Garonne
The Garonne is a river in southwest France and northern Spain, with a length of 602 kilometres. It flows into the Atlantic Ocean at Bordeaux; the name derives from Garumna, a Latinized version of the Aquitanian name meaning "stony river". The Garonne's headwaters are to be found in the Aran Valley in the Spanish Pyrenees, though three different locations have been proposed as the true source: the Uelh deth Garona at Plan de Beret, the Ratera-Saboredo cirque 42°36′26″N 0°57′56″E), or the slopes of Pic Aneto; the Uelh deth Garona at 1,862 metres above sea level has been traditionally considered as the source of the Garonne. From this point a brook runs for 2.5 kilometres until the bed of the main upper Garonne valley. The river runs for another 38 kilometres until the French border at Pont de Rei, 40.5 kilometres in total. The Ratera-Saboredo cirque is the head of the upper Garonne valley, its upper lake at 2,600 metres above sea level is the origin of the Ruda-Garona river, running for 16 kilometres until the confluence with the Beret-Garona brook, another 38 kilometres until the French border at Pont del Rei, 54 kilometres in total.
At the confluence, the Ruda-Garona carries 2.6 cubic metres per second of water. The Ratera-Saboredo cirque has been pointed by many researchers as the origin of the Garonne; the third thesis holds that the river rises on the slopes of Pic Aneto at 2,300 metres above sea level and flows by way of a sinkhole known as the Forau de Aigualluts through the limestone of the Tuca Blanca de Pomèro and a resurgence in the Val dera Artiga above the Aran Valley in the Spanish Pyrenees. This underground route was suggested by the geologist Ramond de Carbonnières in 1787, but there was no confirmation until 1931, when caver Norbert Casteret poured fluorescein dye into the flow and noted its emergence a few hours 4 kilometres away at Uelhs deth Joèu in the Artiga de Lin on the other side of the mountain. From Aigualluts to the confluence with the main river at the bed of the upper Garonne valley at 800 metres above sea level, the Joèu has run for 12.4 kilometres, carrying 2.16 cubic metres per second of water, while the main river is carrying 17.7 cubic metres per second.
Despite the lack of universal agreement upon definition for determining a stream's source, the United States Geological Survey, the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution agree that a stream's source should be considered as the most distant point in the drainage basin from which water runs. The Ratera-Saboredo cirque is the "most distant point in the drainage basin from which water runs", the source of the Garonne, according to the United States Geological Survey, the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution convention upon determining a stream's source; the Garonne follows the Aran Valley northwards into France, flowing via Toulouse and Agen towards Bordeaux, where it meets the Gironde estuary. The Gironde flows into the Atlantic Ocean. Along its course, the Garonne is joined by three other major rivers: the Ariège, the Tarn, the Lot. Just after Bordeaux, the Garonne meets the Dordogne at the Bec d'Ambès, forming the Gironde estuary, which after 100 kilometres empties into the Atlantic Ocean.
Other tributaries include the Gers. The Garonne is one of the few rivers in the world. Surfers and jet skiers could ride the tidal bore at least as far as the village of Cambes, 120 kilometres or 75 miles from the Atlantic, further upstream to Cadillac, although the tidal bore appears and disappears in response to changes in the channel bathymetry. In 2010 and 2012, some detailed field studies were conducted in the Garonne's Arcins channel between Arcins Island and the right bank close to Lastrene township. A striking feature of the field data sets was the large and rapid fluctuations in turbulent velocities and turbulent stresses during the tidal bore and flood flow; the European sea sturgeon known as the Atlantic sturgeon or common sturgeon, is now a Critically Endangered species status. This species of sturgeon that can reach a length of 6 m and weigh 400 kg and can reach an age of 100 year Previously found on most coasts of Europe, it has now become so rare that they ONLY breed in the Garonne river basin in France.
