the son of Cretheus. He and his twin-brother Neleus were exposed by their mother, but were nurtured by a herdsman. When grown to manhood they were acknowledged by their mother. After the death of Cretheus, Pelias made himself master of the kingdom of Iolous, having previously quarrelled with Neleus, who removed to Messenia, where he founded Pylos. In order to rid himself of Jason, Pelias sent him to Colchis in quest of the golden fleece, and took advantage of his absence to put to death his father, Aeson, his mother and brother. When Jason returned he sought to avenge the death of his parents, and Medea persuaded the daughters of Pelias to cut in pieces and boil their father, assuring them that he would thus be restored to youth. Acastus, son of Pelias, drove out Jason and Medea and celebrated funeral games in honour of his father, which were celebrated by the poet Stesichorus and represented on the chest of Cypselus. The death of Pelias was the subject of Sophocles’ Rhizotomoi (Root-cutters), and in the Tyro he treated another portion of the legend. Peliades (the daughters of Pelias) was the name of Euripides’ first play.
PELICAN (Fr. Pélican; Lat. Pelecanus or Pelicanus), a large fish-eating water-fowl, remarkable for the enormous pouch
formed by the extensible skin between the lower jaws of its long,
and apparently formidable but in reality very weak, bill. The
ordinary pelican, the Onocrotalus of the ancients, to whom it was
well known, and the Pelecanus onocrotalus of ornithologists,
is a very abundant bird in some districts of south-eastern
Europe, south-western Asia and north-eastern Africa, occasionally
straying, it is believed, into the northern parts of Germany and
France; but the possibility of such wanderers having escaped
from confinement is always to be regarded,[1] since few zoological
gardens are without examples. Its usual haunts are the shallow
margins of the larger lakes and rivers, where fishes are plentiful,
since it requires for its sustenance a vast supply of them. The
nest is formed among reeds, placed on the ground and lined with
grass. Therein two eggs, with white, chalky shells, are commonly
laid. The young during the first twelvemonth are of a
greyish-brown, but when mature almost the whole plumage,
except the black primaries, is white, deeply suffused by a rich
blush of rose or salmon-colour, passing into yellow on the crest
and lower part of the neck in front. A second and somewhat
larger species, Pelecanus crispus, also inhabits Europe, but has
a more eastern distribution. This, when adult, is readily distinguishable
from the ordinary bird by the absence of the blush
from its plumage, and by the curled feathers that project from
and overhang each side of the head, which with some difference
of coloration of the bill, pouch, bare skin round the eyes and
irides give it a wholly distinct expression. Two specimens of the
humerus have been found in the English fens (Ibis, 1868, p. 363; Proc. Zool. Society, 1871, p. 702), thus proving the existence of
the bird in England at no very distant period, and one of them
being that of a young example points to its having been bred
in this country. It is possible from their large size that they
belonged to P. crispus. Ornithologists have been much divided
in opinion as to the number of living species of the genus Peleranus (cf. op. cit., 1868, p. 264; 1869, p. 571; 1871, p. 631)—the
estimate varying from six to ten or eleven, but the former is the
number recognized by M. Dubois (Bull. Mus. de Belgique, 1883). North America has one, P. erythrorhynchus, very similar to
P. onocrotalus both in appearance and habits, but remarkable for a triangular, horny excrescence developed on the ridge of the
male’s bill in the breeding season, which falls off without leaving
trace of its existence when that is over. Australia has
P. conspicillatus, easily distinguished by its black tail and wing-coverts
Of more marine habit are P. philippensis and P. fuscus,
the former having a wide range in Southern Asia, and, it is said,
reaching Madagascar, and the latter common on the coasts of the warmer parts of both North and South America.
