[Asphyx`ia], suspended respiration in the physical life; a term frequently employed by Carlyle to denote a much more recondite, but a no less real, corresponding phenomenon in the spiritual life.
[Aspinwall], a town founded by an American of the name in 1800, at the Atlantic extremity of the Panama railway; named Colon, since the Empress Eugenie presented it with a statue of Columbus.
[Aspromon`te], a mountain close by Reggio, overlooking the Strait of Messina, near which Garibaldi was defeated and captured in 1862.
[Asquini, Count], a rural economist who did much to promote silk culture in Italy (1726-1818).
[Assab Bay], a coaling-station belonging to Italy, on the W. coast of the Red Sea.
[Assam`] (5,500), a province E. of Bengal, ceded to Britain after the Burmese war in 1826; being an alluvial plain, with ranges of hills along the Brahmapootra, 450 m. long and 50 broad; the low lands extremely fertile and productive, and the hills covered with tea plantations, yielding at one time, if not still, three-fourths of the tea raised in India.
[Assarotti], an Italian philanthropist, born at Genoa; the first to open a school for deaf-mutes in Italy, and devoted zealously his fortune and time to the task (1753-1821).
[As`sas, Nicolas], captain of the French regiment of Auvergne, whose celebrity depends on a single act of defiance: having entered a wood to reconnoitre it the night before the battle of Kloster Kampen, was suddenly surrounded by the enemy's (the English) soldiers, and defied with bayonets at his breast to utter a cry of alarm; "Ho, Auvergne!" he exclaimed, and fell dead on the instant, pierced with bayonets, to the saving of his countrymen.
[Assassins], a fanatical Moslem sect organised in the 11th century, at the time of the Crusades, under a chief called the Old Man of the Mountain, whose stronghold was a rock fortress at Alamut, in Persia, devoted to the assassination of all enemies of the Moslem faith, and so called because they braced their nerves for their deeds of blood by draughts of an intoxicating liquor distilled from hashish (the hemp-plant). A Tartar force burst upon the horde in their stronghold in 1256, and put them wholesale to the sword.
[Assaye`], a small town 46 m. NE. of Aurungabad, where Sir Arthur Wellesley gained a victory over the Mahrattas in 1803.