Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "L" to "Lamellibranchia" (part 3)

In the first and most critical stage of the South African War of 1899-1902 (see Transvaal) Ladysmith was the centre of the struggle. During the British concentration on the town there were fought the actions of Talana (or Dundee) on the 20th, Elandslaagte on the 21st and Rietfontein on the 24th of October 1899. On the 30th of October the British sustained a serious defeat in the general action of Lombard’s Kop or Farquhar’s Farm, and Sir George White decided to hold the town, which had been fortified, against investment and siege until he was relieved directly or indirectly by Sir Redvers Buller’s advance. The greater portion of Buller’s available troops were despatched to Natal in November, with a view to the direct relief of Ladysmith, which meantime the Boers had closely invested. His first attempt was repelled on the 15th of December in the battle of Colenso, his second on the 24th of January 1900 by the successful Boer counterstroke against Spion Kop, and his third was abandoned without serious fighting (Vaalkranz, Feb. 5). But two or three days after Vaalkranz, almost simultaneously with Lord Roberts’s advance on Bloemfontein Sir Redvers Buller resumed the offensive in the hills to the east of Colenso, which he gradually cleared of the enemy, and although he was checked after reaching the Tugela below Colenso (Feb. 24) he was finally successful in carrying the Boer positions (Pieter’s Hill) on the 27th and relieving Ladysmith, which during these long and anxious months (Nov. 1-Feb. 28) had suffered very severely from want of food, and on one occasion (Caesar’s Camp, Jan. 6, 1900) had only with heavy losses and great difficulty repelled a powerful Boer assault. The garrison displayed its unbroken resolution on the last day of the investment by setting on foot a mobile column, composed of all men who were not too enfeebled to march out, in order to harass the Boer retreat. This expedition was however countermanded by Buller.

LAELIUS, the name of a Roman plebeian family, probably settled at Tibur (Tivoli). The chief members were:—

Gaius Laelius, general and statesman, was a friend of the elder Scipio, whom he accompanied on his Spanish campaign (210-206 B.C.). In Scipio’s consulship (205), Laelius went with him to Sicily, whence he conducted an expedition to Africa. In 203 he defeated the Massaesylian prince Syphax, who, breaking his alliance with Scipio, had joined the Carthaginians, and at Zama (202) rendered considerable service in command of the cavalry. In 197 he was plebeian aedile and in 196 praetor of Sicily. As consul in 190 he was employed in organizing the recently conquered territory in Cisalpine Gaul. Placentia and Cremona were repeopled, and a new colony founded at Bononia. He is last heard of in 170 as ambassador to Transalpine Gaul. Though little is known of his personal qualities, his intimacy with Scipio is proof that he must have been a man of some importance. Silius Italicus (Punica, xv. 450) describes him as a man of great endowments, an eloquent orator and a brave soldier.

See Index to Livy; Polybius x. 3. 9, 39, xi. 32, xiv. 4. 8, xv. 9. 12, 14; Appian, Hisp. 25-29; Cicero, Philippica, xi. 7.

His son, Gaius Laelius, is known chiefly as the friend of the younger Scipio, and as one of the speakers in Cicero’s De senectute, De amicitia (or Laelius) and De Republica. He was surnamed Sapiens (“the wise”), either from his scholarly tastes or because, when tribune, he “prudently” withdrew his proposal (151 B.C.) for the relief of the farmers by distributions of land, when he saw that it was likely to bring about disturbances. In the third Punic War (147) he accompanied Scipio to Africa, and distinguished himself at the capture of the Cothon, the military harbour of Carthage. In 145 he carried on operations with moderate success against Viriathus in Spain; in 140 he was elected consul. During the Gracchan period, as a staunch supporter of Scipio and the aristocracy, Laelius became obnoxious to the democrats. He was associated with P. Popillius Laenas in the prosecution of those who had supported Tiberius Gracchus, and in 131 opposed the bill brought forward by C. Papirius Carbo to render legal the election of a tribune to a second year of office. The attempts of his enemies, however, failed to shake his reputation. He was a highly accomplished man and belonged to the so-called “Scipionic circle.” He studied philosophy under the Stoics Diogenes Babylonius and Panaetius of Rhodes; he was a poet, and the plays of Terence, by reason of their elegance of diction, were sometimes attributed to him. With Scipio he was mainly instrumental in introducing the study of the Greek language and literature into Rome. He was a gifted orator, though his refined eloquence was perhaps less suited to the forum than to the senate. He delivered speeches De Collegiis (145) against the proposal of the tribune C. Licinius Crassus to deprive the priestly colleges of their right of co-optation and to transfer the power of election to the people; Pro Publicanis (139), on behalf of the farmers of the revenue; against the proposal of Carbo noticed above; Pro Se, a speech in his own defence, delivered in answer to Carbo and Gracchus; funeral orations, amongst them two on his friend Scipio. Much information is given concerning him in Cicero, who compares him to Socrates.

See Index to Cicero; Plutarch, Tib. Gracchus, 8; Appian, Punica, 126; Horace, Sat. ii. 1. 72; Quintilian, Instit. xii. 10. 10; Suetonius, Vita Terentii; Terence, Adelphi, Prol. 15, with the commentators.

LAENAS, the name of a plebeian family in ancient Rome, notorious for cruelty and arrogance. The two most famous of the name are:—

Gaius Popillius Laenas, consul in 172 B.C. He was sent to Greece in 174 to allay the general disaffection, but met with little success. He took part in the war against Perseus, king of Macedonia (Livy xliii. 17, 22). When Antiochus Epiphanes, king of Syria, invaded Egypt, Laenas was sent to arrest his progress. Meeting him near Alexandria, he handed him the decree of the senate, demanding the evacuation of Egypt. Antiochus having asked time for consideration, Laenas drew a circle round him with his staff, and told him he must give an answer before he stepped out of it. Antiochus thereupon submitted (Livy xlv. 12; Polybius xxix. 11; Cicero, Philippica, viii. 8; Vell. Pat. i. 10).

Publius Popillius Laenas, son of the preceding. When consul in 132 B.C. he incurred the hatred of the democrats by his harsh measures as head of a special commission appointed to take measures against the accomplices of Tiberius Gracchus. In 123 Gaius Gracchus brought in a bill prohibiting all such commissions, and declared that, in accordance with the old laws of appeal, a magistrate who pronounced sentence of death against a citizen, without the people’s assent, should be guilty of high treason. It is not known whether the bill contained a retrospective clause against Laenas, but he left Rome and sentence of banishment from Italy was pronounced against him. After the restoration of the aristocracy the enactments against him were cancelled, and he was recalled (121).

See Cicero, Brutus, 25. 34, and De domo sua, 31; Vell. Pat. ii. 7; Plutarch, C. Gracchus, 4.

The name is said by Cicero to be derived from laena, the sacerdotal cloak carried by Marcus Popillius (consul 359) when he went to the forum to quell a popular rising.

LAER (or Laar), PIETER VAN (1613-c. 1675), Dutch painter, was born at Laaren in Holland. The influence of a long stay in Rome begun at an early age is seen in his landscape and backgrounds, but in his subjects he remained true to the Dutch tradition, choosing generally lively scenes from peasant life, as markets, feasts, bowling scenes, farriers’ shops, robbers, hunting scenes and peasants with cattle. From this taste, or from his personal deformity, he was nicknamed Bamboccio by the Italians. On his return to Holland about 1639, he lived chiefly at Amsterdam and Haarlem, in which latter city he died in 1674 or 1675. His pictures are marked by skilful composition and good drawing; he was especially careful in perspective. His colouring, according to Crowe, is “generally of a warm, brownish tone, sometimes very clear, but oftener heavy, and his execution broad and spirited.” Certain etched plates are also attributed to him.

LAESTRYGONES, a mythical race of giants and cannibals. According to the Odyssey (x. 80) they dwelt in the farthest north, where the nights were so short that the shepherd who was driving out his flock met another driving it in. This feature of the tale contains some hint of the long nightless summer in the Arctic regions, which perhaps reached the Greeks through the merchants who fetched amber from the Baltic coasts. Odysseus in his wanderings arrived at the coast inhabited by the Laestrygones, and escaped with only one ship, the rest being sunk by the giants with masses of rock. Their chief city was Telepylus, founded by a former king Lamus, their ruler at that time being Antiphates. This is a purely fanciful name, but Lamus takes us into a religious world where we can trace the origin of the legend, and observe the god of an older religion becoming the subject of fairy tales (see Lamia) in a later period.

The later Greeks placed the country of the Laestrygones in Sicily, to the south of Aetna, near Leontini; but Horace (Odes, iii. 16. 34) and other Latin authors speak of them as living in southern Latium, near Formiae, which was supposed to have been founded by Lamus.

LAETUS, JULIUS POMPONIUS [Giulio Pomponio Leto], (1425-1498), Italian humanist, was born at Salerno. He studied at Rome under Laurentius Valla, whom he succeeded (1457) as professor of eloquence in the Gymnasium Romanum. About this time he founded an academy, the members of which adopted Greek and Latin names, met on the Quirinal to discuss classical questions and celebrated the birthday of Romulus. Its constitution resembled that of an ancient priestly college, and Laetus was styled pontifex maximus. The pope (Paul II.) viewed these proceedings with suspicion, as savouring of paganism, heresy and republicanism. In 1468 twenty of the academicians were arrested during the carnival; Laetus, who had taken refuge in Venice, was sent back to Rome, imprisoned and put to the torture, but refused to plead guilty to the charges of infidelity and immorality. For want of evidence, he was acquitted and allowed to resume his professorial duties; but it was forbidden to utter the name of the academy even in jest. Sixtus IV. permitted the resumption of its meetings, which continued to be held till the sack of Rome (1527) by Constable Bourbon during the papacy of Clement VII. Laetus continued to teach in Rome until his death on the 9th of June 1498. As a teacher, Laetus, who has been called the first head of a philological school, was extraordinarily successful; in his own words, like Socrates and Christ, he expected to live on in the person of his pupils, amongst whom were many of the most famous scholars of the period. His works, written in pure and simple Latin, were published in a collected form (Opera Pomponii Laeti varia, 1521). They contain treatises on the Roman magistrates, priests and lawyers, and a compendium of Roman history from the death of the younger Gordian to the time of Justin III. Laetus also wrote commentaries on classical authors, and promoted the publication of the editio princeps of Virgil at Rome in 1469.

