ÆäÀÌÁö À̹ÌÁö
PDF
ePub
[blocks in formation]

The envious clouds are bent
To dim his glory, and to stain the tract
Of his bright passage to the occident.

Shakspeare.
Ere twice in murk and occidental damp,
Moist Hesperus hath quenched his sleepy lamp.

Id. If she had not been drained she might have tiled her palaces with occidental gold and silver. Howel. East and west have been the obvious conceptions of philosophers, magnifying the condition of India above the settling and occidental climates. Browne. OC'CIPUT, n. s. Į Lat. occiput, occipitalis. OCCIPITAL, adj. The back of the head; pertaining to or placed in the back of the head.

His broad-brimmed hat

Hangs o'er his occiput most quaintly,
To make the knave appear more saintly.

Butler.

OCCIPUT, in anatomy, os memoriæ, os nervorum, or os basuare, the name given to that bone which forms the posterior and inferior part of the scull. It is of an irregular figure, convex on the outside, and concave internally. Its external surface is very irregular, and thus serves for the attachment of several muscles. The inferior portion of the bone is stretched forward in form of a wedge, whence it is called the cuneiform, or basilary process. At the base of this process, situated obliquely on each side of the foramen magnum, are two flat oblong protuberances, named condyles. They are covered with cartilage, and serve for the articulation of the head with the first vertebra of the neck. At the basis of the cranium, and immediately behind the cuneiform process, there is a considerable hole, through which the medulla oblongata, the nervi accessorii, and the vertebral arteries, pass into the spine. Man being designed for an erect posture, this foranum magnum is found nearly in the middle of the basis of the human cranium, and at a pretty equal distance from the posterior part of the occiput, and the anterior part of the lower jaw; whereas in quadrupeds it is nearer the back part of the occiput.

This bone is thicker and stronger than any other of the bones of the head, except the petrous parts of the ossa temporum. The reason for this seems to be that it covers the cerebellum, in which any wound is of the utmost consequence, and that it is, by its situation, more liable to be fractured by falls than any other bone of the cranium. For if we fall forwards the hands are naturally put out to prevent the forehead's touching the ground; and if on one side the shoulders in a great measure protect the sides of the head; but if a person falls backwards the hind part of the head consequently strikes against the earth, and that too with considerable violence. Nature therefore has wisely constructed this bone so as to be capable of the greatest strength at its upper part, where it is most exposed to injury. See ANATOMY, Index.

[blocks in formation]

They take it up, and roll it upon the earths, whereby occluding the pores they conserve the natural humidity, and so prevent corruption.

Browne.

The appulse is either plenary and occluse, so as to preclude all passages of breath or voice through the mouth; or else partial and pervious, so as to give Holder. them some passages out of the mouth.

OCCOA, a river of Hispaniola, which runs into the sea, and forms a bay on the south coast, to which it gives name, west of Point Salinas. Occoa, a bay at the eastern extremity of the island of Cuba. OCCULT, adj. OCCULTATION, n. s. OCCULT'NESS.

Fr. occulte; Lat. occultus. Obscure; secret; hidden; unknown occultation, in astronomy, is the time that a star or planet is hid from our sight by the interposition of the body of the moon, or some other planet: occultness, secretness; the state of being hid. If this occult guilt

Do not itself unkennel in one speech,
It is a damned ghost that we have seen.
Shakspeare.

An artist will play a lesson on an instrument without minding a stroke; and our tongues, will run divisions in a tune not missing a note, even when our thoughts are totally engaged elsewhere: which ef

fects are to be attributed to some secret act of the soul, which to us is utterly occult, and without the ken of our intellects.

Glanville.

These instincts we call occult qualities; which is all one with saying that we do not understand how L'Estrange. they work.

