[El Dorado] (lit. the Land of Gold), a country which Orellana, the lieutenant of Pizzaro, pretended to have discovered in S. America, between the Amazon and Orinoco, and which he represented as abounding in gold and precious gems; now a region of purely imaginary wealth.
[Eleanor], queen of Edward I. of England and sister of [Alfonso X.] (q. v.) of Castile, surnamed the Wise, accompanied her husband to the Crusade in 1269, and is said to have saved him by sucking the poison from a wound inflicted by a poisoned arrow; was buried at Westminster (1244-1290).
[Eleatics], a school of philosophy in Greece, founded by Xenophanes of Elia, and of which Parmenides and Zeno, both of Elia, were the leading adherents and advocates, the former developing the system and the latter completing it, the ground-principle of which was twofold—the affirmation of the unity, and the negative of the diversity, of being—in other words, the affirmation of pure being as alone real, to the exclusion of everything finite and merely phenomenal. See "[Sartor]," Bk. I. chap. 8.
[Election, The Doctrine of], the doctrine that the salvation of a man depends on the election of God for that end, of which there are two chief phases—the one is election to be Christ's, or unconditional election, and the other that it is election in Christ, or conditional election.
[Electors, The], or Kurfürsts, of Germany, German princes who enjoyed the privilege of disposing of the imperial crown, ranked next the emperor, and were originally six in number, but grew to eight and finally nine; three were ecclesiastical—the Archbishops of Mayence, Cologne, and Trèves, and three secular—the Electors of Saxony, the Palatinate, and Bohemia, to which were added at successive periods the Electors of Brandenburg, of Bavaria, and Hanover. "There never was a tenth; and the Holy Roman Empire, as it was called, which was a grand object once, but had gone about in a superannuated and plainly crazy state some centuries, was at last put out of pain by Napoleon, August 6, 1806, and allowed to cease from the world."
[Electra] (i. e. the Bright One), an ocean nymph, the mother of [Isis] (q. v.).
[Electra], the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who, with her brother Orestes, avenged the death of her father on his murderers.
[Electric Light], a brilliant white light due to positive and negative currents rushing together between two points of carbon or (the "incandescent" light) to the intense heat in a solid body, caused by an electric current passing through it.
[Electricity], the name given to a subtle agent called the electric fluid, latent in all bodies, and first evolved by friction, and which may manifest itself, under certain conditions, in brilliant flashes of light, or, when in contact with animals, in nervous shocks more or less violent. It is of two kinds, negative and positive, and as such exhibits itself in the polarity of the magnet, when it is called [Magnetic] (q. v.), and is excited by chemical action, when it is called [Voltaic] (q. v.).
[Elegy], a song expressive of sustained earnest yearning, or mild sorrow after loss.