Part 20

The English method of selecting a mayor by the council is followed for the corresponding functionaries in France (except Paris), the more important cities of Italy, and in Germany, where, however, the central government must confirm the choice of the council. Direct appointment by the central government exists in Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the smaller towns of Italy and Spain. As a rule, too, the term of office is longer in other countries than in the United Kingdom. In France election is for four years, in Holland for six, in Belgium for an indefinite period, and in Germany usually for twelve years, but in some cases for life. In Germany the post may be said to be a professional one, the burgomaster being the head of the city magistracy, and requiring, in order to be eligible, a training in administration. German burgomasters are most frequently elected by promotion from another city. In France the _maire_, and a number of experienced members termed "adjuncts," who assist him as an executive committee, are elected directly by the municipal council from among their own number. Most of the administrative work is left in the hands of the _maire_ and his adjuncts, the full council meeting comparatively seldom. The _maire_ and the adjuncts receive no salary.

Further information will be found in the sections on local government in the articles on the various countries; see also A. Shaw, _Municipal Government in Continental Europe_; J. A. Fairlie, _Municipal Administration_; S. and B. Webb, _English Local Government_; Redlich and Hirst, _Local Government in England_; A. L. Lowell, _The Government of England_.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] If a place was of mercantile importance it was called a port (from _porta_, the city gate), and the reeve or bailiff, a "portreeve."

[2] The mayors of certain cities in the United Kingdom (London, York, Dublin) have acquired by prescription the prefix of "lord." In the case of London it seems to date from 1540. It has also been conferred during the closing years of the 19th century by letters patent on other cities--Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Sheffield, Leeds, Cardiff, Bradford, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Belfast, Cork. In 1910 it was granted to Norwich. Lord mayors are entitled to be addressed as "right honourable."

MAYOR OF THE PALACE.--The office of mayor of the palace was an institution peculiar to the Franks of the Merovingian period. A landowner who did not manage his own estate placed it in the hands of a steward (_major_), who superintended the working of the estate and collected its revenues. If he had several estates, he appointed a chief steward, who managed the whole of the estates and was called the _major domus_. Each great personage had a _major domus_--the queen had hers, the king his; and since the royal house was called the palace, this officer took the name of "mayor of the palace." The mayor of the palace, however, did not remain restricted to domestic functions; he had the discipline of the palace and tried persons who resided there. Soon his functions expanded. If the king were a minor, the mayor of the palace supervised his education in the capacity of guardian (_nutricius_), and often also occupied himself with affairs of state. When the king came of age, the mayor exerted himself to keep this power, and succeeded. In the 7th century he became the head of the administration and a veritable prime minister. He took part in the nomination of the counts and dukes; in the king's absence he presided over the royal tribunal; and he often commanded the armies. When the custom of commendation developed, the king charged the mayor of the palace to protect those who had commended themselves to him and to intervene at law on their behalf. The mayor of the palace thus found himself at the head of the _commendati_, just as he was at the head of the functionaries.

It is difficult to trace the names of some of the mayors of the palace, the post being of almost no significance in the time of Gregory of Tours. When the office increased in importance the mayors of the palace did not, as has been thought, pursue an identical policy. Some--for instance, Otto, the mayor of the palace of Austrasia towards 640--were devoted to the Crown. On the other hand, mayors like Flaochat (in Burgundy) and Erkinoald (in Neustria) stirred up the great nobles, who claimed the right to take part in their nomination, against the king. Others again, sought to exercise the power in their own name both against the king and against the great nobles--such as Ebroïn (in Neustria), and, later, the Carolingians Pippin II., Charles Martel, and Pippin III., who, after making use of the great nobles, kept the authority for themselves. In 751 Pippin III., fortified by his consultation with Pope Zacharias, could quite naturally exchange the title of mayor for that of king; and when he became king, he suppressed the title of mayor of the palace. It must be observed that from 639 there were generally separate mayors of Neustria, Austrasia and Burgundy, even when Austrasia and Burgundy formed a single kingdom; the mayor was a sign of the independence of the region. Each mayor, however, sought to supplant the others; the Pippins and Charles Martel succeeded, and their victory was at the same time the victory of Austrasia over Neustria and Burgundy.

See G. H. Pertz, _Geschichte der merowingischen Hausmeier_ (Hanover, 1819); H. Bonnell, _De dignitate majoris domus_ (Berlin, 1858); E. Hermann, _Das Hausmeieramt, ein echt germanisches Amt_, vol. ix. of _Untersuchungen zur deutschen Staats- und Rechtsgeschichte_, ed. by O. Gierke (Breslau, 1878, seq.); G. Waitz, _Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte_, 3rd ed., revised by K. Zeumer; and Fustel de Coulanges, _Histoire des institutions politiques de l'ancienne France: La monarchie franque_ (Paris, 1888). (C. Pf.)