These are manifest qualities, and their causes only are occult. And the Aristotelians give the name of occult qualities not to manifest qualities, but to such and to be the unknown causes of manifest effects. qualities only as they suppose to lie hid in bodies,

OCCUPANCY, n. s. OCCUPANT, Oc'CUPATE, v. a. OCCUPATION, n. s. OCCUPIER,

Oc'cUPY, v. a. & v. n.

Newton's Opticks. Lat. occupo. The act of taking or keeping possession: an occupant is he who takes or keeps possession: occupate, to possess; hold: occupation, the act of taking or holding possession: hence employment; business; avocation: an occupier is a possessor; one who follows any employment or calling: to occupy, to possess; keep; hold; take up; give employment to; follow as a business; use; spend; apply.

All the gold occupied for the work was twenty and nine talents. Erod. xxxviii. 2. Thy merchandise and the occupiers of thy merchandise shall fall into the midst of the seas. Ezek. xxvii. 27.

He called his ten servants, and delivered them ten pounds, and said unto them, Occupy till I come. Luke xix. 13.

He was of the same craft with them, and wrought, for by their occupation they were tent-makers. Acts.

How shall he that occupieth the room of the ununderstandeth not what thou sayest? learned say Amen at thy giving of thanks, seeing he

1 Corinthians.

They occupied themselves about the sabbath yielding exceeding praise to the Lord. 2 Maccabeus. How can he get wisdom that driveth oxen and is occupied in their labours, and whose talk is of bul. locks? Ecclus. xxxviii. 25.

[ocr errors][merged small]

An archbishop may have chaplains than six.

They occupy their business

cause to occupy more Act of Henry VIII. in deep waters.

Common Prayer. The red pestilence strikes all trades in Rome, And occupations perish. Shakspeare. Coriolanus. If the title of occupiers be good in a land unpeopled, why should it be bad accounted in a country peopled thinly? Raleigh.

Of beasts and birds the property passeth with the possession, and goeth to the occupant; but of civil people not so. Bacon.

Drunken men are taken with a plain destitution in voluntary motion; for that the spirits of the wine oppress the spirits animal, and occupate part of the place where they are, and so make them weak to Id. Natural History.

move.

Spain hath enlarged the bounds of its crown within this last sixscore years much more than the Ottomans; I speak not of matches or unions, but of arms, occupations, invasions.

Bacon.

My occupations must vary according to occasions. My end shall be one, and the same now on earth that it must be one day in heaven.

vation.

Hall.

In your most busy occupations, when you are never so much taken up with other affairs, yet now and then send up an ejaculation to the God of your salWake: Powder being suddenly fired altogether, upon this high rarefaction, requireth a greater space than before its body occupied.

Browne.

He must assert infinite generations before that first deluge; and then the earth could not receive them, but the infinite bodies of men must occupy an infinite

space.

Bentley's Sermons. Of moveables, some are things natural; others, things artificial. Property in the first is gained by occupancy, in the latter by improvement.

Warburton.

Such were the distresses of the then infant world, so incessant their occupations about provision for food, that there was little leisure to commit any thing to writing. Woodward.

There was deep silence in the chamber: dim And distant from each other burned the lights, And slumber hovered o'er each lovely limb Of the fair occupants. Byron. OCCUPANCY, in law, is the taking possession of those things which before belonged to nobody. This, says judge Blackstone, is the true ground and foundation of all property, or holding those things in severalty, which, by the law of nature, unqualified by that of society, were common to all mankind. But, when once it was agreed that every thing capable of ownership should have an owner, reason suggested that he who could first declare his intention of appropriating any thing to his own use, and, in consequence of such his intention, actually took it into possession, should thereby gain the absolute property of it; according to that rule of the law of nations, recognised by the laws of Rome, Quod nullius est, id ratione naturali occupanti conceditur. This right of occupancy, so far as it concerns real property, has been confined by the laws of England within a very narrow compass; and was extended only to a single instance; namely, where a man was tenant pour autre vie, or had an estate granted to himself only for the life of another man, and died during the life of.cestuy que vie, or him by whose life it was holden in this case be that could first enter on the land might law

