Micmacs
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a tribe of Algonquin Indians, the first with whom the English came in contact in America; they remained hostile to the English and their colonies till 1760. They number from 3,000 to 4,000, and are mostly in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton Island, Newfoundland, and New Brunswick. MICROBES. See BACTERIA. MICROCOSM and MACROCOSM. The belief of the ancients that the world or cosmos was animated, or had a soul, led to the notion that the parts and members of organic beings must have their counterparts in the members of the cosmos. The natural philosophers of the 16th century--Paracelsus at their headtook up this notion anew in a somewhat modified shape, and considered the world as a human organism on the large scale, and man as a world, or cosmos, in miniature; hence they called man a microcosm (Greek, "little world") and the universe itself the macrocosm ("great world"). With this was associated the belief that the vital movements of the microcosm exactly corresponded to those of the macrocosm, and represented them as it were in copy. From this it was an easy transition to the further assumption, that the movements of the stars exercise an influence on the temperament and for tunes of men. See ASTROLOGY. MICROMETER ment used with a telescope or microscope (-krom'-), an instruto measure small distances, or the apparent diameters of objects which subtend very small angles. Micrometers are variously constructed. The field of the telescope may be provided with a graduated scale, or a metallic ring, or a diaphragm having parallel and intersecting spider-lines or fine wires. The micrometer with a graduated scale is used for measuring distances by direct comparison.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote in 1921 the Micmacs were a remnant of "from 3,000 to 4,000" people; today the Mi'kmaq, who now spell their name that way, number in the tens of thousands across the Maritimes, Gaspe, Newfoundland and New England, with the Qalipu Mi'kmaq First Nation in Newfoundland federally recognized only in 2011 and enrolling tens of thousands of members. The old entry frames them purely as enemies of English colonists until 1760; the eighteenth-century Peace and Friendship Treaties it alludes to are now live law, upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in the 1999 Marshall decision on the right to fish and trade commercially. That ruling and the disputes it set off, including the 2020 confrontations over the Nova Scotia lobster fishery, have made the Mi'kmaq a central presence in Canadian legal and political life rather than the vanishing tribe of 1921. The Mi'kmaq language survives, taught in community schools and written in both roman orthography and the older hieroglyphic script.
Written for this edition, 2026.