See The Life of Leto by Sabellicus (Strassburg, 1510); G. Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des klassischen Alterthums, ii.; F. Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter, vii. (1894), p. 576, for an account of the academy; Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship (1908), ii. 92.

LAEVIUS (? c. 80 B.C.), a Latin poet of whom practically nothing is known. The earliest reference to him is perhaps in Suetonius (De grammaticis, 3), though it is not certain that the Laevius Milissus there referred to is the same person. Definite references do not occur before the 2nd century (Fronto, Ep. ad M. Caes. i. 3; Aulus Gellius, Noct. Att. ii. 24, xii. 10, xix. 9; Apuleius, De magia, 30; Porphyrion, Ad Horat. carm. iii. 1, 2). Some sixty miscellaneous lines are preserved (see Bährens, Fragm. poët. rom. pp. 287-293), from which it is difficult to see how ancient critics could have regarded him as the master of Ovid or Catullus. Gellius and Ausonius state that he composed an Erotopaegnia, and in other sources he is credited with Adonis, Alcestis, Centauri, Helena, Ino, Protesilaudamia, Sirenocirca, Phoenix, which may, however, be only the parts of the Erotopaegnia. They were not serious poems, but light and often licentious skits on the heroic myths.

See O. Ribbeck, Geschichte der römischen Dichtung, i.; H. de la Ville de Mirmont, Étude biographique et littéraire sur le poète Laevius (Paris, 1900), with critical ed. of the fragments, and remarks on vocabulary and syntax; A. Weichert, Poëtarum latinorum reliquiae (Leipzig, 1830); M. Schanz, Geschichte der römischen Litteratur (2nd ed.), pt. i. p. 163; W. Teuffel, Hist. of Roman Literature (Eng. tr.), § 150, 4; a convenient summary in F. Plessis, La Poésie latine (1909), pp. 139-142.

LAEVULINIC ACID (β-acetopropionic acid), C5H8O3 or CH3CO·CH2·CH2·CO2H, a ketonic acid prepared from laevulose, inulin, starch, &c., by boiling them with dilute hydrochloric or sulphuric acids. It may be synthesized by condensing sodium acetoacetate with monochloracetic ester, the acetosuccinic ester produced being then hydrolysed with dilute hydrochloric acid (M. Conrad, Ann., 1877, 188, p. 222).

It may also be prepared by heating the anhydride of γ-methyloxy-glutaric acid with concentrated sulphuric acid, and by oxidation of methyl heptenone and of geraniol. It crystallizes in plates, which melt at 32.5-33° C. and boil at 148-149° (15 mm.) (A. Michael, Jour. prak. Chem., 1891 , 44, p. 114). It is readily soluble in alcohol, ether and water. The acid, when distilled slowly, is decomposed and yields α- and β-angelica lactones. When heated with hydriodic acid and phosphorus, it yields n-valeric acid; and with iodine and caustic soda solution it gives iodoform, even in the cold. With hydroxylamine it yields an oxime, which by the action of concentrated sulphuric acid rearranges itself to N-methylsuccinimide [CH2·CO]2N·CH3.

LA FARGE, JOHN (1835-1910), American artist, was born in New York, on the 31st of March 1835, of French parentage. He received instruction in drawing from his grandfather, Binsse de St Victor, a painter of miniatures; studied law and architecture; entered the atelier of Thomas Couture in Paris, where he remained a short time, giving especial attention to the study and copying of old masters at the Louvre; and began by making illustrations to the poets (1859). An intimacy with the artist William M. Hunt had a strong influence on him, the two working together at Newport, Rhode Island. La Farge painted landscape, still life and figure alike in the early sixties. But from 1866 on he was for some time incapacitated for work, and when he regained strength he did some decorative work for Trinity church, Boston, in 1876, and turned his attention to stained glass, becoming president of the Society of Mural Painters. Some of his important commissions include windows for St Thomas’s church (1877), St Peter’s church, the Paulist church, the Brick church (1882), the churches of the Incarnation (1885) and the Ascension (1887), New York; Trinity church, Buffalo, and the “Battle Window” in Memorial Hall at Harvard; ceilings and windows for the house of Cornelius Vanderbilt, windows for the houses of W. H. Vanderbilt and D. O. Mills, and panels for the house of Whitelaw Reid, New York; panels for the Congressional Library, Washington; Bowdoin College, the Capitol at St Paul, Minn., besides designs for many stained glass windows. He was also a prolific painter in oil and water colour, the latter seen notably in some water-colour sketches, the result of a voyage in the South Seas, shown in 1895. His influence on American art was powerfully exhibited in such men as Augustus St Gaudens, Wilton Lockwood, Francis Lathrop and John Humphreys Johnston. He became president of the Society of American Artists, a member of the National Academy of Design in 1869; an officer of the Legion of Honour of France; and received many medals and decorations. He published Considerations on Painting (New York, 1895), Hokŭsai: A Talk about Hokŭsai (New York, 1897), and An Artist’s Letters from Japan (New York, 1897).

See Cecilia Waern, John La Farge, Artist and Writer (London, 1896, No. 26 of The Portfolio).

LA FARINA, GIUSEPPE (1815-1863), Italian author and politician, was born at Messina. On account of the part he took in the insurrection of 1837 he had to leave Sicily, but returning in 1839 he conducted various newspapers of liberal tendencies, until his efforts were completely interdicted, when he removed to Florence. In 1840 he had published Messina ed i suoi monumenti, and after his removal to Florence he brought out La Germania coi suoi monumenti (1842), L’ Italia coi suoi monumenti (1842), La Svizzera storica ed artistica (1842-1843), La China, 4 vols. (1843-1847), and Storia d’ Italia, 7 vols. (1846-1854). In 1847 he established at Florence a democratic journal, L’ Alba, in the interests of Italian freedom and unity, but on the outbreak of the revolution in Sicily in 1848 he returned thither and was elected deputy and member of the committee of war. In August of that year he was appointed minister of public instruction and later of war and marine. After vigorously conducting a campaign against the Bourbon troops, he was forced into exile, and repaired to France in 1849. In 1850 he published his Storia documentata della Rivoluzione Siciliana del 1848-1849, and in 1851-1852 his Storia d’ Italia dal 1815 al 1848, in 6 vols. He returned to Italy in 1854 and settled at Turin, and in 1856 he founded the Piccolo Corriere d’ Italia, an organ which had great influence in propagating the political sentiments of the Società Nazionale Italiana, of which he ultimately was chosen president. With Daniele Manin (q.v.), one of the founders of that society, he advocated the unity of Italy under Victor Emmanuel even before Cavour, with whom at one time he had daily interviews, and organized the emigration of volunteers from all parts of Italy into the Piedmontese army. He also negotiated an interview between Cavour and Garibaldi, with the result that the latter was appointed commander of the Cacciatori delle Alpi in the war of 1859. Later he supported Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily, where he himself went soon after the occupation of Palermo, but he failed to bring about the immediate annexation of the island to Piedmont as Cavour wished. In 1860 he was chosen a member of the first Italian parliament and was subsequently made councillor of state. He died on the 5th of September 1863.

See A. Franchi, Epistolario di Giuseppe La Farina (2 vols., 1869) and L. Carpi, Il Risorgimento Italiano, vol. i. (Milan, 1884).

LA FAYETTE, GILBERT MOTIER DE (1380-1462), marshal of France, was brought up at the court of Louis II., 3rd duke of Bourbon. He served under Marshal Boucicaut in Italy, and on his return to France after the evacuation of Genoa in 1409 became seneschal of the Bourbonnais. In the English wars he was with John I., 4th duke of Bourbon, at the capture of Soubise in 1413, and of Compiègne in 1415. The duke then made him lieutenant-general in Languedoc and Guienne. He failed to defend Caen and Falaise in the interest of the dauphin (afterwards Charles VII.) against Henry V. in 1417 and 1418, but in the latter year he held Lyons for some time against Jean sans Peur, duke of Burgundy. A series of successes over the English and Burgundians on the Loire was rewarded in 1420 with the government of Dauphiny and the office of marshal of France. La Fayette commanded the Franco-Scottish troops at the battle of Baugé (1422), though he did not, as has been sometimes stated, slay Thomas, duke of Clarence, with his own hand. In 1424 he was taken prisoner by the English at Verneuil, but was released shortly afterwards, and fought with Joan of Arc at Orleans and Patay in 1429. The marshal had become a member of the grand council of Charles VII., and with the exception of a short disgrace about 1430, due to the ill-will of Georges de la Trémouille, he retained the royal favour all his life. He took an active part in the army reform initiated by Charles VII., and the establishment of military posts for the suppression of brigandage. His last campaign was against the English in Normandy in 1449. He died on the 23rd of February 1462. His line was continued by Gilbert IV. de La Fayette, son of his second marriage with Jeanne de Joyeuse.

