of any size. The town has been brought within the railway circuit, and the production of petroleum has been developed in the district. Ebisa, on the island of Sado, was opened as a supplementary harbour of refuge, but not as a trading port. There is a large manufacture of lacquer-ware in the town. The foreign trade is entirely in the hands of Japanese merchants. During winter Niigata suffers from a terribly severe climate; the summers, moreover, are excessively hot.
NIJAR, a town of south-eastern Spain, in the province of Almeria; on the southern slope of the Sierra Alhamilla, and on the small river Artal, which flows into the Mediterranean Sea 6 m. S.W. Pop. (1900) 12,497. Despite the lack of railway communication, Nijar is a place of some commercial importance. Lead, iron and manganese are mined in the neighbouring mountains; the fertile plain watered by the Artal yields an abundance of wheat, fruit, olives and esparto grass; and fine porcelain and woollen and cotton goods are manufactured in the town.
NIJMWEGEN, Nimeguen, Nymegen or Nimwegen, a town in the province of Gelderland, Holland, on the left bank of the Waal, 2412 m. by rail E. by S. of Tiel. It has regular steamboat communication with Rotterdam, Cologne and Arnhem, and steam-tramways connect it with the popular resorts of Neerbosch, Beek and Berg-en-Dal in the vicinity. Pop. (1904) 49,342. Nijmwegen is very prettily situated on the slopes of five low hills rising from the river-side. It stands up with a boldness quite unusual in a Dutch town, and steps are even necessary to lead to the higher portions of the town. In 1877–1884 the old town walls were demolished, a promenade and gardens taking their place, and since then a new quarter has grown up on the south side with a fine open place called the Emperor Charles’s Plain. On the east of the town is the beautiful park called the Valkhof, which marks the site of the old palace of the Carolingian emperors. The palace was still inhabitable in 1787, but was ruined by the French bombardment of 1794, and only two portions of it remain. These are a part of the choir of the 12th-century palace-church, and a sixteen-sided baptistry originally consecrated by Pope Leo III. in 799 and rebuilt in the 12th or 13th century. Close by is the lofty tower of the Belvedere, dating from 1646. The Groote Kerk of St Stephen forms with its tall square tower one of the most striking features in the general views of the town. Originally built about 1272, it dates in its present condition mainly from the 15th and 16th centuries. In the choir is the fine monument of Catherine of Bourbon (d. 1469), wife of Adolphus of Egmont, duke of Gelderland, with a brass of the duchess, and the heraldic achievements of the house of Bourbon. There is also a fine organ. The interesting Renaissance town-hall was built in 1554 (restored in 1879). It is adorned with the effigies of kings and emperors who were once benefactors of Nijmwegen. Inside are to be found some fine wood-carving, tapestries, pictures and a cumbrous safe in which the town charters were so jealously preserved that the garrison used to be called out and the city gates closed whenever they were consulted. There is also an interesting museum of antiquities. Other buildings of note are the theatre (1839), the Protestant hospital, the Roman Catholic or Canisius hospital (1866), and the old weigh-house and Flesher’s Hall, probably built in 1612 and restored in 1885. Between 1656 and 1678 Nijmwegen was the Seat of a university. Beer, Prussian blue, leather, tin, pottery, cigars, and gold and silver work are the chief industrial products, and there is a considerable trade by rail and river.
