ZEEHAN, a township of recent growth on the W. coast of Tasmania, with large silver-lead mines wrought by several companies, and a source of great wealth.

ZEIT-GEIST (i. e.  Time-spirit), German name for the spirit of the time, or the dominant trend of life and thought at any particular period.

ZEITUN (20), a town in the province of Aleppo, with iron mines, inhabited chiefly by Armenian Christians; distinguished as having for centuries maintained their independence under Turkish oppression.

ZELLER, EDUARD, German professor of Philosophy, born in Wuertemberg; studied at Tuebingen; was first a disciple of Baur, and then of Hegel; became professor at Berlin, and devoted himself chiefly to the history of Greek philosophy, and distinguished himself most in that regard; b. 1814.

ZEMINDAR, in India a holder or farmer of land from the government, and responsible for the land-tax.

ZEM-ZEM, a sacred well in Mecca, and all built round along with the CAABA (q. v.); has its name from the bubbling sound of the waters; the Moslems think it the Well which Hagar found with her little Ishmael in the wilderness when he was dying of thirst.

ZENANA, in India the part of a house reserved for the women among Hindu families of good caste, and to which only since 1860 Christian women missionaries have been admitted, and a freer intercourse established.

ZEND, name applied, mistakenly it would seem, by the Europeans to the ancient Iranian language of Persia, or the language in which the Zend-Avesta is written, closely related to the Sanskrit of the Vedas it appears.

ZEND-AVESTA, the name given to the sacred writings of the Guebres or Parsees, ascribed to Zoroaster, of which he was more the compiler than the author, and of which many are now lost; they represent several stages of religious development, and as a whole yield no consistent system.

ZENITH, name of Arab origin given to the point of the heaven directly overhead, being as it were the pole of the horizon, the opposite point directly under foot being called the Nadir, a word of similar origin; the imaginary line connecting the two passes through the centre of the earth.

ZENO, Greek philosopher of the ELEATIC SCHOOL (q. v.), and who flourished in 500 B.C.; was the founder of the dialectic so successfully adopted by Socrates, which argues for a particular truth by demonstration of the absurdity that would follow from its denial, a process of argument known as the reductio ad absurdum.

ZENO, Greek philosopher, the founder of Stoic philosophy, born at Citium, in Cyprus, son of a merchant and bred to merchandise, but losing all in a shipwreck gave himself up to the study of philosophy; went to Athens, and after posing as a cynic at length opened a school of his own in the Stoa, where he taught to extreme old age a gospel called Stoicism, which, at the decline of the heathen world, proved the stay of many a noble