LA FAYETTE, LOUISE DE (c. 1616-1665), was one of the fourteen children of John, comte de La Fayette, and Marguerite de Bourbon-Busset. Louise became maid of honour to Anne of Austria, and Richelieu sought to attract the attention of Louis XIII. to her in the hope that she might counterbalance the influence exercised over him by Marie de Hautefort. The affair did not turn out as the minister wished. The king did indeed make her the confidante of his affairs and of his resentment against the cardinal, but she, far from repeating his confidences to the minister, set herself to encourage the king in his resistance to Richelieu’s dominion. She refused, nevertheless, to become Louis’s mistress, and after taking leave of the king in Anne of Austria’s presence retired to the convent of the Filles de Sainte-Marie in 1637. Here she was repeatedly visited by Louis, with whom she maintained a correspondence. Richelieu intercepted the letters, and by omissions and falsifications succeeded in destroying their mutual confidence. The cessation of their intercourse was regretted by the queen, who had been reconciled with her husband through the influence of Louise. At the time of her death in January 1665 Mlle de La Fayette was superior of a convent of her order which she had founded at Chaillot.

See Mémoires de Madame de Motteville; Victor Cousin, Madame de Hautefort (Paris, 1868); L’Abbé Sorin, Louise-Angèle de La Fayette (Paris, 1893).

LA FAYETTE, MARIE JOSEPH PAUL YVES ROCH GILBERT DU MOTIER. Marquis de (1757-1834), was born at the château of Chavaniac in Auvergne, France, on the 6th of September 1757. His father was killed at Minden in 1759, and his mother and his grandfather died in 1770, and thus at the age of thirteen he was left an orphan with a princely fortune. He married at sixteen Marie Adrienne Françoise de Noailles (d. 1807), daughter of the duc d’Ayen and granddaughter of the duc de Noailles, then one of the most influential families in the kingdom. La Fayette chose to follow the career of his father, and entered the Guards.

La Fayette was nineteen and a captain of dragoons when the English colonies in America proclaimed their independence. “At the first news of this quarrel,” he afterwards wrote in his memoirs, “my heart was enrolled in it.” The count de Broglie, whom he consulted, discouraged his zeal for the cause of liberty. Finding his purpose unchangeable, however, he presented the young enthusiast to Johann Kalb, who was also seeking service in America, and through Silas Deane, American agent in Paris, an arrangement was concluded, on the 7th of December 1776, by which La Fayette was to enter the American service as major-general. At this moment the news arrived of grave disasters to the American arms. La Fayette’s friends again advised him to abandon his purpose. Even the American envoys, Franklin and Arthur Lee, who had superseded Deane, withheld further encouragement and the king himself forbade his leaving. At the instance of the British ambassador at Versailles orders were issued to seize the ship La Fayette was fitting out at Bordeaux, and La Fayette himself was arrested. But the ship was sent from Bordeaux to a neighbouring port in Spain, La Fayette escaped from custody in disguise, and before a second lettre de cachet could reach him he was afloat with eleven chosen companions. Though two British cruisers had been sent in pursuit of him, he landed safely near Georgetown, S.C., after a tedious voyage of nearly two months, and hastened to Philadelphia, then the seat of government of the colonies.

When this lad of nineteen, with the command of only what little English he had been able to pick up on his voyage, presented himself to Congress with Deane’s authority to demand a commission of the highest rank after the commander-in-chief, his reception was a little chilly. Deane’s contracts were so numerous, and for officers of such high rank, that it was impossible for Congress to ratify them without injustice to Americans who had become entitled by their service to promotion. La Fayette appreciated the situation as soon as it was explained to him, and immediately expressed his desire to serve in the American army upon two conditions—that he should receive no pay, and that he should act as a volunteer. These terms were so different from those made by other foreigners, they had been attended with such substantial sacrifices, and they promised such important indirect advantages, that Congress passed a resolution, on the 31st of July 1777, “that his services be accepted, and that, in consideration of his zeal, illustrious family and connexions, he have the rank and commission of major-general of the United States.” Next day La Fayette met Washington, whose lifelong friend he became. Congress intended his appointment as purely honorary, and the question of giving him a command was left entirely to Washington’s discretion. His first battle was Brandywine (q.v.) on the 11th of September 1777, where he showed courage and activity and received a wound. Shortly afterwards he secured what he most desired, the command of a division—the immediate result of a communication from Washington to Congress of November 1, 1777, in which he said:—

“The marquis de La Fayette is extremely solicitous of having a command equal to his rank. I do not know in what light Congress will view the matter, but it appears to me, from a consideration of his illustrious and important connexions, the attachment which he has manifested for our cause, and the consequences which his return in disgust might produce, that it will be advisable to gratify his wishes, and the more so as several gentlemen from France who came over under some assurances have gone back disappointed in their expectations. His conduct with respect to them stands in a favourable point of view—having interested himself to remove their uneasiness and urged the impropriety of their making any unfavourable representations upon their arrival at home. Besides, he is sensible, discreet in his manners, has made great proficiency in our language, and from the disposition he discovered at the battle of Brandywine possesses a large share of bravery and military ardour.”

Of La Fayette’s military career in the United States there is not much to be said. Though the commander of a division, he never had many troops in his charge, and whatever military talents he possessed were not of the kind which appeared to conspicuous advantage on the theatre to which his wealth and family influence rather than his soldierly gifts had called him. In the first months of 1778 he commanded troops detailed for the projected expedition against Canada. His retreat from Barren Hill (May 28, 1778) was commended as masterly; and he fought at the battle of Monmouth (June 28,) and received from Congress a formal recognition of his services in the Rhode Island expedition (August 1778).

The treaties of commerce and defensive alliance, signed by the insurgents and France on the 6th of February 1778, were promptly followed by a declaration of war by England against the latter, and La Fayette asked leave to revisit France and to consult his king as to the further direction of his services. This leave was readily granted; it was not difficult for Washington to replace the major-general, but it was impossible to find another equally competent, influential and devoted champion of the American cause near the court of Louis XVI. In fact, he went on a mission rather than a visit. He embarked on the 11th of January 1779, was received with enthusiasm, and was made a colonel in the French cavalry. On the 4th of March following Franklin wrote to the president of Congress: “The marquis de La Fayette ... is infinitely esteemed and beloved here, and I am persuaded will do everything in his power to merit a continuance of the same affection from America.” He won the confidence of Vergennes.

La Fayette was absent from America about six months, and his return was the occasion of a complimentary resolution of Congress. From April until October 1781 he was charged with the defence of Virginia, in which Washington gave him the credit of doing all that was possible with the forces at his disposal; and he showed his zeal by borrowing money on his own account to provide his soldiers with necessaries. The battle of Yorktown, in which La Fayette bore an honourable if not a distinguished part, was the last of the war, and terminated his military career in the United States. He immediately obtained leave to return to France, where it was supposed he might be useful in negotiations for a general peace. He was also occupied in the preparations for a combined French and Spanish expedition against some of the British West India Islands, of which he had been appointed chief of staff, and a formidable fleet assembled at Cadiz, but the armistice signed on the 20th of January 1783 between the belligerents put a stop to the expedition. He had been promoted (1781) to the rank of maréchal de camp (major-general) in the French army, and he received every token of regard from his sovereign and his countrymen. He visited the United States again in 1784, and remained some five months as the guest of the nation.

La Fayette did not appear again prominently in public life until 1787, though he did good service to the French Protestants, and became actively interested in plans to abolish slavery. In 1787 he took his seat in the Assembly of Notables. He demanded, and he alone signed the demand, that the king convoke the states-general, thus becoming a leader in the French Revolution. He showed Liberal tendencies both in that assembly and after its dispersal, and in 1788 was deprived, in consequence, of his active command. In 1789 La Fayette was elected to the states-general, and took a prominent part in its proceedings. He was chosen vice-president of the National Assembly, and on the 11th of July 1789 presented a declaration of rights, modelled on Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence in 1776. On the 15th of July, the second day of the new régime, La Fayette was chosen by acclamation colonel-general of the new National Guard of Paris. He also proposed the combination of the colours of Paris, red and blue, and the royal white, into the famous tricolour cockade of modern France (July 17). For the succeeding three years, until the end of the constitutional monarchy in 1792, his history is largely the history of France. His life was beset with very great responsibility and perils, for he was ever the minister of humanity and order among a frenzied people who had come to regard order and humanity as phases of treason. He rescued the queen from the hands of the populace on the 5th and 6th of October 1789, saved many humbler victims who had been condemned to death, and he risked his life in many unsuccessful attempts to rescue others. Before this, disgusted with enormities which he was powerless to prevent, he had resigned his commission; but so impossible was it to replace him that he was induced to resume it. In the Constituent Assembly he pleaded for the abolition of arbitrary imprisonment, for religious tolerance, for popular representation, for the establishment of trial by jury, for the gradual emancipation of slaves, for the freedom of the press, for the abolition of titles of nobility, and the suppression of privileged orders. In February 1790 he refused the supreme command of the National Guard of the kingdom. In May he founded the “Society of 1789” which afterwards became the Feuillants Club. He took a prominent part in the celebration of July 14, 1790, the first anniversary of the destruction of the Bastille. After suppressing an émeute in April 1791 he again resigned his commission, and was again compelled to retain it. He was the friend of liberty as well as of order, and when Louis XVI. fled to Varennes he issued orders to stop him. Shortly afterwards he was made lieutenant-general in the army. He commanded the troops in the suppression of another émeute, on the occasion of the proclamation of the constitution (September 18, 1791), after which, feeling that his task was done, he retired into private life. This did not prevent his friends from proposing him for the mayoralty of Paris in opposition to Pétion.