NIKĀYA (“collection”), the name of a division of the Buddhist canonical books. There are four principal Nikāyas, making together the Sutta Piṭaka (“Basket of Discourses”), the second of the three baskets into which the canon is divided. The fifth or miscellaneous Nikāya is by some authorities added to this Piṭaka, by others to the next. The first two Nikāyas, called respectively Dīgha and Majjhima (Longer and Shorter), form one book, a collection of the dialogues of the Buddha, the longer ones being included in the former, the shorter ones in the latter. The third, called the Anguttara (Progressive Addition), rearranges the doctrinal matter contained in the Dialogues in groups of ethical concepts, beginning with the units, then giving the pairs, then the groups of three, four, five, &c., up to ten. In the Dialogues the arrangement in such numbered groups is frequent. In an age when books, in our modern sense, were unknown, it was a practical necessity to invent and use aids to memory. Such were the repetition of memorial tags, of, cues (as now used for a precisely similar purpose on the stage), to suggest what is to come. Such were also these numbered lists of technical ethical terms. Religious teachers in the West had similar groups—the seven deadly sins, the ten commandments, the four cardinal virtues, the seven Sacraments, and many others. These are only now, since the gradual increase of books, falling out of use. In the 5th century B.C. in India it was found convenient by the early Buddhists to classify almost the whole of their psychology and ethics in this manner. And the Anguttara Nikāya is based on that classification. In the last Nikāya, the Saṃyutta (The Clusters), the same doctrines are arranged in a different set of groups, according to subject. All the Logia (usually of the master himself, but also of his principal disciples) on any one point, or in a few cases as addressed to one set of people, are here brought together. That was, of course, a very convenient arrangement then. It saved a teacher or scholar who wanted to find the doctrine on any one subject from the trouble of repeating over, or getting some one else to repeat over for him, the whole of the Dialogues or the Anguttara. To us, now, the Saṃyutta seems full of repetitions; and we are apt to forget that they are there for a very good reason.
During the time when the canon was being completed there was great activity in learning, repeating to oneself, rehearsing in company and discussing these three collections. But there was also considerable activity in a more literary direction. Hymns were sung, lyrics were composed, tales were told, the results of some exciting or interesting talk were preserved in summaries of exegetical exposition. A number of these have been fortunately preserved for us in twenty-two collections, mostly of very short pieces, in the fifth or miscellaneous Nikāya, the Khuddaka Nikāya.
The text of the Dialogues fills about 2000 pages 8vo in the edition prepared for the Pali Text Society, of which five vols. out of six had been published in 1909, and the first had been translated into English. The Saṃyutta, of about the same size, and the Anguttara, which is a little smaller, have both been edited. Of the twenty-two miscellaneous books twenty have been edited (see Rhys Davids, American Lectures (1896), pp. 66-79), five have been translated into English and two more into German.
See Dīgha Nikāya, ed. Rhys Davids and Carpenter (3 vols.); Saṃyutta Nikāya (5 vols.), ed. Léon Feer, vol. vi. by Mrs Rhys Davids, containing indices; Anguttara Nikāya, ed. R. Morris and E. Hardy (5 vols.); all published by the Pali Text Society. Also Rhys Davids, Dialogues of the Buddha, vol. i. (Oxford, 1899); A. J. Edmunds, “Buddhist Bibliography,” in Journal of the Pali Text Society (1903), pp. 5-12. (T. W. R. D.)
NIKĒ, in Greek mythology, the goddess of victory (Gr. νίκη).
She does not appear personified in Homer; in Hesiod (Theog.
384) she is the daughter of the giant Pallas and Styx, and is sent
to fight on the side of Zeus against the Titans. Nikē does not
appear to have been the object of a separate cult at Athens.
She was at first inseparably connected and confounded with
Pallas Athena, the dispenser of victory, but gradually separated
from her. As an attribute of both Athena and Zeus she is
represented as a small figure carried by those divinities in their hand.
Athena Nikē was always wingless, Nikē as a separate goddess
winged. In works of art she appears carrying a palm branch
or a wreath (sometimes a Hermes staff as the messenger of
victory); erecting a trophy or recording a victory on a shield;
frequently hovering with outspread wings over the victor in a
competition, since her functions referred not only to success in
war, but to all other human undertakings. In fact, Nikē gradually
came to be recognized as a sort of mediator of success between
gods and men.
At Rome the goddess of victory (Victoria) was worshipped from the earliest times. Evander was said to have erected a temple in her honour on the Palatine before the foundation of Rome itself (Dion. Halic. i. 32, 33). With the introduction of the Greek gods, Victoria became merged in Nikē. She always had a
