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  • lavender water (toiletry)
    ...and is used chiefly in fine perfumes and cosmetics. It is a colourless or yellow liquid, the fragrant constituents of which are linalyl acetate, linalool, pinene, limonene, geraniol, and cineole. Lavender water, a solution of the essential oil in alcohol with other added scents, is used in a variety of toilet preparations....
  • Lavengro (work by Borrow)
    ...the son of a professional soldier and led a wandering childhood as his father’s regiment was moved around the British Isles; these peregrinations inspired memorable passages in his masterpiece, Lavengro (1851). Between 1815 and 1818 he attended grammar school at Norwich, and it was here that he began to acquire a smattering of many languages. An attempt to apprentice him to the la...
  • laver (algae)
    any member of the genus Porphyra, a group of marine red algae. The thallus, a sheet of cells embedded in a thin gelatinous stratum, varies in colour from deep brown or red to pink; sexual reproductive structures are borne at the margin. Laver grows near the high-water mark of the intertidal zone in both Northern and Southern hemispheres. It grows best in nitrogen-rich water, such as is foun...
  • Laver, Rod (Australian tennis player)
    outstanding Australian tennis player, the second male player in the history of the game (after Don Budge in 1938) to win the four major singles championships—Australia, France, Great Britain (Wimbledon), and the United States—in one year (1962) and the first to repeat this grand slam (1969)....
  • Laver, Rodney George (Australian tennis player)
    outstanding Australian tennis player, the second male player in the history of the game (after Don Budge in 1938) to win the four major singles championships—Australia, France, Great Britain (Wimbledon), and the United States—in one year (1962) and the first to repeat this grand slam (1969)....
  • Lavéra (France)
    ...through loss of markets or transfer to the city’s periphery. Heavy industry (oil refining and petrochemicals) grew up around the Berre Lagoon in the 1950s following the building of an outport at Lavéra capable of receiving large oil tankers. This trend was accelerated from the late 1960s with the opening of the Fos port-industrial complex and with the addition of more petrochemica...
  • Laverack setter (breed of dog)
    breed of sporting dog that has served as a gun dog in England for more than 400 years and has been bred in its present form since about 1825. It is sometimes called the Llewellin setter or the Laverack setter for the developers of two strains of the breed. Like the other setters, it locates birds for the hunter. Characteristically rugged yet aristocratic in appearance, it stands...
  • Laveran, Alphonse (French physician and pathologist)
    French physician, pathologist, and parasitologist who discovered the parasite that causes human malaria. For this and later work on protozoal diseases he received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1907....
  • Laveran, Charles-Louis-Alphonse (French physician and pathologist)
    French physician, pathologist, and parasitologist who discovered the parasite that causes human malaria. For this and later work on protozoal diseases he received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1907....
  • LaVey, Anton Szandor (American religious leader)
    counterculture group founded in the United States in the 1960s by Anton Szandor LaVey (1930–1997), born Howard Levy. Contrary to its name, the church does not promote evil but rather humanistic values....
  • Lavia frons (mammal)
    ...and fly from the cave exit well before nightfall. Should they be too early, their internal clock may be reset. A few species of bats, including a flying fox (Pteropus samoensis), the yellow-winged bat (Lavia frons), and the greater sac-winged bat Saccopteryx bilineata, may forage actively during the day, but little is yet known of their special......
  • Lavigerie, Charles-Martial-Allemand (Roman Catholic archbishop)
    cardinal and archbishop of Algiers and Carthage (now Tunis, Tunisia) whose dream to convert Africa to Christianity prompted him to found the Society of Missionaries of Africa, popularly known as the White Fathers....
  • Lavin, Mary (Irish writer)
    U.S.-born Irish writer who was best known for her short stories that revealed the complexities and remarkableness of seemingly ordinary small-town Irish life (b. June 11, 1912--d. March 25, 1996)....
  • Lavinde, Gabriele de (Italian cryptologist)
    ...cryptology dates from the Middle Ages, when it was developed by the Papal States and the Italian city-states. The first European manual on cryptography (c. 1379) was a compilation of ciphers by Gabriele de Lavinde of Parma, who served Pope Clement VII. This manual, now in the Vatican archives, contains a set of keys for 24 correspondents and embraces symbols for letters, nulls, and sever...
