[Mercator], a celebrated Dutch geographer who has given name to a projection of the earth's surface on a plane (1512-1592).
[Mercenaries], originally hired soldiers as distinguished from feudal levies, now bodies of foreign troops in the service of the State; the Scots Guards in France from the 15th to 18th centuries were famous, and Swiss auxiliaries once belonged to most European armies; William III. had Dutch mercenaries in England; under the Georges, German were hired and were used in the American War, the Irish rebellion, and the Napoleonic struggle; in the Crimean War German, Swiss, and Italian were enrolled.
[Mercia], one of the three chief kingdoms of early England; founded by Anglian settlers in the Upper Trent Valley (now South Staffordshire) In the 6th century; it rose to greatness under Penda 626-655, subsequently succeeded Northumberland in the supremacy, but after the death of Cenwulf 819, waned in turn before Wessex and the Danes.
[Mercury], the Roman name for the Greek Hermes, the son of Jupiter and Maia, the messenger of the gods, the patron of merchants and travellers, and the conductor of the souls of the dead to the nether world.
[Mercury], an interior planet of the Solar system, whose orbit is nearest the sun, the greatest distance being nearly 43,000,000 m. and the least over 28,000,000, is one-seventeenth the size of the earth, but is of greater density, and accomplishes its revolution in about 84 days; it is visible just before the sun rises and after it sets, but that very seldom owing to the sun's neighbourhood.
[Mer-de-glace], the great glacier of the Alps near Chamouni, was the subject of the experiments of Professor J. D. Forbes of Edinburgh about 1843, and on which the movement of the glaciers was first observed.
[Meredith, George], poet and novelist, born in Hampshire; began his literary career 1851 as a poet, in which capacity he has since distinguished himself and given expression to his deepest personal convictions, but it is chiefly as a novelist he is most widely known and is generally judged of; as a novel-writer he occupies a supreme place, and is reckoned superior in that department to all his contemporaries in the same line by the unanimous consent of one and all of them; his novels, however, appeal only to a select few, but by them they are regarded with unbounded admiration, some giving preference to this and others to that of the series; "The Ordeal of Richard Feveril," published in 1859, is by many considered his best, though it is over "The Egoist" that Louis Stevenson breaks out into raptures; Meredith has most sympathetic insights into nature and life, has a marvellous power in analysing and construing character, and shows himself alive to all the great immediate interests of humanity; b. 1828.
[Meredith, Owen], the nom de plume assumed by Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton, from his descent from a Welsh noble of the name.
[Mergui], a small seaport near the mouth of the Tenasserim, British Burma, which exports birds' nests to China.
[Meridian], an imaginary great circle passing through the poles at right angles to the equator.