Conservation projects are under way to save this fish from extinction with species reintroduction from aquaculture with the first releases being made in 1995. Aran Valley: Vielha, Bossòst Haute-Garonne: Saint-Gaudens, Toulouse Tarn-et-Garonne: Castelsarrasin Lot-et-Garonne: Agen, Aiguillon Gironde: Langon, Bordeaux Following the flow of the river: The Garonne plays an important role in inland shipping; the river not only allows seagoing vessels to reach the port of Bordeaux but forms part of the Canal des Deux Mers, linking the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. From the ocean, ships pass through the Gironde estuary up to the mouth of the Garonne. Ships continue on the tidal river Garonne up to the Pont de Pierre in Bordeaux. Inland vessels continue upstream to Castets-en-Dor
Michel de Montaigne
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Lord of Montaigne was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. His work is noted for its merging of casual anecdotes and autobiography with intellectual insight, his massive volume, contains some of the most influential essays written. Montaigne had a direct influence on Western writers, including Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Albert Hirschman, William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan Zweig, Eric Hoffer, Isaac Asimov, on the works of William Shakespeare. During his lifetime, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author; the tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, his declaration that, "I am myself the matter of my book", was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, Montaigne came to be recognized as embodying better than any other author of his time, the spirit of entertaining doubt that began to emerge at that time.
He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, "Que sçay-je?". Montaigne was born in the Aquitaine region of France, on the family estate Château de Montaigne, in a town now called, Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, close to Bordeaux; the family was wealthy. His father, Pierre Eyquem, Seigneur of Montaigne, was a French Catholic soldier in Italy for a time and he had been the mayor of Bordeaux. Although there were several families bearing the patronym "Eyquem" in Guyenne, his father's family is thought to have had some degree of Marrano origins, while his mother, Antoinette López de Villanueva, was a convert to Protestantism, his maternal grandfather, Pedro Lopez, from Zaragoza, was from a wealthy Marrano family that had converted to Catholicism. His maternal grandmother, Honorette Dupuy, was from a Catholic family in France. During a great part of Montaigne's life his mother lived near him and survived him, but is mentioned only twice in his essays. Montaigne's relationship with his father, however, is reflected upon and discussed in his essays.
Montaigne's education began in early childhood and followed a pedagogical plan that his father had developed, refined by the advice of the latter's humanist friends. Soon after his birth, Montaigne was brought to a small cottage, where he lived the first three years of life in the sole company of a peasant family, in order to, according to the elder Montaigne, "draw the boy close to the people, to the life conditions of the people, who need our help". After these first spartan years, Montaigne was brought back to the château. Another objective was for Latin to become his first language; the intellectual education of Montaigne was assigned to a German tutor. His father hired only servants who could speak Latin, they were given strict orders always to speak to the boy in Latin; the same rule applied to his mother and servants, who were obliged to use only Latin words he employed, thus they acquired a knowledge of the language his tutor taught him. Montaigne's Latin education was accompanied by spiritual stimulation.
He was familiarized with Greek by a pedagogical method that employed games and exercises of solitary meditation, rather than the more traditional books. The atmosphere of the boy's upbringing, although designed by refined rules taken under advisement by his father, created in the boy's life the spirit of "liberty and delight" that he would describe as making him "relish... duty by an unforced will, of my own voluntary motion...without any severity or constraint". And so a musician woke him every morning, playing one instrument or another, an épinettier was the constant companion to Montaigne and his tutor, playing tunes to alleviate boredom and tiredness. Around the year 1539, Montaigne was sent to study at a highly-regarded boarding school in Bordeaux, the Collège de Guyenne under the direction of the greatest Latin scholar of the era, George Buchanan, where he mastered the whole curriculum by his thirteenth year, he began his study of law at the University of Toulouse in 1546 and entered a career in the local legal system.