  • Lavinia (fictional character)
    ...returns to Rome after having defeated the Goths, bringing with him Queen Tamora, whose eldest son he sacrifices to the gods. The late emperor’s son Saturninus is supposed to marry Titus’s daughter Lavinia; however, when his brother Bassianus runs away with her instead, Saturninus marries Tamora. Saturninus and Tamora then plot revenge against Titus. Lavinia is raped and mutilated ...
  • Lavinia (Roman mythology)
    ...which means “Etruscan.” In Virgil’s Aeneid Turnus is king of the city of Ardea, and his people are called the Rutuli. He is the favourite suitor of Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus, eponymous king of the Latins. When Latinus engages Lavinia to marry Aeneas instead, the goddess Juno, who hates the Trojans, drives Turnus mad. He leads his people....
  • Lavinium (Italy)
    an ancient town of Latium (modern Pratica di Mare, Italy), 19 miles (30 kilometres) south of Rome, regarded as the religious centre of the early Latin peoples. Roman tradition maintained that it had been founded by Aeneas and his followers from Troy and named after his wife, Lavinia. Here he is supposed to have built a temple establishing the worship of the household gods, the P...
  • Lavo (Thailand)
    town, south-central Thailand, north of Bangkok. Lop Buri is a rice-collecting centre situated on the Lop Buri River and on the country’s main north-south highway and railway. Founded as Lavo in the 5th–7th century, it was incorporated into the Khmer empire of Angkor in the 10th or 11th century and became an important provincial capital. It later became an active centre within the kin...
  • Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent (French chemist)
    prominent French chemist and leading figure in the 18th-century chemical revolution who developed an experimentally based theory of the chemical reactivity of oxygen and coauthored the modern system for naming chemical substances. Having also served as a leading financier and public administrator before the French Revolution, he was executed with other financiers during the revo...
  • lavolta (dance)
    16th-century leaping and turning dance for couples, originating in Italy and popular at French and German court balls until about 1750. Performed with a notoriously intimate embrace, it became respectable, but never completely dignified, after Queen Elizabeth I of England danced it with the earl of Leicester....
  • Lavon Affair (Israeli history)
    ...in part from the bitter internal controversy between his supporters and his rivals in the party, who rose against him for the first time because of the political implications of the 1954 “Lavon Affair,” involving Israeli-inspired sabotage of U.S. and British property in Egypt. The affair led Ben-Gurion in 1965 to leave Mapai with a number of his supporters and to found a small......
  • Lavon, Pinchas (Israeli politician)
    Israeli politician who held a number of government posts and was accused in 1954 of involvement in a plot to discredit Egypt by secretly attacking U.S. facilities in that country. Although he was cleared of all charges, the “Lavon Affair,” as it came to be known, effectively ended his political career....
  • Lavon, Pinhas (Israeli politician)
    Israeli politician who held a number of government posts and was accused in 1954 of involvement in a plot to discredit Egypt by secretly attacking U.S. facilities in that country. Although he was cleared of all charges, the “Lavon Affair,” as it came to be known, effectively ended his political career....
  • “Lavorare stanca” (work by Pavese)
    ...gallo canti, 1949; in The Political Prisoner, 1955) and the novella Il compagno (1947; The Comrade, 1959). His first volume of lyric poetry, Lavorare stanca (1936; Hard Labor, 1976), followed his release from prison. An initial novella, Paesi tuoi (1941; The Harvesters, 1961), recalled, as many of his works do, the sacred places of childho...
  • Lavoratore, Il (Italian Communist publication)
    ...the antiwar movement and editor of the Roman Socialist organ Avanguardia. In 1921 he helped found the Italian Communist Party and in 1922 became the editor of the party’s paper in Trieste, Il Lavoratore (“The Worker”). He devoted all his time to foreign missions and underground organization for the party until the Fascists drove him into exile. In 1929–...
  • Lavoratori Italiani, Partito dei (political party, Italy)
    former Italian political party, one of the first Italian parties with a national scope and a modern democratic organization. It was founded in 1892 in Genoa as the Italian Workers’ Party (Partito dei Lavoratori Italiani) and formally adopted the name Italian Socialist Party in 1893....
