4. Gnaeus Manlius Vulso, praetor 195, consul 189. He was sent to Asia to conclude peace with Antiochus III., king of Syria. He marched into Pamphylia, defeated the Celts of Galatia on Mt Olympus and drove them back across the Halys. In the winter, assisted by ten delegates sent from Rome, he settled the terms of peace with Antiochus, and in 187 received the honour of a triumph.
Polybius xxii. 16-25; Livy xxxviii. 12-28, 37-50; xxxix. 6.
MANN, HORACE (1796-1859), American educationist, was born in Franklin, Massachusetts, on the 4th of May 1796. His childhood and youth were passed in poverty, and his health was early impaired by hard manual labour. His only means for gratifying his eager desire for books was the small library founded in his native town by Benjamin Franklin and consisting principally of histories and treatises on theology. At the age of twenty he was fitted, in six months, for college, and in 1819, graduated with highest honours, from the Brown University at Providence, Rhode Island, having devoted himself so unremittingly to his studies as to weaken further his naturally feeble constitution. He then studied law for a short time at Wrentham, Massachusetts; was tutor in Latin and Greek (1820-1822) and librarian (1821-1823) at Brown University; studied during 1821-1823 in the famous law school conducted by Judge James Gould at Litchfield, Connecticut; and in 1823 was admitted to the Norfolk (Mass.) bar. For fourteen years, first at Dedham, Massachusetts, and after 1833 at Boston, he devoted himself, with great success, to his profession. Meanwhile he served, with conspicuous ability, in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1827 to 1833 and in the Massachusetts Senate from 1833 to 1837, for the last two years as president. It was not until he became secretary (1837) of the newly created board of education of Massachusetts, that he began the work which was soon to place him in the foremost rank of American educationists. He held this position till 1848, and worked with a remarkable intensity—holding teachers’ conventions, delivering numerous lectures and addresses, carrying on an extensive correspondence, introducing numerous reforms, planning and inaugurating the Massachusetts normal school system, founding and editing The Common School Journal (1838), and preparing a series of Annual Reports, which had a wide circulation and are still considered as being “among the best expositions, if, indeed, they are not the very best ones, of the practical benefits of a common school education both to the individual and to the state” (Hinsdale). The practical result of his work was the virtual revolutionizing of the common school system of Massachusetts, and indirectly of the common school systems of other states. In carrying out his work he met with bitter opposition, being attacked particularly by certain school-masters of Boston who strongly disapproved of his pedagogical theories and innovations, and by various religious sectaries, who contended against the exclusion of all sectarian instruction from the schools. He answered these attacks in kind, sometimes perhaps with unnecessary vehemence and rancour, but he never faltered in his work, and, an optimist by nature, a disciple of his friend George Combe (q.v.), and a believer in the indefinite improvability of mankind, he was sustained throughout by his conviction that nothing could so much benefit the race, morally, intellectually and materially, as education. Resigning the secretaryship in 1848, he was elected to the national House of Representatives, as an anti-slavery Whig to succeed John Quincy Adams, and was re-elected in 1849, and, as an independent candidate, in 1850, serving until March 1853. In 1852 he was the candidate of the Free-soilers for the governorship of Massachusetts, but was defeated. In Congress he was one of the ablest opponents of slavery, contending particularly against the Compromise Measures of 1850, but he was never technically an Abolitionist and he disapproved of the Radicalism of Garrison and his followers. From 1853 until his death, on the second of August 1859, he was president of the newly established Antioch College at Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he taught political economy, intellectual and moral philosophy, and natural theology. The college received insufficient financial support and suffered from the attacks of religious sectaries—he himself was charged with insincerity because, previously a Unitarian, he joined the Christian Connexion, by which the college was founded—but he earned the love of his students, and by his many addresses exerted a beneficial influence upon education in the Middle West.
A collected edition of Mann’s writings, together with a memoir (1 vol.) by his second wife, Mary Peabody Mann, a sister of Miss E. P. Peabody, was published (in 5 vols. at Boston in 1867-1891) as the Life and Works of Horace Mann. Of subsequent biographies the best is probably Burke A. Hinsdale’s Horace Mann and the Common School Revival in the United Stales (New York, 1898), in “The Great Educators” series. Among other biographies O. H. Lang’s Horace Mann, his Life and Work (New York, 1893), Albert E. Winship’s Horace Mann, the Educator (Boston, 1896), and George A. Hubbell’s Life of Horace Mann, Educator, Patriot and Reformer (Philadelphia, 1910), may be mentioned. In vol. I. of the Report for 1895-1896 of the United States commissioner of education there is a detailed “Bibliography of Horace Mann,” containing more than 700 titles.