MAYORUNA, a tribe of South American Indians of Panoan stock. Their country is between the Ucayali and Javari rivers, north-eastern Peru. They are a fine race, roaming the forests and living by hunting. They cut their hair in a line across the forehead and let it hang down their backs. Many have fair skins and beards, a peculiarity sometimes explained by their alleged descent from Ursua's soldiers, but this theory is improbable. They are famous for the potency of their blow-gun poison.

MAYO-SMITH, RICHMOND (1854-1901), American economist, was born in Troy, Ohio, on the 9th of February 1854. Educated at Amherst, and at Berlin and Heidelberg, he became assistant professor of economics at Columbia University in 1877. He was an adjunct professor from 1878 to 1883, when he was appointed professor of political economy and social science, a post which he held until his death on the 11th of November 1901. He devoted himself especially to the study of statistics, and was recognized as one of the foremost authorities on the subject. His works include _Emigration and Immigration_ (1890); _Sociology and Statistics_ (1895), and _Statistics and Economics_ (1899).

MAYOTTE, one of the Comoro Islands, in the Mozambique Channel between Madagascar and the African mainland. It has belonged to France since 1843 (see COMORO ISLANDS).

MAYOW, JOHN (1643-1679), English chemist and physiologist, was born in London in May 1643. At the age of fifteen he went up to Wadham College, Oxford, of which he became a scholar a year later, and in 1660 he was elected to a fellowship at All Souls. He graduated in law (bachelor, 1665, doctor, 1670), but made medicine his profession, and "became noted for his practice therein, especially in the summer time, in the city of Bath." In 1678, on the proposal of R. Hooke, he was chosen a fellow of the Royal Society. The following year, after a marriage which was "not altogether to his content," he died in London in September 1679. He published at Oxford in 1668 two tracts, on respiration and rickets, and in 1674 these were reprinted, the former in an enlarged and corrected form, with three others "De sal-nitro et spiritu nitro-aereo," "De respiratione foetus in utero et ovo," and "De motu musculari et spiritibus animalibus" as _Tractatus quinque medico-physici_. The contents of this work, which was several times republished and translated into Dutch, German and French, show him to have been an investigator much in advance of his time.

Accepting as proved by Boyle's experiments that air is necessary for combustion, he showed that fire is supported not by the air as a whole but by a "more active and subtle part of it." This part he called _spiritus igneo-aereus_, or sometimes _nitro-aereus_; for he identified it with one of the constituents of the acid portion of nitre which he regarded as formed by the union of fixed alkali with a _spiritus acidus_. In combustion the _particulae nitro-aereae_--either pre-existent in the thing consumed or supplied by the air--combined with the material burnt; as he inferred from his observation that antimony, strongly heated with a burning glass, undergoes an increase of weight which can be attributed to nothing else but these particles. In respiration he argued that the same particles are consumed, because he found that when a small animal and a lighted candle were placed in a closed vessel full of air the candle first went out and soon afterwards the animal died, but if there was no candle present it lived twice as long. He concluded that this constituent of the air is absolutely necessary for life, and supposed that the lungs separate it from the atmosphere and pass it into the blood. It is also necessary, he inferred, for all muscular movements, and he thought there was reason to believe that the sudden contraction of muscle is produced by its combination with other combustible (salino-sulphureous) particles in the body; hence the heart, being a muscle, ceases to beat when respiration is stopped. Animal heat also is due to the union of nitro-aerial particles, breathed in from the air, with the combustible particles in the blood, and is further formed by the combination of these two sets of particles in muscle during violent exertion. In effect, therefore, Mayow--who also gives a remarkably correct anatomical description of the mechanism of respiration--preceded Priestley and Lavoisier by a century in recognizing the existence of oxygen, under the guise of his _spiritus nitro-aereus_, as a separate entity distinct from the general mass of the air; he perceived the part it plays in combustion and in increasing the weight of the calces of metals as compared with metals themselves; and, rejecting the common notions of his time that the use of breathing is to cool the heart, or assist the passage of the blood from the right to the left side of the heart, or merely to agitate it, he saw in inspiration a mechanism for introducing oxygen into the body, where it is consumed for the production of heat and muscular activity, and even vaguely conceived of expiration as an excretory process.

