everely from an earthquake.

AVOCA, or OVOCA, VALE OF, a mountain glen of county Wicklow, Ireland, in
the south-eastern part of the county, formed by the junction of the small
rivers Avonmore and Avonbeg, which, rising in the central highlands of the
county, form with their united waters the Ovoca river, flowing south and
south-east to the Irish Sea at Arklow. The vale would doubtless rank only
as one among the many beautiful glens of the district, but that it has
obtained a lasting celebrity through one of the _Irish Melodies_ of the
poet Thomas Moore, in which its praises are sung. It is through this song
that the form "Avoca" is most familiar, although the name is locally spelt
"Ovoca." The glen is narrow and densely wooded. Its beauty is somewhat
marred by the presence of lead and copper mines, and by the main line of
the Dublin & South Eastern railway, on which Ovoca station, midway in the
vale, is 42-3/4 m. south of Dublin. Of the two "meetings of the waters"
(the upper, of the Avonmore and Avonbeg, and the lower, of the Aughrim with
the Ovoca) the upper, near the fine seat of Castle Howard, is that which
inspired the poet. At Avondale, above the upper "meeting," by the Avonmore,
Charles Stewart Parnell was born.

AVOCADO PEAR, the fruit of the tree _Persea gratissima_, which grows in the
West Indies and elsewhere; the flesh is of a soft and buttery consistency
and highly esteemed. The name _avocado_, the Spanish for "advocate," is a
sound-substitute for the Aztec _ahuacatl_; it is also corrupted into
"alligator-pear." _Avocato_, _avigato_, _abbogada_ are variants.

AVOGADRO, AMEDEO, CONTE DI QUAREGNA (1776-1856), Italian physicist, was
born at Turin on the 9th of June 1776, and died there on the 9th of July
1856. He was for many years professor of higher physics in Turin
University. He published many physical memoirs on electricity, the
dilatation of liquids by heat, specific heats, capillary attraction, atomic
volumes &c. as well as a treatise in 4 volumes on _Fisica di corpi
ponderabili_ (1837-1841). But he is chiefly remembered for his "Essai d'une
maniere de determiner les masses relatives des molecules elementaires des
corps, et les proportions selon lesquelles elles entrent dans les
combinaisons" (_Journ. de Phys._, 1811), in which he enunciated the
hypothesis known by his name (Avogadro's rule) that under the same
conditions of temperature and pressure equal volumes of all gases contain
the same number of