“The sense of shame is to a man of great importance. When one
is ashamed of having been without shame, he will afterwards not
have occasion for shame.”
“To nourish the heart there is nothing better than to keep the desires few. Here is a man whose desires are few; in some things he may not be able to keep his heart, but they will be few. Here is a man whose desires are many; in some things he may be able to keep his heart, but they will be few.”
“Benevolence is the distinguishing characteristic of man. As embodied in his conduct, it may be called the path of duty.”
“There is an ordination for everything; and a man should receive submissively what may be correctly ascribed thereto. He who has the correct idea of what Heaven’s ordination is will not stand beneath a tottering wall. Death sustained in the discharge of one’s duties may be correctly ascribed to Heaven. Death under handcuffs and fetters cannot be correctly so ascribed.”
“When one by force subdues men, they do not submit to him in heart. When he subdues them by virtue, in their hearts’ core they are pleased, and sincerely submit.”
Two translations of the works of Mencius are within the reach of European readers: that by Stanislaus Julien, in Latin (Paris, 1824–1829); and that forming the second volume of Legge’s Chinese Classics (Hong-Kong, 1862). The latter has been published at London (1875) without the Chinese text. See also E. Faber, The Mind of Mencius, or Political Economy founded on Moral Philosophy, translated from the German by A. B. Hutchinson (London, 1882). (J. Le.)
MENDE, a town of south-eastern France, capital of the
department of Lozère, 59 m. N.N.E. of Millau by rail. Pop.
(1906), town 5246; commune 7007. Mende is picturesquely
situated on the left bank of the Lot, and at the foot of the
Mimat cliff, which rises 1000 ft. above the town, and terminates
the Causse de Mende. The town is the seat of a bishopric.
Its cathedral of St Peter was founded in the 14th century by
Pope Urban V., a native of the district, but the two towers,
respectively 280 and 210 ft. high, were added by Bishop François
de la Rovère in the early part of the 16th century. Partly
destroyed during the devastation of the town by the Protestants
in 1579 and 1580, it was rebuilt in the 17th century, and in
1874 a statue of Urban V. was erected in front of it. A Renaissance
tower of the ancient citadel now serves as the belfry
of the church of the Penitents, and a 14th-century bridge
crosses the Lot. The town is a convenient centre for visitors
to the gorges of the Tarn. It is the seat of a prefect and a
court of assizes, and has a tribunal of first instance and a chamber
of commerce. The chief industry is the manufacture of serges
and shalloons, known as Mende stuffs, exported to Spain, Italy
and Germany.
Mende (Mimate) grew up around the hermitage, partly excavated in the side of the Mimat cliff, to which St Privat, bishop of Javols, retreated after the destruction of that town, and where he was subsequently slain by the Vandals, who had pursued him thither, about 408. In the 14th century the new town became the civil, as it had previously been the ecclesiastical, capital of the Gévaudan district.
MENDELÉEFF, DMITRI IVANOVICH (1834–1907), Russian chemist, the youngest of a family of seventeen, was born at Tobolsk, Siberia, on the 7th of February (N.S.) 1834. After attending the gymnasium of his native place, he went to study natural science at St Petersburg, where he graduated in chemistry in 1856, subsequently becoming privatdozent. In 1860 he went to Heidelberg, where he started a laboratory of his own, but returning to St Petersburg in 1861, he became professor of chemistry in the technological institute there in 1863, and three years later succeeded to the same chair in the university. In 1890 he resigned the professorship, and in 1893 he was appointed director of the Bureau of Weights and Measures, a post which he occupied till his death.
Mendeléeff’s original work covered a wide range, from questions in applied chemistry to the most general problems of chemical and physical theory. His name is best known for his work on the Periodic Law. Various chemists had traced numerical sequences among the atomic weights of some of the elements and noted connexions between them and the properties of the different substances; but it was left to him to give a full expression to the generalization, and to treat it not merely as a system of classifying the elements according to certain observed facts, but as a “law of nature” which could be relied upon to predict new facts and to disclose errors in what were supposed to be old facts. Thus in 1871 he was led by certain gaps in his tables to assert the existence of three new elements so far unknown to the chemist, and to assign them definite properties. These three he called ekaboron, ekaaluminium, and ekasilicon; and his prophecy was completely vindicated within fifteen years by the discovery of gallium in 1871, scandium in 1879, and germanium in 1886. Again, in several cases he ventured to question the correctness of the “accepted atomic weights,” on the ground that they did not correspond with the Periodic Law, and here also he was justified by subsequent investigation. In 1902, in an “attempt at a chemical conception of the ether,” he put forward the hypothesis that there are in existence two elements of smaller atomic weight than hydrogen, and that the lighter of these is a chemically inert, exceedingly mobile, all-penetrating and all-pervading gas, which constitutes the aether. Mendeléeff also devoted much study to the nature of such “indefinite” compounds as solutions, which he looked upon as homogeneous liquid systems of unstable dissociating compounds of the solvent with the substance dissolved, holding the opinion that they are merely an instance of ordinary definite or atomic compounds, subject to Dalton’s laws. In another department of physical chemistry he investigated the expansion of liquids with heat, and devised a formula for its expression similar to Gay-Lussac’s law of the uniformity of the expansion of gases, while so far back as 1861 he anticipated T. Andrews’s conception of the critical temperature of gases by defining the absolute boiling-point of a substance as the temperature at which cohesion and heat of vaporization become equal to zero and the liquid changes to vapour, irrespective of the pressure and volume. Mendeléeff wrote largely on chemical topics, his most widely known book probably being The Principles of Chemistry, which was written in 1868–1870, and has gone through many subsequent editions in various languages. For his work on the Periodic Law he was awarded in 1882, at the same time as L. Meyer, the Davy medal of the Royal Society, and in 1905 he received its Copley medal. He died at St Petersburg on the 2nd of February 1907.
See W. A. Tilden, “Mendeléeff Memorial Lecture,” Jour. Chem. Soc., 95, p. 2077.
MENDELISM. To define what some biologists call Mendelism briefly is not possible. Within recent years there has come to biologists a new idea of the nature of living things, a new conception of their potentialities and of their limitations; and for this we are primarily indebted to the work of Gregor Mendel. Peasant boy, monk, and abbot of Brünn, this remarkable man at one time interested himself in the workings of heredity, and the experiments devised by him and carried out in his cloister garden are to-day the foundation of that exact knowledge of the physiological process of heredity which biologists are rapidly extending in various directions. This extension Mendel never saw. Born in 1822 he published the account of his experiments in 1865, but it was not until 1900, eighteen years after his death, that biologists came to appreciate what he had accomplished. That year marked the simultaneous rediscovery of his work by three distinguished botanists: Hugo de Vries, C. Correns and E. Tschermak. Thenceforward Mendel’s ideas have steadily gained ground, and, as the already strong body of evidence in their favour grows, they must come to exert upon biological conceptions an influence not less than those associated with the name of Darwin.
Dominant and Recessive.—Mendel chose the common pea (Pisum sativum) as a subject for experiment, and investigated the effects of crossing different varieties. In his method he differed from previous investigators in concentrating his attention on the mode of inheritance of a single pair of alternative characters at a time. Thus on crossing a tall with a dwarf and paying attention to this pair of characters alone, he found that the hybrids (or F1 generation) were all tall and that no intermediates appeared. Accordingly he termed the tall character dominant and the dwarf character recessive. On allowing these hybrids to fertilize themselves in the ordinary
