HODMEZO-VASARHELY

hodmezo-vasarhely, a town of hungary, in the county of csongrad, 135 m. s.e. of budapest by rail. pop. (1900) 60,824 of which about two-thirds are protestants. the town, situated on lake hod, not far from the right bank of the tisza, has a modern aspect. the soil of the surrounding country, of which 383 sq. m. belong to the municipality, is exceedingly fertile, the chief products being wheat, mangcorn, barley, oats, millet, maize and various descriptions of fruit, especially melons. extensive vineyards, yielding large quantities of both white and red grapes, skirt the town, and the horned cattle and horses of hodmezo-vasarhely have a good reputation; sheep and pigs are also extensively reared. the commune is protected from inundations of the tisza by an enormous dike, but the town, nevertheless, sometimes suffers considerable damage during the spring floods. hodograph (gr. [greek: hodos], a way, and [greek: graphein], to write), a curve of which the radius vector is proportional to the velocity of a moving particle. it appears to have been used by james bradley, but for its practical development we are mainly indebted to sir william rowan hamilton, who published an account of it in the _proceedings of the royal irish academy_, 1846. if a point be in motion in any orbit and with any velocity, and if, at each instant, a line be drawn from a fixed point parallel and equal to the velocity of the moving point at that instant, the extremities of these lines will lie on a curve called the hodograph. let pp1p2 be the path of the moving point, and let ot, ot1,