MALALAS (or Malelas) (Syriac for “orator”), JOHN (c. 491-578), Byzantine chronicler, was born at Antioch. He wrote a Χρονογραφία in 18 books, the beginning and the end of which are lost. In its present state it begins with the mythical history of Egypt and ends with the expedition to Africa under Marcianus, the nephew of Justinian. Except for the history of Justinian and his immediate predecessors, it possesses little historical value; it is written without any idea of proportion and contains astonishing blunders. The writer is a supporter of Church and State, an upholder of monarchical principles. The work is rather a chronicle written round Antioch, which he regarded as the centre of the world, and (in the later books) round Constantinople. It is, however, important as the first specimen of a chronicle written not for the learned but for the instruction of the monks and the common people, in the language of the vulgar, with an admixture of Latin and Oriental words. It obtained great popularity, and was conscientiously exploited by various writers until the 11th century, being translated even into the Slavonic languages. It is preserved in an abridged form in a single MS. now at Oxford.
For the authorities consulted by Malalas, the influence of his work on Slavonic and Oriental literature, the state of the text, the original form and extent of the work, the date of its composition, the relation of the concluding part to the whole, and the literature of the subject, see C. Krumbacher’s Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (1897). See also the editio princeps, by E. Chilmead (Oxford, 1691), containing an essay by Humphrey Hody and Bentley’s well-known letter to Mill; other editions in the Bonn Corpus scriptorum hist. byz., by L. Dindorf (1831), and in J. P. Migne Patrologia graeca, xcvii.
MALAN, SOLOMON CAESAR (1812-1894), British divine and orientalist, was by birth a Swiss descended from an exiled French family, and was born at Geneva on the 22nd of April 1812, where his father, Dr Henry Abraham Caesar Malan (1787-1864) enjoyed a great reputation as a Protestant divine. From his earliest youth he manifested a remarkable faculty for the study of languages, and when he came to Scotland as tutor in the marquis of Tweeddale’s family at the age of 18 he had already made progress in Sanskrit, Arabic and Hebrew. In 1833 he matriculated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford; and English being almost an unknown tongue to him, he petitioned the examiners to allow him to do his paper work of the examination in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Latin or Greek, rather than in English. But his request was not granted. After gaining the Boden and the Pusey and Ellerton scholarships, he graduated 2nd class in Lit. hum. in 1837. He then proceeded to India as classical lecturer at Bishop’s College, Calcutta, to which post he added the duties of secretary to the Bengal branch of the Royal Asiatic Society; and although compelled by illness to return in 1840, laid the foundation of a knowledge of Tibetan and Chinese. After serving various curacies, he was presented in 1845 to the living of Broadwindsor, Dorset, which he held until 1886. During this entire period he continued to augment his linguistic knowledge, which he carried so far as to be able to preach in that most difficult language, Georgian, on a visit which he paid to Nineveh in 1872. His translations from the Armenian, Georgian and Coptic were numerous. He applied his Chinese learning to the determination of important points connected with Chinese religion, and published a vast number of parallel passages illustrative of the Book of Proverbs. In 1880 the university of Edinburgh conferred upon him the honorary degree of D.D. No modern scholar, perhaps, has so nearly approached the linguistic omniscience of Mezzofanti; but, like Mezzofanti, Dr Malan was more of a linguist than a critic. He made himself conspicuous by the vehemence of his opposition to Westcott and Hort’s text of the New Testament, and to the transliteration of Oriental languages, on neither of which points did he in general obtain the suffrages of scholars. His extensive and valuable library, some special collections excepted, was presented by him in his lifetime to the Indian Institute at Oxford. He died at Bournemouth on the 25th of November 1894. His life has been written by his son.