  • Lavr School (school, Kiev, Ukraine)
    ...hierarchy was reestablished, and a Romanian nobleman, Peter Mogila, was elected metropolitan of Kiev (1632). He created the first Orthodox theological school of the modern period, the famous Academy of Kiev. Modelled after the Latin seminaries of Poland, with instruction given in Latin, this school served as the theological training centre for almost the entire Russian high clergy in the......
  • lavradore (Brazilian farmer)
    ...was the engenho, the mill. So expensive were the mill, technicians’ salaries, and the force of African slaves to work there that mill owners normally depended on cane growers called lavradores to produce cane for the mill. Under various kinds of leasing arrangements, the lavradores used their own African slave crews to cultivate the land, grow the cane, and transport...
  • Lavrenov, Tsanko (Bulgarian artist)
    ...style and subject matter took place, and the foundations were laid for later artists such as Vladimir Dimitrov, an extremely gifted painter specializing in the rural scenes of his native country; Tsanko Lavrenov, a noted graphic artist and art critic who also painted scenes of old Bulgarian towns; Zlatyo Boyadjiev, noted for his village portraits; and Ilya Petrov, who painted scenes and......
  • Lávrion (Greece)
    industrial town of the nomós (department) of Attica, on the Aegean Sea, famous in antiquity for its silver mines. Its port, sheltered by Makrónisos island, imports coal, loads ore, and handles coastal and insular shipping....
  • Lavrov, Pyotr Lavrovich (Russian philosopher)
    Russian Socialist philosopher whose sociological thought provided a theoretical foundation for the activities of various Russian revolutionary organizations during the second half of the 19th century....
  • law (society)
    the discipline and profession concerned with the customs, practices, and rules of conduct of a community that are recognized as binding by the community. Enforcement of the body of rules is through a controlling authority....
  • law (science)
    A second difficulty for Hempel’s account resulted from his candid admission that he was unable to offer a full analysis of the notion of a scientific law. Laws are generalizations about a range of natural phenomena, sometimes universal (“Any two bodies attract one another with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely as the square of the distance betw...
  • Law (sacred text)
    in Judaism, in the broadest sense the substance of divine revelation to Israel, the Jewish people: God’s revealed teaching or guidance for mankind. The meaning of “Torah” is often restricted to signify the first five books of the Old Testament, also called the Law or the Pentateuch. These are the books traditionally ascribed to Moses, the recipient of the original revelation f...
  • Law & Order (American television program)
    ...when the latter became vice president. Thompson was reelected in 1996 but declined to run again in 2002, instead resuming his acting career as a regular on the television series Law & Order and its related spin-offs. In 2007 he quit the show in order to explore a presidential run. Among the issues he supported were lower taxes, a smaller federal government, and...
  • Law and Justice (political party, Poland)
    ...SLD and the Union of Labour (Unia Pracy; UP) were the majority winners, with Leszek Miller of the SLD becoming prime minister. In the next set of elections, the SLD fell to the centre-right party Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość; PiS), with its founders, identical twins Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński, attaining the posts of president (2005) and prime minister......
  • Law and Order (documentary film by Wiseman)
    ...proceeded to make documentaries on various American institutions, including a public high school (High School, 1968), a metropolitan police force (Law and Order, 1969), an inner-city hospital (Hospital, 1970), military training (Basic Training, 1971), a juvenile court (......
  • Law and the Golden Calf, The (painting by Tintoretto)
    ...Decapitation of St. Paul (c. 1556), the figures stand out dramatically on a space suffused with a vaporous, unreal light. In the two enormous canvases depicting the Jews worshipping the golden calf while Moses on Mt. Sinai receives the tables of the law and a Last Judgment, Tintoretto painted two works of the highest rank with a great richness of narrative means, with an awa...
  • Law and the Profits, The (work by Parkinson)
    ...of his “law,” which first appeared in an essay in the London Economist in 1955, Parkinson later devised a second law, “Expenditure rises to meet income,” detailed in The Law and the Profits (1960)....
  • Law, Andrew Bonar (prime minister of United Kingdom)
    prime minister of Great Britain from Oct. 23, 1922, to May 20, 1923, the first holder of that office to come from a British overseas possession. He was the leader of the Conservative Party during the periods 1911–21 and 1922–23....
