See Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, i. No. 195; Polybius i. 22; Diod. Sic. xvii. 44; Frontinus, Strat. ii. 3; Florus ii. 2; Cicero, De senectute, 13; Silius Italicus vi. 667; and [Punic Wars].
DUISBURG, a town of Germany in the kingdom of Prussia, 15 m. by rail N. from Düsseldorf, between the Rhine and the Ruhr, with which rivers it communicates by a canal. It is an important railway centre. Pop. (1885) 47,519; (1900) 92,729; (1905), including many outlying townships then recently incorporated, 191,551. It has six Roman Catholic and six Protestant churches, among the latter the fine Gothic Salvatorkirche, of the 15th century. It is well furnished with schools, which include a school of machinery. Of modern erections, the concert hall, the law courts and a memorial fountain to the cartographer Gerhard Kremer (Mercator) are worthy of mention. There are important foundries, rolling mills for copper, steel and brass plates, chemical works, saw-milling, shipbuilding, tobacco, cotton, sugar, soap and other manufactures.
Duisburg was known to the Romans as Castrum Deutonis, and mentioned under the Frankish kings as Dispargum. In the 12th century it attained the rank of an imperial free town, but on being mortgaged in 1290 to Cleves it lost its privileges. At the beginning of the 17th century it was transferred to Brandenburg, and during the Thirty Years’ War was alternately occupied by the Spaniards and the Dutch. In 1655 the elector Frederick William of Brandenburg founded here a Protestant university, which flourished until 1802.
DUK-DUK, a secret society of New Britain or New Pomerania, Bismarck Archipelago, in the South Pacific. The society has religious and political as well as social objects. It represents a rough sort of law and order through its presiding spirit Duk-Duk, a mysterious figure dressed in leaves to its waist, with a helmet like a gigantic candle-extinguisher made of network. Upon this figure women and children are forbidden to look. Women, who are entitled in New Britain to their own earnings and work harder than men, are the special victims of Duk-Duk, who levies blackmail upon them if they are about during its visits. These are generally timed to coincide with the hours at which the women are out in the fields and therefore cannot help seeing the figure. Justice is executed, fines extorted, taboos, feasts, taxes and all tribal matters are arranged by the Duk-Duk members, who wear hideous masks or chalk their faces. In carrying out punishments they are allowed to burn houses and even kill people. Only males can belong to Duk-Duk, the entrance fees of which vary from 50 to 100 fathoms of dewarra (small cowrie shells strung on strips of cane). The society has its secret signs and ritual, and festivals at which the presence of a stranger would mean his death. Duk-Duk only appears with the full moon. The society is now much discredited and is fast dying out.
See “Duk-Duk and other Customs or Forms of Expression of the Melanesian’s Intellectual Life,” by Graf von Pfeil (Journ. of Anthrop. Instit. vol. 27, p. 181).
DUKE (corresponding to Fr. duc, Ital. duca, Ger. Herzog), the title of one of the highest orders of the European nobility, and of some minor sovereign princes. The word “duke,” which is derived from the Lat. dux, a leader, or general, through the Fr. duc (O. Fr. dusc, ducs, dus), originally signified a leader, and more especially a military chief, and in this latter sense was the equivalent of the A.S. heretoga (here, an army, and teon, from togen, to draw; Ger. ziehen, zog; Goth, tiuhan; Lat. ducere) and the old Ger. herizog. In this general sense the word survived in English literature until the 17th century, but is now obsolete.
The origin of modern dukes is twofold. The dux first appears in the Roman empire under the emperor Hadrian, and by the time of the Gordians has already a recognized place in the official hierarchy. He was the general appointed to the command of a particular expedition and his functions were purely military. In the 4th century, after the separation of the civil and military administrations, there was a duke in command of the troops quartered in each of the frontier provinces of the empire, e.g. the dux Britanniarum. The number of dukes continually increased, and in the 6th and 7th centuries there were duces at Rome, Naples, Rimini, Venice and Perugia. Gradually, too, they became charged with civil as well as military functions, and even exercised considerable authority in ecclesiastical administration. Under the Byzantine emperors they were the representatives in all causes of the central power. The Roman title of duke was less dignified than that of count (comes, companion) which implied an honourable personal relation to the emperor (see [Count]). Both titles were borrowed by the Merovingian kings for the administrative machinery of the Frank empire, and under them the functions of the duke remained substantially unaltered. He was a great civil and military official, charged to watch, in the interests of the crown, over groups of several comitatus, or countships, especially in the border provinces. The sphere of the dukes was never rigidly fixed, and their commission was sometimes permanent, sometimes temporary. Under the Carolingians the functions of the dukes remained substantially the same; but with the decay of the royal power in the 10th century, both dukes and counts gained in local authority; the number of dukes became for the time fixed, and finally title and office were made hereditary, the relation to the crown being reduced to that of more or less shadowy vassalage. (See [Feudalism].)