AP´ATITE, a translucent but seldom transparent mineral, which crystallizes in a regular six-sided prism, usually terminated by a truncated six-sided pyramid. It passes through various shades of colour, from white to yellow, green, blue, and occasionally red, scratches fluor-spar but is scratched by felspar, and has a specific gravity of about 3.5. It is a compound of calcium phosphate with calcium fluoride or chloride. It occurs principally in igneous rocks, particularly diorites. The very coarse-grained granites of Ontario contain apatite crystals of corresponding size, which have been picked out as a source of artificial phosphate manures. Apatite supplies to soils almost all the phosphorus available for plants in a state of nature.
APE, a common name of a number of quadrumanous animals inhabiting the Old World (Asia and the Asiatic Islands, and Africa), and including a variety of species. The word _ape_ was formerly applied indiscriminately to all quadrumanous mammals; but it is now limited to the anthropoid or man-like monkeys. The family includes the chimpanzee, gorilla, orang-outang, &c., and has been divided into three genera, Troglod[)y]tes, Simia, and Hylob[)a]tes. See _Chimpanzee_, _Gibbon_, _Gorilla_, _Monkey_, _Orang_, &c.
APELDOORN (ä´pel-d[=o]rn), a town of Holland, province of Guelderland, 17 miles north of Arnhem, with manufactures of paper. The royal palace Loo is here. Pop. 44,474.
APELLES (a-pel´[=e]z), the most famous of the painters of ancient Greece and of antiquity, was born in the fourth century B.C., probably at Colophon. Ephorus of Ephesus was his first teacher, but attracted by the renown of the Sicyonian school he went and studied at Sicyon. In the time of Philip he went to Macedonia, and there a close friendship between him and Alexander the Great was established. The most admired of his pictures was that of Venus rising from the sea and wringing the water from her dripping locks. His portrait of Alexander with a thunderbolt in his hand was no less celebrated. He died about the end of the century. Among the anecdotes told of Apelles is the one which gave rise to the Latin proverb, 'Ne sutor ultra crepidam'--'Let not the shoemaker go beyond the shoe'. Having heard a cobbler point out an error in the drawing of a shoe in one of his pictures he corrected it, whereupon the cobbler took upon him to criticize the leg, and received from the artist the famous reply.