give tertiary alcohols, zinc propyl only gives secondary
alcohols. During recent years (1900 onwards) many brilliant
syntheses have been effected by the aid of magnesium-alkyl-haloids.
Properties.
The alcohols are neutral in reaction, and the lower members
possess the property of entering into combination with salts, in
which the alcohol plays the role of water of crystallization.
Sodium or potassium dissolves in them with the formation of
alcoholates, the hydrogen of the hydroxyl group being replaced by
the metal. With strong acids water is split off and esters are
formed. The haloid esters of the paraffin alcohols formed by
heating the alcohols with the halogen acids are the monohaloid
derivatives of the paraffins, and are more conveniently
prepared by the action of the phosphorous haloid on the
alcohol. Energetic dehydration gives the olefine hydrocarbons,
but under certain conditions ethers (see ETHER) are obtained.
The physical properties of the alcohols exhibit a gradation
with the increase of molecular weight. The lower members
are colourless mobile liquids, readily soluble in water and
exhibiting a characteristic odour and taste. The solubility
decreases as the carbon content rises. The normal alcohols
containing 1 to 16 carbon atoms are liquids at the ordinary
temperatures; the higher members are crystalline, odourless
and tasteless solids, closely resembling the fats in
appearance. The boiling points of the normal alcohols
increase regularly about 10 deg. for each CH2 increment;
this is characteristic of all homologous series of organic
compounds. Of the primary, secondary and tertiary alcohols
having the same empirical formula, the primary have the
highest, and the tertiary the lowest boiling point; this
is in accordance with the fairly general rule that a gain
in symmetry is attended by a fall in the boiling point.
The following monatomic alcohols receive special treatment
under their own headings:--ALCOHOL (ETHYL), ALLYL
ALCOHOL, AMYL, ALCOHOLS, BEN zsqrt. L ALCOHOL, BUTYL
ALcohols, METHY L ALcohol, and PROPYL ALCOHOLS.
ALCOTT, AMOS BRONSON (1799-1888), American educationalist
and writer, born on Spindle Hill, in the town of Wolcott,
New Haven county, Connecticut, on the 29th of November
1799. His father, Joseph Chatfield Alcox, was a farmer
and mechanic whose ancestors, then bearing the name of
Alcocke, had setlled in eastern Massachusetts in colonial
days. The son adopted the spelling ``Alcott'' in his early
youth. Self-educated and early thrown upon his own resources,
he began in 1814 to earn his living by working in a clock
factory in Plymouth, Conn., and for many years after 1815
he peddled books and merchardise, chiefly in the southern
states. He began teaching in Bristol, Conn., in 1823, and
subsequently conducted schools in Cheshire, Conn., in 1825-1827,
again in Bristol in 1827-1828, in Boston in 1828-1830, in
Germantown, now part of Philadelphia, in 1831-1833, and
in Philadelphia in 1833. In 1830 he had mariied Abby May,
the sister of Samuel J. May (1797-1871), the reformer and
abolitionist. In 1834 he opened in Boston a school which
became famous because of his original methods; his plan being
to develop self-instruction on the basis of self-analysis, with
an ever-present desire on his own part to stimulate the child's
personality. The feature of his school which attracted most
attention, perhaps, was his scheme for the teacher's receiving
punishment, in certain circumstances, at the hands of an offending
pupil, whereby the sense of shame might be quickened in the
mind of the errant child. The school was denounced in the
press, was not pecuniarily successful, and in 1839 was given
up, although Alcott had won the affection of his pupils, and
his educational experiments had challenged the attention of
students of pedagogy. The school is perhaps best described
in Miss E. P. Peabody's A Record of Mr Alcott's School
(1835). In 1840 Alcott removed to Concord, Massachusetts.
After a visit to England, in 1842, he started with two English
associates, Charles Lane and Henry C. Wright, at ``Fruitlands,''
in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, a communistic experiment
at farm-living and nature-meditation as tending to develop the
best powers of body and soul. This speedily came to naught,
and Alcott returned (1844) to his home near that of Emerson in
Concord, removing to Boston four years later, and again living
in Concord after 1857. He spoke, as opportunity offered,
before the ``lyceums'' then common in various parts of the
United States, or addressed groups of hearers as they invited
him. These ``conversations,'' as he called them, were more
or less informal talks on a great range of topics, spiritual,
aesthetic and practical, in which he emphasized the ideas of
the school of American Transcendentalists led by Emerson, who
was always his supporter and discreet admirer. He dwelt upon
the illumination of the mind and soul by direct communion with
the Creative Spirit; upon the spiritual and poetic monitions
of external nature; and upon the benefit to man of a serene
mood and a simple way of life. As regards the trend and
results of Alcott's philosophic teaching, it must be said
that, like Emerson, he was sometimes inconsistent, hazy or
abrupt. But though he formulated no system of philosophy, and
seemed to show the influence now of Plato, now of Kant, or of
German thought as filtered through the brain of Coleridge, he
was, like his American master, associate and friend, steadily
optimistic, idealistic, individualistic. The teachings of
William Ellery Channing a little before, as to the sacred
inviolability of the human conscience--anticipating the later
conclusions of Martineau--really lay at the basis of the work
of most of the Concord transcendentalists and contributors
to The Dial, of whom Alcott was one. In his last years,
living in a serene and beautiful old age in his Concord
home, the Orchard House,where every comfort was provided by
his daughter Louisa (q.v.), Alcott was gratified at being
able to become the nominal, and at times the actual, head
of a Concord ``Summer School of Philosophy and Literature,''
which had its first session in 1879, and in which --in
a rudely fashioned building next his house--thoughtful
listeners were addressed during a part of several successive
summer seasons on many themes in philosophy, religion and
letters. Of Alcott's published works the most important is
Tablets (1868); next in order of merit is Concord Days
(1872). His Sonnets and Canzonets (1882) are chiefly
interesting as an old man's experiments in verse. He left
a large collection of personal jottings and memorabilia,
most of which remain unpublished. He died in Boston on the
4th of March 1888. Alcott was a Garrisonian abolitionist.
