End and Headlands. There are large granite quarries along the coast, especially in Pigeon Cove, and there are two varieties of granite, called commercially “grey” and “green” both very hard, the former the more abundant. It has been used in building the great breakwater off Sandy Bay and various large bridges. Granite for paving-stones is quarried. Like many of the Maine quarries those of Rockport owe much of their development to their nearness to deep water transportation. Isinglass, glue, tools, parts for automobile engines, and copper paint are among the manufactures. Fishing was formerly of importance, but quarrying has displaced it. Sandy Bay, the fifth parish of Gloucester, first settled about 1697, and Pigeon Cove, part of the third parish, were set off from Gloucester and were incorporated as the township of Rockport in 1840. The Bennett & Mackay transatlantic commercial cable was landed in Rockport in May 1884.
ROCKVILLE, a city of Tolland county, Connecticut, U.S.A., in the N.E. part of the state, on the Hockanum river, about 15 m. N.E. of Hartford. Pop. (1890) 7772; (1900) 7287, of whom 2548 were foreign-born, many being Germans and Poles; (1910) 7977. It is served by the New York, New Haven & Hartford railway and by electric lines. It is in the township of Vernon (pop. in 1890, 8808; in 1910, 9087; area, 19 sq. m.), which was separated from Bolton township in 1808, and contains the villages of Vernon, Vernon Centre, Dobsonville and Talcottville. In the city are the George Maxwell Memorial Library and the Sykes Manual Training School. The river, by a series of falls, makes a descent of 280 ft. here, and furnishes power for large manufacturing establishments. The principal manufactures are woollen, silk and cotton goods, envelopes, and silk fish-lines. In 1841 fancy cassimeres, probably the first manufactured in the United States, were made here. At the Hockanum Mills (established 1809) worsted for men's clothing was first made (about 1870) in the United States. The first settlement here was made about 1726. Rockville was chartered as a city in 1889.
ROCKY MOUNTAIN GOAT, or White Goat (Oreamnus montanus), a North American hollow-horned ruminant of the family Bovidae, distinguished by its white colour. It is, in fact, the only ruminant, with the exception of the white Alaskan wild sheep, which is entirely white at all seasons of the year; and cannot, therefore, be mistaken for any other animal, and its description may consequently be brief. In the winter coat the hair is long and pendent, elongated into a short beard on the sides of the lower jaw behind the chin; and it is also longer than elsewhere on the neck and the chest; at the base of the long hair is a thick growth of short and woolly under-fur. In summer the coat becomes comparatively short. The muzzle is hairy, the ears are of moderate size, and the tail is short, and partially buried among the long hair of the rump. There are no glands on the face; but there is a large globular one at the base of each horn of the size of half a small orange. The black horns, which are ringed in their basal portion, are comparatively short and not unlike those of the Asiatic serows in general characters, being sub cylindrical, and curving slightly backwards. They taper, however, much more rapidly than those of the serows, and diverge much more widely from the middle line. The lateral hoofs are well developed. Although commonly described as white, the hair has a more or less decided tinge of yellow, which appears to be more marked in the summer than in the winter coat. The cannon-bones are remarkably short and wide, and in this respect differ from those of all allied ruminants, except the Tibetan takin. The general shape of the animal is ungainly, owing to a huge hump on the withers, at which point the height is about 3 ft.
The head of a white goat obtained in 1900 from the mountains at the mouth of Copper river, opposite Kyak Island, has been described as a species apart. In addition to certain details in the conformation of the skull, the horns are much more slender than in the ordinary white goat, and instead of bending regularly backwards till near their tips, curve widely outwards from their bases. Their length is nearly equal to that of the longest pair of the ordinary form hitherto recorded, while the tip-to-tip interval is nearly double that of any other known specimen. This animal can scarcely be regarded as more than a local race, and should be styled Oreamnus montanus kennedyi.
The affinities of the white goat (which is really a member of a group intermediate between goats and antelopes) are probably with the Asiatic serows and takin, and hence perhaps with the musk-ox.
See a paper by Madison Grant, entitled “ The Rocky Mountain Goat,” published in the ninth annual report of the New York Zoological Society (1905). (R. L.*)
ROCOCO, or Rocaille, literally “rock-work,” a style of architectural and mobiliary decoration popular throughout the greater part of Europe during the first half of the 18th century. In France it was especially characteristic of the regency and the reign of Louis XV. A debased style at the best, essentially fantastic and bizarre, it ended in extravagance and decadence. A meaningless mixture of imitation rock-work, shells, scrolls and foliage, the word came eventually to be applied to anything extravagant, flamboyant or tasteless in art or literature. The very exuberance of the rococo forms is, indeed, the negation of art, which is based upon restraint. There is something fundamentally Italian in the bravura upon which the style depends; yet Italy has produced some of the worst examples of what in that country is called the “Jesuit style,” in allusion to the supposed lack of directness in Jesuit policy. Everything, indeed, in the rococo manner is involved and tortured, though before a superb example of Jacques Caffieri, such as the famous commode in the Wallace Collection, it is impossible not to admire the art with which genius can treat even the defects and weaknesses of a peculiarly mannered fashion. The best French work possesses a balance and symmetry which are usually entirely absent from its imitations. Spain and Italy produced many monstrous travesties—it is impossible to imagine anything more grotesque than the flamboyant convolutions of the monumental Roman style of the third quarter of the 18th century. In Germany, weak and lifeless imitations were as popular as might be imagined in a land which was content to take its art, especially its bad art, from France. England did not escape the infection, and Chippendale and his school produced examples of rocaille work and coquillage which were quite foreign to their own sentiment, and rarely rose above respectable mediocrity.
ROCROI, a town of northern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Ardennes, 22 m. N.N.W. of Charleville by rail, and within 2 m. of the Belgian frontier. Pop. (1906) town, 796; commune, 2116. As a fortified place it commands the Ardennes plateau between the valley of the Meuse and the head-waters of the Oise. The present fortifications, constructed by Vauban, form a pentagon and entirely close in the town, which has regularly built streets converging on a central square. Overlooking the latter is the church, a florid building of the 18th century. Rocroi is the seat of a sub-prefect and has a tribunal of first instance.
The place, originally called Croix-de-Rau or Rau Croix, was fortified in the 16th century and besieged by the imperialists in 1555. Invested by the Spaniards in 1643, it was relieved by Louis II., the duke of Enghien (afterwards the Great Condé), after a brilliant victory. Captured in 1658 by the same duke, then in the Spanish service, it was not restored to France till the treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. In 1815 Rocroi was besieged for a month by the allies.
ROD, ÉDOUARD (1857-1910), French-Swiss novelist, was born at Nyon, in Switzerland, on the 31st of March 1857. He studied at Lausanne and Berlin, and in 1878 found his way to Paris. In 1881 he dedicated his novel, Palmyre Veulard, to Zola, of whom he was at this period of his career a faithful disciple. A series of novels of similar tendency followed. In 1884 he became editor of the Revue contemporaine, and in 1887 succeeded Marc Monnier as professor of comparative literature at Geneva, where he remained till 1893. La Course à la mort (1885) marks a turning-point in his career; in it he
