almost land-locked, easy of access, and with so secure an anchorage that vessels can safely lie alongside the rocks that fringe the shore. It is the best harbour on the Pacific coast of Mexico, and it is a port of call for steamship lines running between Panama and San Francisco. The town is built on a narrow strip of low land, scarcely half a mile wide, between the shore line and the lofty mountains that encircle the bay. There is great natural beauty in the surroundings, but the mountains render the town difficult of access from the interior, and give it an exceptionally hot and unhealthy climate. The effort to admit the cooling sea breezes by cutting through the mountains a passage called the Abra de San Nicolas had some beneficial effect. Acapulco was long the most important Mexican port on the Pacific, and the only depot for the Spanish fleets plying between Mexico and Spain’s East Indian colonies from 1778 until the independence of Mexico, when this trade was lost. The town has been chosen as the terminus for two railway lines seeking a Pacific port—the Interoceanic and the Mexican Central. The town suffered considerably from earthquakes in July and August 1909. There are exports of hides, cedar and fruit, and the adjacent district of Tabares produces cotton, tobacco, cacao, sugar cane, Indian corn, beans and coffee.
ACARNANIA, a district of ancient Greece, bounded on the W. by the Ionian Sea, on the N. by the Ambracian Gulf, on the E. and S. by Mt. Thyamus and the Achelous. The Echinades islands, off the S.W. coast, are gradually being joined up to the mainland. Its most populous region was the plain of the Achelous, commanded by the principal town Stratus; communication with the coast was impeded by mountain ridges and lagoons. Its people long continued in semi-barbarism, having little intercourse with the rest of Greece. In the 5th century B.C. with the aid of Athens they subdued the Corinthian factories on their coast. In 391 they submitted to the Spartan king Agesilaus; in 371 they passed under Theban control. In the Hellenistic age the Acarnanians were constantly assailed by their Aetolian neighbours. On the advice of Cassander they made effective their ancient cantonal league, apparently after the pattern of Aetolia. In the 3rd century they obtained assistance from the Illyrians, and formed a close alliance with Philip V. of Macedonia, whom they supported in his Roman wars, their new federal capital, Leucas, standing a siege in his interest. For their sympathy with his successor Perseus they were deprived of Leucas and required to send hostages to Rome (167). The country was finally desolated by Augustus, who drafted its inhabitants into Nicopolis and Patrae. Acarnania took a prominent part in the national uprising of 1821; it is now joined with Aetolia as a nome. The sites of several ancient towns in Acarnania are marked by well-preserved walls, especially those of Stratus, Oeniadae and Limnaea.
Authorities.—Strabo vii. 7, x. 2; Thucydides; Polybius iv. 40; Livy xxxiii. 16-17; Corpus Inscr. Graecarum, no. 1739; E. Oberhummer, Akarnanien im Altertum (Munich, 1887); Heuzey, Mt. Olympe et l’Acarnanie (Paris, 1860). (M. O. B. C.; E. Gr.)
ACARUS (from Gr. ἅκαρι, a mite), a genus of Arachnids, represented by the cheese mite and other forms.
ACASTUS, in Greek legend, the son of Pelias, king of Iolcus in Thessaly (Ovid, Metam. viii. 306; Apollonius Rhodius i. 224; Pindar, Nemea, iv. 54, v. 26). He was a great friend of Jason, and took part in the Calydonian boar-hunt and the Argonautic expedition. After his father’s death he instituted splendid funeral games in his honour, which were celebrated by artists and poets, such as Stesichorus. His wife Astydameia (called Hippolytē in Horace, Odes, iii. 7. 17) fell in love with Peleus (q.v.), who had taken refuge at Iolcus, but when her advances were rejected accused him falsely to her husband. Acastus, to avenge his fancied wrongs, left Peleus asleep on Mount Pelion, having first hidden his famous sword. On awaking, Peleus was attacked by the Centaurs, but saved by Cheiron. Having recovered his sword he returned to Iolcus and slew Acastus and Astydameia. Acastus was represented with his famous horses in the painting of the Argonautic expedition by Micon in the temple of the Dioscuri at Athens.
