martyrs with this thy
chrism, perfected by thee, O Lord, blessed, abiding within our bowels in
the name of our Lord Jesus Christ."

In various churches the dead are anointed with holy oil, to guard them
against the vampires or ghouls which ever threaten to take possession of
dead bodies and live in them. In the Armenian church, as formerly in
many Greek churches, a cross is not holy until the Spirit has been
formally led into it by means of prayer and anointing with holy oil. A
new church is anointed at its four corners, and also the altar round
which it is built; similarly tombs, church gongs, and all other
instruments and utensils dedicated to cultual uses. In churches of the
Greek rite a little of the old year's chrism is left in the jar to
communicate its sanctity to that of the new. (F. C. C.)

ANOMALY (from Gr. [Greek: anomalia], unevenness, derived from [Greek:
an-], privative, and [Greek: homalos], even), a deviation from the
common rule. In astronomy the word denotes the angular distance of a
body from the pericentre of the orbit in which it is moving. Let AB be
the major axis of the orbit, B the pericentre, F the focus or centre of
motion, P the position of the body. The anomaly is then the angle BFP
which the radius vector makes with the major axis. This is the actual or
_true anomaly_. _Mean anomaly_ is the anomaly which the body would have
if it moved from the pericentre around F with a uniform angular motion
such that its revolution would be completed in its actual time (see
ORBIT). _Eccentric anomaly_ is defined thus:--Draw the circumscribing
circle of the elliptic orbit around the centre C of the orbit. Drop the
perpendicular RPQ through P, the position of the planet, upon the major
axis. Join CR; the angle CRQ is then the eccentric anomaly.

[Illustration]

In the ancient astronomy the anomaly was taken as the angular distance
of the planet from the point of the farthest recession from the earth.

_Kepler's Problem_, namely, that of finding the co-ordinates of a planet
at a given time, which is equivalent--given the mean anomaly--to that of
determining the true anomaly, was solved approximately by Kepler, and
more completely by Wallis, Newton and others.

The anomalistic revolution of a planet or other heavenly body is the
revolution between two consecutive passages through the pericentre.
Starting from the pericentre, it is completed on the return to the
pericentre. If the pericentre is