ARGAO, a town on the east coast of Cebu, Philippine Islands, 36 m. S.S.W. of the town of Cebu. Pop. (1903) 35,448. Large quantities of a superior quality of cacao are produced in the vicinity, and rice and Indian corn are other important products. A limited amount of cotton is raised and woven into cloth. The language is Cebu-Visayan. Argao was founded in 1608.
ARGAUM, a village of British India in the Akola district of the Central Provinces, 32 m. north of Akola. The village is memorable for an action which took place on the 28th of November 1803 between the British army, commanded by Major-General Wellesley (afterwards duke of Wellington), and the Mahrattas under Sindhia and the raja of Berar, in which the latter were defeated with great loss. A medal struck in England in 1851 commemorates the victory.
ARGEI, the name given by the ancient Romans to a number of rush puppets (24 or 27 according to the reading of Varro, de Ling. lat. vii. 44, or 30 according to Dionysius i. 38) resembling men tied hand and foot, which were taken down to the ancient bridge over the Tiber (pans sublicius) on the 14th of May by the pontifices and magistrates, with the flaminica Dialis in mourning guise, and there thrown into the Tiber by the Vestal virgins. There were also in various parts of the four Servian regions of the city a number of sacella Argeorum (chapels), round which a procession seems to have gone on the 17th of March (Varro, L.L. v. 46-54; Jordan, Rom. Topogr. vol. ii. 603), and it has been conjectured that the puppets were kept in these chapels until the time came for them to be cast into the river. The Romans had no historical explanation of these curious rites, and neither the theories of their scholars nor the beliefs of the common people, who fancied that the puppets were substitutes for old men who used at one time to be sacrificed to the river, are worth serious consideration. Recently two explanations have been given: (1) that of W. Mannhardt, who by comparing numerous examples of similar customs among other European peoples arrived at the conclusion that the rite was of extreme antiquity and of dramatic rather than sacrificial character, and that its object was possibly to procure rain; (2) that of Wissowa, who refuses to date it farther back than the latter half of the 3rd century B.C., and sees in it the yearly representation of an original sacrifice of twenty-seven captive Greeks (taking Argei as a Latin form of Ἀργεῖοι) by drowning in the Tiber. This second theory is, however, not borne out by any Roman historical record.
See Wissowa’s arguments in the article “Argei” in his edition of Pauly’s Realencydopadie. For the other view see W. Mannhardt, Antike Wald und Feldkulte, 178 foll.; W.W. Fowler, Roman Festivals, pp. 111 foll.
(W. W. F.*)
ARGELANDER, FRIEDRICH WILHELM AUGUST (1799-1875), German astronomer, ’was born at Memel on the 22nd of March 1799. He studied at the university of Konigsberg, and was attracted to astronomy by F.W. Bessel, whose assistant he became (October 1, 1820). His treatise on the path of the great comet of 1811 appeared in 1822; he was, in 1823, entrusted with the direction of the observatory at Åbo; and he exchanged it for a similar charge at Helsingfors in 1832. His admirable investigation of the sun’s motion in space was published in 1837; and in the same year he was appointed professor of astronomy in the university of Bonn, where he died on the 17th of February 1875. He also published Observations Astronomicae Aboae Factae (3 vols., 1830-1832); DLX Stellarum Fixarum Positiones Mediae (1835); and the first seven volumes of Astronomische Beobachtungen auf der Sternwarte zu Benn (1846-1869), containing his observations of northern and southern star-zones, and his great Durchmusterung (vols, iii,-v., 1859-1862) of 324,198 stars, from the north pole to -2° Dec. The corresponding atlas was issued in 1863. His observations (begun in 1838) and discussions of variable stars were embodied in vol. vii. of the same series.