He was a counselor of the Court des Aides of Périgueux and, in 1557, he was appointed counselor of the Parlement in Bordeaux, a high court. From 1561 to 1563 he was courtier at the court of Charles IX and he was present with the king at the siege of Rouen, he was awarded the highest honour of the French nobility, the collar of the Order of St. Michael, something to which he aspired from his youth. While serving at the Bordeaux Parlement, he became a close friend of the humanist poet Étienne de la Boétie, whose death in 1563 affected Montaigne, it has been suggested by Donald M. Frame, in his introduction to The Complete Essays of Montaigne that because of Montaigne's "imperious need to communicate", after losing Étienne he began the Essais as a new "means of communication" and that "the reader takes the place of the dead friend". Montaigne married Françoise de la Cassaigne in 1565 in an arranged marriage, she was the niece of wealthy merchants of Toulouse and Bordeaux. They
Sculpture
Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sculptural processes used carving and modelling, in stone, ceramics and other materials but, since Modernism, there has been an complete freedom of materials and process. A wide variety of materials may be worked by removal such as carving, assembled by welding or modelling, or molded or cast. Sculpture in stone survives far better than works of art in perishable materials, represents the majority of the surviving works from ancient cultures, though conversely traditions of sculpture in wood may have vanished entirely. However, most ancient sculpture was brightly painted, this has been lost. Sculpture has been central in religious devotion in many cultures, until recent centuries large sculptures, too expensive for private individuals to create, were an expression of religion or politics; those cultures whose sculptures have survived in quantities include the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and China, as well as many in Central and South America and Africa.
The Western tradition of sculpture began in ancient Greece, Greece is seen as producing great masterpieces in the classical period. During the Middle Ages, Gothic sculpture represented the agonies and passions of the Christian faith; the revival of classical models in the Renaissance produced famous sculptures such as Michelangelo's David. Modernist sculpture moved away from traditional processes and the emphasis on the depiction of the human body, with the making of constructed sculpture, the presentation of found objects as finished art works. A basic distinction is between sculpture in the round, free-standing sculpture, such as statues, not attached to any other surface, the various types of relief, which are at least attached to a background surface. Relief is classified by the degree of projection from the wall into low or bas-relief, high relief, sometimes an intermediate mid-relief. Sunk-relief is a technique restricted to ancient Egypt. Relief is the usual sculptural medium for large figure groups and narrative subjects, which are difficult to accomplish in the round, is the typical technique used both for architectural sculpture, attached to buildings, for small-scale sculpture decorating other objects, as in much pottery and jewellery.
Relief sculpture may decorate steles, upright slabs of stone also containing inscriptions. Another basic distinction is between subtractive carving techniques, which remove material from an existing block or lump, for example of stone or wood, modelling techniques which shape or build up the work from the material. Techniques such as casting and moulding use an intermediate matrix containing the design to produce the work; the term "sculpture" is used to describe large works, which are sometimes called monumental sculpture, meaning either or both of sculpture, large, or, attached to a building. But the term properly covers many types of small works in three dimensions using the same techniques, including coins and medals, hardstone carvings, a term for small carvings in stone that can take detailed work; the large or "colossal" statue has had an enduring appeal since antiquity. Another grand form of portrait sculpture is the equestrian statue of a rider on horse, which has become rare in recent decades.
The smallest forms of life-size portrait sculpture are the "head", showing just that, or the bust, a representation of a person from the chest up. Small forms of sculpture include the figurine a statue, no more than 18 inches tall, for reliefs the plaquette, medal or coin. Modern and contemporary art have added a number of non-traditional forms of sculpture, including sound sculpture, light sculpture, environmental art, environmental sculpture, street art sculpture, kinetic sculpture, land art, site-specific art. Sculpture is an important form of public art. A collection of sculpture in a garden setting can be called a sculpture garden. One of the most common purposes of sculpture is in some form of association with religion. Cult images are common in many cultures, though they are not the colossal statues of deities which characterized ancient Greek art, like the Statue of Zeus at Olympia; the actual cult images in the innermost sanctuaries of Egyptian temples, of which none have survived, were evidently rather small in the largest temples.
