offices, prisons and a substantial bridge were built, good roads
made, and a large staff of sanitary inspectors appointed.
The streets are generally narrow and the houses built of
mud. There are numerous markets in which a considerable
trade is done in native products and articles of European
manufacture. Palm-oil, timber, rubber, yams and shea-butter
are the chief articles of trade. An official newspaper is
published in the Yoruba and English languages. Abeokuta is
the headquarters of the Yoruba branch of the Church Missionary
Societyi and British and American, missionaries have met
with some success in their civilizing work. In their schools
about 2000 children are educated. The completion in 1899
of a railway from Lagos helped not only to develop trade
but to strengthen generally the influence of the white man.
Abeokuta (a word meaning ``under the rocks,''), dating
from 1825, owes its origin to the incessant inroads of the
slavehunters from Dahomey and Ibadan, which compelled the
village populations scattered over the open country to take
refuge in this rocky stronghold against the common enemy.
Here they constituted themselves a free confederacy of many
distinct tribal groups, each preserving the traditional customs,
religious rites and even the very names of their original
villages. Yet this apparently incoherent aggregate held
its ground successfully against the powerful armies often
sent against the place both by the king of Dahomey from the
west, and by the people of Ibadan from the north-east.
The district of Egba, of which Abeokuta is the capital, has
an estimated area of 3000 sq. m. and a population of some
350,000. It is officially known as the Abeokuta province
of the Southern Nigeria protectorate. It contains luxuriant
forests of palmtrees, which constitute the chief wealth of the
people. Cotton is indigenous and is grown for export.
The Egbas are enthusiastic farmers and have largely adopted
European methods of cultivation. They are very tenacious
of their independence, but accepted without opposition the
establishment of a British protectorate, which, while putting
a stop to inter-tribal warfare, slave-raiding and human
sacrifices, and exercising control over the working of the
laws, left to the people executive and fiscal autonomy. The
administration is in the hands of a council of chiefs which
exercises legislative, executive and, to some extent, judicial
functions. The president of this council, or ruling chief
---chosen from among the members of the two recognized
reigning families--is called the alake, a word meaning
``Lord of Ake,'' Ake being the name of the principal quarter
of Abeokuta, after the ancient capital of the Egbas. The
alake exercises little authority apart from his councili
the form of government being largely democratic. Revenue
is chiefly derived from tolls or import duties. A visit
of the alake to England in 1904 evoked considerable public
interest. The chief was a man of great intelligence, eager
to study western civilization, and an ardent agriculturist.
See the publications of the Church Missionary Society
dealing mith the Voruba Mission; Col. A. B. Ellis's The
Yoruba-speaking Peoples (London, 1894); and an article on
Abeokuta by Sir Wm. Macgregor, sometime governor of Lagos, in
the African Society's Journal, No. xii. (London, July 1904).
ABERAVON, a contributory parliamentary and municipal borough
of Glamorganshire, Wales, on the right bank of the Avon, near
its mouth in Swansea Bay, 11 m. E.S.E. of Swansea and 170 m.
from London by rail. Pop. (1901) 7553. It has a station on the
Rhondda and Swansea Bay railway and is also on the main South
Wales line of the Great Western, whose station, however, is at
fort Talbot, half a mile distant, on the eastern side of the
Avon. The valley of the Avon, which is only some three miles
long, has been from about 1840 a place of much metallurgical
activity. There are tinplate and engineering works within
the borough. At Cwmavon, 1 1/2 m. to the north-east, are
large copper-smelting works established in 1838, acquired
two years later by the governor and Company of the Copper
Miners of England, but now worked by the Rio Tinto Copper
Company. There are also iron, steel and tinplate works
both at Cwmavon and at Port Talbot, which, when it consisted
only of docks, was appropriately known as Aberavon Port.
The town derives its name from the river Avon (corrupted from
Avan), which also gave its name to a medieval lordship. On
the Norman conquest at Glamorgan, Caradoc, the eldest son of
the defeated prince, Lestyn ab Gwrgan, continued to hold this
lordship, and for the defence of thc passage of the river
built here a castle whose foundations are still traceable in
a field near the churchyard. His descendants (who from the
13th century onwards styled themselves De Avan or D'Avene)
established, under line protection of the castle, a chartered
town, which in 1372 received a further charter from Edward
Le Despenser, into whose family the lordship had come on an
exchange of lands. In modern times these charters were not
acted upon, the town being deemed a borough by prescription,
but in 1861 it was incorporated under the Municipal
Corporations Act. Since 1832 it has belonged to the Swansea
parliamentary district of boroughs, uniting with Kenfig,
Loughor, Neath and Swansea to return one member; but in 1885
the older portion of Swansea was given a separate member.
ABERCARN, an urban district in the southern parliamentary
division of Monmouthshire, England, 10 m. N.W. of Newport
by the Great Western railway. Pop. (1901) 12,607. There are
collieries, ironworks and tinplate works in the district;
the town, which lies in the middle portion of the Ebbw
valley, being situated on the south-eastern flank of the
great mining region of Glamorganshire and Monmouthshire.
