N1LPOS NERI. 



173 



Pomuk, who was archbishop of Prague in 1393. 

 Yet the marble sepulchre of Nepomuk is shown in 

 the cathedral at Prague. According to others, 

 again, he was thrown into the river because he 

 refused to renounce the authority of the archbishop, 

 whose vicar he was, and who had excommunicated 

 the chamberlain of the king, and preached against 

 the vicious life of the king himself. 



NEPOS. See Cornelius Nepos. 



NEPOTISM ; a word used in the languages of the 

 European continent to signify, originally, the undue 

 patronage bestowed by the popes upon the members 

 of their family (nepotes) by appointing them to high 

 offices in the church, or making them important 

 grants. It was not uncommon for a person elected 

 pope, to elevate his whole family, so that ever after 

 the family belonged to the richest nobility in Rome. 

 The term lias been used also in a more general sense, 

 to denote any patronage bestowed in consideration of 

 family relationship, and not of merit. 



NEPTUNE appears to have been originally known 

 to the Romans merely as the god of horses, and as 

 such to have been confounded with the ancient Italian 

 god Consus. When the Roman state became a naval 

 power, and the Greek mythology was introduced 

 into Rome, attributes of the Grecian Poseidon, or 

 Poseidaon, were transferred to the Roman Neptune, 

 who therefore came to be considered the same god 

 under different names. Neptune was the son of 

 Saturn and Rhea or Ops, and brother of Jupiter 

 (q. v.) and Pluto. Different accounts are given of 

 the manner in which his mother saved him from the 

 fate to which he was doomed by his father. (See 

 Saturn.) According to some, he was thrown up 

 again after having been swallowed by his father ; 

 according to others, Rhea gave her husband a foal 

 instead of the infant, and the latter was secretly edu- 

 cated in Boeotia. After the successful rebellion of 

 his brother Jupiter, Neptune received the dominion 

 of the sea (Pantos or the inland sea, and not the 

 ocean) as his share of the spoils. It is not easy to 

 determine the true meaning of the mythus which de- 

 scribes him as having produced the horse in a contest 

 with Minerva (q. v.) for the possession of Attica. It 

 may imply that the use of the horse was first intro- 

 duced into Greece at the same time with the worship 

 of the Phoenician god Poseidon, by Phoenician pirates, 

 or it may be connected with some symbolical idea. 

 He raises, calms, and shakes the sea, and even makes 

 the earth, with its mountains and woods, tremble. He 

 was particularly worshipped in islands and on the 

 sea-coast. The Isthmian games (q. v.) were cele- 

 brated in honour of him. Beside dolphins and other 

 marine animals, the horse, and sometimes the owl, 

 were sacred to him. In the earliest monuments of art, 

 he is represented naked : in his hand he holds the tri- 

 dent, which the Mediterranean people early used as 

 a harpoon, and as a mark of possession on any coast. 

 He rides over the surface of the sea in a chariot 

 drawn by two horses, accompanied byNereids and sea- 

 monsters. By his wife Amphitrite, he had two chil- 

 dren, Triton and Rhode. The traditions concerning 

 his other children, by various mothers, are by some 

 explained as symbolical of the 'carrying off of women 

 by pirates. Strength, courage, heroic deeds at sea, 

 also obtained for men the appellation of sons of Nep- 

 tune. The epithets applied to Neptune by the 

 poets, refer chiefly to the sea, to navigation, to the 

 creation of the horse, and also to his power of shaking 

 the earth. Having taken part in the unsuccessful 

 attempt of the gods to rise against Jupiter, he was 

 condemned, together with Apollo, to serve Laome- 

 don, king of Troy. Neptune built the walls of the 

 city for Laomedon, but, being refused the pay pro- 

 mised him, caused an inundation, and sent a terrible 



sea-monster to infest the country. In the war of 

 Troy, he was on the side of the Greeks, and in the 

 battle of the gods, he encountered Apollo. 



NEPTUNIANS, or NEPTUNISTS, are those who 

 maintain the opinion, that the form of the earth and 

 the revolutions which it has undergone have been pro- 

 duced entirely by the action of water. See Geology, 

 and f^ulcanists. 



NEREIDS ; sea nymphs, daughters of Nereus. 

 They were fifty in number, and they had, like their 

 father, the gift of prophecy and the power of assum- 

 ing different shapes. 



NEREUS ; an interior divinity of the sea, some- 

 times also the sea itself, when it is calm. He was 

 the oldest son of Pontus (the Sea) and Terra (the 

 Earth). The poets represented him as a faithful, 

 benevolent old man, the friend of justice and moder- 

 ation, and the enemy of oppression. He possessed 

 the gift of divination in a greater degree than all 

 the gods of the three elements, air, earth, and 

 water, and like other gods of the sea, could con- 

 vert himself into all shapes. By Doris, the daughter 

 of Oceanus, his spouse, and other goddesses, he was 

 the father of the Nereids. His chief place of resi- 

 dence was the ^Egean sea. When Paris sailed 

 through this sea with Helen, whom he was carrying 

 oft', Nereus, according to the beautiful ode of Horace, 

 warned him of the destruction of Troy. In the ancient 

 works of art, and also by the ancient poets, he is repre- 

 sented as a malicious old man, with a wreath of sedge, 

 sitting upon the waves, with a sceptre in his hand. 



NERI. See Guelfs. 



NERI, ANTHONY, deserves to be mentioned as one 

 of the first chemists, at a time when the natural 

 sciences were called occult. He was born in Florence 

 about the middle of the sixteenth century. Though 

 he had received holy orders, he always refused any 

 benefice, in order to live solely for his science. He 

 travelled through most countries of Europe, and 

 wherever he was unable to study chemistry with dis- 

 tinguished men in any other way, he worked with 

 them as an assistant in their laboratories. But his 

 active life came prematurely to a close. There is 

 only one treatise by him extant, on glass L' Arte 

 Vetraria distinta in libri sette ; ne' yuali si scoprono 

 maravigliosi effetti e s'insegnano segreti bellissimi del 

 vetro nel fuoco, ed altre cose curiose (Florence, Giunti, 

 1612, 4Lo), a work which has been translated into 

 German, French, Latin, English. The best transla- 

 tion is said to be that by Holbach, in French, with 

 the notes of the German and English translations, and 

 many additional ones. Though chemistry has made 

 immense progress since the time of Neri, his work, 

 nevertheless, deserves to be read. The colouring of 

 glass, it is well known, was a great subject of atten- 

 tion at a certain period, and attained a perfection 

 which, having lost, it har iot since reached. 



NERI, ST PHILIP, the founder of the congregation 

 of the Oratory in Italy, was born in Florence in 1515, 

 of a noble family. From early youth he distinguished 

 himself by piety and application to study. A rich 

 uncle, a merchant, intended to make him his sole heir, 

 but Neri left him secretly, and went to Rome in 1533, 

 where he became instructer in the house of a gentle- 

 man of Florence. At the age of twenty-three, he sold 

 his books, and gave the price to the poor. He now de- 

 voted himself entirely to the sick and pilgrims. In 

 1548, he established the fraternity of the Holy Trinity, 

 for the purpose of aiding strangers who came to Rome 

 for devotional purposes, and soon after he founded 

 the hospice for the reception of pilgrims, which has 

 become one of the finest in Rome.* He did not 



* At the time of the jubilee in 1600, this establishment sup- 

 ported, during three days, upwards of 440,500 men and 25,000 

 women. 



