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ancient Egypt, “ Osiris was represented by a sceptre and an eye,”to denote that, this god was the sun looking down from heaven onall tilings upon earth. Some of the ancients, however, and a fewof the most learned moderns, have contended, that by Osiris theEgyptians understood the Nile or spirit of the Nile , whilst othershave confounded him with the Grecian Bacchus. But that theyareall mistaken, has been evinced by Jablonski in such a manner asto enforce the fullest conviction. But though the original Osiris wasundoubtedly the sun , or the intelligence actuating the sun, yetthere-was a secondary Osiris , who was said to be the founder ofthe Egyptian monarchy; and, as was customary in those days,having either received the name of the sun, .or communicated hisown to that luminary, was after his death deified fur the benefitswhich he had rendered to his country: and being at first worship-ped only as a demigod, was in process of time advanced to full di-vinity, and confounded with his heavenly godfather.

OSMA, a town of Spain , in Old Castile, 80 miles N. by E. ofMadrid . Lon. 2. 12. \V. Lat. 41.30. N.

OSMAN 1. orOTHMAN L emperor of the Turks, succeededhis uncle Mustapha l. who was deposed in 1618. He marchedagainst the Poles in 162’-, with a great army, but being repeatedlydefeated, concluded a disadvantageous peace, and'returned borne;where he was deposed by the janizaries, and Mustapha restored,who caused him to be strangled.

OSM1TES, in botany, a genus of the syngenesia class, andpolygamu frustraneaorder; natural order Compositse. Calyx im-bricate, seariose ; corolla of the ray ligulutc ; down obsolete ; re-ceptacle chaffy. There are four species, shrubs of the Cape.

OSMIUM , a metal which as well as iridium was discovered byMr. Tennant, in the black powder which remained after dissolv-ing platina. The osmium was obtained by beating the black pow-der with pure alkali, in a silver-crucible. The oxide of this metalcombined with the alkali ma\ be expelled by an acid, and, beingvery volatile, may be obtained by distillation. It does not redden ve-getable blues, but stains the skin of a deep red or black. The ox-ide, in solution with water, is colourless; combined with alkalior lime, it is yellow; with the infusion of nut-galls, it all'ords avery vivid blue colour. It is precipitated by all the metals, ex-cepting gold and platina. The name osmium was given to thismetal because of its strong smell of the oxide.

OSMUND, OSMUNDA, Moonwort ; in botanv, a genus ofthe order of /ilices, and eryplogamia class of plants ; capsules dis-tinct, disposed in a raceme, in such a manner as to look the sameway, or else heaped on the back of the pinna or division of thefrond, sessile, sub-globular, opening transversely without any ring;seeds very many, extremely minute. There are twenty-sevenspecies. 1 he root of the O. regalis boiled in water is very slimy ;aU cvoTii Se » ^ le " ol ^' to stiffen linen instead of starch.

OSNABRUCK, or OSNABURG, a late bishopric of Ger-many, situated in the centre of Westphalia .

. Osnaburg, or Osnabkuck, the capital of the above latebishopric, 3o miles N. E. of Munster. Lon. 8. 20. E Lat. 52.24. N.

Osnaburg Island, or Mautea, an island in the South Sea,about three miles in circuit; m some parts covered with trees inothers naked. Lon. 147. 30. W. Lat. 17. 51. S. ’

Osnaburg Island, another island in the South Sea, discoveredby Captain Carteret, in 1707. Lon. 141. 34. W. Lat. 22. 4s. S.

OSORNO, a town of Chili, on the Bueno, 80 miles S of Valdi-via. Lon. 73. 20. W.. Lat. 40. 58. S.

OSPRAY, or OSPREY. Sec Falco.

OSSA, a lofty mountain of Thessaly, near the Pencus, whichruns between this mountain and Olympus; famous, in fabulous his-tory as one of tiiose which the giants piled up -to facilitate their'attack on heaven.

OSSABAW, an island of the United States , near the E. coast ofGeorgia, 20 miles in circumference. Lon. 81. 17. W. Lat. 31.■42. N.

