OELS, the chief town of a circle in Prussian Silesia, and the capital of a mediatized principality of its own name, lies in a sandy plain on the Oelsa, 18 miles to the northeast of Breslau. The prince’s chateau, dating from 1558, contains a good library and a collection of pictures. The Schlosskirche was originally built about 980. The other buildings are unimportant. The inhabitants, numbering 10,157 in 1880, are chiefly engaged in making shoes and growing vegetables for sale at Breslau. There is also a manufactory of agricultural implements, and a trade is carried on in grain and flax.
The town of Oels was founded about 940, and appears as the capital of an independent principality at the beginning of the 14th century. The principality, with an area of 750 square miles and about 150,000 inhabitants, passed through various hands and was finally inherited by the ducal family of Brunswick in 1792. The present proprietor is the reigning duke of Brunswick.
See W. Häusler, Geschichte des Fürstenthums Oels (Breslau, 1883)....
OeNANTHIC ACID and ETHER. Liebig and Pelouze, by distilling large quantities of wine, obtained from the very last fractions of the distillate an oil which in a very high degree exhibited the generic smell common to all wines,—the smell which a small remnant of any kind of wine left in an open bottle exhibits after the “bouquet” is gone. They recognized the oil as the ethyl-ether of a particular acid of the composition (C 14 H 2β O 3 )H 2 , which they called “oenanthic acid.” An oil similar to Liebig and Pelouze’s oenanthic ether was isolated by Wöhler from quince-peel. Liebig and Pelouze’s results were called in question by Delffs, who by experiments of his own arrived at the result that their oenanthic acid is identical with pelargonic, C 9 H 17 O 2 . H, which latter is known as a component of the volatile oil of Pelargonium roseum. A. Fischer examined an “oenanthic ether” manufactured by Lichtenberger at Hambach in the Rhenish Palatinate, and found it to be a mixture of the ethyl-ethers of caprylic and capric acids, C 8 H la O 2 and C 10 H 20 O 2 , and fatty acids higher than capric. The general impression amongst chemical wine-specialists seems to be that Liebig and Pelouze’s oenanthic acid was a mixture of capric, caprylic, and other fatty acids. The notion of oenanthic acid must not be mixed up with that of oenanthylic acid, C 7 H 13 O 2 . H, the acid of primary heptyl-alcohol, C 7 H 16 O. The aldehyde C 7 H 14 O, intermediate between the two, is procured by the destructive distillation of castor oil, and from it the acid is easily prepared by oxidation with dilute chromic acid.
OeN0MAUS was king of Olympia, where his wooden house was still shown in the Altis, the sacred precinct, when Pausanias visited it. It was fated that he should be slain by the husband of his daughter Hippodamia. His father, the god Ares-Hippios, gave him winged horses swift as the wind, and he promised his daughter to the man who could outstrip him in the chariot race; those suitors who were beaten died by his hand. Pelops, by the treachery of Myrtilus, the charioteer of Oenomaus, won the race and married Hippodamia. Pelops is conceived as a stranger from Asia Minor, and Oenomaus is obviously the representative of a race of Ares-v τ orshippers who were conquered by, or amalgamated with, an immigrant race, who brought with them the new religion of Zeus, but who kept up the old worship of Ares in the country where they settled.
[624 words — estimated reading time: 4 minutes]