ALLSTON 



2US 



ALMANAC 



ALLSTON, awl' stun, WASHINGTON (1779- 

 1&43), an American painter whose characteristic 

 use of rich, glowing color has given him the 

 name "the American Titian." He was born 

 at Waccamaw, S. C., studied art in New Eng- 

 land schools and was graduated at Harvard 

 in 1800. While abroad he attended the Royal 

 Academy of London, and also made a special 

 study of the master artiste of the Venetian 

 School. An early painting, The Dead Man 

 Revived, is in the Pennsylvania Academy of 

 Fine Arts. Other works include Uriel in the 

 Sun, The Prophet Jeremiah and Belshazzar's 

 Feast. 



ALLUVIUM, allu' vium. Water is one of 

 the chief agents which slowly but continuously 

 modify and change the surface of our earth. 

 The materials produced by the action of water, 

 known as erosion (which see), are collected 

 by the rivers and deposited along their lower 

 course. These deposits are known as alluvium 

 or alluvial deposits. They consist of sand, 

 mud, gravel, clay, boulders and so on, and are 

 deposited either at the bottom of the rivers, 

 or along their banks or at their mouth, where 

 they form what is known as deltas. The large 

 tracts of fertile land found in the valleys and 

 along the banks of many rivers hava been 

 formed by alluvial deposits left there by the 

 river in the course of many centuries. Gold 

 found in the soil on the banks and in the bed 

 of streams is spoken of as alluvial gold, that 

 is, gold found in alluvium. See DELTA; FLOOD 

 PLAIN; RIVER. 



ALMA MATER, al' ma may' tur, a Latin 

 phrase meaning fostering mother, affectionately 

 applied by the graduates of a school or col- 

 lege to the institutions in which they have 

 been educated. Thus a graduate will speak of 

 Harvard, Michigan, McGill, Cambridge, or 

 other college or university as his alma mater. 

 In England the term is applied rather to one 

 of the great public schools than to a university, 

 so that Eton is more frequently referred to as 

 alma mater than is Oxford. The term was 

 originally applied by the Romans to Ceres, the 

 goddess of agriculture, but it has been used in 

 its present figurative meaning for many years. 



ALMANAC, awl' manak, a book or pam- 

 phlet which contains a calendar and a variety 

 of information. It usually gives interesting 

 facts about the planets and the stars, the 

 dates of the phases of the moon, and the time 

 of eclipses and other phenomena. Holidays 

 and feast days are given, as well as birthdays 

 of great men, dates of important battles, and 



many items of current interest, often includ- 

 ing summaries of recent events in political 

 history and statistics of area, population, agri- 

 culture, manufactures, mining and other indus- 

 tries. 



In addition to these general almanacs there 

 are many whose field is limited to special sub- 

 jects, such as navigation and astronomy. One 



ALMANACK 



FOR. 



The Tear of our. LORD 

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Philomath. 



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ONE OF AMERICA'S EARLIEST ALMANACS 

 Only two copies of the 1667 Almanac are 

 known to exist. One Is in the library of the 

 American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass., 

 purchased for $275. The other is in the hands 

 of a private collector in Albany, N. Y. The 

 illustration shows the title page. 



of the most famous of these is the Almanack 

 de Gotha (that is, Almanac of Gotha), so 

 called because it is published in the German 

 city of Gotha. It includes much statistical 

 matter for all countries, but is best known for 

 its genealogies of royal and noble families. It 

 is edited with extreme care, and only those 

 persons are listed whose right to a title is 

 beyond dispute. 



Almanacs were in use among the Romans in 

 ancient times, but the oldest existing manu- 

 script copies date from the fourteenth and 