fully retain the possession so long as cestuy que vie lived by right of occupancy. This seems to have been recurring to first principles, and calling in the law of nature to ascertain the property of the land when left without a legal owner. For it did not revert to the granter, who had parted with all his interest, so long as cestuy que vie lived; it did not escheat to the lord of the fee, and not of any particular estate carved out of it, for all escheats must be of the absolute entire fee, much less of so minute a remnant as this; it did not belong to the grantee, for he was dead; it did not descend to his heirs, for there were no words of inheritance in the grant; nor could it vest in his executors, for no executors could succeed to a freehold. Belonging therefore to nobody, like the hæreditas jacens of the Romans, the law left it open to be seized and appropriated by the first person that could enter upon it, during the life of the cestuy que vie, under the name of an occupant. But there was no right of occupancy allowed where the king had the reversion of the lands; for the reversioner has an equal right with any other man to enter upon the vacant possession; and, where the king's title and a subject's interfere, the king's shall always be preferred. Against the king, therefore, there could be no prior occupant, because nullum tempus occurrit regi. And, even in the case of a subject, had the estate pour autre vie been granted to a man and his heirs during the life of cestuy que vie, there the heir might, and still may, enter and hold possession, and is called in clusive right, by the terms of the original grant, law a special occupant; as having a special exto enter upon and occupy this hæreditas jacens, during the residue of the estate granted; though some have thought that such estate is rather a descendible freehold. But the title of common occupancy is now reduced almost to nothing by two statutes; the one 29 Car. II. c. 3, which enacts that where there is no special occupant, in whom the estate may vest, the tenant pour autre vie may devise it by will, or it shall go to the executors, and be assets in their hands for payment of debts; the other, that of 14 Geo. II. c. 20, which enacts that it shall vest not only in the executors, but, in case the tenant dies intestate, in the administrators also; and go in course of a distribution like a chattel interest. By these two statutes the title of common occupancy is utterly extinct and abolished: though that of special occupancy, by the heir at law, continues to this day: such heir being held to succeed to the ancestor's estate, not by descent, for then he must take an estate of inheritance, but as an occupant, specially marked out and appointed by the original grant. For the statutes must not be construed so as to create any new estate, or to keep that alive which, by the common law, was determined, and thereby to defeat the granter's reversion; but merely to dispose of an interest in being, to which by law there was no owner, and which therefore was left open to the first occupant. When there is a residue left the statutes give it to the executors, &c., instead of the first occupant; but they will not create a residue on purpose to give it to the executors. So also, in some cases, where the laws of other nations give

