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Beccaria, Giambattista

(Encyclopedia)Beccaria, Giambattista jämˌbät-tēˈstä bāk-kärēˈä [key], 1716–81, Italian physicist. He joined the Piarist order in 1732 and studied in Rome and Narni. After teaching at various Italian un...

Bergman, Torbern Olof

(Encyclopedia)Bergman, Torbern Olof to͝orˈbərn o͞oˈlôv bĕrˈyəmän [key], 1735–84, Swedish chemist, physicist, and mineralogist. A professor at the Univ. of Uppsala from 1758, he developed a theory of che...

swamp

(Encyclopedia)swamp, shallow body of water in a low-lying, poorly drained depression, usually containing abundant plant growth dominated by trees, such as cypress, and high shrubs. Swamps develop in moist climates,...

Titchener, Edward Bradford

(Encyclopedia)Titchener, Edward Bradford tĭchˈənər [key], 1867–1927, American psychologist, b. Chichester, England, grad. Oxford, 1890. He studied in Leipzig (Ph.D. 1892) under Wundt (whose Principles of Phys...

Fleury, Claude

(Encyclopedia)Fleury, Claude flörēˈ [key], 1640–1723?, French ecclesiastical historian, a Roman Catholic priest, confessor to Louis XV, and author of the learned and unbiased Histoire ecclésiastique. This gr...

pessimism

(Encyclopedia)pessimism, philosophical opinion or doctrine that evil predominates over good; the opposite of optimism. Systematic forms of pessimism may be found in philosophy and religion. In religion Buddhism and...

Metazoa

(Encyclopedia)Metazoa mĕtˌəzōˈə [key], subkingdom of the animal kingdom comprising the multicellular animals in the traditional two-kingdom system of taxonomic classification, in which living organisms were c...

biology

(Encyclopedia)biology, the science that deals with living things. It is broadly divided into zoology, the study of animal life, and botany, the study of plant life. Subdivisions of each of these sciences include cy...

Scaliger, Julius Caesar

(Encyclopedia)Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 1484–1558, Italian philologist and physician in France. Scaliger studied medicine and settled in France (1526), where he worked as a physician. A scholar of profound eruditi...

Bertillon system

(Encyclopedia)Bertillon system bərtĭlˈyən [key], first scientific method of criminal identification, developed by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914). The system, based on the classificati...