  • Law Applicable to Contractual Obligations, Convention on the (European Union [1980])
    ...treaties remain matters for the courts of the individual participating states. A notable exception was the Convention on the Law Applicable to Contractual Obligations (1980), commonly known as the Rome Convention, which applied in the member states of the European Union (EU) and whose interpretation lay within the scope of the European Court of Justice upon reference from national courts. The.....
  • Law, ark of the (Judaism)
    (“holy ark”), in Jewish synagogues, an ornate cabinet that enshrines the sacred Torah scrolls used for public worship. Because it symbolizes the Holy of Holies of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem, it is the holiest place in the synagogue and the focal point of prayer. The ark is reached by steps and is commonly placed so that the worshiper facing it also “fa...
  • Law as a Means to an End (work by Jhering)
    ...4 vol. (1852–65; “The Spirit of the Roman Law”), he elaborated the relation of law to social change. Even more influential in the 20th century was his Law As a Means to an End, 2 vol. (1877–83; originally in German), which maintained that the purpose of law was the protection of individual and societal interests by coordinating them......
  • Law, Bernard Cardinal (American archbishop)
    When 2002 began, Boston’s Bernard Cardinal Law was the senior Roman Catholic cardinal in the U.S. and the chairman of the bishops’ Committee on International Policy, but as the year drew to a close, he had resigned his position as head of his archdiocese and apologized for what he called his “shortcomings and mistakes” in response to allegations of sexual misconduct aga...
  • Law, Bonar (prime minister of United Kingdom)
    prime minister of Great Britain from Oct. 23, 1922, to May 20, 1923, the first holder of that office to come from a British overseas possession. He was the leader of the Conservative Party during the periods 1911–21 and 1922–23....
  • law code (law)
    a more or less systematic and comprehensive written statement of laws. Law codes were compiled by the most ancient peoples. The oldest extant evidence for a code is tablets from the ancient archives of the city of Ebla (now at Tell Mardikh, Syria), which date to about 2400 bc. The best known ancient code is the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. The Romans began keeping...
  • Law Commission (English law)
    ...Law Revision Committee, established in 1959, eventually made a variety of specific recommendations, including the elimination of the distinction between felonies and misdemeanours. In addition, the Law Commission, also a permanent body, was established in 1965 with the goal of continually reviewing the entire law, not just the criminal law. In 1981 the commission undertook a new attempt at......
  • law court (law)
    a person or body of persons having judicial authority to hear and resolve disputes in civil, criminal, ecclesiastical, or military cases. The word court, which originally meant simply an enclosed place, also denotes the chamber, hall, building, or other place where judicial proceedings are held. (See also military law; arbitration...
  • law, court of (law)
    a person or body of persons having judicial authority to hear and resolve disputes in civil, criminal, ecclesiastical, or military cases. The word court, which originally meant simply an enclosed place, also denotes the chamber, hall, building, or other place where judicial proceedings are held. (See also military law; arbitration...
  • Law Courts (building, London, United Kingdom)
    in London, complex of courtrooms, halls, and offices concerned primarily with civil (noncriminal) litigation. It lies in the Greater London borough of Westminster, on the boundary with the City of London....
  • Law Dome (ice cap, Antarctica)
    ...Budd, and Knox, which are all claimed by Australia; and Adélie Coast, which is claimed by France. Australia and France maintain stations along the Wilkes Land coasts. A local ice cap, the Law Dome, is partially attached to the ice sheet and has been heavily studied by Australian glaciologists....
  • Law, Edward, Earl of Ellenborough (British governor of India)
    British governor-general of India (1842–44), who also served four times as president of the board of control for India and was first lord of the British Admiralty. He was recalled from India for being out of control and later resigned another office under pressure....
  • law enforcement
    British governor-general of India (1842–44), who also served four times as president of the board of control for India and was first lord of the British Admiralty. He was recalled from India for being out of control and later resigned another office under pressure.......
  • Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour (German history)
    ...15, 1935. One, the Reichsbürgergesetz (German: “Law of the Reich Citizen”), deprived Jews of German citizenship, designating them “subjects of the state.” The other, the Gesetz zum Schutze des Deutschen Blutes und der Deutschen Ehre (“Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour”), usually called simply the Blutschutzgesetz (“B...
