ALACOQUE, MARIE, a French nun of a mystic tendency, the founder of the devotion of the Sacred Heart (1647-1690).

ALAD`DIN, one of the chiefs of the Assassins in the 13th century, better known by the name of the Old Man of the Mountain.

ALADDIN, a character in the “Arabian Nights,” who became possessed of a wonderful lamp and a wonderful ring, by rubbing which together he could call two evil genii to do his bidding.

ALADINISTS, free-thinkers among the Mohammedans.

ALAGO`AS (397), a maritime province of Brazil, N. of Pernambuco, 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 wife.