When, in December 1791, three armies were formed on the western frontier to attack Austria, La Fayette was placed in command of one of them. But events moved faster than La Fayette’s moderate and humane republicanism, and seeing that the lives of the king and queen were each day more and more in danger, he definitely opposed himself to the further advance of the Jacobin party, intending eventually to use his army for the restoration of a limited monarchy. On the 19th of August 1792 the Assembly declared him a traitor. He was compelled to take refuge in the neutral territory of Liége, whence as one of the prime movers in the Revolution he was taken and held as a prisoner of state for five years, first in Prussian and afterwards in Austrian prisons, in spite of the intercession of America and the pleadings of his wife. Napoleon, however, though he had a low opinion of his capacities, stipulated in the treaty of Campo Formio (1797) for La Fayette’s release. He was not allowed to return to France by the Directory. He returned in 1799; in 1802 voted against the life consulate of Napoleon; and in 1804 he voted against the imperial title. He lived in retirement during the First Empire, but returned to public affairs under the First Restoration and took some part in the political events of the Hundred Days. From 1818 to 1824 he was deputy for the Sarthe, speaking and voting always on the Liberal side, and even becoming a carbonaro. He then revisited America (July 1824-September 1825) where he was overwhelmed with popular applause and voted the sum of $200,000 and a township of land. From 1825 to his death he sat in the Chamber of Deputies for Meaux. During the revolution of 1830 he again took command of the National Guard and pursued the same line of conduct, with equal want of success, as in the first revolution. In 1834 he made his last speech—on behalf of Polish political refugees. He died at Paris on the 20th of May 1834. In 1876 in the city of New York a monument was erected to him, and in 1883 another was erected at Puy.

Few men have owed more of their success and usefulness to their family rank than La Fayette, and still fewer have abused it less. He never achieved distinction in the field, and his political career proved him to be incapable of ruling a great national movement; but he had strong convictions which always impelled him to study the interests of humanity, and a pertinacity in maintaining them, which, in all the strange vicissitudes of his eventful life, secured him a very unusual measure of public respect. No citizen of a foreign country has ever had so many and such warm admirers in America, nor does any statesman in France appear to have ever possessed uninterruptedly for so many years so large a measure of popular influence and respect. He had what Jefferson called a “canine appetite” for popularity and fame, but in him the appetite only seemed to make him more anxious to merit the fame which he enjoyed. He was brave to rashness; and he never shrank from danger or responsibility if he saw the way open to spare life or suffering, to protect the defenceless, to sustain the law and preserve order.

His son, Georges Washington Motier de La Fayette (1779-1849), entered the army and was aide-de-camp to General Grouchy through the Austrian, Prussian and Polish (1805-07) campaigns. Napoleon’s distrust of his father rendering promotion improbable, Georges de La Fayette retired into private life in 1807 until the Restoration, when he entered the Chamber of Representatives and voted consistently on the Liberal side. He was away from Paris during the revolution of July 1830, but he took an active part in the “campaign of the banquets,” which led up to that of 1848. He died in December of the next year. His son, Oscar Thomas Gilbert Motier de La Fayette (1815-1881), was educated at the École Polytechnique, and served as an artillery officer in Algeria. He entered the Chamber of Representatives in 1846 and voted, like his father, with the extreme Left. After the revolution of 1848 he received a post in the provisional government, and as a member of the Constituent Assembly he became secretary of the war committee. After the dissolution of the Legislative Assembly in 1851, he retired from public life, but emerged on the establishment of the third republic, becoming a life senator in 1875. His brother Edmond Motier de La Fayette (1818-1890) shared his political opinions. He was one of the secretaries of the Constituent Assembly, and a member of the senate from 1876 to 1888.

See Mémoires historiques et pièces authentiques sur M. de La Fayette pour servir à l’histoire des révolutions (Paris, An II., 1793-1794); B. Sarrans, La Fayette et la Révolution de 1830, histoire des choses et des hommes de Juillet (Paris, 1834); Mémoires, correspondances et manuscrits de La Fayette, published by his family (6 vols., Paris, 1837-1838); Regnault Warin, Mémoires pour servir à la vie du général La Fayette (Paris, 1824); A. Bardoux, La jeunesse de La Fayette (Paris, 1892); Les Dernières années de La Fayette (Paris, 1893); E. Charavaray, Le Général La Fayette (Paris, 1895); A. Levasseur, La Fayette en Amérique 1824 (Paris, 1829); J. Cloquet, Souvenirs de la vie privée du général La Fayette (Paris, 1836); Max Büdinger, La Fayette in Oesterreich (Vienna, 1898); and M. M. Crawford, The Wife of Lafayette (1908); Bayard Tuckerman, Life of Lafayette (New York, 1889); Charlemagne Tower, The Marquis de La Fayette in the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 1895).

The family of La Fayette, to the cadet branch of which he belonged, received its name from an estate in Aix, Auvergne, which belonged in the 13th century to the Motier family.

LA FAYETTE, MARIE-MADELEINE PIOCHE DE LA VERGNE, Comtesse de (1634-1692), French novelist, was baptized in Paris, on the 18th of March 1634. Her father, Marc Pioche de la Vergne, commandant of Havre, died when she was sixteen, and her mother seems to have been more occupied with her own than her daughter’s interests. Mme de la Vergne married in 1651 the chevalier de Sévigné, and Marie thus became connected with Mme de Sévigné, who was destined to be a lifelong friend. She studied Greek, Latin and Italian, and inspired in one of her tutors, Gilles de Ménage, an enthusiastic admiration which he expressed in verse in three or four languages. Marie married in 1655 François Motier, comte de La Fayette. They lived on the count’s estates in Auvergne, according to her own account (in a letter to Ménage) quite happily; but after the birth of her two sons her husband disappeared so effectually that it was long supposed that he died about 1660, though he really lived until 1683. Mme de La Fayette had returned to Paris, and about 1665 contracted an intimacy with the duc de la Rochefoucauld, then engaged on his Maximes. The constancy and affection that marked this liaison on both sides justified it in the eyes of society, and when in 1680 La Rochefoucauld died Mme de La Fayette received the sincerest sympathy. Her first novel, La Princesse de Montpensier, was published anonymously in 1662; Zayde appeared in 1670 under the name of J. R. de Segrais; and in 1678 her masterpiece, La Princesse de Clèves, also under the name of Segrais. The history of the modern novel of sentiment begins with the Princesse de Clèves. The interminable pages of Mlle de Scudéry with the Précieuses and their admirers masquerading as Persians or ancient Romans had already been discredited by the burlesques of Paul Scarron and Antoine Furetière. It remained for Mme de La Fayette to achieve the more difficult task of substituting something more satisfactory than the disconnected episodes of the roman comique. This she accomplished in a story offering in its shortness and simplicity a complete contrast to the extravagant and lengthy romances of the time. The interest of the story depends not on incident but on the characters of the personages. They act in a perfectly reasonable way and their motives are analysed with the finest discrimination. No doubt the semi-autobiographical character of the material partially explains Mme de La Fayette’s refusal to acknowledge the book. Contemporary critics, even Mme de Sévigné amongst them, found fault with the avowal made by Mme de Clèves to her husband. In answer to these criticisms, which her anonymity prevented her from answering directly, Mme de La Fayette wrote her last novel, the Comtesse de Tende.

The character of her work and her history have combined to give an impression of melancholy and sweetness that only represents one side of her character, for a correspondence brought to light comparatively recently showed her as the acute diplomatic agent of Jeanne de Nemours, duchess of Savoy, at the court of Louis XIV. She had from her early days also been intimate with Henrietta of England, duchess of Orleans, under whose immediate direction she wrote her Histoire de Madame Henriette d’Angleterre, which only appeared in 1720. She wrote memoirs of the reign of Louis XIV., which, with the exception of two chapters, for the years 1688 and 1689 (published at Amsterdam, 1731), were lost through her son’s carelessness. Madame de La Fayette died on the 25th of May 1692.

See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de femmes; the comte d’Haussonville, Madame de La Fayette (1891), in the series of Grands écrivains français; M. de Lescure’s notice prefixed to an edition of the Princesse de Clèves (1881); and a critical edition of the historical memoirs by Eugène Asse (1890). See also L. Rea, Marie Madeleine, comtesse de La Fayette (1908).

LAFAYETTE, a city and the county-seat of Tippecanoe county, Indiana, U.S.A., situated at the former head of navigation on the Wabash river, about 64 m. N.W. of Indianapolis. Pop. (1900) 18,116, of whom 2266 were foreign-born; (1910 census) 20,081. It is served by the Chicago, Indianapolis & Louisville, the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St Louis, the Lake Erie & Western, and the Wabash railways, and by the Terre Haute, Indianapolis & Eastern (electric), and the Fort Wayne & Wabash Valley (electric) railways. The river is not now navigable at this point. Lafayette is in the valley of the Wabash river, which is sunk below the normal level of the plain, the surrounding heights being the walls of the Wabash basin. The city has an excellent system of public schools, a good public library, two hospitals, the Wabash Valley Sanitarium (Seventh Day Adventist), St Anthony’s Home for old people and two orphan asylums. It is the seat of Purdue University, a co-educational, technical and agricultural institution, opened in 1874 and named in honour of John Purdue (1802-1876), who gave it $150,000. This university is under state control, and received the proceeds of the Federal agricultural college grant of 1862 and of the second Morrill Act of 1890; in connexion with it there is an agricultural experiment station. It had in 1908-1909 180 instructors, 1900 students, and a library of 25,000 volumes and pamphlets. Just outside the city is the State Soldiers’ Home, where provision is also made for the wives and widows of soldiers; in 1908 it contained 553 men and 700 women. The city lies in the heart of a rich agricultural region, and is an important market for grain, produce and horses. Among its manufactures are beer, foundry and machine shop products (the Chicago, Indianapolis & Louisville railway has shops here), straw board, telephone apparatus, paper, wagons, packed meats, canned goods, flour and carpets; the value of the factory product increased from $3,514,276 in 1900 to $4,631,415 in 1905, or 31.8%. The municipality owns its water works.