  • Law is a Bottom-less Pit; or, The History of John Bull (work by Arbuthnot)
    ...British, French, Spanish, and Dutch that led up to the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). Published in five pamphlets, the earliest appearing in 1712, it was collected in 1727 under the composite title Law is a Bottom-less Pit; or, The History of John Bull, and it established and popularized for the first time the character who was to become the permanent symbol of England in cartoon and......
  • Law, John (Scottish economist)
    Scottish monetary reformer and originator of the “Mississippi scheme” for the development of French territories in America....
  • Law, Legislation and Liberty (work by Hayek)
    Hayek returned to Freiburg permanently in 1977 and finished work on what would become the three-part Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973–79), a critique of efforts to redistribute incomes in the name of “social justice.” Later in the 1970s Hayek’s monograph The Denationalization of Money was published by the Institute of....
  • law merchant (medieval European law)
    during the Middle Ages, the body of customary rules and principles relating to merchants and mercantile transactions and adopted by traders themselves for the purpose of regulating their dealings. Initially, it was administered for the most part in special quasi-judicial courts, such as those of the guilds in Italy and, later, regularly constituted piepoudre courts in England (...
  • Law of Civilization and Decay (work by Adams)
    ...correspondence they developed the idea—revolutionary at the time—that by its nature and substance U.S. democracy was foreordained to degradation and decay. In 1895 he published his Law of Civilization and Decay, in which he expounded his theory of history. It held that the centre of trade had consistently followed a westward movement from the ancient crossroads in the East....
  • law of conservation (physics)
    in physics, several principles that state that certain physical properties (i.e., measurable quantities) do not change in the course of time within an isolated physical system. In classical physics, laws of this type govern energy, momentum, angular momentum, mass, and electric charge. In particle physic...
  • law of diminishing returns (economics)
    economic law stating that if one input in the production of a commodity is increased while all other inputs are held fixed, a point will eventually be reached at which additions of the input yield progressively smaller, or diminishing, increases in output....
  • Law of Freedom in a Platform, The (work by Winstanley)
    The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652), his sketch of a communist society, was dedicated to Oliver Cromwell. Winstanley believed that the English Civil War had been fought against the king, landlords, lawyers, and all who bought and sold, these being enemies of the landless and labouring poor, and against priests, whose preaching of heaven and hell diverted men from asserting their......
  • Law of Nature (work by Locke)
    ...understand man, however, it is not enough to observe his actions; one must also inquire about his capacities for knowledge. Locke had been conscious of this point in writing his paper on the “Law of Nature” as early as 1663. In 1671, as has been seen, he set out to write a book about human knowledge, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which was not published,......
  • Law of Population (work by Sadler)
    ...seat created for Leeds. Although he received considerable working class support, he was defeated by the historian Thomas Babington (later Baron) Macaulay, who had criticized Sadler’s Law of Population (1830), a massive treatise attacking the pessimistic theories of the economist-demographer Thomas Robert Malthus....
  • Law of Property Act (United Kingdom [1922])
    ...Lloyd George, prime minister in the second wartime coalition, offered Smith the lord chancellorship, which he, as Baron Birkenhead, assumed on Feb. 4, 1919. His greatest accomplishments were the Law of Property Act (1922) and subsequent real-property statutes (1925) that replaced a convoluted, largely medieval system of land law. Although enacted after he had left office (Oct. 24, 1922), the......
  • law of segregation (genetics)
    ...or contaminate each other. Mendel inferred that, when a heterozygote forms its sex cells, the allelic genes segregate and pass to different gametes. This is expressed in the first law of Mendel, the law of segregation of unit genes. Equal numbers of gametes, ovules, or pollen grains are formed that contain the genes R and r. Now, if the gametes unite at random, then the......
  • Law of the Sea, Convention on the (international law [1982])
    branch of international law concerned with public order at sea. Much of this law is codified in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, signed Dec. 10, 1982. The convention, described as a “constitution for the oceans,” represents an attempt to codify international law regarding territorial waters, sea-lanes, and ocean...
  • Law on Associated Labour (Yugoslavia [1976])
    ...worker self-management in factories and institutions was adopted. This program, which sought to address problems inherent in the highly centralized Soviet model of socialism, was codified in the Law on Associated Labour of 1976. Each Yugoslav worker belonged to a Basic Organization of Associated Labour (BOAL) that was based on the precise role played by the worker in the production process.......