The genus Pelecanus as instituted by Linnaeus included the cormorant (q.v.) and gannet (q.v.) as well as the true pelicans, and for a long while these and some other distinct groups, as the snake-birds (q.v.), Frigate-birds (q.v.) and tropic-birds (q.v.), which have all the four toes of the foot connected by a web, were regarded as forming a single family, Pelecanidae, but this name has now been restricted to the pelicans only, though all are still usually associated in the suborder Steganopodes of Ciconiiform birds. It may be necessary to state that there is no foundation for the venerable legend of the pelican feeding her young with blood from her own breast, which has given it an important place in ecclesiastical heraldry, except that, as A. D. Bartlett suggested (Proc. Zool. Society, 1869, p. 146), the curious bloody secretion ejected from the mouth of the flamingo may have given rise to the belief, through that bird having been mistaken for the “Pelican of the wilderness.”[2] (A. N.)
PELION, a wooded mountain in Thessaly in the district of Magnesia, between Volo and the east coast. Its highest point
(mod. Plessidi) is 5340 ft. It is famous in Greek mythology;
the giants are said to have piled it on Ossa in order to scale
Olympus, the abode of the gods; it was the home of the centaurs,
especially of Chiron, who had a cave near its summit, and
educated many youthful heroes; the ship “Argo” was built
from its pine-woods. On its summit was an altar of Zeus
Actaeus, in whose honour an annual festival was held in the
dog-days, and worshippers clad themselves in skins.
PELISSE (through the Fr. from Lat. pellicia: sc. vestis, a
garment made of fur, pellis, skin), properly a name of a cloak
made of or lined with fur, hence particularly used of the fur-trimmed
“dolman” worn slung from the shoulders by hussar
regiments. The word is now chiefly employed as the name of a
long-sleeved cloak of any material worn by women and children.
PÉLISSIER, AIMABLE JEAN JACQUES (1794–1864), duke of Malakoff, marshal of France, was born on the 6th of November 1794 at Maromme (Seine Inférieure), of a family of prosperous artisans or yeoman, his father being employed in a powder-magazine. After attending the military college of La Flèche and the special school of St Cyr, he in 1815 entered the army as sub-lieutenant in an artillery regiment. A brilliant examination in 1819 secured his appointment to the staff. He served as aide-de-camp in the Spanish campaign of 1823, and in the expedition to the Morea in 1828–29. In 1839 he took part in the expedition to Algeria, and on his return was promoted to the rank of chef d’escadron. After some years’ staff service in Paris he was again sent to Algeria as chief of staff of the province of Oran with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and remained there till the Crimean War, taking a prominent part in many important operations. The severity of his conduct in suffocating a whole Arab tribe in the Dahra or Dahna caves, near Mustaganem, where they had taken refuge (June 18, 1845), awakened such indignation in Europe that Marshal Soult, the minister of war, publicly expressed his regret; but Marshal Bugeaud, the governor-general of Algeria, not only gave it his approval, but secured for Pélissier the rank of general of brigade, which he held till 1850, when he was promoted general of division. After the battles of October and November 1854 before Sevastopol, Pélissier was sent to the Crimea, where on the 16th of May 1855 he succeeded Marshal Canrobert as commander-in-chief of the French forces before Sevastopol (see Crimean War). His command was marked by relentless pressure of the enemy and unalterable determination to conduct the campaign without interference from Paris. His perseverance was crowned with
- ↑ This caution was not neglected by the prudent, even so long ago as Sir Thomas Browne’s days, for he, recording the occurrence of a pelican in Norfolk, was careful to notice that about the same time one of the pelicans kept by the king (Charles II.) in St James’s Park, had been lost.
- ↑ The legend was commonly believed in the middle ages. Epiphanius, bishop of Constantia, in his Physiologus (1588), writes that the female bird, in cherishing her young, wounds them with loving, and pierces their sides, and they die. After three days the male pelican comes and finds them dead, and his heart is pained. He smites his own side, and as he stands over the wounds of the dead young ones the blood trickles down, and thus are they made alive again The pelican “in his piety”—i.e. in this pious act of reviving his offspring—was a common subject for 15th century emblem books; it became a symbol of self-sacrifice, a type of Christian redemption and of the Eucharistic doctrine. The device was adopted by Bishop Fox in 1516 for his new college of Corpus Christi, Oxford.—[H. Ch.]
