Milton. The pleiades before him danced, Shedding sweet influence. Then sailors quartered heaven, and found a name For pleiads, hyads, and the northern car. Dryden. PLEIADES, in astronomy, an assemblage of seven stars in the neck of the constellation Taurus. They are thus called from the Greek λ, navigare, to sail; as being terrible to mariners, by reason of the rains and storms that frequently rise with them. The Latins called them vergiliæ, from ver, spring; because of their rising about the time of the vernal equinox. The largest is of the third magnitude, and is called lucida pleiadum. PLEIADES, in the mythology, the seven daughters of Atlas king of Mauritania, and Pleione, thus called from their mother. They were Maia, Electra, Taygete, Asterope, Merope, Halcyone, and Celono; and were also called Atlantides, from their father. These princesses were carried off by Busiris, king of Egypt; but Hercules, having conquered him, delivered them to their father; yet they afterwards suffered a new persecution from Orion, who pursued them five years, till Jove, being prevailed on by their prayers, took them up into the heavens, where they form the constellation which bears their name. was the mother of Mercury by Jupiter. Maia PLEIONE, in fabulous history, a daughter of Oceanus, who married Atlas, king of Mauritania, by whom she had a son and twelve daughters, seven of whom were from her called Pleiades, and five were called Hyades, from their brother Hyas. PLENARY, adj. & n. s. Lat. plenus. Full; complete; a complete or decisive procedure. I am far from denying that compliance on my part, for plenary consent it was not, to his destruction. King Charles. The cause is made a plenary cause, and ought to be determined plenarily. Ayliffe's Parergon. Institution without induction does not make a plenary against the king, where he has a title to pre sent. Id. PLE'NIST, n. s. PLENITUDE, Lat. plenus, plenitas; Gr. or. One who PLEN'TEOUS, adj. believes in the univer PLEN TEOUSLY, adv. sal fulness of space, PLEN'TEOUSNESS, n. s. or that all space is PLENTIFUL, adj. full of matter: ple PLENTIFULLY, adv. nitude, plenteousness, PLENTIFULNESS, n. s. plentifulness, and PLENTY. plenty, mean fulness; copiousness; abundance; completeness: reple tion plenty is also corruptly used for plentiful: plenteous is copious; abundant; exuberant; fertile: the adverb and noun substantive cor responding in sense plentiful, synonymous with plenteous, only more commonly used in prose; plentifully and plentifulness correspond being a great multitude of fountains. Bern is plentifully furnished with water, there Addison's Italy The plenitude of William's fame Can no accumulated stores receive. If there were every where an absolute pleitet and density without any pores between the particies of bodies, all bodies of equal dimensions would ce tain an equal quantity of matter, and consequently Bentity be equally ponderous. diet. Relaxation from plenitude is cured by spare Arbuthnot. plenteously reward us in the next. God proves us in this life, that he may the more Wake. Two plenteous fountains the whole prospect crowned; This through the gardens leads its streams around. Pope Alcibiades was a young man of noble birth, ex cellent education, and a plentiful fortune. Surf PLETH'ORA, or " Gr. πληθώρα. The PLETH'ORY, n. s. state in which the vessels PLETHOR'IC, adj. contain a greater quantity of humors than is agreeable to health: plethoric is, of a full habit. Perhaps thou labourest of some plethory of pride, or of some dropsy of covetousness, or of the staggers of inconstancy; it is a rare soul that has not some notable disease. Bp. Hall. The diseases of the fluids are a plethora, or too great abundance of laudable juices. Arbuthnot. The fluids, as they consist of spirit, water, salts, oil, and terrestrial parts, differ according to the redundance of the whole or of any of these; and therefore the plethoric are phlegmatick, oily, saline, earthy, or dry. Id. In too great repletion, the elastic force of the tube throws the fluid with too great a force, and subjects the animal to the diseases depending upon a plethory. Id. is compressed, the one side resembling the back the other the belly. These flat fish swim sidewise, for which reason Linnæus called them pleuronectes. There are several species; the most remarkable are these: 1. P. flesus, the flounder, inhabits every part of the British Sea, and even frequents our rivers at a great distance from the salt waters; and for this reason some writers call it the passer fluviatilis. It never grows large in our rivers, but is reckoned sweeter than those that live in the sea. It is inferior in size to the plaise, seldom or never weighing more than six pounds. It may very easily be distinguished from the plaise, or any other fish of this genus, by a row of sharp small spines that surround its upper sides, and are placed just at the junction of the fins with the body. Another row marks the side-line, and runs half way down the back. The color of the upper part of the body is a pale brown, sometimes marked with a few obscure spots of dirty yellow; the belly is white. 