The same is true in Hinduism, where the simple and ancient form of the lingam is the most common. Buddhism brought the sculpture of religious figures to East Asia, where there seems to have been no earlier equivalent tradition, though again simple shapes like the bi and cong had religious significance. Small sculptures as personal possessions go back to the earliest prehistoric art, the use of large sculpture as public art to impress the viewer with the power of a ruler, goes back at least to the Great Sphinx of some 4,500 years ago. In archaeology and art history the appearance, sometimes disappearance, of large or monumental sculpture in a culture is regarded as of great significance, though tracing the emergence is complicated by the presumed existence of sculpture in wood and other perishable materials of which no record remains; the ability to s
France
France the French Republic, is a country whose territory consists of metropolitan France in Western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The metropolitan area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean, it is bordered by Belgium and Germany to the northeast and Italy to the east, Andorra and Spain to the south. The overseas territories include French Guiana in South America and several islands in the Atlantic and Indian oceans; the country's 18 integral regions span a combined area of 643,801 square kilometres and a total population of 67.3 million. France, a sovereign state, is a unitary semi-presidential republic with its capital in Paris, the country's largest city and main cultural and commercial centre. Other major urban areas include Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Nice. During the Iron Age, what is now metropolitan France was inhabited by a Celtic people. Rome annexed the area in 51 BC, holding it until the arrival of Germanic Franks in 476, who formed the Kingdom of Francia.
The Treaty of Verdun of 843 partitioned Francia into Middle Francia and West Francia. West Francia which became the Kingdom of France in 987 emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages following its victory in the Hundred Years' War. During the Renaissance, French culture flourished and a global colonial empire was established, which by the 20th century would become the second largest in the world; the 16th century was dominated by religious civil wars between Protestants. France became Europe's dominant cultural and military power in the 17th century under Louis XIV. In the late 18th century, the French Revolution overthrew the absolute monarchy, established one of modern history's earliest republics, saw the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which expresses the nation's ideals to this day. In the 19th century, Napoleon established the First French Empire, his subsequent Napoleonic Wars shaped the course of continental Europe. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a tumultuous succession of governments culminating with the establishment of the French Third Republic in 1870.
France was a major participant in World War I, from which it emerged victorious, was one of the Allies in World War II, but came under occupation by the Axis powers in 1940. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and dissolved in the course of the Algerian War; the Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, remains today. Algeria and nearly all the other colonies became independent in the 1960s and retained close economic and military connections with France. France has long been a global centre of art and philosophy, it hosts the world's fourth-largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites and is the leading tourist destination, receiving around 83 million foreign visitors annually. France is a developed country with the world's sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP, tenth-largest by purchasing power parity. In terms of aggregate household wealth, it ranks fourth in the world. France performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, human development.
France is considered a great power in global affairs, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and an official nuclear-weapon state. It is a leading member state of the European Union and the Eurozone, a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, La Francophonie. Applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name "France" comes from the Latin "Francia", or "country of the Franks". Modern France is still named today "Francia" in Italian and Spanish, "Frankreich" in German and "Frankrijk" in Dutch, all of which have more or less the same historical meaning. There are various theories as to the origin of the name Frank. Following the precedents of Edward Gibbon and Jacob Grimm, the name of the Franks has been linked with the word frank in English, it has been suggested that the meaning of "free" was adopted because, after the conquest of Gaul, only Franks were free of taxation.
Another theory is that it is derived from the Proto-Germanic word frankon, which translates as javelin or lance as the throwing axe of the Franks was known as a francisca. However, it has been determined that these weapons were named because of their use by the Franks, not the other way around; the oldest traces of human life in what is now France date from 1.8 million years ago. Over the ensuing millennia, Humans were confronted by a harsh and variable climate, marked by several glacial eras. Early hominids led a nomadic hunter-gatherer life. France has a large number of decorated caves from the upper Palaeolithic era, including one of the most famous and best preserved, Lascaux. At the end of the last glacial period, the climate became milder. After strong demographic and agricultural development between the 4th and 3rd millennia, metallurgy appeared at the end of the 3rd millennium working gold and bronze, iron. France has numerous megalithic sites from the Neolithic period, including the exceptiona
Reign of Terror
The Reign of Terror, or The Terror, refers to a period during the French Revolution after the First French Republic was established. Several historians consider the "reign of terror" to have begun in 1793, placing the starting date at either 5 September, June or March, while some consider it to have begun in September 1792, or July 1789, but there is a consensus that it ended with the fall of Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794. Between June 1793 and the end of July 1794, there were 16,594 official death sentences in France, of which 2,639 were in Paris. There was a sense of emergency among leading politicians in France in the summer of 1793 between the widespread civil war and counter-revolution. Bertrand Barère exclaimed on 5 September 1793 in the Convention: "Let's make terror the order of the day!" They were determined to avoid street violence such as the September Massacres of 1792 by taking violence into their own hands as an instrument of government. Robespierre in February 1794 in a speech explained the necessity of terror: If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror.
