NIEPCE 



NIGER 



499 



Memel, rises a few miles south of Minsk, and its 

 two branches reach the Kurisches Haff each hy four 

 mouths. See TILSIT. 



Niepce, JOSEPH NICEPHORE, was born at 

 Chalon-sur-Saone, 7th March 1765, served in the 

 army in Italy, and in 1795 became administrator 

 of the district of Nice ; and returning to Chalon in 

 1801, he made those experiments with sunlight 

 pictures which made Photography (q. v. ) possible. 

 He died 5th July 1833. His nephew, CLAUDE 

 MARIE FRANCOIS JUEPCE DESj VICTOR (1805-70), 

 also a soldier, wrote a Traite Pratique ( 1856) 

 on photography, and Recherches Photogra/i/tiyuex 

 (1855). [Pron. Nee-epps'.] 



Nierstein, a Hessian village on the Rhine, 10 

 in ilf-sSSK. <f Mainz, famous for its wine. Pop. 3283. 



Nietzsche, FRIEDKICH WILHELM, born the son 

 of a pastor at Rocken in Saxony, 15th October 

 1844, studied at Bonn and Leipzig, and obtained 

 distinction by treatises on Theogins, on the origin 

 of tragedy, &c. But from 1878 he began in a long 

 series of works to expound a revolutionary philo- 

 sophy denouncing alt religion and treating all 

 moral laws as a remnant of Christian superstition, 

 cherishing the 'virtues of the weak.' His ideal, 

 ' the overman,' is to be developed by giving 

 unbridled freedom to the struggle for existence, 

 will seek only his own power and pleasure, and 



knows nothing of 

 eight volumes 

 Tin 



< of pity, 

 of his v 



A translation by Tille of 

 works began in 1896 with 



TTius spake Zarathustra. The inmate of an insane 

 asylum since IS'Jo, he died 24th August 1900. See. 

 the Quarterly Review, October 1896. 



\ieiiwvcld. See CAPE COLONY. 



>"i-vre, a central department of France, on the 

 watershed lietween the Loire and the Seine. Area, 

 2632 sq. m. ; pop. ( 1881 ) 347,576 ; ( 1891 ) 343,581. 

 Mountains of the Morvan system, which forms 

 the watershed between the Seine and Rhone, 

 divide the department into two great declivities. 

 There are plateaus more or less fertile, vine-clad 

 hills, and valleys rich in pastures ; but the principal 

 wealth of the department consists in its forests 

 ami minerals coal, iron, and gypsum. The Nievre 

 is an inconsiderable affluent of the Loire from the 

 right. The three chief rivers are the Allier, Loire, 

 and Yonne. The iron industry is important, and 

 pottery and glass are manufactured. Arrondissc- 

 ments, Nevers, Chatean-Chinon, Clamecy, and 

 Cosne ; capital, Nevera. 



\ifllicim. See SCANDINAVIAN MYTHOLOGY. 



a genus of plants of the natural order 

 Ranunciilacesp, having five coloured spreading 

 sepals ; five or ten small two-lipped petals, with 

 tubular claw ; the carpels more or less connected 

 together, many-seeded ; the leaves divided into 

 threadlike segments, the flowers solitary at the 

 top of the stem or branches. They are annuals, 

 natives chiefly of the countries near the Medi- 

 terranean and the warmer temperate parts of Asia. 

 Some of them, occasionally seen in gardens in 

 Britain, are vulgarly known as Devil-in-a-mist. 

 The seeds are aromatic and somewhat peppery. 

 Those of N. saliva, a species common in corn- 

 fields in the south of Europe, are supposed to ! 

 the Black Cummin of the ancients, and perhaps the 

 Cummin of the Bible. 



.\iifrr. the name now generally applied to one 

 of the most remarkable river-systems of \\Vst 

 Equatorial Africa, first appears in Ptolemy as 

 designating, it is l>elieved, the modern Wadi Draa, 

 and coupled with a river Gir, which may be 

 identified with the modem O-Guir, flowing south- 

 ward from the Atlas towards the oases of Tuat. 