2. P. hippoglossus, the holibut. This is the largest of the genus; some have been taken in our seas weighing from 100 to 300 lbs.; but much larger are found in those of Newfoundland, Greenland, and Iceland, where they are taken with a hook and line in very deep water. They are part of the food of the Greenlanders, who cut them into large slips, and dry them in the sun. They are common in the London markets, where they are exposed to sale, cut into large pieces. They are very coarse eating, excepting the part which adheres to the side fins, which is extremely fat and delicious, but surfeiting. They are the most voracious of all flat fish. There have been instances of their swallowing the lead weight at the end of a line, with from on board a ship. The holibut, in respect which the seamen were sounding the bottom to its length, is the narrowest of any of this genus except the sole. It is perfectly smooth, and free from spines either above or below. The color of the upper part is dusky; beneath of a pure white. 3. P. limanda, the dab, is found with the It is in best other species, but is less common. season during February, March, and April; they spawn in May and June, and become flabby and watery the rest of summer. They are superior in quality to the plaise and flounder, but far inferior in size. It is generally of a uniform brown color on the upper side, though sometimes clouded with a darker. The scales are small The lateral line is extremely incurvated at the and rough, which is a character of this species. beginning, then goes quite straight to the tail. The lower part of the body is white. 4. P. maximus, the turbot, grows to a very large size Pennant has seen them of twenty three pounds weight. The turbot is of a remarkable square form; the color of the upper part of the body is cinereous, marked with numbers of black spots of different sizes; the belly is white, the skin is without scales, but greatly wrinkled, and mixed with smail short spines, dispersed without any order. 5. P. platessa, the plaise, very common on most of our coasts, and sometimes taken of the weight of fifteen pounds; but it seldom attains that size, one of eight or nine pounds being reck oned a large fish. The best and largest are taken off Rye on the coast of Sussex, and also off the Dutch coasts. They spawn in the beginning of February. They are very flat, and much more square than the holibut. Behind the left eye is a row of six tubercles, that reaches to the commencement of the lateral line. The upper part of the body and fins are of a clear brown, marked with large bright orange-colored spots; the belly is white. 6. P. solea, the sole, is found on all our coasts; but those on the western shores are much superior in size to those on the north. On the former they are sometimes taken of the weight of six or seven pounds, but towards Scarborough they rarely exceed one pound; if they reach two, it is extremely uncommon. They are usually taken in the trawl-net; they keep much at the bottom, and feed on small shell-fish. It is of a form much more narrow and oblong than any other of the genus. The irides are yellow, the pupils of a bright sapphirine color; the scales are small and very rough, the upper part of the body is of a deep brown; the tip of one of the pectoral fins black, the under part of the body white, the lateral line is straight, the tail rounded at the end. It is a fish of a very delicate flavor, but the small soles are in this respect much superior to large ones. By the ancient laws of the Cinque Ports, no one was to take soles from the 1st of November to the 15th of March; neither was any body to fish from sun-setting to sun-rising, that the fish might enjoy their night food. The chief fishery for them is at Brixham in Torbay. PLEXIPPUS AND TOXEUS, the sons of Thestius brothers of Althæa, and uncles of Meleager, who killed them, and in consequence lost his own life. See MELEAGER. PLEXUS, among