Terror is nothing more than speedy and inflexible justice. Some historians argue. Others suggest there were additional causes, including emotional. Enlightenment thought emphasized the importance of rational thinking and began challenging legal and moral foundations of society, providing the leaders of the Terror with new ideas about the role and structure of government. Rousseau's Social Contract argued that each person was born with rights, they would come together to form a government that would protect those rights. Under the social contract, the government was required to act for the general will, which represented the interests of everyone rather than a few factions. Drawing from the idea of a general will, Robespierre felt that the French Revolution could result in a Republic built for the general will but only once those who fought this ideal were expelled; those who resisted the government were deemed "tyrants" fighting against the virtue and honor of the general will. The leaders felt their ideal version of government was threatened from the inside and outside of France, terror was the only way to preserve the dignity of the Republic created from French Revolution.
Robespierre's ideology was not derived from Rousseau. The writings of another Enlightenment thinker of the time, Baron de Montesquieu influenced Robespierre. One of Montesquieu's writings, The Spirit of the Laws, defines a core principle of a democratic government: virtue, he describes it as "the love of laws and of our country." In Robespierre's speech to the National Convention on 5 February 1794, On Political Morality, he talks about virtue being the "fundamental principle of popular or democratic government." This was, in fact, the same virtue defined by Montesquieu 50 years earlier. Robespierre believed that the virtue needed for any democratic government was lacking in the French people; as a result, he decided to weed out those. The result was a continual push towards Terror; the Convention used this as justification for the course of action to "crush the enemies of the revolution... let the laws be executed, … and let liberty be saved."These members of the Enlightenment movement influenced revolutionary leaders.
Voltaire's warnings were overlooked, though some of his ideas were used for justification of the Revolution and the start of the Terror. He protested against Catholic Dogmas and the ways of Christianity stating, "of all religions, the Christian should of course inspire the most toleration, but till now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men." These criticisms were used by Robespierre and other leaders as justification for their anti-religious reforms. Voltaire laid down some warnings. In his Philosophical Dictionary, he states, "we are all steeped in error. After the beginning of the French Revolution, the surrounding monarchies did not show great hostility towards the rebellion. Though ignored, Louis XVI was able to find support in Leopold II of Austria and Frederick William II of Prussia. On 27 August 1791, these foreign leaders made the Pillnitz Declaration saying they would restore the French monarch if other European rulers joined. In response to what they viewed to be the meddling of foreign powers, France declared war on 20 April 1792.
However, at this point, the war was only Austria against France. France began this war with a large series of defeats which set a precedent of fear of invasion in the people that would last throughout the war. Massive reforms of military institutions, while effective in the long run, presented the initial problems of inexperienced forces and leaders of questionable political loyalty. In the time it took for officers of merit to use their new freedoms to climb the chain of command, France suffered. Many of the early battles were definitive losses for the Fren
Montesquieu
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu referred to as Montesquieu, was a French judge, man of letters, political philosopher. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, implemented in many constitutions throughout the world, he is known for doing more than any other author to secure the place of the word "despotism" in the political lexicon. His anonymously published The Spirit of the Laws in 1748, received well in both Great Britain and the American colonies, influenced the Founding Fathers in drafting the United States Constitution. Montesquieu was born at the Château de la Brède in southwest France, 25 kilometres south of Bordeaux, his father, Jacques de Secondat, was a soldier with a long noble ancestry. His mother, Marie Françoise de Pesnel, who died when Charles was seven, was an heiress who brought the title of Barony of La Brède to the Secondat family. After the death of his mother he was sent to the Catholic College of Juilly, a prominent school for the children of French nobility, where he remained from 1700 to 1711.