MÄLAR, a lake of Sweden, extending 73 m. westward from Stockholm, which lies at its junction with the Saltsjö, an arm of the Baltic Sea. The height of the lake is normally only from 11 in. to 2 ft. above sea-level, and its outflow is sometimes reversed. The area is 449 sq. m. The bottom consists of a series of basins separate by ridges from which rise numerous islands. The deepest sounding is 210 ft. The outline is very irregular, the mean breadth being about 15 m., but an arm extends northward for 30 m. nearly to the city of Upsala with many ramifications. The area of the drainage basin is 8789 sq. m., of which 1124 are occupied by lakes. The navigable connexions with the lake are—(1) with lake Hjelmar to the south-west by the Arboga river and the Hjelmar canal; and by the Eskilstuna river and the Thorshälla canal; (2) with the Baltic southward through the Södertelge canal, the route followed by the Göta canal steamers; (3) with the Baltic by two channels at Stockholm. The more important towns, besides Stockholm, are Vesterås on the north, Södertelge and Eskilstuna near the south shore. The lake offers a field for recreation fully appreciated by the inhabitants of the capital, and many of those whose business lies at Stockholm have their residences on the shores of Mälar. On Drottningholm (Queen’s Island, named from Catherine, wife of John III.) is a palace with a fine park and formal gardens. John III. built a palace at the close of the 16th century, but the existing building, by Nicodemus Tessin and his son Nicodemus, dates from the second half of the 17th century. At Mariefred on the south shore there is the castle of Gripsholm (1537), built by Gustavus Vasa, a picturesque erection with four towers, richly adorned within, and containing a large collection of portraits. Strengnäs, on the same shore, became an episcopal see in 1291, when the fine cathedral, much altered since, was consecrated. In the episcopal palace, a building of the 15th century now used as a school, Gustavus Vasa was elected to the throne of Sweden in 1523. On the northward arm of the lake is the palace of Rosenberg, used as a school of gunnery, in a well-wooded park. On a branch of the same arm is Sigtuna, a village whose ruined churches are a memorial of its rank among the principal towns of Sweden after its foundation in the 11th century. Remains prove that on Björkö, an island in the eastern part of the lake, there was a large settlement of earlier importance than Sigtuna. Here a cross commemorates the preaching of Christianity by St Ansgar in 829. Finally, on the northern arm about 10 m. south of Upsala, there is the château of Skokloster, occupying the site of a monastery, and presented by Gustavus Adolphus to Marshal Herman Wrangel, whose son Charles Gustavus Wrangel stored it with a remarkable collection of trophies from Germany, taken during the Thirty Years’ War; including a library, an armoury, and a great accumulation of curios.
MALARIA, an Italian colloquial word (from mala, bad, and aria, air), introduced into English medical literature by Macculloch (1827) as a substitute for the more restricted terms “marsh miasm” or “paludal poison.” It is generally applied to the definite unhealthy condition of body known by a variety of names, such as ague, intermittent (and remittent) fever, marsh fever, jungle fever, hill fever, “fever of the country” and “fever and ague.” A single paroxysm of simple ague may come upon the patient in the midst of good health or it may be preceded by some malaise. The ague-fit begins with chills proceeding as if from the lower part of the back, and gradually extending until the coldness overtakes the whole body. Tremors of the muscles more or less violent accompany the cold sensations, beginning with the muscles of the lower jaw (chattering of the teeth), and extending to the extremities and trunk. The expression has meanwhile changed: the face is pale or livid; there are dark rings under the eyes; the features are pinched and sharp, and the whole skin shrunken; the fingers are dead white, the nails blue.
All those symptoms are referable to spasmodic constriction of the small surface arteries, the pulse at the wrist being itself small, hard and quick. In the interior organs there are indications of a compensating accumulation of blood, such as swelling of the spleen, engorgement (very rarely rupture) of the heart, with a feeling of oppression in the chest, and a copious flow of clear and watery urine from the congested kidneys. The body temperature will have risen suddenly from the normal to 103° or higher. This first or cold stage of the paroxysm varies much in length; in temperate climates it lasts from one to two hours, while in tropical and subtropical countries it may be shortened. It is followed by the stage of dry heat, which will be prolonged in proportion as the previous stage is curtailed. The feeling of heat is at first an internal one, but it spreads outwards to the surface and to the extremities; the skin becomes warm and red, but remains dry; the pulse becomes softer and more full, but still quick; and the throbbings occur in exposed arteries, such as the temporal. The spleen continues to enlarge; the urine is now scanty and high-coloured; the body temperature is high, but the highest temperatures occur during the chill; there is considerable thirst; and there is the usual intellectual unfitness, and it may be confusion, of the feverish state. This period of dry heat, having lasted three or four hours or longer, comes to an end in perspiration, at first a mere moistness of the skin, passing into sweating that may be profuse and even drenching. Sleep may overtake the patient in the midst of the sweating stage, and he awakes, not without some feeling of what he has passed through, but on the whole well, with the temperature fallen almost or altogether to the normal, or it may be even below the normal; the pulse moderate and full; the spleen again of its ordinary size; the urine that is passed after the paroxysm deposits a thick brick-red sediment of urates. The three stages together will probably have lasted six to twelve hours. The paroxysm is followed by a definite interval in which there is not only no fever, but even a fair degree of bodily comfort and fitness; this is the intermission of the fever. Another paroxysm begins at or near the same hour next day (quotidian ague), which results from a double tertian infection, or the interval may be forty-eight hours (tertian ague), or seventy-two hours (quartan ague). It is the general rule, with frequent exceptions, that the quotidian paroxysm comes on in the morning, the tertian about noon, and the quartan in the afternoon. Another rule is that the quartan has the longest cold stage, while its paroxysm is shortest as a whole; the quotidian has the shortest cold stage and a long hot stage, while its paroxysm is longest as a whole. The point common to the various forms of ague is that the paroxysm ceases about midnight or early morning. Quotidian intermittent is on the whole more common than tertian in hot countries; elsewhere the tertian is the usual type, and quartan is only occasional.
If the first paroxysm should not cease within the twenty-four hours, the fever is not reckoned as an intermittent, but as a remittent.