anatomists, a bundle of small vessels interwoven in the form of network; thus a congeries of vessels within the brain is called plexus choroides, reticularis, or retiformis. PLIABLE, adj. Fr. pliable, plier, pliant. PLIABLENESS, n. s. Flexible; easily bent: PLIANCY, hence of flexible disposiPLIANT, adj. tion or temper: pliablePLIANTNESS, n. s. ness and pliancy are of PLIERS. corresponding sense: pliant is, bending; flexible; limber; tough; and is also used metaphorically for compliant; easily persuadable: pliers, an instrument for bending wire or other works of art. In languages the tongue is more pliant to all sounds, the joints more supple to all feats of activity, in youth than afterwards. Bacon. Greatness of weight, closeness of parts, fixation, pliantness or softness. Id. Natural History. God's preventing graces, which have thus fitted the soil for the kindly seeds-time, planted pliableness, humility in the heart. Hammond. As the sword of the best tempered metal is most flexible; so the truly generous are most pliant and courteous to their inferiors. Fuller. Though an act be never so sinful, they will strip it of its guilt, and make the very law so pliable and bending, that it shall be impossible to be broke. South Compare the ingenuous pliableness to virtuous counsels in youth, as it comes fresh out of the hands sorts of sin, that is to be found in an aged sinner. of nature, with the confirmed obstinacy in most Id. The will was then ductile and pliant to right reason, it met the dictates of a clarified understanding halfway. Id. Whether the different motions of the animal spirits may have any effect on the mould of the face, when the lineaments are pliable and tender, I shall leave Addison. to the curious. Had not exercise been necessary, Nature would such a pliancy to every part, as produces those comnot have given such an activity to the limbs, and pressions and extensions necessary for the preservation of such a system. Id. Spectator. An anatomist promised to dissect a woman's tongue, and examine whether the fibres may not be made up of a finer and more pliant thread. Addison. PLIGHT, v. a. & n. s. Skinner derives this word from the Dutch plicht, office or employment; but Junius observes that Saxon plit, signifies distress or pressing danger; whence I suppose, says Dr. Johnson, plight was derived, it being generally used in a bad sense. Rather the noun substantive seems derived from the verb, which has the sense, and was originally the preterperfect of pledge, condition; hence fix or bring into a certain state. To pledge; offer a deposit as surety or security; pawn: as a noun substantive, condition or state; case; pledge; gage. Who abuseth his cattle and starves them for meat, By carting or plowing his gain is not great; Where he that with labour can use them aright, Hath gaine to his comfort, and cattle in plight. Tusser. He plighted his right hand Met the night mare, and her ninefold, Shakspeare. Lie in this miserable loathsome plight. Milton. New vows to plight, and plighted vows to break. Dryden. I'll never mix my plighted hands with thine, While such a cloud of mischiefs hangs about us. Addison. PLIGHT, v. a. & n. s. Lat. plico. To weave; braid hence a fold; pucker; and (obsolete) a garment. Her head she fondly would aguise Spenser. Milton. I took it for a fairy vision Of some gay creatures of the element, That in the colours of the rainbow live, And play i' the' plighted clouds. PLINIA, in botany, a genus of plants of the class polyandria, and order monogynia. The empalement is divided into five segments; the flower consists of five petals; the stamina are numerous filaments, slender, and as long as the flower; the antheræ, and the germen of the pistil, are small; the style is subulated, and of the length of the stamina; the stigma is simple; the fruit is a large globose berry, of a striated or sulcated surface, containing only one cell, in which is a very large, smooth, and globose seed. There is only one species, a tree of North America. PLINTH OF A STATUE, &c., is a base, either flat, round, or square, that serves to support it. PLINTH OF A WALL denotes two or three rows of bricks advancing out from a wall; or, in general, a flat high moulding, that serves in a front wall to mark the floors, to sustain the eaves of a wall, or the larmier of a chimney. PLINTH, n. s. Gr. λivoog. In architecture, that square member which serves as a foundation to the base of a pillar. The plinth is used at the foot, or foundation of columns: being that flat