His father died in 1713 and he became a ward of his uncle, the Baron de Montesquieu. He became a counselor of the Bordeaux Parliament in 1714; the next year, he married the Protestant Jeanne de Lartigue, who bore him three children. The Baron died in 1716, leaving him his fortune as well as his title, the office of président à mortier in the Bordeaux Parliament. Montesquieu's early life occurred at a time of significant governmental change. England had declared itself a constitutional monarchy in the wake of its Glorious Revolution, had joined with Scotland in the Union of 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. In France, the long-reigning Louis XIV died in 1715 and was succeeded by the five-year-old Louis XV; these national transformations had a great impact on Montesquieu. Montesquieu withdrew from the practice of law to devote himself to writing, he achieved literary success with the publication of his 1721 Persian Letters, a satire representing society as seen through the eyes of two imaginary Persian visitors to Paris and Europe, cleverly criticizing the absurdities of contemporary French society.
He next published Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, considered by some scholars, among his three best known books, as a transition from The Persian Letters to his master work. The Spirit of the Laws was published anonymously in 1748; the book rose to influence political thought profoundly in Europe and America. In France, the book met with an unfriendly reception from both supporters and opponents of the regime; the Catholic Church banned The Spirit – along with many of Montesquieu's other works – in 1751 and included it on the Index of Prohibited Books. It received the highest praise from the rest of Europe Britain. Montesquieu was highly regarded in the British colonies in North America as a champion of liberty. According to one political scientist, he was the most quoted authority on government and politics in colonial pre-revolutionary British America, cited more by the American founders than any source except for the Bible. Following the American Revolution, Montesquieu's work remained a powerful influence on many of the American founders, most notably James Madison of Virginia, the "Father of the Constitution".
Montesquieu's philosophy that "government should be set up so that no man need be afraid of another" reminded Madison and others that a free and stable foundation for their new national government required a defined and balanced separation of powers. Besides composing additional works on society and politics, Montesquieu traveled for a number of years through Europe including Austria and Hungary, spending a year in Italy and 18 months in England, where he became a freemason, admitted to the Horn Tavern Lodge in Westminster, before resettling in France, he was troubled by poor eyesight, was blind by the time he died from a high fever in 1755. He was buried in the Église Paris. Montesquieu's philosophy of history minimized the role of individual events, he expounded the view in Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence that each historical event was driven by a principal movement: It is not chance that rules the world. Ask the Romans, who had a continuous sequence of successes when they were guided by a certain plan, an uninterrupted sequence of reverses when they followed another.
There are general causes and physical, which act in every monarchy, elevating it, maintaining it, or hurling it to the ground. All accidents are controlled by these causes, and if the chance of one battle—that is, a particular cause—has brought a state to ruin, some general cause made it necessary for that state to perish from a single battle. In a word, the main trend draws with it all particular accidents. In discussing the transition from the Republic to the Empire, he suggested that if Caesar and Pompey had not worked to usurp the government of the Republic, other men would have risen in their place; the cause was not the ambition of man. Montesquieu is credited as being among the progenitors, which include Herodotus and Tacitus, of anthropology, as being among the first to extend comparative methods of classification to the political forms in human societies. Indeed, the French political anthropologist Georges Balandier considered Montesquieu to be "the initiator of a scientific enterprise that for a time performed the role of cultural and social anthrop
Quincunx
A quincunx is a geometric pattern consisting of five points arranged in a cross, with four of them forming a square or rectangle and a fifth at its center. It forms the arrangement of five units in the pattern corresponding to the five-spot on six-sided dice, playing cards, dominoes, it is represented in Unicode as U+2059 ⁙ FIVE DOT PUNCTUATION or U+2684 ⚄ DIE FACE-5. The quincunx was a coin issued by the Roman Republic c. 211–200 BC, whose value was five twelfths of an as, the Roman standard bronze coin. On the Roman quincunx coins, the value was sometimes indicated by a pattern of pellets. However, these dots were not always arranged in a quincunx pattern; the Oxford English Dictionary dates the first appearances of the Latin word in English as 1545 and 1574. The first citation for "A pattern used for planting trees" dates from 1606; the OED cites a 1647 reference to the German astronomer Kepler to the astronomical/astrological meaning. Jackson states that the word refers to the pattern of trees in an orchard, but uses it more abstractly for a version of the orchard-planting problem involving patterns of points and lines in the plane.
