194 M E T M E T METHODIUS, the apostle of the Slavs, was a native of Thessalonica, and was born about the year 825. His nationality is unknown, but most probably he was a Graecized Slav; the family of which he was a member appears to have been one of considerable social distinction, and he himself had already attained high official rank in the government of Macedonia before he determined to abandon his secular career and embrace the monastic life. His younger brother Constantine (better known as Cyril, the name he adopted at Rome shortly before his death) had also distinguished himself as a secular " philosopher " in Constantinople before he withdrew to the cloister and to solitude. Constantine about 860 had been sent by the emperor Michael III. to the Khazars, in response to their request for a Christian teacher, but had not remained long among them ; after his return to within the limits of the empire, his brother and he laboured for the instruction of the Slavonic or Slavonicized population, especially by means of translations of the Scripture lessons and the liturgical books used in Christian worship. About the year 863, at the invitation of Rastislav, king of " Great Moravia," who desired the Christianization of his subjects, but at the same time that they should be independent of the Germans, the two brothers went to his capital (its site is unknown), and, besides establishing a seminary for the education of priests, successfully occupied themselves in preaching in the vernacular and in diffusing their religious literature. After four years they seem to have received and accepted an invitation to Rome from Pope Nicholas I., who had just been engaged in his still extant corre spondence with the newly converted Bulgarian king ; his death occurred before their arrival, but they were kindly received by his successor Hadrian II. Constantine died in Rome, but Methodius, after satisfying the pope of his orthodoxy and obedience, went back to his labours in "Moravia" as archbishop of Pannonia. His province appears to have been, roughly speaking, co-extensive with the basins of the Raab, Drave, and Save, and thus to have included parts of what had previously belonged to the pro vinces of Salzburg and Passau. In 871 complaints on this account were made at Rome, nominally on behalf of the archbishop of Salzburg, but really in the interests of the German king and his Germanizing ally Swatopluk, Rastislav s successor ; they were not, however, immediately successful. In 879, however, Methodius was again sum moned to Rome by Pope John VIII., after having declined to give up the practice of celebrating mass in the Slavonic tongue ; but, owing to the peculiar delicacy of the relations of Rome with Constantinople, and with the young church of Bulgaria, the pope, contrary to all expectation, ulti mately decided in favour of a Slavonic liturgy, and sent Methodius (880) back to his diocese with a suffragan bishop, and with a letter of recommendation to Swatopluk. This suffragan, a German named Wiching, unfortunately proved quite the reverse of helpful to his metropolitan, and through his agency, especially after the death of John VIII. in 882, the closing years of the life of Methodius were embittered by continual ecclesiastical disputes, in the course of which he is said to have laid Swatopluk and his supporters under the ban, and the realm under interdict. The date of the death of Methodius is variously given ; the most trustworthy tradition says that it took place on April 6, 885. He was buried at Welehrad (probably Stuhlweissenberg). The Greek Church commemorates St Cyril on February 14 and St Methodius on May 11 ; in the Roman Church both are commemorated on March 9. See Schafarik s Slaivische Alterthiimer, where the original authorities are fully referred to. The subject of the present notice is most probably not to be identified with the Methodius, a painter and monk, who, according to a well-known legend, converted Boris cf Bulgaria by means of a picture of Christ s second coming. METHYL, a chemical term which until lately was used in two radically different senses, namely, as designating either the atom-group CH 3 , which in numberless chemical formulae figures as a "radical" (compare CHEMISTRY, vol. v. p. 552), or a gaseous substance of the same composition, which, however, nowadays is generally called " dimethyl," to distinguish it from the radical. A gas of the composi tion and the specific gravity (C 2 H 6 -=- H 2 = 15) corresponding to C 2 H 6 can be produced in two principal ways, first, by the decomposition of zinc-ethyl by water (Frankland) Zn(C 2 H 5 ) 2 + 20H . H = Zn(OH) 2 + C 2 H 5 H ; and, secondly, by the electrolysis of acetate of potash solution (Kolbe), we have virtually 2CH 3 .COOH = (CH 3 ) 2 + 200 2 +H 2 . +pole. pole. These two gases used to be distinguished as two different substances, Frankland s being looked upon as hydride of ethyl, C 2 H 5 . H, Kolbe s as " real methyl " (CH 3 )(CH 3 ), until Schorlemmer proved their identity by showing that both, when treated with chlorine, yield the same identical chloride of ethyl, C 2 H 5 . Cl. This confirmed the now generally adopted notion that the radical ethyl itself is nothing but methylo-methyl, H 3 C CH 2 *, so that the filling up of the gap* by an H must necessarily produce "hydride of ethyl" and "dimethyl" in one. The "true methyl " which chemists used to dream of, and which, when treated with chlorine, would yield two CH 3 CPs analogous to HH + C1C1 = HC1 4- HC1, does not, and according to our present knowledge cannot, exist. A quasi apology for it is "marsh gas," CH 4 , the principal component of the gas mixture which bubbles up from any marshy pond when its mud is stirred up with a stick. It is always produced when vegetable matter decays in the presence of water, and in the relative or absolute absence of air. What everybody knows as " fire-damp " is nothing but a (neces sarily explosive) mixture of air with impure marsh gas, produced in the constantly progressing metamorphosis of the coal deposits ; in certain districts streams of marsh gas are issuing forth from cracks in the earth ; the " holy fire " of Baku is such a marsh-gas spring, which, having once caught fire by accident, continues burning to this day. Perfectly pure marsh gas can only be obtained from zinc- methyl, Zn(CH 3 ).,, by its decomposition with water (vide supra) ; a nearly pure preparation is procurable by heating a mixture of acetate of potash or soda and caustic alkali to dull redness : CH 3 . COONa + NaOH = Na 2 C0 3 + CH 3 H . Acetate. Carbonate. Marsh gas can be prepared synthetically by the action of bisulphide of carbon vapour and sulphuretted hydrogen (both producible from their elements) on red-hot copper, CS 2 + 2H 2 S + 8Cu = 4Cu 2 S + CH 4 (Berthelot). A mixture of marsh gas and chlorine, when exposed to direct sunlight, explodes with formation of hydrochloric acid and char coal. In diffuse daylight only part of the hydrogen is eliminated and " replaced " by its equivalent in chlorine, which in general leads to the formation of four bodies : CH 3 C1 = CH 4 + C1. 2 -HC1, chloride of methyl; CH 2 C1 2 , chloride of methylene ; CHC1 3 , chloroform ; CC1 4 , tetra- chloride of carbon. Of these several chloromethanes, as they are called, the first here interests us more than any of the rest, because from it any other methyl compound can be produced by the substitution of the proper kind of radical for the Cl of the CH 3 C1. Thus, for instance, we can convert it into methyl-alcohol by treating the chloride with aqueous caustic potash at 100 C. (Berthelot). This is a most important synthesis, because it is this methyl- alcohol that, in practice, always serves as the starting point in the preparation of other methyl compounds.
Methyl- Alcohol. This substance, in ordinary practice,