a right by occupancy, as in lands newly created, by the rising of an island in a river, or by the alluvion or dereliction of the sea; in these instances the law of England assigns them an immediate owner. For Bracton tells us that if an island arise in the middle of a river it belongs in common to those who have lands on each side thereof; but, if it be nearer to one bank than the other, it belongs only to him who is proprietor of the nearest shore; which is agreeable to the civil law. Yet this seems only to be reasonable where the soil of the river is equally divided between the owners of the opposite shores; for if the whole soil is the freehold of any one, as it must be whenever a several fishery is claimed, there it seems just (and so is the practice) that the islets arising in any part of the river shall be the property of him who owneth the piscary and the soil. However in case a new island arise in the sea, though the civil law gives it to the first occupant, yet ours gives it to the king. And as to lands gained from the sea, either by alluvion, by the washing up of sand and earth, so as in time to make terra firma; or by dereliction, as when the sea shrinks back below the usual water-mark; in these cases the law is held to be, that if this gain be by little and little, by small and imperceptible degrees, it shall go to the owner of the land adjoining. For de minimis non curat lex: and besides, these owners being often losers by the breaking in of the sea, or at charges to keep it out, this possible gain is therefore a reciprocal consideration for such possible charge or loss. But, if the alluvion or dereliction be sudden and considerable, in this case it belongs to the king; for as the king is lord of the sea, and so owner of the soil while it is covered with water, it is but reasonable he should have the soil when the water has left it dry. So that the quantity of ground gained, and the time during which it is gained, are what make it either the king's or the subject's property. In the same manner, if a river, running between two lordships, by degrees gains upon one, and thereby leaves the other dry; the owner who loses his land thus imperceptibly has no remedy; but if the course of the river be changed by a sudden and violent flood, or other hasty means, and thereby a man loses his ground, he shall have what the river has left in any other place as a recompense for this sudden loss. And this law of alluvions and derelictions with regard to rivers is nearly the same in the imperial law; whence indeed those our determinations seem to have been drawn and adopted: but we ourselves, as islanders, have applied them to marine increases, and have given our sovereign the prerogative he enjoys, as well upon the particular reasons before-mentioned as upon this other general ground of prerogative, formerly remarked, that whatever has no other owner is vested by the law in the king. See PREROGATIVE. OCCUR', v. n. OCCURRENCE, N. s. currence. To come to meOCCURRENT, adj. mory; appear here and OCCURSION, n. s. there; clash; strike against; intercept: occurrence (from the Fr.) is, incident; accidental event: occurrent, incident: occursion, accidental blow; clash.

Lat. occurro;

Fr.

oc

Contentions were as yet never able to prevent two evils, the one a mutual exchange of unseemly and unjust disgraces, the other a common hazard of both, to be made a prey by such as study how to work upon all occurrents, with most advantage in private. Hooker.

in every particular, from Calice, to the mayor and He did himself certify all the news and occurrents aldermen of London.

[ocr errors]

Bacon. There doth not occur to me any use of this experiment for profit. Id. Natural History.

So pleasing is the vicissitude of things that the intercourse even of those occurrents which in their own nature are less worthy, gives more contentment than the unaltered estate of better. Bp. Hall. In the resolution of bodies, by fire, some of the dissipated parts may, by their various occursion occaBoyle. sioned by the heat, stick closely. justled by the occursion of other bodies, so orderly Now should those active particles, ever and anon keep their cells without alteration of site.

[merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small]

Bodies have a determinate motion according to the

degrees of their external impulse, their inward principle of gravitation, and the resistance of the bodies they occur with. Bentley. Before I begin that, I must occur to one specious objection against this proposition.

[ocr errors]

. Id. Voyages detain the mind by the perpetual occurrence and expectation of something new. Watts. The far greater part of the examples that occur to us are so many encouragements to vice and disobedience. Rogers.

O'CEAN, n. s. & adj. Fr. ocean; Lat. oceOCEAN'IC. anus. The main sea; any great expanse: ocean is classically used by Milton in the sense of oceanic, i. e. pertaining to the ocean.

The golden sun salutes the morn,
And, having gilt the ocean with his beams,
Gallops the zodiack.
Shakspeare.
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Id. Macbeth.
Clean from my hand?

In bulk as huge as that sea-beast,
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swims the' ocean stream.
Milton.

Bounds were set

To darkness, such as bound the ocean wave. Id. Time, in general, is to duration, as place to expansion. They are so much of those boundless oceans of eternity and immensity, as is set out and distinguished from the rest, to denote the position of infinite real beings, in those uniform, infinite_oceans of duration and space. Locke.

And I have loved thee Ocean, and my joy Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be Borne like thy bubbles onward: from a boy I wantoned with thy breakers.

Byron.

Hear! hear Prometheus from his rock appeal To earth, air, ocean, all that felt or feel. His power and glory; all who yet shall hear A war eternal as the rolling year.

Id.

So some tall rock, whose bare broad bosom high Towers from the earth, and braves the' inclement sky; On whose vast top the blackening deluge pours, At whose wide base the thundering ocean roais,

Canning.