  • law, philosophy of
    the formulation of concepts and theories to aid in understanding the nature of law, the sources of its authority, and its role in society. In English-speaking countries the term “jurisprudence” is often used synonymously and is invariably used in reference to particular subdivisions of the field....
  • law, pure theory of
    Austrian-American legal philosopher, teacher, jurist, and writer on international law, who formulated a kind of positivism known as the “pure theory” of law....
  • law report (common law)
    in common law, published record of a judicial decision that is cited by lawyers and judges for their use as precedent in subsequent cases. The report of a decision ordinarily contains the title of the case, a statement of the facts giving rise to the litigation, and its history in the courts. It then reproduces the opinion of the court and concludes with the court’s judgm...
  • law, rule of (political philosophy)
    Libertarians consider the rule of law to be a crucial underpinning of a free society. In its simplest form, this principle means that individuals should be governed by generally applicable and publicly known laws and not by the arbitrary decisions of kings, presidents, or bureaucrats. Such laws should protect the freedom of all individuals to pursue happiness in their own ways and should not......
  • Law Society (British legal organization)
    The official organization of solicitors is the Law Society, a voluntary group, incorporated by Parliament. The Law Society has extensive authority in setting and enforcing standards for solicitors. Its rules prescribe how money held for a client or in trust is to be kept and to be shown on books of account, which must be certified each year. The society maintains a client-compensation fund to......
  • law, wager of (law)
    in early English law, method of settling issues of fact by appeal to a type of character witness. Compurgation was practiced until the 16th century in criminal matters and into the 19th century in civil matters....
  • law, wheel of the (Buddhism)
    ...Religious symbols are used to convey concepts concerned with man’s relationship to the sacred or holy (e.g., the cross in Christianity) and also to his social and material world (e.g., the dharma-cakra, or wheel of the law, of Buddhism). Other nonreligious types of symbols achieved increasing significance in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially those dealing with man’s.....
  • Law, William (British author)
    English author of influential works on Christian ethics and mysticism....
  • Law XII (Austria [1867])
    ...the discussion. On Feb. 17, 1867, Francis Joseph restored the Hungarian constitution. A ministry responsible to the Hungarian Diet was formed under Andrássy, and in May 1867 the diet approved Law XII, legalizing what became known as the Ausgleich (“Compromise”). This was a compromise between the Hungarian nation and the dynasty, not between Hungary and the rest of the empir...
  • Lawa (people)
    peoples of the upland areas of eastern Myanmar (Burma) and southwestern Yunnan province of China. They speak a variety of Austroasiatic languages related to those spoken by upland-dwelling groups in northern Thailand and Laos. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Wa numbered approximately 600,000 in Myanmar and 350,000 in China, where they have been designated an official m...
  • Lawa River (river, South America)
    ...on the east from Suriname on the west. Its upper course is known as the Litani in Suriname, or Itany in French Guiana; its middle course, along which there is placer gold mining, is called the Lawa, or Aoua. Shallow-draft vessels can penetrate 60 miles (100 km) upstream from the river’s mouth; beyond that point there are many waterfalls and rapids. The river’s chief tributary is t...
  • Lawamon (English poet)
    early Middle English poet, author of the romance-chronicle the Brut (c. 1200), one of the most notable English poems of the 12th century. It is the first work in English to treat of the “matter of Britain”—i.e., the legends surrounding Arthur and the knights of the Round Table—and was written at a...
  • Lawarai Pass (mountain pass, Asia)
    ...(22,447 feet [6,842 metres]) and Buni Zom (21,499 feet [6,553 metres])—which strikes southward from the Lupsuk Peak (18,861 feet [5,749 metres]) in the eastern region, then continues to the Lawarai Pass (12,100 feet [3,688 metres]) and beyond to the Kābul River. If this chain is considered part of the Hindu Kush, then the outlying mountains of the Swat Kohistan region of Pakistan....
  • Lawes, Henry (English composer)
    English composer noted for his continuo songs....
  • Lawes, Lewis Edward (American penologist)
    U.S. penologist whose introduction of novel penal administrative policies helped to emphasize a rehabilitative role for prisons....
