The countship of Angoulême dated from the 9th century, the most important of the early counts being William Taillefer, whose descendants held the title till the end of the 12th century. Withdrawn from them on more than one occasion by Richard Coeur-de-Lion, it passed to King John of England on his marriage with Isabel, daughter of Count Adhémar, and by her subsequent marriage in 1220 to Hugh X. passed to the Lusignan family, counts of Marche. On the death of Hugh XIII. in 1302 without issue, his possessions passed to the crown. In 1394 the countship came to the house of Orleans, a member of which, Francis I., became king of France in 1515 and raised it to the rank of duchy in favour of his mother Louise of Savoy. The duchy afterwards changed hands several times, one of its holders being Charles of Valois, natural son of Charles IX. The last duke was Louis-Antoine, eldest son of Charles X., who died in 1844.
See A. F. Lièvre, Angoulême: histoire, institutions et monuments (Angoulême, 1885).
ANGOUMOIS, an old province of France, nearly corresponding to-day to the department of Charente. Its capital was Angoulême.
See Essai d’une bibliothèque historique de l’Angoumois, by E. Castaigne (1845).
ANGRA, or Angra do Heroismo (“Bay of Heroism,” a name given it in 1829, to commemorate its successful defence against the Miguelist party), the former capital of the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores, and chief town of an administrative district, comprising the islands of Terceira, St George and Graciosa. Pop. (1900) 10,788. Angra is built on the south coast of Terceira in 38° 38′ N. and in 27° 13′ W. It is the headquarters of a military command, and the residence of a Roman Catholic bishop; its principal buildings are the cathedral, military college, arsenal and observatory. The harbour, now of little commercial or strategic importance, but formerly a celebrated naval station, is sheltered on the west and south-west by the promontory of Mt. Brazil; but it is inferior to the neighbouring ports of Ponta Delgada and Horta. The foreign trade is not large, and consists chiefly in the exportation of pineapples and other fruit. Angra served as a refuge for Queen Maria II. of Portugal from 1830 to 1833.
ANGRA PEQUENA, a bay in German South-West Africa, in 26° 38′ S., 15° E., discovered by Bartholomew Diaz in 1487. F. A. E. Lüderitz, of Bremen, established a trading station here in 1883, and his agent concluded treaties with the neighbouring chiefs, who ceded large tracts of country to the newcomers. On the 24th of April 1884 Lüderitz transferred his rights to the German imperial government, and on the following 7th of August a German protectorate over the district was proclaimed. (See Africa, § 5, and German South-West Africa.) Angra Pequena has been renamed by the Germans Lüderitz Bay, and the adjacent country is sometimes called Lüderitzland. The harbour is poor. At the head of the bay is a small town, whence a railway, begun in 1906, runs east in the direction of Bechuanaland. The surrounding country for many miles is absolute desert, except after rare but terrible thunderstorms, when the dry bed of the Little Fish river is suddenly filled with a turbulent stream, the water finding its way into the bay.
The islands off the coast of Angra Pequena, together with others north and south, were annexed to Great Britain in 1867 and added to Cape Colony in 1874. Seal Island and Penguin Island are in the bay; Ichaboe, Mercury, and Hollam’s Bird islands are to the north; Halifax, Long, Possession, Albatross, Pomona, Plumpudding, and Roastbeef islands are to the south. On these islands are guano deposits; the most valuable is on Ichaboe Island.
ANGSTRÖM, ANDERS JONAS (1814–1874), Swedish physicist, was born on the 13th of August 1814 at Lögdö, Medelpad, Sweden. He was educated at Upsala University, where in 1839 he became privat docent in physics. In 1842 he went to Stockholm Observatory in order to gain experience in practical astronomical work, and in the following year he became observer at Upsala Observatory. Becoming interested in terrestrial magnetism he made many observations of magnetic intensity and declination in various parts of Sweden, and was charged by the Stockholm Academy of Sciences with the task, not completed till shortly before his death, of working out the magnetic data obtained by the Swedish frigate “Eugénie” on her voyage round the world in 1851–1853. In 1858 he succeeded Adolph Ferdinand Svanberg (1806–1857) in the chair of physics at Upsala, and there he died on the 21st of June 1874. His most important work was concerned with the conduction of heat and with spectroscopy. In his optical researches, Optiska Undersökningar, presented to the Stockholm Academy in 1853, he not only pointed out that the electric spark yields two superposed spectra, one from the metal of the electrode and the other from the gas in which it passes, but deduced from Euler’s theory of resonance that an incandescent gas emits luminous rays of the same refrangibility as those which it can absorb. This statement, as Sir E. Sabine remarked when awarding him the Rumford medal of the Royal Society in 1872, contains a fundamental principle of spectrum analysis, and though for a number of years it was overlooked it entitles him to rank as one of the founders of spectroscopy. From 1861 onwards he paid special attention to the solar spectrum. He announced the existence of hydrogen, among other elements, in the sun’s atmosphere in 1862, and in 1868 published his great map of the normal solar spectrum which long remained authoritative in questions of wave-length, although his measurements were inexact to the extent of one part in 7000 or 8000 owing to the metre which he used as his standard having been slightly too short. He was the first, in 1867, to examine the spectrum of the aurora borealis, and detected and measured the characteristic bright line in its yellow green region; but he was mistaken in supposing that this same line, which is often called by his name, is also to be seen in the zodiacal light.
His son, Knut Johan Ångström, was born at Upsala on the 12th of January 1857, and studied at the university of that town from 1877 to 1884. After spending a short time in Strassburg he was appointed lecturer in physics at Stockholm University in 1885, but in 1891 returned to Upsala, where in 1896 he became professor of physics. He especially devoted himself to investigations of the radiation of heat from the sun and its absorption by the earth’s atmosphere, and to that end devised various delicate methods and instruments, including his electric compensation pyrheliometer, invented in 1893, and apparatus for obtaining a photographic representation of the infra-red spectrum (1895).
ANGUIER, FRANÇOIS (c. 1604–1669), and MICHEL (1612–1686), French sculptors, were two brothers, natives of Eu in Normandy. Their apprenticeship was served in the studio of Simon Guillain. The chief works of François are the monument to Cardinal de Bérulle, founder of the Carmelite order, in the chapel of the oratory at Paris, of which all but the bust has been destroyed, and the mausoleum of Henri II., last duc de Montmorency, at Moulins. To Michel are due the sculptures of the triumphal arch at the Porte St Denis, begun in 1674, to serve as a memorial for the conquests of Louis XIV. A marble group of the Nativity in the church of Val de Grâce was reckoned his masterpiece. From 1662 to 1667 he directed the progress of the sculpture and decoration in this church, and it was he who superintended the decoration of the apartments of Anne of Austria in the old Louvre. F. Fouquet also employed him for his château in Vaux.
See Henri Stein, Les frères Anguier (1889), with catalogue of works, and many references to original sources; Armand Sanson, Deux sculpteurs Normands: les frères Anguier (1889).
ANGUILLA, or Snake, a small island in the British Indies, part of the presidency of St Kitts-Nevis, in the colony of the Leeward Islands. Pop. (1901) 3890, mostly negroes. It is situated in 18° 12′ N. and 63° 5′ W., about 60 m. N.W. of St Kitts, is 16 m. long and has an area of 35 sq. m. The destruction of trees by charcoal-burners has resulted in the almost complete deforestation of the island. Nearly all the land is in the hands of peasant proprietors, who cultivate sweet potatoes, peas, beans, corn, &c., and rear sheep and goats. Cattle, phosphate of lime and salt, manufactured from a lake in the interior, are the principal
