Memphis City (pop., 2000: 650,100), southwestern Tennessee, U.S. Situated above the Mississippi River where the borders of Arkansas, Mis¬ sissippi, and Tennessee meet, it was founded in 1819 on the site of a Chickasaw Indian village and a U.S. fort. It was incorporated as a city in 1826. A Confederate military centre at the start of the American Civil War, it was captured by Union forces in 1862. In the 1870s yellow fever killed more than 5,000 residents, and the city was forced into bankruptcy. Rechartered in 1893, it was the state’s largest city by 1900. Sites of inter¬ est include Beale Street, made famous by W.C. Handy as the birthplace of the blues; and Graceland, the mansion of Elvis Presley. It is the seat of several educational institutions, including the University of Memphis.
Memphremagog V.mem-fri-'ma-.gagV Lake Lake that crosses the U.S.-Canadian border. Extending from northern Vermont, U.S., into southern Quebec, Can., it is 27 mi (43 km) long and only 1-2 mi (1.5-3 km) wide for most of its length. It has several large bays, including Fitch Bay and Sargents Bay. At its northern end the lake drains into the St. Frangois River. Its name is an Algonquian term meaning “where there is a big expanse of water.”
Menai Strait Vme-.nA Channel of the Irish Sea separating the Isle of Anglesey from the mainland of northern Wales. It extends 15 mi (24 km) and varies in width from 600 ft (180 m) to 2 mi (3 km). Two famous bridges span the strait: Thomas Telford’s suspension road bridge of 1827 and Robert Stephenson’s Britannia tubular railway bridge of 1849.
Menander Vmo-'nan-dorV (b. c. 342—d. c. 292 bc) Athenian dramatist. He produced his first play in 321 bc, and in 316 he won a festival prize with Dyscolus (“The Misanthrope”), the only one of his plays for which a com¬ plete text still exists. By the end of his career he had written more than 100 plays and had won eight victories at Athenian dramatic festivals. Menander was considered by ancient critics the supreme poet of Greek New Comedy. He excelled at presenting characters such as stem fathers, young lovers, and intriguing slaves. As adapted by the Romans Plautus and Terence, his plays influenced the later development of Renaissance comedy.
"Diptych with Madonna and Martin van Nieuwenhove" (left wing), oil on panel by Hans Memling, 1487; in the Memling-Museum, Brugge, Bel.
COURTESY OF THE MEMLING-MUSEUM, BRUGGE, BEL., PHOTOGRAPH, © A.C.L, BRUSSELS
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Mencius \'men-she-3s\ Chinese Mengzi or Meng-tzu \'m9q-'ts3\ orig. Meng K'o (b. c. 372—d. c.
289 bc) Chinese philosopher. The book Mencius contains statements on innate human goodness, a topic warmly debated by followers of Con¬ fucius up to modern times. That the four principles (si duan )—the feel¬ ings of commiseration, shame, cour¬ tesy, and right and wrong—are all inborn in humans was a self-evident truth to Mencius; the four principles, when properly cultivated, will develop into the four cardinal virtues of ren (benevolence), righteousness, decorum, and wisdom. His develop¬ ment of orthodox Confucianism earned him the title “second sage.”
Mencius or Mengzi or Meng-
tzu Chinese Confucian text con¬ cerning government, written by Mencius. The book maintains that the welfare of the common people comes before every other consider¬ ation. When a ruler no longer prac¬ tices benevolence and righteousness, the mandate of heaven (his right to rule) is withdrawn and he should be removed. Mencius did not become a classic until the 12th century, when it was published by Zhu Xi together with Daxue, Zhongyong, and Lunyu (Analects) as the Four Books. See also Confucianism.
Mencken, H(enry) L(ouis) (b. Sept. 12, 1880, Baltimore, Md., U.S.—d. Jan. 29, 1956, Baltimore)
U.S. controversialist, humorous journalist, and critic. Mencken worked on the staff of the Baltimore Sun for much of his life. With George Jean Nathan (1882-1958), he coedited The Smart Set (1914-23) and cofounded and edited (1924-33) the American Mercury , both impor¬ tant literary magazines. Probably the most influential U.S. literary critic in the 1920s, he often used criticism to jeer at the nation’s social and cultural weaknesses. Prejudices (1919-27) collects many of his reviews and essays. In The American Language (1919; supplements 1945, 1948) he brought together American expres¬ sions and idioms; by the time of his death he was perhaps the leading authority on the language of the U.S.
Mendel Vmen-dalV Gregor (Johann) (b. July 22, 1822, Heinzen- dorf, Austria—d. Jan. 6, 1884, Briinn, Austria-Hungary) Austrian botanist and plant experimenter. He became an Augustinian monk in 1843 and later studied at the University of Vienna. In 1856, working in his monastery’s garden, he began the experiments that led to his formulation of the basic principle of heredity. He crossed varieties of the garden pea that had maintained constant differences in such single alternative traits as tallness and dwarfishness, flower colour, and pod form. He theorized that the occurrence of the visible alternative traits of the plants, in the constant varieties and in their descendants, was due to the occurrence of paired elementary units of heredity, now known as genes. What was new in Mendel’s interpretation of his data was his recognition that genes obey simple statistical laws. His system proved to be of general application and is one of the basic principles of biology. He achieved fame only after his death, through the work of Carl Erich Correns, Erich Tschermak von Sey- senegg, and Hugo de Vries, who independently obtained similar results and found that both the experimental data and the general theory had been published 34 years previously.
Mendele Moykher Sforim Vmen-ds-lo-mo-'ker-sfa-'remX or Men- dele Mokher Sefarim X.sef-o-'renA orig. Sholem Yankev Abra- movitsh Yiddish "Mendele the Book Peddler" (b. Nov. 20,1835,
Kopyl, near Minsk, Russia—d. Dec. 8, 1917, Odessa) Russian author. He lived much of his life in Ukraine, becoming a rabbi and head of a tradi¬ tional school (Talmud Torah) at Odessa. His stories, written with lively humour and gentle satire, are invaluable in the study of Jewish life in Eastern Europe at the time when its traditional structure was giving way. His greatest work is The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third (1875), a panorama of Jewish life in Russia. He is considered the founder of both modem Yiddish and modern Hebrew narrative literature and the creator of modem literary Yiddish.
Mendeleyev X.men-da-'la-ofV, Dmitry (Ivanovich) Mendeleyev
also spelled Mendeleev (b. Feb. 8, 1834, Tobolsk, Siberia, Russia—d. Feb. 2, 1907, St. Petersburg) Russian chemist. He taught at the Univer¬ sity of St. Petersburg (1867-90) and later served as director of Russia’s bureau of weights and measures. He made a fundamental contribution to chemistry by establishing in 1869 the principle of periodicity of the ele¬ ments. His first periodic table was based on arranging the elements in ascending order of atomic weight and grouping them by similarity of prop¬ erties. Mendeleyev’s theory allowed him to predict the existence and atomic weights of several elements not discovered until years later.
Mendelsohn Vmen-dols-.zonV Erich (b. March 21, 1887, Allenstein, Ger.—d. Sept. 15, 1953, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.) German architect. While studying architecture in Munich, he was influenced by the Blaue Reiter group of Expressionist artists. Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower, Pots¬ dam (1919-21), a highly sculptural structure, reflects his early preoccupa¬ tion with science fiction. In the 1920s he designed a number of imaginative structures, including the Schocken stores in Stuttgart (1927) and Chemnitz (1928), notable for their prominent use of glass in strongly horizontal com¬ positions. He fled the Nazis in 1933 and eventually settled in the U.S.; his American works include the Maimonides Hospital, San Francisco (1946).