Russian nobility, but his more immediate progenitors were all very poor, and unable to read or write. His grandfather ploughed the ields as a simple peasant, and his father, as Peesemsky himself said, was washed and clothed by a rich relative, and placed as a soldier in the army, from which he retired as a major after thirty years' service. During childhood Peesemsky read eagerly the translated works of Walter Scott and Victor Hugo, and later those of Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, Rousseau, Voltaire and George Sand. From the gymnasium of Kostroma he passed through Moscow University, and in 1884 entered the government service as a clerk in the office of the Crown domains in his native province. Between 1854 and 1872, when He finally quitted the civil service, he occupied similar posts in St Petersburg and Moscow. His early works exhibit a profound disbelief in the higher qualities of humanity, and a disdain for the other sex, although he appears to have been attached to a particularly devoted and sensible Wife. His first novel, Boyarstchina, was forbidden for its unflattering description of the Russian nobility. His principal novels are Tufak (“A Muff”), 1850; Teesicha doush (“A Thousand Souls”), 1862, which is considered his best work of the kind; and Vzbalomoucheneoe more (“A Troubled Sea”), giving a picture of the excited state of Russian society about the year 1862. He also produced a comedy, Gorkaya soudbina (“A Bitter Fate”), depicting the dark sides of the Russian peasantry, which obtained for him the Ouvaroff prize of the Russian Academy. In 1856 he was sent, together with other literary men, to report on the ethnographical and commercial condition of the Russian interior, his particular field of inquiry having been Astrakhan and the region of the Caspian Sea. His scepticism in regard to the liberal reforms of the 'sixties made him very unpopular among the more progressive writers of that time. He died at Moscow on the 2nd of February 1881 (Jan 21, Russian style).
PEGASUS (from Gr. πηγός, compact, strong), the famous
winged horse of Greek fable, said to have sprung from the trunk
of the Gorgon Medusa when her head was cut off by Perseus.
Bellerophon caught him as he drank of the spring Peirene on
the Acrocorinthus at Corinth, or received him tamed and
bridled at the hands of Athena (Pindar, Ol. xiii. 63, Pausanias
ii. 4). Mounted on Pegasus, Bellerophon slew the Chimaera
and overcame the Solymi and the Amazons, but when he tried
to fly to heaven on the horse's back he threw him and continued
his heavenward course (Apollodorus ii. 3). Arrived in heaven,
Pegasus served Zeus, fetching for him his thunder and lightning
(Hesiod, Theog. 281). Hence some have thought that Pegasus
is a symbol of the thundercloud. According to O. Gruppe
(Griechische Mythologie, i. 75, 123) Pegasus, like Arion the
fabled offspring of Demeter and Poseidon, was a curse-horse,
symbolical of the rapidity with which curses were fulfilled. In
later legend he is the horse of Eos, the morning The erroneous
derivation from πηγή, “a spring of water,” may have given
birth to the legends which connect Pegasus with water; e.g.
that his father was Poseidon, that he was born at the springs
of Ocean, and that he had the power of making springs rise
from the ground by a blow of his hoof. When Mt Helicon,
enchanted by the song of the Muses, began to rise to heaven,
Pegasus stopped its ascent by stamping on the ground (Antoninus
Liberalis 9), and where he struck the earth Hippocrene (horse spring),
the fountain of the Muses, gushed forth (Pausanias
ii. 31, ix. 31). But there are facts that speak for an independent
mythological connexion between horses and water, e.g. the
sacredness of the horse to Poseidon, the epithets Hippios and
Equester applied to Poseidon and Neptune, the Greek fable
of the origin of the first horse (produced by Poseidon striking
the ground with his trident), and the custom in Argolis of
sacrificing horses to Poseidon by drowning them in a well.
From his connexion with Hippocrene Pegasus has come to be
regarded as the horse of the Muses and hence as a symbol of
poetry. But this is a modern attribute of Pegasus, not known
to the ancients, and dating only from the Orlando innamorato
of Boiardo.