MAYSVILLE, a city and the county-seat of Mason county, Kentucky, U.S.A., on the Ohio river, 60 m. by rail S.E. of Cincinnati. Pop. (1890) 5358; (1900) 6423 (1155 negroes); (1910) 6141. It is served by the Louisville & Nashville, and the Chesapeake & Ohio railways, and by steamboats on the Ohio river. Among its principal buildings are the Mason county public library (1878), the Federal building and Masonic and Odd Fellows' temples. The city lies between the river and a range of hills; at the back of the hills is a fine farming country, of which tobacco of excellent quality is a leading product. There is a large plant of the American Tobacco Company at Maysville, and among the city's manufactures are pulleys, ploughs, whisky, flour, lumber, furniture, carriages, cigars, foundry and machine-shop products, bricks and cotton goods. The city is a distributing point for coal and other products brought to it by Ohio river boats. Formerly it was one of the principal hemp markets of the country. The place early became a landing point for immigrants to Kentucky, and in 1784 a double log cabin and a blockhouse were erected here. It was then called Limestone, from the creek which flows into the Ohio here, but several years later the present name was adopted in honour of John May, who with Simon Kenton laid out the town in 1787, and who in 1790 was killed by the Indians. Maysville was incorporated as a town in 1787, was chartered as a city in 1833, and became the county-seat in 1848.

In 1830, when the question of "internal improvements" by the National government was an important political issue, Congress passed a bill directing the government to aid in building a turnpike road from Maysville to Lexington. President Andrew Jackson vetoed the bill on the ground that the proposed improvement was a local rather than a national one; but one-half the capital was then furnished privately, the other half was furnished through several state appropriations, and the road was completed in 1835 and marked the beginning of a system of turnpike roads built with state aid.

MAZAGAN (_El Jadida_), a port on the Atlantic coast of Morocco in 33° 16´ N. 8° 26´ W. Pop. (1908), about 12,000, of whom a fourth are Jews and some 400 Europeans. It is the port for Marrákesh, from which it is 110 m. nearly due north, and also for the fertile province of Dukálla. Mazagan presents from the sea a very un-Moorish appearance; it has massive Portuguese walls of hewn stone. The exports, which include beans, almonds, maize, chick-peas, wool, hides, wax, eggs, &c., were valued at £360,000 in 1900, £364,000 in 1904, and £248,000 in 1906. The imports (cotton goods, sugar, tea, rice, &c.) were valued at £280,000 in 1900, £286,000 in 1904, and £320,000 in 1906. About 46% of the trade is with Great Britain and 34% with France. Mazagan was built in 1506 by the Portuguese, who abandoned it to the Moors in 1769 and established a colony, New Mazagan, on the shores of Para in Brazil.

See A. H. Dyé, "Les ports du Maroc" in _Bull. Soc. Geog. Comm. Paris_, xxx. 325-332 (1908), and British consular reports.

MAZAMET, an industrial town of south-western France in the department of Tarn, 41 m. S.S.E. of Albi by rail. Pop. (1906), town, 11,370; commune, 14,386. Mazamet is situated on the northern slope of the Montagnes Noires and on the Arnette, a small sub-tributary of the Agout. Numerous establishments are employed in wool-spinning and in the manufacture of "swan-skins" and flannels, and clothing for troops, and hosiery, and there are important tanneries and leather-dressing, glove and dye works. Extensive commerce is carried on in wool and raw hides from Argentina, Australia and Cape Colony.

MAZANDARAN, a province of northern Persia, lying between the Caspian Sea and the Elburz range, and bounded E. and W. by the provinces of Astarabad and Gilan respectively, 220 m. in length and 60 m. in (mean) breadth, with an area of about 10,000 sq. m. and a population estimated at from 150,000 to 200,000. Mazandaran comprises two distinct natural regions presenting the sharpest contrasts in their relief, climate and products. In the north the Caspian is encircled by the level and swampy lowlands, varying in breadth from 10 to 30 m., partly under impenetrable jungle, partly under rice, cotton, sugar and other crops. This section is fringed northwards by the sandy beach of the Caspian, here almost destitute of natural harbours, and rises somewhat abruptly inland to the second section, comprising the northern slopes and spurs of the Elburz, which approach at some points within 1 or 2 m. of the sea, and are almost everywhere covered with dense forest. The lowlands, rising but a few feet above the Caspian, and subject to frequent floodings, are extremely malarious, while the highlands, culminating with the magnificent Demavend (19,400 ft.), enjoy a tolerably healthy climate. But the climate, generally hot and moist in summer, is everywhere capricious and liable to sudden changes of temperature, whence the prevalence of rheumatism, dropsy and especially ophthalmia, noticed by all travellers. Snow falls heavily in the uplands, where it often lies for weeks on the ground. The direction of the long sandbanks at the river mouths, which project with remarkable uniformity from west to east, shows that the prevailing winds blow from the west and north-west. The rivers themselves, of which there are as many as fifty, are little more than mountain torrents, all rising on the northern slopes of Elburz, flowing mostly in independent channels to the Caspian, and subject to sudden freshets and inundations along their lower course. The chief are the Sardab-rud, Chalus, Herhaz (Lar in its upper course), Babul, Tejen and Nika, and all are well stocked with trout, salmon (_azad-mahi_), perch (_safid-mahi_), carp (_kupur_), bream (_subulu_), sturgeon (_sag-mahi_) and other fish, which with rice form the staple food of the inhabitants; the sturgeon supplies the caviare for the Russian market. Near their mouths the rivers, running counter to the prevailing winds and waves of the Caspian, form long sand-hills 20 to 30 ft. high and about 200 yds. broad, behind which are developed the so-called _múrd-áb_, or "dead waters," stagnant pools and swamps characteristic of this coast, and a main cause of its unhealthiness.