ABERCORN, JAMES HAMILTON, 1ST EARL OF (c. 1575-1618),
was the eldest son of Claud Hamilton, Lord Paisley (4th son of
James, 2nd earl of Arran, and duke of Chatelherault), and of
Margaret, daughter of George, 6th Lord Seton. He was made
sheriff of Linlithgow in 1600, received large grants of
lands in Scotland and Ireland, was created in 1603 baron of
Abercorn, and on the 10th of July 1606 was rewarded for his
services in the matter of the union by being made earl of
Abercorn, and Baron Hamilton, Mount Castle and Kilpatrick.
He married Marion, daughter of Thomas, 5th Lord Boyd, and left
five sons, of whom the eldest, baron of Strabane, succeeded
him as 2nd earl of Abercorn. He died on the 23rd of March
1618. The title of Abercorn, held by the head of the Hamilton
family, became a marquessate in 1790, and a dukedom in 1868,
the 2nd duke of Abercorn (b. 1838) being a prominent Unionist
politician and chairman of the British South Africa Company.
ABERCROMRIE, JOHN (1780-1844), Scottish physician, was the son
of the Rev. George Abercrombie of Aberdeen, where he was born
on the 10th of October 1780. He was educated at the university
of Edinburgh, and after graduating as M.D. in 1803 he settled
down to practise in that city, where he soon attained a leading
position. From 1816 he published various papers in the
Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, which formed the basis
of his Pathological and Practical Researches on Diseases
of the Brain and Spinal Cord, and of his Researches on the
Diseases of the Intestinal Canal, Liver and other Viscera
of the Abdomen, both published in 1828. He also found time
for philosophical speculations, and in 1830 he published his
Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers of Man and
the Investigation of Truth, which was followed in 1833 by a
sequel, The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings. Both works,
though showing little originality of thought, achieved wide
popularity. He died at Edinburgh on the 14th of November 1844.
ABERCROMBY, DAVID, a 17th-century Scottish physician who
was sufficiently noteworthy a generation after the probable
date of his death to have his Nova Medicinae Praxis
reprinted at Paris in 1740. During his lifetime his Tuta
ac efficax luis venereae saepe absque mercurio ac semper
absque salivatione mercuriali curando methodus (1684) was
translated into French, Dutch and German. Two other works
by him were De Pulsus Variatione (London, 1685), and Ars
explorandi medicas facultates plantarum ex solo sapore
(London, 1685--1688); His Opuscula were collected in 1687.
These professional writings gave him a place and memorial
in A. von Haller's Bibliotheca Medicinae Pract. (4 vols.
8vo, 1779, tom. iii. p. 619); but he claims notice rather by
his remarkable controversial books in theology and philosophy
than by his medical writings. Bred up at Douai as a Jesuit,
he abjured popery, and published Protestancy proved Safer
than Popery' (London, 1686). But the most noticeable of
his productions is A Discourse of Wit (London, 1685), which
contains some of the most characteristic and most definitely-put
metaphysical opinions of the Scottish philosophy of common
sense. It was followed by Academia Scientiarum (1687),
and by A Moral Treatise of the Power. of Interest (1690),
dedicated to Robert Boyle. A Short Account of Scots Divines,
by him, was printed at Edinburgh in 1833, edited by James
Maidment. The exact date of his death is unknown, but
according to Haller he was alive early in the 18th century.
ABERCROMBY, PATRICK (1656-c.1716), Scottish physician
and antiquarian, was the third son of Alexander Abercromby
of Fetterneir in Aberdeenshire, and brother of Francis
Abercromby, who was created Lord Glasford by James II. He
was born at Forfar in 1656 apparently of a Roman Catholic
family. Intending to become a doctor of medicine he entered
the university of St Andrews, where he took his degree of M.D.
in 1685, but apparently he spent most of his youthful years
abroad. It has been stated that he attended the university of
Paris. The Discourse of Wit (1685), sometimes assigned to
him, belongs to Dr David Abercromby (q.v.). On his return to
Scotland, he is found practising as a physician in Edinburgh,
where, besides his professional duties, he gave himself with
characteristic zeal to the study of antiquities. He was
appointed physician to James II. in 1685, but the revolution
deprived him of the post. Living during the agitations for
the union of England and Scotland, he took part in the war
of pamphlets inaugurated and sustained by prominent men on
both sides of the Border, and he crossed swords with no less
redoubtable a foe than Daniel Defoe in his Advantages of the
Act of Security compared with those of the intended Union
(Edinburgh, 1707), and A Vindication of the Same against Mr
De Foe (ibid.). A minor literary work of Abercromby's was
a translation of Jean de Beaugue's Histoire de la guerre
d'Ecosse (1556) which appeared in 1707. But the work with
which his name is permanently associated is his Martial
Atchievements of the Scots Nation, issued in two large folios,
vol. i. 1711, vol. ii. 1716. In the title-page and preface
to vol. i. he disclaims the ambition of being an historian,
but in vol. ii., in title-page and preface alike, he is no
longer a simple biographer, but an historian. Even though,
read in the light of later researches, much of the first volume
must necessarily be relegated to the region of the mythical,
none the less was the historian a laborious and accomplished
reader and investigator of all available authorities, as well
manuscript as printed; while the roll of names of those who
aided him includes every man of note in Scotland at the time,