Lafayette is about 5 m. N.E. of the site of the ancient Wea (Miami) Indian village known as Ouiatanon, where the French established a post about 1720. The French garrison gave way to the English about 1760; the stockade fort was destroyed during the conspiracy of Pontiac, and was never rebuilt. The headquarters of Tecumseh and his brother, the “Prophet,” were established 7 m. N. of Lafayette near the mouth of the Tippecanoe river, and the settlement there was known as the “Prophet’s Town.” Near this place, and near the site of the present village of Battle Ground (where the Indiana Methodists now have a summer encampment and a camp meeting in August), was fought on the 7th of November 1811 the battle of Tippecanoe, in which the Indians were decisively defeated by Governor William Henry Harrison, the whites losing 188 in killed and wounded and the Indians about an equal number. The battle ground is owned by the state; in 1907 the state legislature and the United States Congress each appropriated $12,500 for a monument, which took the form of a granite shaft 90 ft. high. The first American settlers on the site of Lafayette appeared about 1820, and the town was laid out in 1825, but for many years its growth was slow. The completion of the Wabash and Erie canal marked a new era in its development, and in 1854 Lafayette was incorporated.

LA FERTÉ, the name of a number of localities in France, differentiated by agnomens. La Ferté Imbault (department of Loir-et-Cher) was in the possession of Jacques d’Étampes (1590-1668), marshal of France and ambassador in England, who was known as the marquis of La Ferté Imbault. La Ferté Nabert (the modern La Ferté Saint Aubin, department of Loiret) was acquired in the 16th century by the house of Saint Nectaire (corrupted to Senneterre), and erected into a duchy in the peerage of France (duché-pairie) in 1665 for Henri de Saint Nectaire, marshal of France. It was called La Ferté Lowendal after it had been acquired by Marshal Lowendal in 1748.

LA FERTÉ-BERNARD, a town of western France, in the department of Sarthe, on the Huisne, 27 m. N.E. of Le Mans, on the railway from Paris to that town. Pop. (1906) 4358. La Ferté carries on cloth manufacture and flour-milling and has trade in horses and cattle. Its church of Nôtre Dame has a choir (16th century) with graceful apse-chapels of Renaissance architecture and remarkable windows of the same period; the remainder of the church is in the Flamboyant Gothic style. The town hall occupies the superstructure and flanking towers of a fortified gateway of the 15th century.

La Ferté-Bernard owes its origin and name to a stronghold (fermeté) built about the 11th century and afterwards held by the family of Bernard. In 1424 it did not succumb to the English troops till after a four months’ siege. It belonged in the 16th century to the family of Guise and supported the League, but was captured by the royal forces in 1590.

LA FERTÉ-MILON, a town of northern France in the department of Aisne on the Ourcq, 47 m. W. by S. of Reims by rail. Pop. (1906) 1563. The town has imposing remains comprising one side flanked by four towers of an unfinished castle built about the beginning of the 15th century by Louis of Orleans, brother of Charles VI. The churches of St Nicholas and Notre-Dame, chiefly of the 16th century, both contain fine old stained glass. Jean Racine, the poet, was born in the town, and a statue by David d’Augers has been erected to him.

LAFFITTE, JACQUES (1767-1844), French banker and politician, was born at Bayonne on the 24th of October 1767, one of the ten children of a carpenter. He became clerk in the banking house of Perregaux in Paris, was made a partner in the business in 1800, and in 1804 succeeded Perregaux as head of the firm. The house of Perregaux, Laffitte et Cie. became one of the greatest in Europe, and Laffitte became regent (1809), then governor (1814) of the Bank of France and president of the Chamber of Commerce (1814). He raised large sums of money for the provisional government in 1814 and for Louis XVIII. during the Hundred Days, and it was with him that Napoleon deposited five million francs in gold before leaving France for the last time. Rather than permit the government to appropriate the money from the Bank he supplied two million from his own pocket for the arrears of the imperial troops after Waterloo. He was returned by the department of the Seine to the Chamber of Deputies in 1816, and took his seat on the Left. He spoke chiefly on financial questions; his known Liberal views did not prevent Louis XVIII. from insisting on his inclusion on the commission on the public finances. In 1818 he saved Paris from a financial crisis by buying a large amount of stock, but next year, in consequence of his heated defence of the liberty of the press and the electoral law of 1867, the governorship of the Bank was taken from him. One of the earliest and most determined of the partisans of a constitutional monarchy under the duke of Orleans, he was deputy for Bayonne in July 1830, when his house in Paris became the headquarters of the revolutionary party. When Charles X., after retracting the hated ordinances, sent the comte d’Argout to Laffitte to negotiate a change of ministry, the banker replied, “It is too late. There is no longer a Charles X.,” and it was he who secured the nomination of Louis Philippe as lieutenant-general of the kingdom. On the 3rd of August he became president of the Chamber of Deputies, and on the 9th he received in this capacity Louis Philippe’s oath to the new constitution. The clamour of the Paris mob for the death of the imprisoned ministers of Charles X., which in October culminated in riots, induced the more moderate members of the government—including Guizot, the duc de Broglie and Casimir-Périer—to hand over the administration to a ministry which, possessing the confidence of the revolutionary Parisians, should be in a better position to save the ministers from their fury. On the 5th of November, accordingly, Laffitte became minister-president of a government pledged to progress (mouvement), holding at the same time the portfolio of finance. The government was torn between the necessity for preserving order and the no less pressing necessity (for the moment) of conciliating the Parisian populace; with the result that it succeeded in doing neither one nor the other. The impeached ministers were, indeed, saved by the courage of the Chamber of Peers and the attitude of the National Guard; but their safety was bought at the price of Laffitte’s popularity. His policy of a French intervention in favour of the Italian revolutionists, by which he might have regained his popularity, was thwarted by the diplomatic policy of Louis Philippe. The resignation of Lafayette and Dupont de l’Eure still further undermined the government, which, incapable even of keeping order in the streets of Paris, ended by being discredited with all parties. At length Louis Philippe, anxious to free himself from the hampering control of the agents of his fortune, thought it safe to parade his want of confidence in the man who had made him king. Thereupon, in March 1831, Laffitte resigned, begging pardon of God and man for the part he had played in raising Louis Philippe to the throne. He left office politically and financially a ruined man. His affairs were wound up in 1836, and next year he created a credit bank, which prospered as long as he lived, but failed in 1848. He died in Paris on the 26th of May 1844.

See P. Thureau-Dangin, La Monarchie de Juillet (vol. i. 1884).

Apollinaire Antoine Maurice, comte d’Argout (1782-1858), afterwards reconciled to the July monarchy, and a member of the Laffitte Casimir-Périer and Thiers cabinets.

LAFFITTE, PIERRE (1823-1903), French Positivist, was born on the 21st of February 1823 at Béguey (Gironde). Residing at Paris as a teacher of mathematics, he became a disciple of Comte, who appointed him his literary executor. On the schism of the Positivist body which followed Comte’s death, he was recognized as head of the section which accepted the full Comtian doctrine; the other section adhering to Littré, who rejected the religion of humanity as inconsistent with the materialism of Comte’s earlier period. From 1853 Laffitte delivered Positivist lectures in the room formerly occupied by Comte in the rue Monsieur le Prince. He published Les Grands Types de l’humanité (1875) and Cours de philosophie première (1889). In 1893 he was appointed to the new chair founded at the Collège de France for the exposition of the general history of science, and it was largely due to his inspiration that a statue to Comte was erected in the Place de la Sorbonne in 1902. He died on the 4th of January 1903.

LA FLÈCHE, a town of western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Sarthe on the Loire, 31 m. S.S.W. of Le Mans by rail. Pop. (1906) town 7800; commune 10,663. The chief interest of the town lies in the Prytanée, a famous school for the sons of officers, originally a college founded for the Jesuits in 1607 by Henry IV. The buildings, including a fine chapel, were erected from 1620 to 1653 and are surrounded by a park. A bronze statue of Henry IV. stands in the marketplace. La Flèche is the seat of a sub-prefect and of a tribunal of first instance, and carries on tanning, flour-milling, and the manufacture of paper, starch, wooden shoes and gloves. It is an agricultural market.

The lords of La Flèche became counts of Maine about 1100, but the lordship became separate from the county and passed in the 16th century to the family of Bourbon and thus to Henry IV.

LAFONT, PIERRE CHÉRI (1797-1873), French actor, was born at Bordeaux on the 15th of May 1797. Abandoning his profession as assistant ship’s doctor in the navy, he went to Paris to study singing and acting. He had some experience at a small theatre, and was preparing to appear at the Opéra Comique when the director of the Vaudeville offered him an engagement. Here he made his début in 1821 in La Somnambule, and his good looks and excellent voice soon brought him into public favour. After several years at the Nouveautés and the Vaudeville, on the burning of the latter in 1838 he went to England, and married, at Gretna Green, Jenny Colon, from whom he was soon divorced. On his return to Paris he joined the Variétés, where he acted for fifteen years in such plays as Le Chevalier de Saint Georges, Le Lion empaillé, Une dernière conquête, &c. Another engagement at the Vaudeville followed, and one at the Gaiété, and he ended his brilliant career at the Gymnase in the part of the noble father in such plays as Les Vieux Garçons and Nos bons villageois. He died in Paris on the 19th of April 1873.