 The word not improbably contains the root gir, 

 gar, or jur, not infrequent in the river-names of 



northern Africa. Mixed up as it was from time 

 to time with the problem of the Nile, the problem 

 of the Niger remained almost till the 19th cen- 

 tury one of the most perplexed and bemuddled in 

 the whole range of geography. Though the Portu- 

 guese had ascended the river from the sea in the 

 16th century, the most contradictory opinions were 

 held as to its character and relations down to the 

 later part of the 18th century : it was an affluent 

 of the Nile ; an affluent of the Congo ; an inde- 

 pendent river terminating in an inland basin ; and 

 so on. It was still left to Mungo Park and other 

 workers in the service of the African Association 

 (1788) to lay the basis of our present fairly 

 accurate knowledge of the system. Apart from 

 some of the tributary streams, the hundred years 

 of exploration now leave only a blank of some 60 

 or 70 miles in the middle course of the main 

 river. 



The Niger proper (Joliba or Dhinliha, Isa, 

 Kwnrra or Quorra, &c.) has a total length of 2600 

 miles, and the area of the entire basin (including 

 that of the Benue) is estimated at 1,023,280 sq. m. 

 The head-waters are situated in the region now 

 known as the States of Samory, inland from Sierra 

 Leone and Lil>eria, and are contiguous to the head- 

 waters of the Senegal. The Tenihi (first explored 

 by Zweifel and Moustier in 1879), rising at a 

 height of almut 3000 feet aliove the sea in the 

 Loma Mountains in 8 36' N. lat. and 10 33' W. 

 long., is now accepted as the conventional ' source.' 

 This and its sister streams, though draining a com- 

 paratively limited area, soon gather into a good 

 navigable river, which holds a nortli-easterly 

 course as far as Timbuktu ( 18 4' N. lat., 1 45' W. 

 long.), first visited by Laing in 1826. Al>out 300 

 miles above this famous city it is joined by an 

 important right-hand tributary, the ^fayel-Balevel, 

 and develops a tendency to split up into numerous 

 and widely diverging channels, with cross-creeks, 

 back-waters, and swamps. Beyond Timbuktu 

 a more easterly direction is maintained for 200 

 miles, and then with its now united forces the 

 Niger turns south-east to cut its way through a 

 rocky tract of country, and to pass in succession 

 Gao (Gogo) on the southern skirt of the Sahara; 

 Say, the southern point of Barth's exploration ; 

 (Jompa, the northern limit of Flegel and Thomson ; 

 Bussa, where Park came to his untimely end ; 

 Rabba, one of the largest cities on its course ; and 

 Egga, where the river, having struck across the 

 llc-nni-1] Range (2800 feet), turns more to the south. 

 During this long journey from Timbuktu (1130 

 miles) a chief characteristic of the Niger has been 

 the insignificance of its tributary streams ; but at 

 last, in 7" 5W N. lat. and 6 45' E. long., it meets 

 in the Benue or Mother of Waters a rival both in 

 volume and in beauty. This river has travelled 

 860 miles from the east ; and, though exploration 

 in 1890 has deprived it of the credit ( Jiypothetically 

 assigned ) of being a link through the Tuburi swamp 

 with the system of Lake Tsad, it has interest 

 enough, geographical and commercial, of its own. 

 The united river, leaving the sandstone plateau 

 through which it has been carving its channel, 

 ' passes through a series of bold, picturesque hills 

 by a narrow gorge,' and below Onitsha begins to 

 break up into one of the most remarkable man- 

 grove-covered deltas in the world. See Johnson, 

 paper and map, in Proc. Roy. Geoa. Soc. 1888. 



The greater bulk of the exploration of the Niger 

 (especially towards the south) has been accom- 

 plished by Britain (Park, Clapperton, Beecroft, 

 Trotter, Baikie, &c.), and thanks mainly to Mac- 

 gregor Laird, who founded the African Steamship 

 Company in 1832, Britain has held her ground 

 against all foreign commercial competition. By 

 the Berlin Conference of 1884 the whole course of 



