AQUILEIA, an Italian village, 22 m.  W. of Trieste, once a place of great importance, where several councils of the Church were held.

AQUI`NAS, THOMAS, the Angelic Doctor, or Doctor of the Schools, an Italian of noble birth, studied at Naples, became a Dominican monk despite the opposition of his parents, sat at the feet of Albertus Magnus, and went with him to Paris, was known among his pupils as the “Dumb Ox,” from his stubborn silence at study, prelected at his Alma Mater and elsewhere with distinguished success, and being invited to assist the Council at Lyons, fell sick and died.  His “Summa Theologiae,” the greatest of his many works, is a masterly production, and to this day of standard authority in the Romish Church.  His writings, which fill 17 folio vols., along with those of Duns Scotus, his rival, constitute the high-water mark of scholastic philosophy and the watershed of its divergence into the PHILOSOPHICO-SPECULATIVE THOUGHT on the one hand, and the ETHICO-PRACTICAL OR REALISM OF MODERN TIMES on the other, q. v. (1226-1274).

AQUITAINE`, a division of ancient Gaul between the Garonne and the Pyrenees, was from the time of Henry II. till 1453 an appanage of the English crown.

ARABELLA STUART, a cousin of King James I., the victim all her days of jealousy and state policy, suspected of aspiring to the crown on the death of Queen Elizabeth, was shut up in the Tower of London, where she died bereft of reason in 1615 at the age of 38.

ARABESQUE, an ornamentation introduced by the Moors, consisting of imaginary, often fantastic, mathematical or vegetable forms, but exclusive of the forms of men and animals.

ARA`BI, AHMED PASHA, leader of an insurrectionary movement in Egypt in 1882; he claimed descent from the Prophet; banished to Ceylon; b. 1839.

ARABIA (12,000), the most westerly peninsula of Asia and the largest in the world, being one-third the size of the whole of Europe, consisting of (a) a central plateau with pastures for cattle, and fertile valleys; (b) a ring of deserts, the Nefud in the N., stony, the Great Arabian, a perfect Sahara, in the S., sandy, said sometimes to be 600 ft. deep, and the Dahna between; and (c) stretches of coast land, generally fertile on the W. and S.; is divided into eight territories; has no lakes or rivers, only wadies, oftenest dry; the climate being hot and arid, has no forests, and therefore few wild animals; a trading country with no roads or railways, only caravan routes, yet the birthland of a race that threatened at one time to sweep the globe, and of a religion that has been a life-guidance to wide-scattered millions of human beings for over twelve centuries of time.

ARABIA FELIX, the W. coast of Arabia, contains YEMEN and EL HEJAZ (q. v.), and is subject to Turkey.

ARABIAN DESERT.  See ARABIA.