LA FONTAINE, JEAN DE (1621-1695), French poet, was born at Château Thierry in Champagne, probably on the 8th of July 1621. His father was Charles de La Fontaine, “maître des eaux et forêts”—a kind of deputy-ranger—of the duchy of Château Thierry; his mother was Françoise Pidoux. On both sides his family was of the highest provincial middle class, but was not noble; his father was also fairly wealthy. Jean, the eldest child, was educated at the collège (grammar-school) of Reims, and at the end of his school days he entered the Oratory in May 1641, and the seminary of Saint-Magloire in October of the same year; but a very short sojourn proved to him that he had mistaken his vocation. He then apparently studied law, and is said to have been admitted as avocat, though there does not seem to be actual proof of this. He was, however, settled in life, or at least might have been so, somewhat early. In 1647 his father resigned his rangership in his favour, and arranged a marriage for him with Marie Héricart, a girl of sixteen, who brought him twenty thousand livres, and expectations. She seems to have been both handsome and intelligent, but the two did not get on well together. There appears to be absolutely no ground for the vague scandal as to her conduct, which was, for the most part long afterwards, raised by gossips or personal enemies of La Fontaine. All that is positively said against her is that she was a negligent housewife and an inveterate novel reader; La Fontaine himself was constantly away from home, was certainly not strict in point of conjugal fidelity, and was so bad a man of business that his affairs became involved in hopeless difficulty, and a séparation de biens had to take place in 1658. This was a perfectly amicable transaction for the benefit of the family; by degrees, however, the pair, still without any actual quarrel, ceased to live together, and for the greater part of the last forty years of La Fontaine’s life he lived in Paris while his wife dwelt at Château Thierry, which, however, he frequently visited. One son was born to them in 1653, and was educated and taken care of wholly by his mother.

Even in the earlier years of his marriage La Fontaine seems to have been much at Paris, but it was not till about 1656 that he became a regular visitor to the capital. The duties of his office, which were only occasional, were compatible with this non-residence. It was not till he was past thirty that his literary career began. The reading of Malherbe, it is said, first awoke poetical fancies in him, but for some time he attempted nothing but trifles in the fashion of the time—epigrams, ballades, rondeaux, &c. His first serious work was a translation or adaptation of the Eunuchus of Terence (1654). At this time the Maecenas of French letters was the Superintendant Fouquet, to whom La Fontaine was introduced by Jacques Jannart, a connexion of his wife’s. Few people who paid their court to Fouquet went away empty-handed, and La Fontaine soon received a pension of 1000 livres (1659), on the easy terms of a copy of verses for each quarter’s receipt. He began too a medley of prose and poetry, entitled Le Songe de Vaux, on Fouquet’s famous country house. It was about this time that his wife’s property had to be separately secured to her, and he seems by degrees to have had to sell everything of his own; but, as he never lacked powerful and generous patrons, this was of small importance to him. In the same year he wrote a ballad, Les Rieurs du Beau-Richard, and this was followed by many small pieces of occasional poetry addressed to various personages from the king downwards. Fouquet soon incurred the royal displeasure, but La Fontaine, like most of his literary protégés, was not unfaithful to him, the well-known elegy Pleurez, nymphes de Vaux, being by no means the only proof of his devotion. Indeed it is thought not improbable that a journey to Limoges in 1663 in company with Jannart, and of which we have an account written to his wife, was not wholly spontaneous, as it certainly was not on Jannart’s part. Just at this time his affairs did not look promising. His father and himself had assumed the title of esquire, to which they were not strictly entitled, and, some old edicts on the subject having been put in force, an informer procured a sentence against the poet fining him 2000 livres. He found, however, a new protector in the duke and still more in the duchess of Bouillon, his feudal superiors at Château Thierry, and nothing more is heard of the fine. Some of La Fontaine’s liveliest verses are addressed to the duchess, Anne Mancini, the youngest of Mazarin’s nieces, and it is even probable that the taste of the duke and duchess for Ariosto had something to do with the writing of his first work of real importance, the first book of the Contes, which appeared in 1664. He was then forty-three years old, and his previous printed productions had been comparatively trivial, though much of his work was handed about in manuscript long before it was regularly published. It was about this time that the quartette of the Rue du Vieux Colombier, so famous in French literary history, was formed. It consisted of La Fontaine, Racine, Boileau and Molière, the last of whom was almost of the same age as La Fontaine, the other two considerably younger. Chapelle was also a kind of outsider in the coterie. There are many anecdotes, some pretty obviously apocryphal, about these meetings. The most characteristic is perhaps that which asserts that a copy of Chapelain’s unlucky Pucelle always lay on the table, a certain number of lines of which was the appointed punishment for offences against the company. The coterie furnished under feigned names the personages of La Fontaine’s version of the Cupid and Psyche story, which, however, with Adonis, was not printed till 1669. Meanwhile the poet continued to find friends. In 1664 he was regularly commissioned and sworn in as gentleman to the duchess dowager of Orleans, and was installed in the Luxembourg. He still retained his rangership, and in 1666 we have something like a reprimand from Colbert suggesting that he should look into some malpractices at Château Thierry. In the same year appeared the second book of the Contes, and in 1668 the first six books of the Fables, with more of both kinds in 1671. In this latter year a curious instance of the docility with which the poet lent himself to any influence was afforded by his officiating, at the instance of the Port-Royalists, as editor of a volume of sacred poetry dedicated to the prince de Conti. A year afterwards his situation, which had for some time been decidedly flourishing, showed signs of changing very much for the worse. The duchess of Orleans died, and he apparently had to give up his rangership, probably selling it to pay debts. But there was always a providence for La Fontaine. Madame de la Sablière, a woman of great beauty, of considerable intellectual power and of high character, invited him to make his home in her house, where he lived for some twenty years. He seems to have had no trouble whatever about his affairs thenceforward; and could devote himself to his two different lines of poetry, as well as to that of theatrical composition.

In 1682 he was, at more than sixty years of age, recognized as one of the first men of letters of France. Madame de Sévigné, one of the soundest literary critics of the time, and by no means given to praise mere novelties, had spoken of his second collection of Fables published in the winter of 1678 as divine; and it is pretty certain that this was the general opinion. It was not unreasonable, therefore, that he should present himself to the Academy, and, though the subjects of his Contes were scarcely calculated to propitiate that decorous assembly, while his attachment to Fouquet and to more than one representative of the old Frondeur party made him suspect to Colbert and the king, most of the members were his personal friends. He was first proposed in 1682, but was rejected for Dangeau. The next year Colbert died and La Fontaine was again nominated. Boileau was also a candidate, but the first ballot gave the fabulist sixteen votes against seven only for the critic. The king, whose assent was necessary, not merely for election but for a second ballot in case of the failure of an absolute majority, was ill-pleased, and the election was left pending. Another vacancy occurred, however, some months later, and to this Boileau was elected. The king hastened to approve the choice effusively, adding, “Vous pouvez incessamment recevoir La Fontaine, il a promis d’être sage.” His admission was indirectly the cause of the only serious literary quarrel of his life. A dispute took place between the Academy and one of its members, Antoine Furetière, on the subject of the latter’s French dictionary, which was decided to be a breach of the Academy’s corporate privileges. Furetière, a man of no small ability, bitterly assailed those whom he considered to be his enemies, and among them La Fontaine, whose unlucky Contes made him peculiarly vulnerable, his second collection of these tales having been the subject of a police condemnation. The death of the author of the Roman Bourgeois, however, put an end to this quarrel. Shortly afterwards La Fontaine had a share in a still more famous affair, the celebrated Ancient-and-Modern squabble in which Boileau and Perrault were the chiefs, and in which La Fontaine (though he had been specially singled out by Perrault for favourable comparison with Aesop and Phaedrus) took the Ancient side. About the same time (1685-1687) he made the acquaintance of the last of his many hosts and protectors, Monsieur and Madame d’Hervart, and fell in love with a certain Madame Ulrich, a lady of some position but of doubtful character. This acquaintance was accompanied by a great familiarity with Vendôme, Chaulieu and the rest of the libertine coterie of the Temple; but, though Madame de la Sablière had long given herself up almost entirely to good works and religious exercises, La Fontaine continued an inmate of her house until her death in 1693. What followed is told in one of the best known of the many stories bearing on his childlike nature. Hervart on hearing of the death, had set out at once to find La Fontaine. He met him in the street in great sorrow, and begged him to make his home at his house. “J’y allais” was La Fontaine’s answer. He had already undergone the process of conversion during a severe illness the year before. An energetic young priest, M. Poucet, had brought him, not indeed to understand, but to acknowledge the impropriety of the Contes, and it is said that the destruction of a new play of some merit was demanded and submitted to as a proof of repentance. A pleasant story is told of the young duke of Burgundy, Fénelon’s pupil, who was then only eleven years old, sending 50 louis to La Fontaine as a present of his own motion. But, though La Fontaine recovered for the time, he was broken by age and infirmity, and his new hosts had to nurse rather than to entertain him, which they did very carefully and kindly. He did a little more work, completing his Fables among other things; but he did not survive Madame de la Sablière much more than two years, dying on the 13th of April 1695, at the age of seventy-three. He was buried in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents. His wife survived him nearly fifteen years.