See A. Bronson Alcott, His Life and Philosophy (2 vols., Boston,
1893), by F. B. Sanborn and William T. Harris; New Connecticut:
an Autobiographical Poem (Boston, 1887), edited by F. B. Sanborn;
and Lowell's criticism in his Fable for Critics. (C. F. R.)
ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY (1832-1888), American author, was the
daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, and though of New England
parentage and residence, was born in Germantown, now part of
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 29th of November 1832.
She began work at an early age as an occasional teacher and
as a writer--her first book was Flower Fables (1854), tales
originally written for Ellen, daughter of R. W. Emerson. In
1860 she began writing for the Atlantic Monthly, and she was
nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, D.C., for six weeks in
1862-1863. Her home letters, revised and published in the
Commonwealth and collected as Hospital Sketches (1863,
republished with additions in 1869), displayed some power of
observation and record; and Moods, a novel (1864), despite
its uncertainty of method and of touch, gave considerable
promise. She soon turned, however, to the rapid production
of stories for girls, and, with the exception of the cheery
tale entitled Work (1873), and the anonymous novelette
A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), which attracted little
notice, she did not return to the more ambitious fields of the
novelist. Her success dated from the appearance of the first
series of Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868),
in which, with unfailing humour, freshness and lifelikeness,
she put into story form many of the sayings and doings of
herself and sisters. Little Men (1871) similarly treated
the character and ways of her nephews in the Orchard House in
Concord, Massachusetts, in which Miss Alcott's industry had
now established her parents and other members of the Alcott
family; but most of her later volumes, An Old-Fashioned
Girl (1870), Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag (6 vols., 1871-1879),
Rose in Bloom (1876), &c., followed in the line of Little
Women, of which the author's large and loyal public never
wearied. Her natural love of labour, her wide-reaching
generosity, her quick perception and her fondness for sharing
with her many readers that cheery humour which radiated from
her personality and her books, led her to produce stories of
a diminishing value, and at last she succumbed to overwork,
dying in Boston on the 6th of March 1888, two days after
the death of her father in the same city. Miss Alcott's
early education had partly been given by the naturalist
Thoreau, but had chiefly been in the hands of her father;
and in her girlhood and early womanhood she had fully shared
the trials and poverty incident to the life of a peripatetic
idealist. In a newspaper sketch entitled ``Transcendental
Wild Oats,'' afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver
Pitchers (1876), she narrated, with a delicate humour, which
showed what her literary powers might have been if freed from
drudgery, the experiences of her family during an experiment
towards communistic ``plain living and high thinking'' at
``Fruitlands,'' in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1843.
The story of her career has been fully and frankly
told in Mrs Ednah D. Cheney's Louisa May Alcott: Her
Life, Letters and Journals (Boston, 1889). (C. F. R.)
ALCOVE (through the Span. alcova, from the Arab. al-, the,
and quobbah, a vault), an architectural term for a recess in
a room usually screened off by pillars, balustrade or drapery.
ALCOY, a town of south-eastern Spain, in the province of
Alicante, on the small river Serpis, and at the terminus of a
branch railway connected with the Barcelona-Valencia-Alicante
line. Pop. (1900) 32,053. Alcoy is built on high ground
at the entrance to a gorge in the Moncabrer range (4547
ft.). It is a thriving industrial town, devoid of any great
antiquarian or architectural interest, though founded by the
Moors. It owes its prosperity to its manufacture of linen,
woolen goods and paper, especially cigarette paper. Many of
the factories derive their motive power from the falls of a
mountain torrent, known as the Salto de las Aguas. Labour
disturbances are frequent, for, like Barcelona, Alcoy has
become one of the centres of socialistic and revolutionary
agitation, while preserving many old-fashioned customs and
traditions, such as the curious festival held annually in
April in honour of St George, the patron saint of the town.
COCENTAINA (pop. 1900, 7093) is a picturesque and ancient
town, 4 m. N.E. by rail. It is surrounded by Roman walls,
which were partly rebuilt by the Moors, and it contains an
interesting fortified palace, owned by the dukes of Medinaceli.
For an account of the festival of St George of Alcoy,
