STARNBERG, a village and climatic health resort of Germany, in the kingdom of Bavaria, on the Starnberger See, 16 m. by rail S. from Munich. Pop. (1905), 3257. It has an evangelical and a Roman Catholic church, an old castle (now government offices) and a bathing establishment. The Starnberger See (or Wurmsee) is a lake with a length of 12 m., a breadth of 3 m., and covering 23 sq. m. Its greatest depth is about 400 ft. The lake is girdled by hills, studded with attractive villa residences, commanding beautiful and extensive views of the Alps. On the Roseninsel, an island in the lake, remains of lacustrine dwellings have been discovered. The waters abound in fish. In the summer steamboats ply, touching at all the villages lying on the shores.
See Ule, Der Würmsee in Oberbayern (Leipzig, 1901).
STAR-NOSED MOLE (Condylura cristata), a North American
species, the single representative of its genus. In burrowing
habits it resembles the European mole, but is distinguished from
all other members of the family Talpidae by the presence of a
ring of tentacles round the nostrils, probably serving as organs
of touch.
STARODUB, a town of Russia, in the government of Chernigov,
98 m. N.E. of the city of Chernigov. It is regularly built, with
broad straight streets, and the houses are surrounded by large
gardens. Pop. 12,451; Little Russians with about 5000 Jews.
Tanning and the manufacture of copper wares are carried on,
and there is a trade in corn and hemp exported to Riga and
St Petersburg. As early as the 11th and 12th centuries Starodub
was a bone of contention between different Russian princes, who
appreciated its strategic position. The Mongols seem to have
destroyed it in the middle of the 13th century, and its name does
not reappear until the following century. During the 15th and
16th centuries the Russians and Lithuanians were continually
disputing the possession of its fortress, and at the beginning of
the 17th century it became a stronghold of Poland.
STARVATION, the state of being deprived of the essentials
of nutrition, particularly of food, the suffering of the extremities of hunger and also of cold (see Hunger and Thirst). The word
is an invented hybrid, attributed, according to the accepted
story, to Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, who used it in a
parliamentary debate on American matters in 1775 and gained
thereby the nickname of “Starvation Dundas” (see H. Walpole’s
Letters, ed. Cunningham, viii. 30; and Notes and Queries
no. 225). The English word “to starve” meant originally
“to die,” as in O. Eng. steorfan, Du. sterven, Ger. sterben, but
was particularly applied to death from hunger or cold.
STAS, JEAN SERVAIS (1813–1891), Belgian chemist, was
born at Louvain on the 21st of August 1813. He studied for
a medical career and took his doctor’s degree, but soon turned
to chemistry. In 1835 after much trouble he gained admission
to J. B. A. Dumas’s laboratory in Paris in order to continue a
research on phloridzin which he had begun in an attic in his
father’s house, and he was associated with that chemist in several
researches, including his redetermination of the atomic weight
of carbon. In 1840 he left Paris on his appointment to the
chair of chemistry at the École Royale Militaire in Brussels.
There he remained for more than a quarter of a century, but
before he had served the thirty years necessary to secure a
pension he was obliged to resign through a malady which
affected his speech. He was then appointed to a post in connexion
with the Mint, but gave it up in 1872, and spent the rest
of his life in retirement in Brussels, where he died on the 13th
of December 1891. Stas’s name is best known for his determination
of the atomic weights of a number of the more important
elements. His work in this field was marked by extreme care,
and he adopted the most minute precautions to avoid error, with
such success that the greatest variation between his numerous
individual determinations for each element was represented
by from 0·005 to 0·01. Though he started with a predilection
in favour of Prout’s hypothesis he was later led by the results
he obtained and by his failure to find any evidence of dissociation
in the elements to regard it as a pure illusion and to look upon
the unity of matter as merely an attractive speculation unsupported
by proof. Nevertheless, a few years before his death,
a propos of the close approximation to integers presented by a
number of the atomic weights of the elements when hydrogen
is taken as unity, he remarked, “Il faut croire qu’il y a quelque
chose là-dessous.” In connexion with the poisoning of Count Hippolyte de Bocarme with nicotine in 1850 Stas worked out a
method for the detection of the vegetable alkaloids, which,
modified by Friedrich Julius Otto (1809–1870), professor of
chemistry at Brunswick, has been widely used by toxicologists
as the Stas-Otto process.
STASINUS, of Cyprus, according to some ancient authorities
the author of the Cypria (in 11 books) , one of the poems belonging
to the epic cycle. Others ascribed it to Hegesias (or Hegesinus)
of Salamis or even to Homer himself, who was said to have
written it on the occasion of his daughter’s marriage to Stasinus.
The Cypria, presupposing an acquaintance with the events
of the Homeric poem, confined itself to what preceded, and
thus formed a kind of introduction to the Iliad. It contained
an account of the judgment of Paris, the rape of Helen, the
abandonment of Philoctetes on the island of Lemnos, the
landing of the Achaeans on the coast of Asia, and the first
engagement before Troy. It is probable that the list of the
Trojans and their allies (Iliad, ii. 816–876), which formed an
appendix to the catalogue of the Greek ships, is abridged from
that in the Cypria, which was known to contain a list of the
Trojan allies. Proclus, in his Chrestomathia, gave an outline
of the poem (preserved in Photius, cod. 239).
See F. G. Welcker, Der epische Cyclus (1862); D. B. Monro, Appendix to his edition of Odyssey, xiii.-xxiv. (1901); T. W. Allen, “The Epic Cycle,” in Classical Quarterly (Jan. 1908, sqq.) ; and Cycle.
STASSFURT, a town of Germany, in the Prussian province
of Saxony, and one of the chief seats of the German salt-producing
industry, situated on both sides of the Bode, 20 m. S.W.
of Magdeburg by the railway to Aschersleben. Pop. (1905),
18,310. It is still surrounded in part by the ruins of its ancient
walls, but, with the exception of the parish church of St John
(15th century), there are no buildings worthy of special notice;
Although saline springs are mentioned here as early as the
13th century, the first attempt to bore for salt was not made
until 1839, while the systematic exploitation of the salt-beds,
to which the town is indebted for its prosperity, dates only from
1856. The shafts reached deposits of salt at a depth of 850 ft.;
but the finer and purer layers lie more than 1100 ft. below the
surface. Besides the rock-salt, which is excavated by blasting,
the saline deposits of Stassfurt yield a considerable quantity
of deliquescent salts and other saline products, which have
encouraged the foundation of numerous chemical factories in
the town and in the neighbouring village of Leopoldshall, which
lies in Anhalt territory. The rock-salt works are mainly government
property, while the chemical factories are in private
hands.
See Precht, Salzindustrie von Stassfurt und Umgebung (Stassfurt, 1891); and Westphal, Geschichte des königlichen Salzwerks zu Stassfurt (Berlin, 1901).
STATE. As currently employed in that department of
political science which concerns itself, not with the relations
of separate political entities, but with the political composition of society as a whole, the word state expresses the abstract idea of government in general, or the governing authority as opposed to the governed, and is thusDefinition. used by Herbert Spencer in all his discussions of government and society. Louis XIV.’s “l’état, c’est moi,” Rousseau’s theory of the “contrat social,” Bastiat’s “donne à l’état le strict nécessaire et garde le reste pour toi,” all imply this opposition. Hobbes regards the state, or, as he calls it, the commonwealth, as “one person for whose acts a great multitude by