The curious personal character of La Fontaine, like that of some other men of letters, has been enshrined in a kind of legend by literary tradition. At an early age his absence of mind and indifference to business gave a subject to Tallemant des Réaux. His later contemporaries helped to swell the tale, and the 18th century finally accepted it, including the anecdotes of his meeting his son, being told who he was, and remarking, “Ah, yes, I thought I had seen him somewhere!” of his insisting on fighting a duel with a supposed admirer of his wife, and then imploring him to visit at his house just as before; of his going into company with his stockings wrong side out, &c., with, for a contrast, those of his awkwardness and silence, if not positive rudeness, in company. It ought to be remembered, as a comment on the unfavourable description by La Bruyère, that La Fontaine was a special friend and ally of Benserade, La Bruyère’s chief literary enemy. But after all deductions much will remain, especially when it is remembered that one of the chief authorities for these anecdotes is Louis Racine, a man who possessed intelligence and moral worth, and who received them from his father, La Fontaine’s attached friend for more than thirty years. Perhaps the best worth recording of all these stories is one of the Vieux Colombier quartette, which tells how Molière, while Racine and Boileau were exercising their wits upon “le bonhomme” or “le bon” (by both which titles La Fontaine was familiarly known), remarked to a bystander, “Nos beaux esprits ont beau faire, ils n’effaceront pas le bonhomme.” They have not.

The works of La Fontaine, the total bulk of which is considerable, fall no less naturally than traditionally into three divisions, the Fables, the Contes and the miscellaneous works. Of these the first may be said to be known universally, the second to be known to all lovers of French literature, the third to be with a few exceptions practically forgotten. This distribution of the judgment of posterity is as usual just in the main, but not wholly. There are excellent things in the Œuvres Diverses, but their excellence is only occasional, and it is not at the best equal to that of the Fables or the Contes. It was thought by contemporary judges who were both competent and friendly that La Fontaine attempted too many styles, and there is something in the criticism. His dramatic efforts are especially weak. The best pieces usually published under his name—Ragotin, Le Florentin, La Coupe enchantée, were originally fathered not by him but by Champmeslé, the husband of the famous actress who captivated Racine and Charles de Sévigné. His avowed work was chiefly in the form of opera, a form of no great value at its best. Psyche has all the advantages of its charming story and of La Fontaine’s style, but it is perhaps principally interesting nowadays because of the framework of personal conversation already alluded to. The mingled prose and verse of the Songe de Vaux is not uninteresting, but its best things, such as the description of night—

“Laissant tomber les fleurs et ne les semant pas,”

which has enchanted French critics, are little more than conceits, though as in this case sometimes very beautiful conceits. The elegies, the epistles, the epigrams, the ballades, contain many things which would be very creditable to a minor poet or a writer of vers de société, but even if they be taken according to the wise rule of modern criticism, each in its kind, and judged simply according to their rank in that kind, they fall far below the merits of the two great collections of verse narratives which have assured La Fontaine’s immortality.

Between the actual literary merits of the two there is not much to choose, but the change of manners and the altered standard of literary decency have thrown the Contes into the shade. These tales are identical in general character with those which amused Europe from the days of the early fabliau writers. Light love, the misfortunes of husbands, the cunning of wives, the breach of their vows by ecclesiastics, constitute the staple of their subject. In some respects La Fontaine is the best of such tale-tellers, while he is certainly the latest who deserves such excuse as may be claimed by a writer who does not choose indecent subjects from a deliberate knowledge that they are considered indecent, and with a deliberate desire to pander to a vicious taste. No one who followed him in the style can claim this excuse; he can, and the way in which contemporaries of stainless virtue such as Madame de Sévigné speak of his work shows that, though the new public opinion was growing up, it was not finally accepted. In the Contes La Fontaine for the most part attempts little originality of theme. He takes his stories (varying them, it is true, in detail not a little) from Boccaccio, from Marguerite, from the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, &c. He applies to them his marvellous power of easy sparkling narration, and his hardly less marvellous faculty of saying more or less outrageous things in the most polite and gentlemanly manner. These Contes have indeed certain drawbacks. They are not penetrated by the half pagan ardour for physical beauty and the delights of sense which animates and excuses the early Italian Renaissance. They have not the subtle mixture of passion and sensuality, of poetry and appetite, which distinguishes the work of Marguerite and of the Pléiade. They are emphatically contes pour rire, a genuine expression of the esprit gaulois of the fabliau writers and of Rabelais, destitute of the grossness of envelope which had formerly covered that spirit. A comparison of “La Fiancée du roi de Garbe” with its original in Boccaccio (especially if the reader takes M. Émile Montégut’s admirable essay as a commentary) will illustrate better than anything else what they have and what they have not. Some writers have pleaded hard for the admission of actual passion of the poetical sort in such pieces as “La Courtisane amoureuse,” but as a whole it must be admitted to be absent.

The Fables, with hardly less animation and narrative art than the Contes, are free from disadvantages (according to modern notions) of subject, and exhibit the versatility and fecundity of the author’s talent perhaps even more fully. La Fontaine had many predecessors in the fable and especially in the beast fable. In his first issue, comprising what are now called the first six books, he adhered to the path of these predecessors with some closeness; but in the later collections he allowed himself far more liberty, and it is in these parts that his genius is most fully manifested. The boldness of the politics is as much to be considered as the ingenuity of the moralizing, as the intimate knowledge of human nature displayed in the substance of the narratives, or as the artistic mastery shown in their form. It has sometimes been objected that the view of human character which La Fontaine expresses is unduly dark, and resembles too much that of La Rochefoucauld, for whom the poet certainly had a profound admiration. The discussion of this point would lead us too far here. It may only be said that satire (and La Fontaine is eminently a satirist) necessarily concerns itself with the darker rather than with the lighter shades. Indeed the objection has become pretty nearly obsolete with the obsolescence of what may be called the sentimental-ethicalschool of criticism. Its last overt expression was made by Lamartine, excellently answered by Sainte-Beuve. Exception has also been taken to the Fables on more purely literary, but hardly less purely arbitrary grounds by Lessing. Perhaps the best criticism ever passed upon La Fontaine’s Fables is that of Silvestre de Sacy, to the effect that they supply three several delights to three several ages: the child rejoices in the freshness and vividness of the story, the eager student of literature in the consummate art with which it is told, the experienced man of the world in the subtle reflections on character and life which it conveys. Nor has any one, with the exception of a few paradoxers like Rousseau and a few sentimentalists like Lamartine, denied that the moral tone of the whole is as fresh and healthy as its literary interest is vivid. The book has therefore naturally become the standard reading book of French both at home and abroad, a position which it shares in verse with the Télémaque of Fénelon in prose. It is no small testimony to its merit that not even this use or misuse has interfered with its popularity.

The general literary character of La Fontaine is, with allowance made for the difference of subject, visible equally in the Fables and in the Contes. Perhaps one of the hardest sayings in French literature for an English student is the dictum of Joubert to the effect that “Il y a dans La Fontaine une plénitude de poésie qu’on ne trouve nulle part dans les autres auteurs français.” The difficulty arises from the ambiguity of the terms. For inventiveness of fancy and for diligent observation of the rules of art La Fontaine deserves, if not the first, almost the first place among French poets. In his hands the oldest story becomes novel, the most hackneyed moral piquant, the most commonplace details fresh and appropriate. As to the second point there has not been such unanimous agreement. It used to be considered that La Fontaine’s ceaseless diversity of metre, his archaisms, his licences in rhyme and orthography, were merely ingenious devices for the sake of easy writing, intended to evade the trammels of the stately couplet and rimes difficiles enjoined by Boileau. Lamartine in the attack already mentioned affects contempt of the “vers boiteux, disloqués, inégaux, sans symmétrie ni dans l’oreille ni sur la page.” This opinion may be said to have been finally exploded by the most accurate metrical critic and one of the most skilful metrical practitioners that France has ever had, Théodore de Banville; and it is only surprising that it should ever have been entertained by any professional maker of verse. La Fontaine’s irregularities are strictly regulated, his cadences carefully arranged, and the whole effect may be said to be (though, of course, in a light and tripping measure instead of a stately one) similar to that of the stanzas of the English pindaric ode in the hands of Dryden or Collins. There is therefore nothing against La Fontaine on the score of invention and nothing on the score of art. But something more, at least according to English standards, is wanted to make up a “plenitude of poesy,” and this something more La Fontaine seldom or never exhibits. In words used by Joubert himself elsewhere, he never “transports.” The faculty of transporting is possessed and used in very different manners by different poets. In some it takes the form of passion, in some of half mystical enthusiasm for nature, in some of commanding eloquence, in some of moral fervour. La Fontaine has none of these things: he is always amusing, always sensible, always clever, sometimes even affecting, but at the same time always more or less prosaic, were it not for his admirable versification. He is not a great poet, perhaps not even a great humorist; but he is the most admirable teller of light tales in verse that has ever existed in any time or country; and he has established in his verse-tale a model which is never likely to be surpassed.