The chief products are rice, cotton, sugar, a little silk, and fruits in great variety, including several kinds of the orange, lemon and citron. Some of the slopes are covered with extensive thickets of the pomegranate, and the wild vine climbs to a great height round the trunks of the forest trees. These woodlands are haunted by the tiger, panther, bear, wolf and wild boar in considerable numbers. Of the domestic animals, all remarkable for their small size, the chief are the black, humped cattle somewhat resembling the Indian variety, and sheep and goats.

Kinneir, Fraser and other observers speak unfavourably of the Mazandarani people, whom they describe as very ignorant and bigoted, arrogant, rudely inquisitive and almost insolent towards strangers. The peasantry, however, are far from dull, and betray much shrewdness where their interests are concerned. In the healthy districts they are stout and well made, and are considered a warlike race, furnishing some cavalry (800 men) and eight battalions of infantry (5600 men) to government. They speak a marked Persian dialect, but a Turki idiom closely akin to the Turkoman is still current amongst the tribes, although they have mostly already passed from the nomad to the settled state. Of these tribes the most numerous are the Modaunlu, Khojehvand and Abdul Maleki, originally of Lek or Kurd stock, besides branches of the royal Afshar and Kajar tribes of Turki descent. All these are exempt from taxes in consideration of their military service.

The export trade is chiefly with Russia from Meshed-i-Sar, the principal port of the province, to Baku, where European goods are taken in exchange for the white and coloured calicoes, caviare, rice, fruits and raw cotton of Mazandaran. Great quantities of rice are also exported to the interior of Persia, principally to Teheran and Kazvin. Owing to the almost impenetrable character of the country there are scarcely any roads accessible to wheeled carriages, and the great causeway of Shah Abbas along the coast has in many places even disappeared under the jungle. Two routes, however, lead to Teheran, one by Firuz Kuh, 180 m. long, the other by Larijan, 144 m. long, both in tolerably good repair. Except where crossed by these routes the Elburz forms an almost impassable barrier to the south.

The administration is in the hands of a governor, who appoints the sub-governors of the nine districts of Amol, Barfarush, Meshed-i-Sar, Sari, Ashref, Farah-abad, Tunakabun, Kelarrustak and Kujur into which the province is divided. There is fair security for life and property; and, although otherwise indifferently administered, the country is quite free from marauders; but local disturbances have latterly been frequent in the two last-named districts. The revenue is about £30,000, of which little goes to the state treasury, most being required for the governors, troops and pensions. The capital is Sari, the other chief towns being Barfarush, Meshed-i-Sar, Ashref and Farah-abad. (A. H.-S.)

MAZARIN, JULES (1602-1661), French cardinal and statesman, elder son of a Sicilian, Pietro Mazarini, the intendant of the household of Philip Colonna, and of his wife Ortensia Buffalini, a connexion of the Colonnas, was born at Piscina in the Abruzzi on the 14th of July 1602. He was educated by the Jesuits at Rome till his seventeenth year, when he accompanied Jerome Colonna as chamberlain to the university of Alcala in Spain. There he distinguished himself more by his love of gambling and his gallant adventures than by study, but made himself a thorough master, not only of the Spanish language and character, but also of that romantic fashion of Spanish love-making which was to help him greatly in after life, when he became the servant of a Spanish queen. On his return to Rome, about 1622, he took his degree as Doctor _utriusque juris_, and then became captain of infantry in the regiment of Colonna, which took part in the war in the Valtelline. During this war he gave proofs of much diplomatic ability, and Pope Urban VIII. entrusted him, in 1629, with the difficult task of putting an end to the war of the Mantuan succession. His success marked him out for further distinction. He was presented to two canonries in the churches of St John Lateran and Sta Maria Maggiore, although he had only taken the minor orders, and had never been consecrated priest; he negotiated the treaty of Turin between France and Savoy in 1632, became vice-legate at Avignon in 1634, and nuncio at the court of France from 1634 to 1636. But he began to wish for a wider sphere than papal negotiations, and, seeing that he had no chance of becoming a cardinal except by the aid of some great power, he accepted Richelieu's offer of entering the service of the king of France, and in 1639 became a naturalized Frenchman.