, 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 mas