeng river, which enters the Pacific in the Gulf of Peter the Great, and on the shores of the bays of the southern coast. But even there the climate is very harsh. The warm sea-current of the Kuro-Siwo does not reach the coasts of Siberia, while a cold current originating in the Sea of Okhotsk brings its icy water and chilling fogs to the coasts of Sakhalin, and flows along the Pacific shore to the eastern coast of Korea. The high mountains of the sea-coast and the monsoons of the Chinese Sea produce in the southern parts of the Maritime Province cold winters and wet summers. Accordingly, at Vladivostok (on the Gulf of Peter the Great), although it has the same latitude as Marseilles, the average yearly temperature is only 39.5° F., and the harbour is frozen for nearly three months in the year; the Amur and the Usuri are frozen in November. Towards the end of summer the moist monsoons bring heavy rains, which destroy the harvests and give rise to serious inundations of the Amur. The sea-coast farther north has a continental and arctic climate. At Nikolayevsk, temperatures as low as −41.5° F. are observed in winter, and as high as 94.6° in summer, the average yearly temperature being below zero (−0.9°). At Ayan (56° 27′ N.) the average temperature of the year is 25.5° (−0.4° in winter and 50.5° in summer), and at Okhotsk (59° 21′ N.) it is 23° (−6° in winter and 52.5° in summer).
Russian settlements occur throughout the whole of the province, but, with the exception of those on the banks of the Amur and the Usuri, and the southern ports of the sea-coast, they are mere centres of administration.
Okhotsk is one of the oldest towns of East Siberia, having been founded in 1649. Nikolayevsk, on the left bank of the Amur, was formerly the capital of the Maritime Province; but the difficulties of navigation and of communication with the interior, and the complete failure of the governmental colonization of the Amur,
