ISMID, or ISNIKMID (anc. Nicomedia), the chief town of the Khoja Ili sanjak of Constantinople, in Asia Minor, situated on rising ground near the head of the gulf of Ismid. The sanjak has an area of 4650 sq. m. and a population of 225,000 (Moslems 131,000). It is an agricultural district, producing cocoons and tobacco, and there are large forests of oak, beech and fir. Near Yalova there are hot mineral springs, much frequented in summer. The town is connected by the lines of the Anatolian railway company with Haidar Pasha, the western terminus, and with Angora, Konia and Smyrna. It contains a fine 16th-century mosque, built by the celebrated architect Sinan. Pop. 20,000 (Moslems 9500, Christians 8000, Jews, 2500). As the seat of a mutessarif, a Greek metropolitan and an Armenian archbishop, Ismid retains somewhat of its ancient dignity, but the material condition of the town is little in keeping with its rank. The head of the gulf of Ismid is gradually silting up. The dockyard was closed in 1879, and the port of Ismid is now at Darinje, 3¾ m. distant, where the Anatolian Railway Company have established their workshops and have built docks and a quay.
ISNARD, MAXIMIN (1758-1825), French revolutionist, was a dealer in perfumery at Draguignan when he was elected deputy for the department of the Var to the Legislative Assembly, where he joined the Girondists. Attacking the court, and the “Austrian committee” in the Tuileries, he demanded the disbandment of the king’s bodyguard, and reproached Louis XVI. for infidelity to the constitution. But on the 20th of June 1792, when the crowd invaded the palace, he was one of the deputies who went to place themselves beside the king to protect him. After the 10th of August 1792 he was sent to the army of the North to justify the insurrection. Re-elected to the Convention, he voted the death of Louis XVI. and was a member of the Committee of General Defence when it was organized on the 4th of January 1793. The committee, consisting of 25 members, proved unwieldy, and on the 4th of April Isnard presented, on behalf of the Girondist majority, the report recommending a smaller committee of nine, which two days later was established as the Committee of Public Safety. On the 25th of May, Isnard was presiding at the Convention when a deputation of the commune of Paris came to demand that J. R. Hébert should be set at liberty, and he made the famous reply: “If by these insurrections, continually renewed, it should happen that the principle of national representation should suffer, I declare to you in the name of France that soon people will search the banks of the Seine to see if Paris has ever existed.” On the 2nd of June 1793 he offered his resignation as representative of the people, but was not comprised in the decree by which the Convention determined upon the arrest of twenty-nine Girondists. On the 3rd of October, however, his arrest was decreed along with that of several other Girondist deputies who had left the Convention and were fomenting civil war in the departments. He escaped, and on the 8th of March 1795 was recalled to the Convention, where he supported all the measures of reaction. He was elected deputy for the Var to the Council of Five Hundred, where he played a very insignificant rôle. In 1797 he retired to Draguignan. In 1800 he published a pamphlet De l’immortalité de l’âme, in which he praised Catholicism; in 1804 Réflexions relatives au senatus-consulte du 28 floréal an XII., which is an enthusiastic apology for the Empire. Upon the restoration he professed such royalist sentiments that he was not disturbed, in spite of the law of 1816 proscribing regicide ex-members of the Convention.
See F. A. Aulard, Les Orateurs de la Législative et de la Convention (Paris, 2nd ed., 1906).
ISOBAR (from Gr. ἴσος, equal, and βάρος, weight), a line upon a meteorological map or pressure chart connecting points where the atmospheric pressure is the same at sea-level, or upon the earth’s surface. A general pressure map will indicate, by these lines, the average pressure for any month or season over large areas. The daily weather charts for more confined regions indicate the presence of a cyclonic or anticyclonic system by means of lines, which connect all places having the same barometric pressure at the same time. It is to be noted that isobaric lines are the intersections of inclined isobaric surfaces with the surface of the earth.
ISOCLINIC LINES (Gr. ἴσος, equal, and κλίνειν, to bend), lines connecting those parts of the earth’s surface where the magnetic inclination is the same in amount. (See [Magnetism, Terrestrial].)
ISOCRATES (436-338 B.C.), Attic orator, was the son of Theodorus, an Athenian citizen of the deme of Erchia—the same in which, about 431 B.C., Xenophon was born—who was sufficiently wealthy to have served the state as choregus. The fact that he possessed slaves skilled in the trade of flute-making perhaps lends point to a passage in which his son is mentioned by the comic poet Strattis.[1] Several popular “sophists” are named as teachers of the young Isocrates. Like other sons of prosperous parents, he may have been trained in such grammatical subtleties as were taught by Protagoras or Prodicus, and initiated by Theramenes into the florid rhetoric of Gorgias, with whom at a later time (about 390 B.C.) he was in personal intercourse. He tells us that his father had been careful to provide for him the best education which Athens could afford. A fact of greater interest is disclosed by Plato’s Phaedrus (278 E). “Isocrates is still young, Phaedrus,” says the Socrates of that dialogue, “but I do not mind telling you what I prophesy of him.... It would not surprise me if, as years go on, he should make all his predecessors seem like children in the kind of oratory to which he is now addressing himself, or if—supposing this should not content him—some divine impulse should lead him to greater things. My dear Phaedrus, a certain philosophy is inborn in him.” This conversation is dramatically supposed to take place about 410 B.C. It is unnecessary to discuss here the date at which the Phaedrus was actually composed. From the passage just cited it is at least clear that there had been a time—while Isocrates could still be called “young”—at which Plato had formed a high estimate of his powers.