rnambuco,
with tropical products as well as fine timber and dye-woods.

ALAIN DE L'ISLE, a professor of theology in the University of Paris,
surnamed the _Doctor universel_ (1114-1203).

ALAINS. See ALANS.

ALAIS` (18), a town at the foot of the Cevennes, in the centre of a
mining district; once the stronghold of French Protestantism.

ALAMAN`NI, LUIGI, an Italian poet and diplomatist, born at Florence
(1495-1556).

ALAND ISLES, a group of 300 small islands in the Gulf of Bothnia, of
which 80 are inhabited; fortified by Russia.

ALANS, a barbarous horde from the East, who invaded W. Europe in the
4th and 5th centuries, but were partly exterminated and partly ousted by
the Visigoths.

ALAR`CON Y MENDO`ZA, JUAN RUIZ DE, a Spanish dramatist born in
Mexico, who, though depreciated by his contemporaries, ranks after 200
years of neglect among the foremost dramatic geniuses of Spain, next even
to Cervantes and Lope de Vega; he was a humpback, had an offensive air of
conceit, and was very unpopular; he wrote at least twenty dramas, some of
which have been translated into French; _d_. in 1639.

AL`ARIC I., the king of the Visigoths, a man of noble birth, who, at
the end of the 4th and beginning of the 5th century, ravaged Greece,
invaded Italy, and took and pillaged Rome; died at Cosenza, in Calabria,
in 412, at the early age of thirty-four.

ALARIC II., king of the Visigoths, whose dominions included all Gaul
and most of Spain; defeated by the Franks at Poitiers, and killed by the
hand of Clovis, their king, in 567.

ALARIC COTIN, Voltaire's nickname for Frederick the Great, the
former in recognition of him as a warrior, the latter as a would-be
litterateur, after an indifferent French poet of the name of Cotin.

ALAS`CO, JOHN, the uncle of Sigismund, king of Poland, and a zealous
promoter in Poland of the Reformation, the friend of Erasmus and
Zwinglius (1499-1560).

ALAS`KA (32), an immense territory belonging to the U.S. by
purchase from Russia, extending from British N. America to Behring
Strait; it is poor in resources, and the inhabitants, who are chiefly
Indians and Eskimos, live by hunting and fishing, and by the export of
salmon; seal fishery valuable, however.

ALASNAM, a hero related of in the "Arabian Nights" as having erected
eight statues of gold, and in quest of a statue for a ninth unoccupied
pedestal, finding what he wanted in the person of a beautiful woman for a
wif