MALTA (with Gozo) (177), a small British island in the Mediterranean, 80 m.  S. of Sicily; is a strongly fortified and a most important naval station, head-quarters of the British Mediterranean fleet, and coaling-station for naval and mercantile marine; with a history of great interest, Malta was annexed to Britain in 1814.  The island is treeless, and with few streams, but fertile, and has many wells.  Wheat, potatoes, and fruit are largely cultivated, and filigree work and cotton manufactured.  The people are industrious and thrifty; population is the densest in Europe.  The Roman Catholic Church is very powerful.  There is a university at Valetta, and since 1887 Malta has been self-governing.

MALTEBRUN, CONRAD, geographer, born in Denmark; studied in Copenhagen, but banished for his revolutionary sympathies; settled in Paris; was the author of several geographical works, his “Geographic Universelle” the chief (1775-1826).

MALTHUS, THOMAS R., an English economist, born near Dorking, in Surrey; is famous as the author of an “Essay on the Principle of Population,” of which the first edition appeared in 1798, and the final, greatly enlarged, in 1803; the publication provoked much hostile criticism, as it propounded a doctrine which was disastrous to the accepted theory of perfectibility, and which aimed at showing how the progress of the race was held in check by the limited supply of the means of subsistence, a doctrine that admittedly anticipated that struggle for life on a larger scale which the Darwinian hypothesis requires for its “survival of the fittest” (1766-1834).

MALVERN, GREAT (6), a watering-place in Worcestershire, on the side of the Malvern Hills, with a clear and bracing air, a plentiful supply of water, and much frequented by invalids.

MAMBRINO, a Moorish king, celebrated in the romances of chivalry, who possessed a helmet of pure gold which rendered the wearer of it invulnerable, the possession of which was the ambition of all the paladins of Charlemagne, and which was carried off by Rinaldo, who slew the original owner; Cervantes makes his hero persuade himself that he has found it in a barber’s brass basin.

MAMELUKES, originally slaves from the regions of the Caucasus, captured in war or bought in the market-place, who became the bodyguard of the Sultan in Egypt, and by-and-by his master to the extent of ruling the country and supplying a long line of Sultans of their own election from themselves, many of them enlightened rulers, governing the country well, but their supremacy was crushed by the Sultan of Turkey in 1517; after this, however, they retained much of their power, and they offered a brilliant resistance to Bonaparte at the battle of the Pyramids in 1798, who defeated them; but recovering their power after his withdrawal and proving troublesome, they were by two treacherous massacres annihilated in 1811 by Mehemet Ali, who became Viceroy of Egypt under the Porte.