  • Lawes, Sir John Bennet, 1st Baronet (English agronomist)
    English agronomist who founded the artificial fertilizer industry and Rothamsted Experimental Station, the oldest agricultural research station in the world....
  • Lawes, William (English composer)
    English composer, prominent during the early Baroque period, noted for his highly original instrumental music....
  • Lawick-Goodall, Baroness Jane van (British ethologist)
    British ethologist, known for her exceptionally detailed and long-term research on the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania....
  • Lawler, Ray (Australian dramatist)
    actor, producer, and playwright whose Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is credited with changing the direction of modern Australian drama....
  • Lawler, Raymond Evenor (Australian dramatist)
    actor, producer, and playwright whose Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is credited with changing the direction of modern Australian drama....
  • Lawless, Lucy (New Zealander actress)
    Playing ancient warriors on the television shows "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" and its spin-off, "Xena: Warrior Princess," actors Kevin Sorbo and Lucy Lawless conquered their toughest opponent in 1997--the fickle TV viewer--to become king and queen of the syndicated small screen. The well-oiled hero and the leather-bustier-clad heroine outmuscled their competition with a combination of high c...
  • Lawlor, Si (American sailor)
    ...transatlantic voyage was made in a 6-metre boat by Alfred Johnson in 1876 to commemorate the centenary of U.S. independence. The first single-handed race in 1891 was won by the American sailor Si Lawlor. A series of single-handed races, sponsored by the London Observer, began in 1960 and was held quadrennially thereafter. It was in these races that Francis Chichester (later Sir......
  • lawn (garden)
    fine-textured turf of grass that is kept mowed....
  • lawn bowls (sport)
    outdoor game in which a ball (known as a bowl) is rolled toward a smaller stationary ball, called a jack. The object is to roll one’s bowls so that they come to rest nearer to the jack than those of an opponent; this is sometimes achieved by knocking aside an opponent’s bowl or the jack. A form of bowls was played in ancient Egypt, and by the Middle Ages the game was well known in co...
  • lawn moth (insect)
    Destructive borers include the European corn borer, the sugarcane borer, and the grass webworm. Adults of these species are called snout moths because their larvae are characterized by elongated snoutlike mouthparts. The larval stage of the European corn borer (Pyrausta nubilalis) is the most important insect pest of maize throughout the world. It also infests other plants, including......
  • lawn tennis (sport)
    game in which two opposing players (singles) or pairs of players (doubles) use tautly strung rackets to hit a ball of specified size, weight, and bounce over a net on a rectangular court. Points are awarded to a player or team whenever the opponent fails to correctly return the ball within the prescribed dimensions of the court. Organized tennis is played according to rules sanctioned by the ...
  • lawn-leaf (plant genus)
    any of several species of low, creeping plants of the morning glory family (Convolvulaceae) that are used in warm climates as grass substitutes. The plants are from 2 12 to 8 cm (1 to 3 inches) high and spread by runners....
  • Lawnsville (West Virginia, United States)
    city, seat (1826) of Logan county, southwestern West Virginia, U.S. It lies along the Guyandotte River, about 40 miles (64 km) southwest of Charleston, near the Kentucky border. Laid out in 1824 and known as Lawnsville, it was chartered in 1852 and renamed Aracoma for the eldest daughter of the Shawnee chief Cornstalk, who came to live there...
  • Lawrance, Charles Lanier (American aeronautical engineer)
    American aeronautical engineer who designed the first successful air-cooled aircraft engine, used on many historic early flights....
  • Lawrence (Kansas, United States)
    city, seat (1855) of Douglas county, eastern Kansas, U.S. It lies on the Kansas River. It was founded in 1854 by antislavery radicals who had come to Kansas under the auspices of the New England Emigrant Aid Company to outvote proslavery settlers and thus make Kansas a “free” state. The city was named for Amos A. Lawrence, a Ne...
  • Lawrence (county, Pennsylvania, United States)
    county, western Pennsylvania, U.S., bordered to the west by Ohio. It consists of a hilly region on the Allegheny Plateau that is drained by the Shenango, Mahoning, and Beaver rivers. McConnell’s Mill State Park is located along Slippery Rock Creek....
  • Lawrence (antipope)
    antipope in 498 and from 501 to about 505/507, whose disputed papal election gave his name to the Laurentian schism, a split in the Roman Catholic church....
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