contrast with Muspelheim, or
Brighthome, the primeval southern region of warmth and light, the two
poles, as it were, of the Norse world.

NIGER, a great river of Western Africa, whose head-waters rise amid
the Kong Mountains behind Sierra Leone; flowing NE. as far as Timbuctoo
(2 m. from the river), it there bends gradually southward, receives from
the E. its great affluent the Benue, and about 100 m. from the coast
begins to form a wide forest and jungle-covered delta (larger than that
of the Nile), and finally flows into the Gulf of Guinea by 22 mouths
after a course of some 2600 m. Forms, with the Benue, an invaluable
highway into the heart of the country; its upper and middle parts, under
the names Joliba, &c., are within the French sphere, and the lower
portion below Say is under English authority.

NIGHTINGALE, FLORENCE, a famous philanthropic nurse, born at
Florence, of wealthy English parentage; at the age of 22 entered the
institution of Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth to be trained as a
nurse, and afterwards studied the methods of nursing and hospital
management with the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, Paris; after
thoroughly reorganising Harley Street Hospital, London, she in 1854
volunteered to organise a staff of nurses to tend the wounded soldiers in
the Crimea; arriving at Scutari on the eve of Inkermann she, during the
terrible winter of 1854-55, ministered with unwearied devotion to the
suffering soldiers; on her return in 1856 she, with public support,
established a training college for nurses at St. Thomas's and at King's
College Hospital; she is author of "Notes on Nursing," "Notes on
Hospitals," &c.; _b_. in 1820.

NIHILISM, the principles of a movement on the part of the educated
classes in Russia which repudiates the existing creed and organisation of
society, and insists on a root and branch wholesale abolition of them and
a reconstruction of them on communistic principles, and for the purely
secular and everyday ends of common life, subordinating everything in the
first place to the feeding, clothing, and lodging of human beings in a
manner worthy of their rank in the scale of being. The term Nihilism is
also applied to those philosophical systems which sweep the course clear
of all incredibilities and irrationalities, but leave us bare of all our
inherited spiritual possessions.

NIJNI-NOVGOROD (73), capital of a Russian government of the same
name, situated at the confluenc