square table, under the mouldings of the base and pedestal, at the bottom of the whole order; seeming to have been originally intended to keep the bottom of the primitive wooden pillars from rotting. Dr. A. Rees. PLINY, THE ELDER, or Caius Cæcilius Plinius Secundus, one of the most learned men of ancient Rome, was descended from an illustrious family, and born at Verona. He bore arms in the German war; was one of the college of Augurs; became intendant of Spain; and was employed in several important affairs by Vespasian and Titus. While at Masenum, where he commanded the fleet, he was surprised at a sudden appearance of clouds and dust from Vesuvius. His curiosity led him to the mountain and he lodged for the night at the villa of his friend Pomponianus near its base. In the morning, however, he was compelled to fly by showers of ashes filling his apartment, and in his flight was suffocated. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, relates the circumstances of that dreadful eruption, and the death of his uncle, in a letter to Tacitus. Pliny the Elder wrote a Natural History in thirty-seven books, which is still extant, and has gone through many editions; the most esteemed of which is that of Father Hardouin, printed at Paris in 1723, in two volumes folio. The following is the mode of his spending his time at Rome, when in possession of the imperial favor. Before day-break he waited upon Vespasian, to receive and execute his orders. On returning home he employed the rest of the day in study. After taking a light repast, he reclined in the sun according to the Roman custom, while a book was read to him, from which he took notes. He never perused any work without making extracts, as he was accustomed to say that no book was so bad as not to afford something valuable.' He then bathed, slumbered a little, and, after rising, studied till supper time. Even during that repast a reader was at his side, as there was upon all his journeys; and a vacant hour seldom occurred which he did not employ in reading and writing. PLINY, THE YOUNGER, nephew and adopted son of the preceding, was born in the ninth year of Nero, A. D. 62, at Novocomum. Lucius Cæcilius was the name of his father. He showed very early talents, and had the celebrated Virginius for his tutor. He frequented the schools of the rhetoricians, and heard Quintilian, for whom he ever after entertained so high an esteem that he bestowed a considerable portion upon his daughter at her marriage. He was in his eighteenth year when his uncle died; and he then began to plead in the forum. About a year after he assumed the military character, and went into Syria as tribune; but returned after a campaign or two. In his passage home he was detained by contrary winds at the island of Icaria. Upon his return from Syria, he married, and settled in Rome, in the reign of Domitian. During this most perilous time, he continued to plead in the forum, where he was distinguished no less by his uncommon abilities and eloquence, than by his resolution and courage. He was therefore often appointed by the senate to defend the plundered provinces against their oppressive governors, and to manage other causes of an important and dangerous nature. One of these was for the province of Botica, in their prosecution of Babius Massa; in which he acquired so general an applause, that the emperor Nerva, then a private man, and in banishment at Tarentum, wrote to him a letter, in which he congratulated not only Pliny, but the age which had produced an example so much in the spirit of the ancients. Pliny relates this affair in a letter to Tacitus, whom he intreats to record it in his history. He obtained the offices of quæstor and tribune, and fortunately escaped the tyranny of Domitian. But he tells us him self, that his name was afterwards found in D mitian's tablets, in the list of those who were destined to destruction. He lost his wife in the beginning of Nerva's reign, and soon after married his celebrated Calphurnia, of whom we read so much in his Epistles. He had, however, no children by either of his wives. He was promoted to the consulate by Trajan in the year 100, when he was thirty-eight years of age; and in this office pronounced a panegyric, which has ever since been admired. He was then elected augur, and afterwards made proconsul of Bithyna; whence he wrote to Trajan that curious letter concerning the primitive Christians; which, with Trajan's rescript, is extant among his Epistles. Pliny's letter, as Mr. Melmoth observes in