358 N E S N E T the press. In education a decided improvement may be observed. Formerly out of two hundred Nestorians hardly one could read and write ; the proportion is now much higher. The development of the moral and religious char acter of the people is, however, a difficult task; partly on account of their pride in their old church and old beliefs, and partly because, to some extent through Persian influence, their morale has undergone great degradation. Volatile, sensuous, intemperate, and full of all kinds of superstition, while they are certainly more talented and sharper-witted than their brethren among the mountains, they are also much less truthful and trustworthy. As their garb is similar to that of the Persians, so also are many of their manners and customs. Many intelligent countenances are to be found among them. It has even been asserted that these are of the Jewish type, and some travellers have proposed an identification of the Nestorians with the lost tribes of Israel. The ethnographic arguments in favour of this Jewish connexion are, however, of no value ; for many of the individual characteristics in which the Nestorians agree with the ancient Jews are common to all Oriental nations ; and, what is of more importance, the type itself is not the Jewish one. The Nestorians have round heads, and frequently light hair and hazel eyes. Among the mountain Nestorians the complexion is usually a ruddy brown. That through all the centuries of nominal Moham medan domination the national type should have been preserved must be ascribed exclusively to their isolated situation. They still speak Aramaean (Syriac) ; but their dialect is not a lineal descendant of the classical and literary language. In the mountains most of the Nestorians understand Kurdish, and in the low country of Azerbijan Turkish ; and both languages have exercised a great influence on their native tongue. The low-country dialect has greatly suffered from phonetic decay; that of the mountaineers preserves many of the older forms, and is pronounced with greater correctness. The Nestorians, it may be added, call themselves in their own language Surayi, and do not recognize the designation Nestorians bestowed upon them by people of other creeds. The patriarch bears the title of patriarch of the Chaldseans. The Nestorians have a number of peculiar customs and manners. Their marriage ceremonies are very interesting, as also are some of their other festivals, during which, at least in the Urmia plain, there is always plenty of danc ing, drinking, and in the end fighting. The mountain Nestorians more particularly are fond of hunting and hawking. One custom may be mentioned as peculiarly European ; not only do they kiss the hands of their clergy, but they lift their caps to them a mark of respect nowhere else in use in the East. Blood -revenge is in full vogue both in mountains and lowlands ; but there are asylums for homicides. Pork is never eaten. As to creed, the Nestorians are strongly opposed to image worship, have no auricular confession, know nothing of a purgatory, and allow ^their priests to marry. The Lord s Supper is a kind of magical ceremony with them, and several curious customs are connected with its observance. As a matter of course their peculiarities are better preserved in places like Urmia on the one side or the mountain district of Tiyari on the other, where they live together in considerable numbers. In regard to the total numerical strength of the Nestorians, authorities differ greatly. Perkins spoke of 140,000, and assigned 50,000 to Tiyari alone. The most trustworthy data are probably those of Badger, based, in the main, on information furnished by the patriarch, but with the number of families reduced one-third throughout (the figures given having, in some instances, been seen to be greatly exaggerated). The total number of families being 11,378, it may be estimated that the individuals amount to about 70,000. In the following table the enumeration of families as 4500 in Nos. 7 and 8 is purely approximate. Dioceses. Metro politan. liishops. Priests. Churches. Families. 1. Akra 1 1
1
1
)
- 3
2
5
9 18 16 62 24 18 34 7 13 20 23 75 37 34 fQ 9 249 348 220 2,778 1,979 1,082 4,500 222 2. Berwari 3. Buhtan 4. Central Kurdistan 5. Tkhoma, Tchelu, &c 6. Gawar, <fec 7. Shemdina 8. Urmia, <fcc 9. Lewun and Nudes <
188 249 11,378 The iirst-named diocese is the most southerly ; it embraces the districts of Akra, Zebur, Mezuriye, and Jebel Gara to the north of Mosul. It is there more especially that, since the date of the collection of the figures given above, there have probably been accessions to the Chaldcean Church. The second diocese, compris ing Berwari, Nerwi, and Supna, lies to the north of the first, and nearer the mountains ; the third, farther to the west and north west, is mainly occupied by independent Kurds, and is still practi cally unexplored ; the fourth, directly subject to the patriarch, contains, besides the county of Tiyari (upper and lower), almost exclusively inhabited by Nestoriaus, Ashitha to the west, and Kotchaunes, Diz, &c., to the north. North-eastward towards the Persian frontier lies the sixth diocese, including, in addition to Gawar, Albak and some other small isolated parishes ; to the north of Tiyari is the (ninth) diocese of Lewun and Nudes (Nurduz ?), and to the east (fifth diocese) two leading districts of the Tkhoma mountains and the inhospitable Tchelu, along with Bar, Rekan, and Tchall. The seventh diocese, called also Be Shems-ud-din, lies to the east of Tchelu, and includes also Baradost, as well as Tergawer, Marjaver, &c., within Persian territory. See G. P. Badger, The Nestorians and their Rituals, -2 vols., London, 1852; J. Perkins, A Residence of Eight Years in Persia among the Nestorian Christians, Andover, 1843; Asahel Grant, The Nestorians or the Lost Tribes, 2d ed., London, 1843; and also compare Layard s Nineveh and Hitter s Asia. (A. SO.) NESTS. See BIRDS, vol. iii. p. 771. NET. A net consists of a fabric of thread, twine, or cord, the intersections of which are firmly knotted so as to form meshes or interspaces of fixed dimensions, the meshes being usually lozenges of uniform size. The art of netting is intimately related to weaving, knitting, plaiting, and pillow-lace and machine-lace making, from all of which, however, it is distinguished by the knotting of the inter sections of the cord. It is one of the most ancient and uni versal of arts, having been in all times commonly practised among the rudest and most primitive tribes, to whom the net is of great importance in hunting and fishing. Net-making, as a modern industry, is principally con cerned with the manufacture of the numerous forms of net used in fisheries, but netting is also largely employed for many and varied purposes, as for catching game and birds, for the temporary division of fields, for protecting fruit in gardens, for collecting insects, for hammocks, and ship use, for screens and other furniture purposes, for ladies hair, house bags, &c. While to a large extent net-making con tinues to be a handicraft, since the early part of the 19th century numerous forms of machine have been invented for netting, and several of these have been successfully introduced on a large scale in factories for the manufacture Of fishing nets. Such fishing nets were formerly made principally from hemp fibre technically called "twine"; but since the adaptation of machinery to net-making cotton has been increasingly used. Cotton nets, being more flexible and lighter than those made of twine, are much more easily handled and stowed, and in practice they are rapidly superseding all others. The forms of fishing nets vary according to the manner in which they are intended to act. This is either by entangling the fish in their complicated folds, as in the trammel; receiving them into pockets, as in the trawl; suspending them by the body in the meshes, as in the mackerel-net; imprisoning them within their labyrinth- like chambers, as in the stake-net ; or drawing them to shore, as in the seine (See FISHERIES, vol. ix. p. 247). The parts of a net are the head or upper margin, along which the corks are strung upon a rope called the head
