Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) fermentation, process by which the living cell is able to obtain energy through the breakdown of glucose and other simple sugar molecules without requiring oxygen. Fermentation is achieved by somewhat...

(Encyclopedia) Jacobite Church jăkˈəbītˌ [key], officially Syrian Orthodox Church, Christian church of Syria, Iraq, and India, recognizing the Syrian Orthodox patriarch of Antioch as its spiritual head, regarde...

(Encyclopedia) Witt, Jan de yän [key], 1625–72, Dutch statesman. Like his father, Jacob de Witt, burgomaster of Dort, he became a leading opponent of the house of Orange and played a vital role in the three succe...

(Encyclopedia) river, stream of water larger than a brook or creek. Land surfaces are never perfectly flat, and as a result the runoff after precipitation tends to flow downward by the shortest and steepest course i...

(Encyclopedia) Dutch art, the art of the region that is now the Netherlands. As a distinct national style, this art dates from about the turn of the 17th cent., when the country emerged as a political entity and dev...

(Encyclopedia) Lowell Observatory, astronomical observatory located in Flagstaff, Ariz.; it was founded in 1894 by Percival Lowell, the American astronomer who popularized the idea that Mars might support intelligen...

(Encyclopedia) Cook, James, 1728–79, English explorer and navigator. The son of a Yorkshire agricultural laborer, he had little formal education. After an apprenticeship to a firm of shipowners at Whitby, he joine...

(Encyclopedia) Toledo təlēˈdō [key], city (1990 pop. 332,943), seat of Lucas co., NW Ohio, on the Maumee River at its junction with Lake Erie; inc. 1837. With a natural harbor and its railroads and highways, Tol...

(Encyclopedia) Montaigne, Michel Eyquem, seigneur de mŏntānˈ, Fr. mēshĕlˈ ākĕmˈ sānyörˈ də môNtĕnˈyə [key], 1533–92, French essayist. Montaigne was one of the greatest masters of the essay as a li...

(Encyclopedia) coronation, ceremony of crowning and anointing a sovereign on his or her accession to the throne. Although a public ceremony inaugurating a new king or chief had long existed, a new religious service ...