In conscious pride its huge gigantic form
Surveys imperious, and defies the storm.
OCEAN. The oceans of the globe occupy,
collectively, about six-tenths of the earth's sur-
face. See our article GEOGRAPHY. We have in
that article considered the immense body of ter-

[blocks in formation]

2. Eastern or
Great Pacific<
Ocean.

3. Indian

Ocean.

4. Western
Ocean.

restrial waters as divisible into two great basins, which we have called the GREAT ATLANTIC and the GREAT PACIFIC basins. This outline is in a manner followed by the late celebrated Malte Brun in his Precis de la Geographie Universelle: the following is his exact sketch :Its frontier may be fixed by a line drawn from Cape Horn to the Cape of Good Hope; thence to Van Diemen's Land, and returning by the south of New Zealand to Cape Horn.

a. The great Archipelago, or the part comprised between New Zealand on the south, the Marquesas on the east, the island of Formosa on the north, and the surai of Malacca on the west.

b. The North-Eastern Ocean, between Asia and North America. The seas of Japan, of Kamtschatka, and Beering's Strait, make a part of it.

c. The South-Eastern Ocean, stretching from the islands (of the great Archipelago to South America.

With its various gulfs. The limits above indicated show what remains for this section of the great eastern basin. The Red Sea, or Arabian Gulf, the Persian Gulf, and the Bay of Bengal, form part of this division.

f. u. North Sea. It is separated from the Atlantic on the south-west by the Straits of Dover, Great Britain, the Islands of Faroe and Iceland. The Baltic with its gulfs, and the northern Frozen Ocean, constitute parts of this division.

b. The Atlantic Ocean, extending from the above line of demarcation to the two nearest points of Brasil and Guinea. 1. The Mediterranean and its gulfs.

Branches. 2. The Gulf of Mexico, &c.

3. Hudson and Baffin's Bay, or the Esquimaux Seas

c. Ethiopian Ocean, between Brasil and Africa, as far as the line which joins Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope.

On this it may be observed, that nearly one half of the globe is covered with water, while almost the whole of the land is situated in the other half. If the frozen regions about the south pole, says Mr. Myers, do not contain any large tracts of land, we may, by following the meridian of the Cape of Good Hope through the pole to the environs of Beering's Straits, trace a line of about 200°, which is equal to 4000 marine leagues, or 13,840 English miles. This line, therefore, exceeds half the circumference of the globe by about 400 leagues, and passes wholly over an aquatic surface. A line drawn under the equator through Sumatra and Borneo, to the western coast of America, presents, with only two or three interruptions, an aquatic expanse of 4200 leagues. Again, the fortieth parallel of south latitude exhibits a liquid zone, with only 15° of land, and consequently forming an extent of 5300 leagues, a little less than two-thirds of the whole circumference of the earth. Such is the vast extent of the great southern basin of the terrestrial globe.'

The ocean, by its refreshing exhalations contributed to the atmosphere, supports vegetable life, and feeds by its vapors the streams of running water, which, though ever flowing, are never exhaused. According to Dr. Halley, the vapors which arise from the ocean, and which the winds convey to the land, are sufficient to create and replenish all the rivers and other waters at the surface of the earth. Without

the benign influence of its vapors indeed the whole earth would become an inanimate desert; and the drying up of the ocean would probably be alone sufficient to destroy all organised nature. This vast body of water serves also to decompose a great part of the corruptible matter of both the vegetable and animal reigns, while, by opening a boundless field for navigation, it unites nations whom impassable mountains and immense deserts would otherwise have separated for ever.

The shores washed by the ocean are of three descriptions. 1. Elevated or rocky, sometimes composed of perpendicular cliffs several hundred feet high. 2. Downs or coasts formed of sand-hills accumulated by the waves and winds. 3. Low, or generally formed by the retiring of the sea.