ACATALEPSY (Gr. ἀ-, privative, and καταλαμβάνειν, to seize), a term used in Scepticism to denote incomprehensibility.
ACAULESCENT (Lat. acaulescens, becoming stemless, from a, not, and caulis, a stem), a term used of a plant apparently stemless, as dandelion, the stem being almost suppressed.
ACCA LARENTIA (not Laurentia), in Roman legend, the wife of the shepherd Faustulus, who saved the lives of the twins Romulus and Remus after they had been thrown into the Tiber. She had twelve sons, and on the death of one of them Romulus took his place, and with the remaining eleven founded the college of the Arval brothers (Fratres Arvales). The tradition that Romulus and Remus were suckled by a wolf has been explained by the suggestion that Larentia was called lupa (“courtesan,” literally “she-wolf”) on account of her immoral character (Livy i. 4; Ovid, Fasti, iii. 55). According to another account, Larentia was a beautiful girl, whom Hercules won in a game of dice (Macrobius i. 10; Plutarch, Romulus, 4, 5, Quaest. Rom. 35; Aulus Gellius vi. 7). The god advised her to marry the first man she met in the street, who proved to be a wealthy Etruscan named Tarutius. She inherited all his property and bequeathed it to the Roman people, who out of gratitude instituted in her honour a yearly festival called Larentalia (Dec. 23). According to some, Acca Larentia was the mother of the Lares, and, like Ceres, Tellus, Flora and others, symbolized the fertility of the earth—in particular the city lands and their crops.
See Mommsen, “Die echte und die falsche Larentia,” in Römische Forschungen, ii. 1879; E. Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History (Eng. trans. 1906), whose views on the subject are criticized by W. W. Fowler in W. H. D. Rouse’s The Year’s Work in Classical Studies (1907); C. Pascal, Studii di antichità e Mitologia (1896).
ACCELERATION (from Lat. accelerare, to hasten, celer, quick), hastening or quickening; in mechanics, a term employed to denote the rate at which the velocity of a body, whose motion is not uniform, either increases or decreases. (See Mechanics and Hodograph.)
ACCENT. The word “accent” has its origin in the Lat. accentus, which in its turn is a literal translation of the Gr. προσῳδία. The early Greek grammarians used this term for the musical accent which characterized their own language, but later the term became specialized for quantity in metre, whence comes the Eng. prosody. Besides various later developments of usage it is important to observe that “accent” is used in two different and often contrasted senses in connexion with language. In all languages there are two kinds of accent: (1) musical chromatic or pitch accent; (2) emphatic or stress accent. The former indicates differences in musical pitch between one sound and another in speech, the latter the difference between one syllable and another which is occasioned by emitting the breath in the production of one syllable with greater energy than is employed for the other syllables of the same word. These two senses, it is to be noticed, are different from the common usage of the word in the statement that some one talks with a foreign or with a vulgar accent. In these cases, no doubt, both differences of intonation and differences of stress may be included in the statement, but other elements are frequently no less marked, e.g. the pronunciation of t and d as real dentals, whereas the English sounds so described are really produced not against the teeth but against their sockets, the inability to produce the interdental th whether breathed as in thin or voiced as in this and its representation by d or z, the production of o as a uniform sound instead of one ending as in English in a slight u sound, or such dialect changes as lydy (laidy) for lady, or toime for time (taime).
In different languages the relations between pitch and stress differ very greatly. In some the pitch or musical accent predominates. In such languages if signs are employed to mark the position of the chief accent in the word it will be the pitch and not the stress accent which will be thus indicated. Amongst the languages of ancient times Sanskrit and Greek both indicate by signs the position of the chief pitch accent in the word, and the same method has been employed in modern times for languages in which pitch accent is well marked, as it is, for example,