OSIER, or SAL1X VIMINALIS, an indigenous plant, grow-ing in woods, and hedges, especially on boggy land ; it flowers inle months of April amt May. This shrub is very valuable; asits leaves are eaten by horses, cows, sheep, and goats ; its pliantutgs are woven into pulcheons ; wheels for taking eels ; and into>nd-cages: the branches are much used for making hoops, andaige baskets, farther, it forms a hardy and useful hedge forex-vol. iv.— no. Ifi 7 . b

eluding boisterous winds; and, as it flourishes in wet situations*is frequently planted, with a view to prevent the banks of riversfrom being washed away by the force of the current.

OSSELET, [French, ], a little hard substance arising on the-nside of a horse’s knee, among the small bones; jt grows out of agummy substance which fastens those bones together.

OSSETI, or OSS1, one of the Seven Nations of Mount Cau-casus. The Circassians and Tartars call them Kuslia. Their lan-guage is analogous to the Persian .

OSSETIA, the country of the Osseti, is situated between theBlack Sea and the Caspian.

OSSIAN, a celebrated Celtic poet , who is supposed to haveflourished in Caledonia, about the end ot the second or beginningof the third century ; of whom little else is known than what is con-tained in those of his poems, Which were collected, translated, andpublished, by Mr. Macpherson. (See Macpherson.) He wasthe sou of Fingal, who is said to have commanded the Caledoniansduring the invasion of Severus. (See Fingal.) It appears fromhis poems, that in one ot his early expeditions to Ireland , Ossiauhad fallen in love with and married pvirallin, daughter to Branno,petty king of Lego. This Evirallin brought him his son Oscar,whose exploits he celebrates in many of bis poems, and whose deathlie laments in the first book of Tern ora. Evirallin died some timebefore Oscar, (Fingal, B. iv.) who seems to have been her only-child; and Ossian did not marry afterwards: so that his posterity-ended in the death of Oscar; wjio-seems to have died as he wasabout to be married to Malvina, the daughter of Toscar. 'Phiscelebrated maid remained with her intended father-in-law while•he lived, and paid him every attention which his age demanded.It is not certain at what age Ossiau died ; but from bis having beenlong blind with years, and from the many contrasts between bispresent and past situations, in poems composed, as it would ap-pear, at a considerable distance of time from each other, it is mostlikely he lived to an extreme old age. The current tradition is,that he died in the house of Culdee, called the Son of Alpin, withwhom he is said to have held several conferences about the doc-trines of Christianity . The authenticity, however, of these par-ticulars has been disputed by men of the highest literary eminence.But Dr. Blair in a letter to Mr. Morison gives his opinion as fol-lows: “That Mr. M’Pherson may not have given an exact andscrupulous translation of all these poems; that he may have joined,and collected scattered pieces into one, and have omitted somerudenesses that were in the original, is what I never called in.question. But that they are not poems of his composing, butare -really and truly in the substance of them, genuine, original, andancient Gaelick songs, well known to many natives of the High-lands, is what, from innumerable circumstances which I had access-to trace, I am as fully convinced and as certain of, as I can be ofany tiling under the sun.”

OSSIFICATION, in the animal (Economy, is the formationof the bones, but more particularly the conversion of parts natu-rally soft to the hardness and consistency of bones. Bones, Dr-Drake contends, are formed out of the most comminute or brokenparts of the blood ; as the blood of old men, which by a longcourse of circulation becomes in a manner unfit for the commonoffice of nutrition, will however ossify, and convert into bones,many of the tendons and ligaments, and even the- coats of the ves-sels themselves, whose substance being next to the hones the most,compact, admits only of the smallest particles of the blood, whichtherefore soonest become osseous, as they are frequently found.Dr. Nesbit’s opinion of ossification is, "that in the blood, or afluid secreted from it, there is au ossifying juice, having particleswhich are not apparent: (hat .whenever nature designs an ossifica-tion between membranes, or within a cartilage, she occasions amore Hum usual afflux of this fluid ; which so much distends thevessels .which were before invisible, as to make them capable ofreceiving the red globules of blood, which is always to be seennear, to the place where ossification is begun. In Ibis blood, gritty,bony particles may be felt by the point of ;f knife, which have "beenformed by the attraction and cohesion of the particles of the ossify-ing juice obstructed, along with the other grosser fluids, in thebeginning of the vessels prepared to receive refluent juices. SecAnatomy* .and Bones.

OSSILAGO, in Roman antiquity, the god of the bones, whowas supposed to have the care of forming and joining the human, 2 Y bones;