The irregular depths of the ocean prove its bottom to be similar to the surface of the continents, and that if left dry it would in like manner present mountains, valleys, and plains. It is only by this analogy that we can form any estinate of its greatest depth, and this may lead us to conclude that the mountains of the continents correspond with the abysses of the ocean. The greatest depth that had been sounded in 1815 was, according to captain Tuckey, 891 fathoms (by Ellis, in his voyage to Hudson's Bay), without finding bottom. Since this Mr. Scoresby (in June 1817) sounded to the depth of 7200 feet: now the highest mountains exceed

three times this number of feet, and, if we allow half that quantity for, their abrasion by the action of the elements since their formation, we may conclude that the greatest depth of the ocean is, perhaps, between 30,000 and 40,000 feet. The depth of the sea near the shores is generally observed to be in proportion to their height and declivity, deep water being found close to elevated and steep shores, and shallow water near low ones. The bottom of the ocean, as far as has been ascertained, is composed of sand, gravel, and rock, mixed with the spoils of testaceous animals and coralaginous substances; in many places these latter cover the bottom so as to resemble petrified forests, while in others masses of granite appear.

The level of the waters of the ocean is, generally speaking, every where the same: hence the ocean taken collectively has a spherical or rather à spheroidical surface which may be considered the true surface of our planet. As exceptions to this general level, it has been pretended that the Baltic and Zuyder Zee are higher than the British Sea, the Red Sea than the Mediterranean, and that there is a difference in the levels of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on the opposite sides of the isthmus of the Darien; but the facts on which these suppositions rest are by no means sufficiently verified, and, with respect to the Baltic in particular, the contrary has been proved by recent experiments. It seems, however, probable that gulfs or internal seas open to the East are higher than the main ocean, from the accumulation of waters in them by the constant movement of the sea from east to west.

The water of the ocean, besides pure water, contains many foreign substances, the proportions of which vary in different places: the most common are muriatic acid, sulphuric acid, a fixed mineral alkali, magnesia, and sulphated lime. The degree of saltness also varies with the localities, or from adventitious causes, and in many places it has been found to be less at the surface than at a considerable depth. Naturalists have proposed different solutions for the phenomenon of the saltness of the sea, some supposing it to be caused by primitive banks of salt at the bottom; but, if such banks exist, they are probably rather formed by the deposition of the saline particles of the water, than the cause of its saltness. Halley and Buffon ascribed it to the corruption of vegetable and animal matter, conveyed to the sea by rivers; for it being certain that the fresh water received by lakes that have no outlet corrupts, is decomposed, and forms depositions of salt, they considered the ocean as a vast lake, the common reservoir of all the fresh waters of the globe. But if this hypothesis were correct the saltness of the sea must be continually increasing, which there seems to be no reason for supposing. Many naturalists have conceived the ocean to be the residue of a primitive fluid, that held in dissolution all the substances of which the earth is composed, and that, after this fluid had deposited all the earthy and metallic particles, there remained in the residue or actual sea some of the saline elementary principles too intimately combined with the water to escape. The only method of freeing

sea-water from its salt is by distillation; but this process is so tedious, and requires such a quantity of fuel, that it can scarcely ever be carried to sufficient extent to supply the total want of fresh water at sea, though it may considerably protract the arrival of so dreadful a calamity; besides, distillation does not entirely deprive the sea-water of its bitter taste when it contains sal ammoniac. This bitterness, which renders seawater so nauseous, is found to decrease with the depth, whence it probably proceeds from animal and vegetable matter in a state of decomposition near the surface. Sparrman found that sea-water taken from the depth of sixty fathoms had the taste of fresh water in which common salt had been dissolved, and on an analysis it was found to contain an extremely small proportion of magnesia. The analysis of three pounds of water taken up near Aurich, in East Friezeland (British Sea), and the same quantity from New Rostock in the Baltic gave:Brit. Sea. Baltic..

[ocr errors]
[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
« ÀÌÀü°è¼Ó »