Quincunx patterns occur in many contexts: In heraldry, groups of five elements are arranged in a quincunx pattern, called in saltire in heraldic terminology. The flag of the Solomon Islands features this pattern, with its five stars representing the five main island groups in the Solomon Islands. Another instance of this pattern occurred in the flag of the 19th-century Republic of Yucatán, where it signified the five departments into which the republic was divided. A quincunx is a standard pattern for planting an orchard. Quincunxes are used in modern computer graphics as a pattern for multisample anti-aliasing. Quincunx antialiasing samples scenes at the corners and centers of each pixel; these five sample points, in the shape of a quincunx, are combined to produce each displayed pixel. However, samples at the corner points are shared with adjacent pixels, so the number of samples needed is only twice the number of displayed pixels. In numerical analysis, the quincunx pattern describes the two-dimensional five-point stencil, a sampling pattern used to derive finite difference approximations to derivatives.
In architecture, a quincuncial plan defined as a "cross-in-square", is the plan of an edifice composed of nine bays. The central and the four angular ones are covered with domes or groin vaults so that the pattern of these domes forms a quincunx. In Khmer architecture, the towers of a temple, such as Angkor Wat, are sometimes arranged in a quincunx to represent the five peaks of Mount Meru. A quincunx is one of the quintessential designs of Cosmatesque inlay stonework. A quincuncial map is a conformal map projection that maps the poles of the sphere to the centre and four corners of a square, thus forming a quincunx; the points on each face of a unit cell of a face-centred cubic lattice form a quincunx. The quincunx as a tattoo is known as the five dots tattoo, it has been variously interpreted as a fertility symbol, a reminder of sayings on how to treat women or police, a recognition symbol among the Romani people, a group of close friends, standing alone in the world, or time spent in prison.
Thomas Edison, whose many inventions included an electric pen which became the basis of a tattooing machine created by Samuel O'Reilly, had this pattern tattooed on his forearm. Republican Roman manipular legions adopted a checkered formation called quincunx when deployed for battle; the first two stages of the Saturn V super heavy-lift rocket had engines in a quincunx arrangement. A baseball diamond forms a quincunx with the pitcher's mound. Various literary works use or refer to the quincunx pattern for its symbolic value: The English physician Sir Thomas Browne in his philosophical discourse The Garden of Cyrus elaborates upon evidence of the quincunx pattern in art and mystically as evidence of "the wisdom of God". Although Browne wrote about quincunx in its geometric meaning, he may have been influenced by English astrology, as the astrological meaning of "quincunx" was introduced by the astronomer Kepler in 1604. James Joyce uses the term in Grace, a short story in The Dubliners of 1914, to describe the seating arrangement of five men in a church service.
Lobner argues that in this context the pattern serves as a symbol both of the wounds of Christ and of the Greek cross. Lawrence Durrell's novel sequence The Avignon Quintet is arranged in the form of a quincunx, according to the author; the Quincunx is the title of a lengthy and elaborate novel by Charles Palliser set in 19th-century England, published in 1989. In the first chapter of The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald's narrator cites Browne's writing on the quincunx; the quincunx in turn becomes a model for the way. Séamus Heaney describes Ireland's historical provinces as together forming a quincunx, as the Irish word for province cúige explicates; the five provinces of Ireland were Ulster, Connacht and Meath. More in his essay Frontier
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