AQUINAS 



308 



ARABIA 



one miles were tunneled. One of the most 

 remarkable features is the tunnel under the 

 Hudson River, near West Point. It is 3,000 

 feet long, cut in bed rock 1,100 feet below the 

 river's surface. On each shore is a shaft, lined 

 with concrete, with an inside diameter of four- 

 teen feet. The cost of the entire system, 

 including about $25,000,000 for piping and local 

 reservoirs in the city, will be not far from 

 $200,000,000. 



Los Angeles Aqueduct. This is the longest 

 aqueduct in the world, with a length of 235 

 miles. It was begun in 1907 and was placed 

 in operation in 1914. It diverts the entire flow 

 of the Owens River, which it receives about 

 ten miles north of Independence, Cal. As the 

 elevation of the intake is 3,800 feet above the 

 sea, and that of Los Angeles only 275 feet, the 

 water flows to every part of the city by gravity. 

 Besides supplying the city with an abundance 

 of water, the aqueduct carries enough to irri- 

 gate thousands of acres of land nearby, and 

 will ultimately furnish 120,000 horse-power 

 for electric plants of the city. Nearly the 

 whole of the aqueduct was built by the city 

 itself, not by contractors, and its estimated 

 cost was $25,000,000. 



In Mining and Irrigation. The name aque- 

 duct is sometimes applied to ditches and other 

 channels used in mining and in irrigation. 

 Occasionally these are permanent structures of 

 stone or concrete, but more often they are 

 temporary structures of wood and are properly 

 called flumes, not aqueducts. Some irrigating 

 systems require as much water as a fair-sized 

 city, notably in the western part of Canada 

 and the United States. For details, see IRRI- 

 GATION, w. F. z. 



AQUINAS, akwi'nas, SAINT THOMAS (1227- 

 1274), a celebrated divine, called by his fellow- 

 students at Cologne the "dumb ox," but years 

 later by his pupils "the Angelic Doctor." He 

 was a member of the Dominican Order, and 

 taught at Cologne, Rome, Bologna and Pisa, 

 showing such learning and piety that he was 

 looked up to as one of the foremost church- 

 men of his time. His greatest work, the 

 Summa Theologiae, is a "summing up" of the 

 theological system of the Roman Catholic 

 Church, and stands to-day as a standard 

 authority. Aquinas was declared a saint by 

 Pope John XXII in 1323. 



ARABESQUE, arabesk', a term meaning 

 after the Arab style, employed in a narrow 

 sense to describe a certain kind of fantastic 

 ornamentation which the Arabs and Moors 



used on their buildings. More generally the 

 word denotes any kind of ornamentation of a 



ARABESQUE ORNAMENTATION 



fanciful character. In the arabesques of the 

 Mohammedans the figures of men and animals 

 were never used, because the Koran forbade 

 it, and architects and artists confined them- 

 selves to geometric devices, foliage, fruit, floral 

 forms and the like, which were arranged in 

 elaborate designs. The most beautiful Moor- 

 ish arabesques are found in the Alhambra, 

 Spain, and the best examples of Roman work 

 in this same style are the works of Raphael 

 in the Vatican, imitated from earlier friezes. 



ARABIA, ara'bia, a great peninsula of 

 Southwestern Asia, a land of romance, of 

 deserts and unexplored waste, toward which 

 the eyes of the 

 world are turned 

 chiefly because it 

 is the home of 

 one of the great 

 religions, Mo- 

 hammedanism. 

 From it have 

 come, however, in 

 centuries past, 

 the beginnings of 

 so many of the 

 arts and sciences that a history of education or 

 of civilization cannot well omit Arabia. 



The Land. Jncluding the Syrian desert, 

 Arabia has a greatest length of 1,500 miles, 

 while its greatest breadth is 1,200 miles. From 

 its northern to its southern boundary the dis- 

 tance is almost as great as from New York to 

 Denver, and its total area, 1,200,000 square 

 miles, is about one-third that of the United 



ARABIA 

 Location marked in black. 



