pper,
tin, iron, and chemical works.

NEBIIM, the prophets of Israel as an organised class, who first
figure as guardians of the spiritual interests of the nation to the time
of Samuel, when it was threatened with extinction piecemeal at the hands
of the Philistines, and whose mission it was to recall the divided tribes
to a sense of their unity as the chosen of Jehovah, and to see that they
were welded into one under a single king; they lived together in
communities, appeared in companies, wore a distinctive dress, and were
called the sons of the prophets; while they were performing and
discharging their offices they were true to their calling, but when order
was established they, as is usual in such cases, became more and more
lax, until first Elijah, and then another and another who were for most
part not of the order, had, if they would be true to their own souls, to
remind the nation of what its authorised teachers, in their
unfaithfulness, were failing to do, and in consequence suffering God's
cause to go to wreck.

NEBRASKA (1,058), one of the west central States of the American
Union, has Dakota on its N. and Kansas and Colorado on the S., is 11/2
times the size of England; in the E. stretches of fertile land yield
abundant crops of grain (maize chiefly), hemp, flax, sugar-beet, and
tobacco, while in the W. rich prairie pastures favour a prosperous
stock-raising; the Platte, Niobrarah, and Republican Rivers follow the
eastward slope of the land; Omaha and Lincoln (capital) are the chief
centres of the manufacturing industries; climate is dry and bracing;
wolves, foxes, skunks, &c., abound, chiefly in the "Bad Lands" of the N.;
Nebraska was incorporated in the American Union in 1867.

NEBULAE, name given to masses larger or smaller of misty light in the
heavens caused by a group of stars too remote to be severally visible to
the naked eye.

NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS, the theory that the sun and planets with their
satellites in the solar system were originally one mass of nebulous
matter which, gradually cooling and contracting, under violent revolution
resolved itself into separate revolving orbs.

NECKER, JACQUES, celebrated financier, born at Geneva, banker in
Paris; married the accomplished Susanne Curchod, the rejected of Gibbon,
and became by her the father of Mme. de Stael; was a man of high repute
for probity and business capacity; became in 1777 Director-General of
Finance in France, tried hard a