ZITTAU (25), a town of Saxony, 71 m.  SE. of Dresden, with a magnificent Rathhaus; stands on a vast lignite deposit; manufactures cotton, linen, machinery, &c.

ZLATOUST (21), a Russian town near the Urals, 130 m.  NE. of Ufa, with iron and gold mines near; manufactures sword-blades and other steel ware.

ZOAR, a small village of Ohio, U.S., 91 m.  S. of Cleveland, and the seat of a German Socialistic community.

ZOeCKLER, OTTO, German theologian, professor at Greifswald; edited a “Handbuch der theologischen Wissenschaft,” and other works; b. 1833.

ZODIAC, the name given to a belt of the heavens extending 8 deg. on each side of the ecliptic, composed of twelve constellations called signs of the zodiac, which the sun traverses in the course of a year.  These signs, of which six are on the N. of the ecliptic and six on the S., are, commencing with the former, named successively:  Aries, the Ram; Taurus, the Bull; Gemini, the Twins; Cancer, the Crab; Leo, the Lion; Virgo, the Virgin; Libra, the Balance; Scorpio, the Scorpion; Sagittarius, the Archer; Capricornus, the Goat; Aquarius, the Water-bearer; and Pisces, the Fishes.  The sun enters Aries at the spring equinox and Libra at the autumnal equinox, while the first point of Cancer marks the summer solstice, and that of Capricorn the winter.  The name Zodiac is derived from the Greek zoon, an animal, and has been given to the belt because the majority of the signs are named after animals.

ZODIACAL LIGHT, a track of light of triangular figure with its base on the horizon, which in low latitudes is seen within the sun’s equatorial plane before sunrise in the E. or after sunset in the W., and which is presumed to be due to a glow proceeding from some illuminated matter surrounding the sun.

ZOHAR, a Jewish book of cabalistic commentaries on the Old Testament.

ZOILUS, a Greek rhetorician who flourished in the 3rd century B.C.; was distinguished for the bitterness with which he criticised Homer, and whose name has in consequence become a synonym for a malignant critic, hence the saying, “Every great poet has his Zoilus.”

ZOLA, EMILE, a noted French novelist of the realistic school, or of what he prefers to call the naturalist school, born in Paris, of Italian descent; began literature as a journalist, specially in the critical department, but soon gave himself up to novel-writing, ultimately on realistic lines, and an undue catering, as some think, to a morbid interest on the seamy side of life, to which he addressed himself with great vigour and not a little graphic power, but in an entire misconception of his proper functions as an artist and a man of letters, though, it may be pleaded, he has done so from a strong conviction on his part that his duty lay the other way, and that it was high time literature should, regardless of merely dilettante aestheticism, address itself to exposing, by depicting it, the extent to