a note upon the passage, is esteemed one of the few genuine monuments of ecclesiastical antiquity relating to the times immediately succeeding the apostles, it being written at most not above forty years after the death of St. Paul. It was preserved by the Christians, as a clear and unsuspicious evidence of the purity of their doctrines, and is often appealed to by the early writers of the church against the calumnies of their adversaries. It is not known what became of Pliny after his return from Bithynia. Antiquity is also silent as to the time of his death: but it is supposed that he died about A. D. 116. He wrote and published a great number of works; but nothing has escaped the wreck of time except his Epistles and his panegyric upon Trajan. In his letters he may be considered as writing his own memoirs. Every epistle is a kind of historical sketch, wherein we have a view of him in some striking attitude. In them are also preserved anecdotes of many eminent persons, whose works have come down to us, as Suetonius, Silius Italicus, Martial, Tacitus, and Quintilian; and of curious things, which throw great light upon the history of those times. There are two elegant English translations of his Epistles; the one by Mr. Melmoth, and the other by lord Orrery. PLISTHENES, the son of Atreus, king of Argos, and the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, according to Hesiod and others. He died before his father, and his children were educated by their grandfather, Atreus, and hence were called Atridæ, and passed for his sons. PLISTONAX, the son of Pausanias, one of the kings of Sparta, was general of the Lacedæmonians in the Peloponnesian war. He succeeded Plistarchus, and reigned fifty-eight years, but was banished nineteen years, till he was recalled by order of the Delphian oracle. PLOČAMA, in botany, a genus of the monogynia order, and pentandria class of plants: CAL. quinquedentate: fruit a berry and trilocular, with solitary seeds. There is only one spe cies; a native of the Canaries. PLOCE, in music, Lat. nexus; a species of writing, among the ancients, consisting of a succession of disjointed or diatonic passages. Ascending passages were termed nexus or ductus rectus; descending ones were termed nexus anacamptos, or ductus reversus; ascending and descending passages, nexus circumstans, or duc tus circumcurrens. PLOCK, one of the eight palatinates of the present kingdom of Poland, comprises the north and north-west of the kingdom, and lies entirely to the right of the Vistula and the Bug, extending from the Russian frontier to the vicinity of Thorn. Its area is flat but fertile, and calculated at about 7400 square miles. It includes the ancient palatinate of this name, with considerable additional territory. Its climate and products differ in no respect from those of the north of Poland in general. The chief rivers are the Vistula and the Narew. Inhabitants 320,000. PLOCK, or PLOTZK, the chief place of the preceding palatinate, is a bishop's see, situated on the Vistula, in the midst of orchards. It has also a college of Piarists, and 3000 inhabitants Fifty-five miles W. N. W. of Warsaw. PLOD, v. n. ? Dutch ploeghen. Skinner. ર PLOD'DER, n. s. To toil; drudge; pore; travel. Rogues, plod away a' the hoof, seek shelter, pack. Shakspeare. If one of mean affairs He plods to turn his amorous suit T'a plea in law, and prosecute. Hudibres. The unlettered Christian, who believes in gross, Plods on to heaven, and ne'er is at a loss. Dryden. starts. A plodding diligence brings us sooner to our journey's end, than a fluttering way of advancing by L'Estrange. She reasoned without plodding long, Nor ever gave her judgment wrong. Swift's Miscellanies. The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, PLOEN, a town of the duchy of Holstein, Denmark, situated between a large and a small lake. It has an elegant palace, formerly the residence of the dukes of Holstein-Ploen, a branch of the royal family of Denmark. Inhabitants 2000. Eighteen miles S. S. E. of Kiel, and twenty-two north by west of Lubeck. PLOMBIERES, a post town of the department of the Vosges, France, the chief place of a canton in the arrondissement of Remiremont, containing about 1300 inhabitants. It stands in a very picturesque situation, between two steep mountains at the bottom of a valley crossed by the Angronne. It is generally well built, and has some fine walks round it, varied with beautiful scenery. Here are a fine church and an hospital, founded by Stanislaus, king of Poland, to |