UXBRIDGE  , a

market town in the Uxbridge parliamentary division of Middlesex, England, 18 m . W. by N. of St Paul's Cathedral, London, on the river Colne, and on branches of the Great Western and Metropolitan railways . Pop. of urban district (1901), 8585 . There are breweries, foundries and engineering works, and a considerable traffic is carried on by means of the Grand Junction Canal . The town, which is connected by electric tramway with Hammersmith, London, has extended considerably in modern times as a residential centre . The church of St Margaret is Perpendicular, and retains a fine font in that style, and several ancient monuments . Uxbridge is an ancient borough, stated to have been one of those originated by Alfred the Great, but it is not mentioned in Domesday . Here negotiations were begun, on the 3oth of January 1645, between the commissioners of Charles I. and the parliament, but were broken off on the 22nd of February . A part of the " Treaty House," in which they were carried on, remains . In 1647 the parliamentary forces had for some time their headquarters in the town . It remained a garrison town until 1689 . It obtained the grant of a market from Henry II .

U XMAL, a deserted

city of the Mayas in the state of Yucatan, Mexico, 20 M . W. of Tikul, a station on the railway between Merida and Valladolid . The ruins stand on a wooded plain, and cover an area of a little more than half a mile square, although fragments are found over a much larger space . Uxmal is the largest and most important of the deserted cities of Yucatan, and shows some of the finest specimens of Maya architecture . The climate is much drier than that of Chiapas, and the structures are in a better state of preservation than those of Palenque, but the rank vegetation and the decay of the wooden lintels over the doorways have broken down many of the walls . Uxmal was inhabited for some time after the Spanish conquest, but perhaps only by a remnant of a population once much larger . The neighbourhood is now very unhealthy, and it may be presumed that the process of depopulation, caused by increasingly unhealthy conditions and diminishing sources of food supply, was gradual . There are no streams near the ruins, and the water-supply was derived from cisterns and from a few pools now filled with soil and vegetation . A rather soft limestone was used in the buildings, but the locality of the quarries has not been discovered . The walls are commonly about 3 ft. thick, in some cases much thicker, and the stones were set in a whitish mortar . Stone implements wereused . The outer surfaces of the walls are usually- divided by a horizontal moulding into two unequal zones, the lower one plain with a band of sculptured ornaments at the base, and the upper elaborately sculptured .

The interior walls were generally plastered and rarely ornamented . There are no windows, but large doorways . The jambs were of dressed stone, usually plain, and the longer lintels were of zapote

wood; some of them, where protected from the weather, are still to be seen, sometimes covered with inscriptions . The buildings are rectangular in shape, long and narrow, divided usually into two ranges of rooms . They are generally arranged in groups of four, enclosing a quadrangular court, and sometimes singly on massive eminences . The interiors are cut up into numerous small rooms by transverse partitions, while numerous beam-holes and dumb-sheaves indicate other divisions . The rooms are covered by acutely pointed vaults, the stones forming the sides of the vault being bevelled to the angle, and the apex being covered by capstones covering spaces of one to two feet . The spaces between the vaults are filled with solid masonry, and above all is the roof covering, also of masonry, which is some-times surmounted with an ornamental roof-comb . The buildings stand upon raised terraces, or upon truncated pyramids, approached by broad stairways, usually of cut stone . There are five principal buildings or groups—the Temple of the Magician, Nunnery Quadrangle, House of the Turtles, House of the Pigeons and Governor's Palace . There are other structures and groups, smaller and more dilapidated . One of them, standing immediately S. of the Nunnery, consists of two parallel walls only; it is usually described as the ball-court, or gymnasium, a structure common to most Maya cities .

The Temple of the Magician crowns an unusually steep

pyramid 240 X 18o ft. at the base and 8o ft. high . It has three rooms, and a smaller temple is built against the upper western side of the pyramid . A broad steep stairway ascends to the summit platform on the E., and a narrower stairway to the lower temple on the W . The west front is filled with remarkable figures and designs, including the lattice work common in Uxmal . The Nunnery Quadrangle consists of four large rectangular independent buildings, enclosing a quadrangular court, the whole occupying a terrace over 300 ft. square at the base and upwards of 15 ft. above the level of the plain . The buildings resemble each other in the arrangement of their rooms, and their elaborately ornamented facades face inwards upon the court . The division of the buildings into numerous small rooms is understood to signify that they were used as communal habitations, possibly of priestly orders . The Governor's Palace, standing upon a triple terrace S. of the Nunnery, is, according to W . H . Holmes, " the most important single structure of its class in Yucatan, and for that matter in America." It is 320 ft. long, 40 ft. wide and 25 or 26 ft. high, divided into a long central and two end sections, separated by recesses and two trans-verse archways about 25 ft. long, to ft. wide and 20 ft. high . These archways were subsequently blocked, and may have been intended originally as portals to a quadrangle which was never built . The upper zone of the exterior walls is about to ft. wide, exclusive of the mouldings and ornamental frieze, and its total length of 720 ft. is crowded with sculptures, in which there are three principal motives —the mask, the fret and the lattice .

