MONTCLAIR  , a

town of Essex county, New Jersey, U.S.A., 5 M . N.N.W. of Newark . Pop . (1910 census) 21,550 . It is served by the Erie and the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western railways, and by electric lines to Caldwell and Newark . It is situated at the base and on the slopes of the Orange Mountains (its altitude above the sea varying from 217 to about 665 ft.), has an irregular street plan, and is a residential suburb of New York and other neighbouring cities . Montclair has excellent public schools . Among the town's institutions are the Mountainside hospital, a state normal school (1908), Montclair academy (1887), a public library, and two orphan asylums . An annual Bach festival was first held here in June 1905 . The lower part of Montclair was settled about 1675 and gradually became known as Cranetown, which name it retained until 1812 . In that year Bloomfield, including Cranetown, was organized as a separate township . In x868 Cranetown, then popularly known as West Bloomfield, with the addition of the Dutch-settled Speertown, was incorporated as Montclair .

Montclair became a town in 1894 . See

Henry Whittemore, History of Montclair (New York, 1894) . MONT-DE-MARSAN, a town of south-west France, capital of the department of Landes at the confluence of the Midou and the Douze, 92 M . S. of Bordeaux on the Southern railway between Morcenx and Tarbes . Pop . (1906), 9059 . Most of the buildings are in the older quarter, on the peninsula between the two rivers forming the Midouze . La Pepiniere, a beautiful public garden, extends along the right bank of the Douze . A keep of the 14th century, now used for military purposes, was built by Gaston Phoebus, count of Foix, to overawe the inhabitants, and goes by the name of Nou-Ii-Bos (in modern French " Tu ne 1'y veux pas ") . The finest of the modern buildings is an officers' club, which contains a small museum . A court of assizes sits in the town; the local institutions comprise a tribunal of first instance, a branch of the Bank of France, and a lycee . The industries include distillation of turpentine and resinous oils, tanning, the founding and forging of metal, wood-sawing, and manufactures of machinery and straw envelopes for bottles .

There is

trade in resin, wine, brandy, timber, cattle, horses and other live stock . Mont-de-Marsan, the first of the Bastides (q.v.) of the middle ages, dates from 1141, when it was founded by Pierre, vicomte de Marsan, as the capital of his territory . In the 13th century it passed to the viscounts of Beam, but the harsh rule of Gaston Phoebus and some of his successors induced the people to favour the English . The territory was united to the French Crown on the accession of Henry IV .