MAROONS, the name given to wild negro bands in Jamaica and Guiana; those in Jamaica left behind by the Spaniards on the conquest of the island by the English, 1655, escaped to the hills, and continued unsubdued till 1795; in Guiana they still maintain independent communities.  To MAROON a seaman is to leave him alone on an uninhabited island, or adrift in a boat.

MAROT, CLEMENT, French poet, born at Cahors; was valet-de-chambre of Margaret of Valois; was a man of ready wit and a satirical writer, the exercise of which often brought him into trouble; his poems, which consist of elegies, epistles, rondeaux, madrigals, and ballads, have left their impress on both the language and the literature of France (1495-1544).

MARPRELATE TRACTS, a series of clever but scurrilous tracts published under the name of Martin Marprelate, but which are the work of different writers in the time of Elizabeth against prelacy, and which gave rise to great excitement and some inquisition as to their authorship.

MARQUE.  See LETTER OF MARQUE.

MARQUESAS ISLANDS (5), a group of 13 small volcanic mountainous islands in the S. Pacific, 3600 m.  W. of Peru, under French protection since 1842, are peopled by a handsome but savage race, which is rapidly dying out; Chinese immigrants grow cotton; the more southerly were discovered by Mendana in 1595, the more northerly by Ingraham, an American, in 1791.

MARROW CONTROVERSY, a theological controversy which arose in Scotland in the 18th century over the teaching of a book entitled “The Marrow of Modern Divinity,” and which led to a secession from the Established Church on the part of the “Marrow men,” as the supporters of the doctrine of the book were called.  It contained an assertion of the evangelical doctrine of free grace, which was condemned by the Assembly, and for maintaining which the “Marrow men,” headed by the Erskines, were deposed in 1733, to the formation of the Secession Church.

MARRYAT, FREDERICK, novelist, born at Westminster; after service in the royal navy, which he entered in 1806, and in which he attained the rank of commandant, he retired in 1830, and commenced a series of novels; “Frank Mildmay,” the first, proving a success, he resolved to devote the rest of his life to literature; his novels were numerous, all of interest for their character sketches and adventures, and “Peter Simple” and “Midshipman Easy” are reckoned the best; it was by recourse to Marryat’s stories of sea life that Carlyle solaced himself after the burning of the MS. volume of his “French Revolution,” and that he put himself in tune to repair the loss (1792-1848).

MARS, the exterior planet of the Solar system, nearest the earth, of one-half its diameter, with a mean distance from the sun of 141,000,000 m., round which it takes 686 days to revolve, in a somewhat centric orbit, and 241/2 hours to revolve on its own axis, which inclines to its equator at an angle of 29 deg.; examination of it shows that there is four times as much land as water in it; it is accompanied by two moons, an outer making a revolution round it in 30 hours 18 minutes, and an inner in 7 hours and 38 minutes; they are the smallest heavenly bodies known to science.