See monograph by F. Hannig, Breslauer philologische Abhandlungen (1902), vol. viii., pt. 4.
PEGAU, a town of Germany, in the kingdom of Saxony,
situated in a fertile country, on the Elster, 18 m. S.W. from
Leipzig by the railway to Zeitz. Pop. (1905), 5656. It has
two Evangelical churches, that of St Lawrence being a fine
Gothic structure, a 16th-century town-hall; a very old hospital
and an agricultural school. Its industries embrace the manufacture
of felt, boots and metal wares.
Pegau grew up round a monastery founded in 1096, but does not appear as a town before the close of the 12th century. Markets were held here and its prosperity was further enhanced by its position on a main road running east and west. In the monastery, which was dissolved in 1539, a valuable chronicle was compiled, the Annales pegavienses, covering the period from 1039 to 1227
See Fussel, Anfang und Ende des Klosters St Jacob zu Pegau (Leipzig, 1857), and Dillner, Grössel and Gunther, Alles und neues aus Pegau (Leipzig, 1905). The Annales pegavienses are published in Bd. XVI of the Monumenta Germanae historica. Scriptores.
PEGMATITE (from Gr. πῆγμα, a bond), the name given by
Hauy to those masses of graphic granite which frequently occur
in veins. They consist of quartz and alkali feldspars in crystalline
intergrowth (see Petrology, Plate II. fig. 6). The term was
subsequently used by Naumann to signify also the coarsely crystalline
veins rich in quartz, feldspar and muscovite, which
often in great numbers ramify through outcrops of granite and
the surrounding rocks. This application of the name has now
obtained general acceptance, and has been extended by many
authors to include vein-rocks of similar structure and geological
relationships, which occur with syenites, diorites and gabbros.
Only a few of these pegmatites have graphic structure or mutual
intergrowth of their constituents. Many of them are exceedingly
coarse-grained; in granite-pegmatites the feldspars may be
several feet or even yards in diameter, and other minerals such
as apatite and tourmaline often occur in gigantic crystals. Pegmatites
consist of minerals which are found also in the rocks
from which they are derived, e.g. granite-pegmatites contain
principally quartz and feldspar while gabbro-pegmatites
consist of diallage and plagioclase. Rare minerals, however,
often occur in these veins in exceptional amount and as very
perfect crystals The minerals of the pegmatites are always
those which were last to separate out from the parent rock.
As the basic minerals are the first formed the pegmatites contain
a larger proportion of the acid or more siliceous components
which were of later origin. In granite-pegmatites there is little
hornblende, biotite or sphene, but white mica, feldspar and quartz
make up the greater part of the veins. In gabbro-pegmatites
olivine seldom occurs, but diallage and plagioclase occur in
abundance In this respect the pegmatites and aplites agree;
both are of more acid types than the average rock from which
they came, but the pegmatites are coarsely crystalline while
the aplites are fine-grained. Segregations of the early minerals
of a rock are frequent as nodules, lumps and streaks scattered
through its mass, and often dikes of basic character (lamprophyres,
&c) are injected into the surrounding country. These
have been grouped together as intrusions of melanocrate facies
(μέλας, black, κράτος, strength, predominance) because in
them the dark basic minerals preponderate. The aplites and
pegmatites, on the other hand, are leucocrate (λευκός, white),
since they are of acid character and contain relatively large
amounts of the white minerals quartz and feldspar.
Pegmatites are associated with plutonic or intrusive rocks and were evidently formed by slow crystallization at considerable depths below the surface: nothing similar to them is known in lavas. They are very characteristic of granites, especially those which contain muscovite and much alkali feldspar, in gabbros, diorites and syenites pegmatite dikes are comparatively rare. The coarsely crystalline structure may be ascribed to slow crystallization; and is partly the result of the rocks, in which the veins lie, having been at a high temperature when the minerals of the pegmatites separated out. In accordance with this we find that pegmatite veins are nearly always restricted
