the soft white substance which in trees is found between the liber or inner bark and the wood, and in process of time acquiring solidity becomes itself the wood. From its colour and comparative softness, it has been styled by some writers the fat of trees, adeps arborum. Its popular name is sap-wood.

ALCEUS, one of the great lyric poets of Greece, was a native of Mitylene, in Lesbos, and flourished about the year 600 B.C. From the fragments of his poems which have come down to us, we learn that his life was greatly mixed up with the political disputes and internal feuds of his native city. He sided with the nobles, and took an active part against the tyrants, who at that time set themselves up in Mitylene. He was obliged, in consequence, to quit his native country, and spend the rest of his life in exile. The date of his death is unknown. His poems, which were composed in the Æolian dialect, were collected afterwards, and apparently divided into ten books. The subjects, as we can still see from the fragments, were of the most varied kind: some of his poems were hymns to the gods; others were of a martial or political character; others again breathed an ardent love of liberty and hatred of the tyrants; and lastly, some were of an erotic kind, and appear to have been par... particularly remarkable for the fervour of the passion they described. Horace looks upon Alceus as his great model, and has, in one passage (Od. ii. 13. 26. et seq.), given a fine picture of the poetical powers of the Æolian bard. The care which Alceus bestowed upon the construction of his verses was probably the reason why one kind of metre, the Alcaic, was named after him. Not one of his compositions has come down to us entire, but a complete collection of all the extant fragments may be found in Bergk's "Poetas Lyrici Graeci," Lipsiae, 1852, 8vo.

Alceus, an Athenian comic poet, or rather a writer of what is termed mixed comedy. He left ten pieces, one of which, Pasiphae, he produced when he contended with Aristophanes, in the year B.C. 388.