MANNA, a concrete saccharine exudation obtained by making incisions on the trunk of the flowering or manna ash tree, Fraxinus Ornus. The manna ash is a small tree found in Italy, and extending to Switzerland, South Tirol, Hungary, Greece, Turkey and Asia Minor. It also grows in the islands of Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia. It blossoms early in summer, producing numerous clusters of whitish flowers. At the present day the manna of commerce is collected exclusively in Sicily from cultivated trees, chiefly in the districts around Capaci, Carini, Cinisi and Favarota, small towns 20 to 25 m. W. of Palermo, and in the townships of Geraci, Castelbuono, and other places in the district of Cefalù, 50 to 70 m. E. of Palermo. In the frassinetti or plantations the trees are placed about 7 ft. apart, and after they are eight years old, and the trunk at least 3 in. in diameter, the collection of manna is begun. This operation is performed in July or August during the dry weather, by making transverse incisions 1½ to 2 in. long, and about 1 in. apart, through the bark, one cut being made each day, the first at the bottom of the tree, another directly above the first, and so on. In succeeding years the process is repeated on the untouched sides of the trunk, until the tree has been cut all round and exhausted. It is then cut down, and a young plant arising from the same root takes its place. The finest or flaky manna appears to have been allowed to harden on the stem. A very superior kind, obtained by allowing the juice to encrust pieces of wood or straws inserted in the cuts, is called manna a cannolo. The fragments adhering to the stem, after the finest flakes have been removed are scraped off, and form the small or Tolfa manna of commerce. That which flows from the lower incisions is often collected on tiles or on a concave piece of the prickly pear (Opunlia), but is less crystalline and more glutinous, and is less esteemed.
Manna of good quality dissolves at ordinary temperatures in about 6 parts of water, forming a clear liquid. Its chief constituent is mannite or manna sugar, a hexatomic alcohol, C6H8(OH)6, which likewise occurs, in much smaller quantity, in certain species of the brown seaweed, Fucus, and in plants of several widely separated natural orders. Mannite is obtained by extracting manna with alcohol and crystallizing the solution. The best manna contains 70 to 80%. It crystallizes in shining rhombic prisms from its aqueous solution and as delicate needles from alcohol. Manna possesses mildly laxative properties, and on account of its sweet taste is employed as a mild aperient for children. It is less used in England now than formerly, but is still largely consumed in South America. In Italy mannite is prepared for sale in the shape of small cones resembling loaf sugar in shape, and is frequently prescribed in medicine instead of manna.
The manna of the present day appears to have been unknown before the 15th century, although a mountain in Sicily with the Arabic name Gibelman, i.e. “manna mountain,” appears to point to its collection there during the period that the island was held by the Saracens, 827-1070. In the 16th century it was collected in Calabria, and until recently was produced in the Tuscan Maremma, but none is now brought into commerce from Italy, although the name of Tolfa, a town near Civita Vecchia, is still applied to an inferior variety of the drug.
Various other kinds of manna are known, but none of these has been found to contain mannite. Alhagi manna (Persian and Arabic tar-angubīn, also known as terendschabin) is the produce of Alhagi maurorum, a small, spiny, leguminous plant, growing in Arabia, Asia Minor, Persia, Afghanistan, Baluchistan and northern India. This manna occurs in the form of small, roundish, hard, dry tears, varying from the size of a mustard seed to that of a coriander, of a light-brown colour, sweet taste, and senna-like odour. The spines and pods of the plant are often mixed with it. It is collected near Kandahar and Herat, and imported into India from Cabul and Kandahar. Tamarisk manna (Persian gaz-angubīn, tamarisk honey) exudes in June and July from the slender branches of Tamarix gallica, var. mannifera, in the form of honey-like drops, which, in the cold temperature of the early morning, are found in the solid state. This secretion is caused by the puncture of an insect, Coccus manniparus. In the valleys of the peninsula of Sinai, especially in the Wādy el-Sheikh, this manna (Arabic man) is collected by the Arabs and sold to the monks of St Catherine, who supply it to the pilgrims visiting the convent. It is found also in Persia and the Punjab, but does not appear to be collected in any quantity. This kind of manna seems to be alluded to by Herodotus (vii. 31). Under the same name of gaz-angubīn there are sold commonly in the Persian bazaars round cakes, of which a chief ingredient is a manna obtained to the south-west of Ispahan, in the month of August, by shaking the branches or scraping the stems of Astragalus florulentus and A. adscendens.[1] Shir Khist, a manna known to writers on materia medica in the 16th century, is imported into India from Afghanistan and Turkestan to a limited extent; it is the produce of Cotoneaster nummularia (Rosaceae), and to a less extent of Atraphaxis spinosa (Polygonaceae); it is brought chiefly from Herat.