The projecting snouts in the

line of masks forming the upper part of this zone are a peculiar feature of Uxmal ornamentation . The House of the Turtles is a comparatively small structure near the N.W. corner of the Governor's Palace . It has the same features found in the other structures except for a line of sculptured turtles on the mouldings of the frieze . Immediately S.W. of the Governor's Palace is a huge truncated pyramid, 200 X300 ft. at the base and 6o to 70 ft. high . Beyond this is another large quadrangular group known as the House of the Pigeons . It resembles the Nunnery Quadrangle, except that the northern building carries a peculiar roof-comb of colossal size, running its entire length and rising to a height of about 16 ft . The base of this comb is 4 ft. high, capped by a moulding and perforated by over 5o openings . Above this the comb is divided into nine sections rising by large steps to the apex, each pierced by 30 or more openings, like an immense dovecote . Projecting stones suggest that they were built to carry statues or figures like the roof-combs of Palenque . UZ, JOHANN PETER (172o-1796), German poet, was born at Ansbach on the 3rd of October 1720 . He studied law, 1739-43, at the university of Halle, where he associated with the poets Johann Ludwig Gleim (q.v.) and Johann Nikolaus Gotz (q.v.), and in conjunction with the latter translated the odes of Anacreon (1746) . In 1748 Uz was appointed unpaid secretary to the Justizcollegium, an office he held for twelve years; in 1763 he became assessor to the imperial court of justice at Nuremberg, in 1790 was made a judge and, on the annexation of Ansbach to Prussia (2nd of December 1791), entered the Prussian judicial service, and died, shortly after his appointment as Landrichter, at Ansbach on the 12th of May 1796 .

Uz wrote a number of graceful lyrics in Gleim's style, and some patriotic odes; he is the typical representative of the

rococo period in German poetry . In 1749 the first collection of his Lyrische Gedichte was anonymously published . He also wrote, in alexandrines, Der Sieg des Liebesgottes (1753), a close imitation of Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock, and a didactic poem, Versuch Uber die Kunst stets frohlich zu sein (1760) . A complete edition of Uz's works—Samtliche Poetische Werkewas published at Leipzig, 1768; a new edition (Vienna, 1804), which has been often reprinted . A critical edition was published by A . Sauer in 1890 . See Henriette Feuerbach, Uz and Cronegk (1866), Briefe von Uz an einen Freund aus den Jahren 1753–82 (published by A . Henneberger (1866) and E . Petzet, Johann Peter Uz (Ansbach, 1896) . UZ . The " land of Uz " (ply raa) is best known as the scene of the story of Job . Its precise location is a matter of uncertainty, opinion being divided between a position N. of Palestine (" Aram Naharaim ") and one to the S.E., in the neighbourhood of Edom .

In favour of the former are the references in Gen. x . 23, xxii . 21, the inclusion of Job among " the

children of the East," the possibility that Bildad the Shuhite (cf . Gen. xxv . 2, 6) belonged to the Suhu, a people living on the right bank of the Euphrates, and the description of Elihu as a Buzite (xxxii . 2) . Whether the name Uz is found or not in the cuneiform inscriptions is disputed . In favour of the S.E. position we have the description of Elihu as of the family of Ram' which (1 Chron. ii.) was a distinctly southern people, the fact that Eliphaz was a Temanite (i.e. he came from Edom, cf . Gen. xxxvi . 4) and the references in Gen. xxxvi . 28 and Lam. iv . 21 .

The mention of Uz in Jer. xxv . 20 is probably a

gloss . While Edom and Uz are not to be identified, the traditional association of " wisdom " with Edom may incline us to place the Uz of Job in its neighbourhood rather than in that of the Euphrates . The tradition which places Job's home in Hauran has no value . It is worth noting that the Septuagint forms from Uz the adjective Mains, which points to a pronunciation Aus=Arabic AuI, the name of a god whose worship was widely spread and might therefore be readily borne by tribes or attached to districts in several regions .