La Fontaine did not during his life issue any complete edition of his works, nor even of the two greatest and most important divisions of them. The most remarkable of his separate publications have already been noticed. Others were the Poëme de la captivité de St Malc (1673), one of the pieces inspired by the Port-Royalists, the Poëme du Quinquina (1692), a piece of task work also, though of a very different kind, and a number of pieces published either in small pamphlets or with the works of other men. Among the latter may be singled out the pieces published by the poet with the works of his friend Maucroix (1685). The year after his death some posthumous works appeared, and some years after his son’s death the scattered poems, letters, &c., with the addition of some unpublished work bought from the family in manuscript, were carefully edited and published as Œuvres diverses (1729). During the 18th century two of the most magnificent illustrated editions ever published of any poet reproduced the two chief works of La Fontaine. The Fables were illustrated by Oudry (1755-1759), the Contes by Eisen (1762). This latter under the title of “Edition des Fermiers-Généraux” fetches a high price. During the first thirty years of the 19th century Walckenaer, a great student of French 17th-century classics, published for the house of Didot three successive editions of La Fontaine, the last (1826-1827) being perhaps entitled to the rank of the standard edition, as his Histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de La Fontaine is the standard biography and bibliography. The later editions of M. Marty-Laveaux in the Bibliothèque elzévirienne, A. Pauly in the Collection des classiques françaises of M. Lemerre and L. Moland in that of M. Garnier supply in different forms all that can be wished. The second is the handsomest, the third, which is complete, perhaps the most generally useful. Editions, selections, translations, &c., of the Fables, especially for school use, are innumerable; but an illustrated edition published by the Librairie des Bibliophiles (1874) deserves to be mentioned as not unworthy of its 18th-century predecessors. The works of M. Grouchy, Documents inédits sur La Fontaine (1893); of G. Lafenestre, Jean de La Fontaine (1895); and of Émile Faguet, Jean de La Fontaine (1900), should be mentioned.

(G. Sa.)

LAFONTAINE, SIR LOUIS HIPPOLYTE, Bart. (1807-1864), Canadian statesman and judge, third son of Antoine Ménard LaFontaine (1772-1813) and Marie-J-Fontaine Bienvenue, was born at Boucherville in the province of Quebec on the 4th of October 1807. LaFontaine was educated at the Collège de Montréal under the direction of the Sulpicians, and was called to the bar of the province of Lower Canada on the 18th of August 1829. He married firstly Adèle, daughter of A. Berthelot of Quebec; and, secondly, Jane, daughter of Charles Morrison, of Berthier, by whom he had two sons. In 1830 he was elected a member of the House of Assembly for the county of Terrebonne, and became an ardent supporter of Louis Joseph Papineau in opposing the administration of the governor-in-chief, which led to the rebellion of 1837. LaFontaine, however, did not approve the violent methods of his leader, and after the hostilities at Saint Denis he presented a petition to Lord Gosford requesting him to summon the assembly and to adopt measures to stem the revolutionary course of events in Lower Canada. The rebellion broke out afresh in the autumn of 1838; the constitution of 1791 was suspended; LaFontaine was imprisoned for a brief period; and Papineau, who favoured annexation by the United States, was in exile. At this crisis in Lower Canada the French Canadians turned to LaFontaine as their leader, and under his direction maintained their opposition to the special council, composed of nominees of the crown. In 1839 Lord Sydenham, the governor-general, offered the solicitor generalship to LaFontaine, which he refused; and after the Union of 1841 LaFontaine was defeated in the county of Terrebonne through the governor’s influence. During the next year he obtained a seat in the assembly of the province of Canada, and on the death of Sydenham he was called by Sir Charles Bagot to form an administration with Robert Baldwin. The ministry resigned in November 1843, as a protest against the actions of Lord Metcalfe, who had succeeded Bagot. In 1848 LaFontaine formed a new administration with Baldwin, and remained in office until 1851, when he retired from public life. It was during the ministry of LaFontaine-Baldwin that the Amnesty Bill was passed, which occasioned grave riots in Montreal, personal violence to Lord Elgin and the destruction of the parliament buildings. After the death of Sir James Stuart in 1853 LaFontaine was appointed chief justice of Lower Canada and president of the seigneurial court, which settled the vexed question of land tenure in Canada; and in 1854 he was created a baronet. He died at Montreal on the 26th of February 1864.

LaFontaine was well versed in constitutional history and French law; he reasoned closely and presented his conclusions with directness. He was upright in his conduct, sincerely attached to the traditions of his race, and laboured conscientiously to establish responsible government in Canada. His principal works are: L’Analyse de l’ordonnance du conseil spécial sur les bureaux d’hypothèques (Montreal, 1842); Observations sur les questions seigneuriales (Montreal, 1854); see LaFontaine, by A. DeCelles (Toronto, 1906).

(A. G. D.)

LAFOSSE, CHARLES DE (1640-1716), French painter, was born in Paris. He was one of the most noted and least servile pupils of Le Brun, under whose direction he shared in the chief of the great decorative works undertaken in the reign of Louis XIV. Leaving France in 1662, he spent two years in Rome and three in Venice, and the influence of his prolonged studies of Veronese is evident in his “Finding of Moses” (Louvre), and in his “Rape of Proserpine” (Louvre), which he presented to the Royal Academy as his diploma picture in 1673. He was at once named assistant professor, and in 1674 the full responsibilities of the office devolved on him, but his engagements did not prevent his accepting in 1689 the invitation of Lord Montagu to decorate Montagu House. He visited London twice, remaining on the second occasion—together with Rousseau and Monnoyer—more than two years. William III. vainly strove to detain him in England by the proposal that he should decorate Hampton Court, for Le Brun was dead, and Mansart pressed Lafosse to return to Paris to take in hand the cupola of the Invalides. The decorations of Montagu House are destroyed, those of Versailles are restored, and the dome of the Invalides (engraved, Picart and Cochin) is now the only work existing which gives a full measure of his talent. During his latter years Lafosse executed many other important decorations in public buildings and private houses, notably in that of Crozat, under whose roof he died on the 13th of December 1716.

LAGARDE, PAUL ANTON DE (1827-1891), German biblical scholar and orientalist, was born at Berlin on the 2nd of November 1827. His real name was Bötticher, Lagarde being his mother’s name. At Berlin (1844-1846) and Halle (1846-1847) he studied theology, philosophy and oriental languages. In 1852 his studies took him to London and Paris. In 1854 he became a teacher at a Berlin public school, but this did not interrupt his biblical studies. He edited the Didascalia apostolorum syriace (1854), and other Syriac texts collected in the British Museum and in Paris. In 1866 he received three years’ leave of absence to collect fresh materials, and in 1869 succeeded Heinrich Ewald as professor of oriental languages at Göttingen. Like Ewald, Lagarde was an active worker in a variety of subjects and languages; but his chief aim, the elucidation of the Bible, was almost always kept in view. He edited the Aramaic translation (known as the Targum) of the Prophets according to the Codex Reuchlinianus preserved at Carlsruhe, Prophetae chaldaice (1872), the Hagiographa chaldaice (1874), an Arabic translation of the Gospels, Die vier Evangelien, arabisch aus der Wiener Handschrift herausgegeben (1864), a Syriac translation of the Old Testament Apocrypha, Libri V. T. apocryphi syriace (1861), a Coptic translation of the Pentateuch, Der Pentateuch koptisch (1867), and a part of the Lucianic text of the Septuagint, which he was able to reconstruct from manuscripts for nearly half the Old Testament. He devoted himself ardently to oriental scholarship, and published Zur Urgeschichte der Armenier (1854) and Armenische Studien (1877). He was also a student of Persian, publishing Isaias persice (1883) and Persische Studien (1884). He followed up his Coptic studies with Aegyptiaca (1883), and published many minor contributions to the study of oriental languages in Gesammelte Abhandlungen (1866), Symmicta (i. 1877, ii. 1880), Semitica (i. 1878, ii. 1879), Orientalia (1879-1880) and Mittheilungen (1884). Mention should also be made of the valuable Onomastica sacra (1870; 2nd ed., 1887). Lagarde also took some part in politics. He belonged to the Prussian Conservative party, and was a violent anti-Semite. The bitterness which he felt appeared in his writings. He died at Göttingen on the 22nd of December 1891.

See the article in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie; and cf. Anna de Lagarde, Paul de Lagarde (1894).

LAGASH, or Sirpurla, one of the oldest centres of Sumerian civilization in Babylonia. It is represented by a rather low, long line of ruin mounds, along the dry bed of an ancient canal, some 3 m. E. of the Shatt-el-Haī and a little less than 10 m. N. of the modern Turkish town of Shatra. These ruins were discovered in 1877 by Ernest de Sarzec, at that time French consul at Basra, who was allowed, by the Montefich chief, Nasir Pasha, the first Wali-Pasha, or governor-general, of Basra, to excavate at his pleasure in the territories subject to that official. At the outset on his own account, and later as a representative of the French government, under a Turkish firman, de Sarzec continued excavations at this site, with various intermissions, until his death in 1901, after which the work was continued under the supervision of the Commandant Cros. The principal excavations were made in two larger mounds, one of which proved to be the site of the temple, E-Ninnu, the shrine of the patron god of Lagash, Nin-girsu or Ninib. This temple had been razed and a fortress built upon its ruins, in the Greek or Seleucid period, some of the bricks found bearing the inscription in Aramaic and Greek of a certain Hadad-nadin-akhe, king of a small Babylonian kingdom. It was beneath this fortress that the numerous statues of Gudea were found, which constitute the gem of the Babylonian collections at the Louvre. These had been decapitated and otherwise mutilated, and thrown into the foundations of the new fortress. From this stratum came also various fragments of bas reliefs of high artistic excellence. The excavations in the other larger mound resulted in the discovery of the remains of buildings containing objects of all sorts in bronze and stone, dating from the earliest Sumerian period onward, and enabling us to trace the art history of Babylonia to a date some hundreds of years before the time of Gudea. Apparently this mound had been occupied largely by store houses, in which were stored not only grain, figs, &c., but also vessels, weapons, sculptures and every possible object connected with the use and administration of palace and temple. In a small outlying mound de Sarzec discovered the archives of the temple, about 30,000 inscribed clay tablets, containing the business records, and revealing with extraordinary minuteness the administration of an ancient Babylonian temple, the character of its property, the method of farming its lands, herding its flocks, and its commercial and industrial dealings and enterprises; for an ancient Babylonian temple was a great industrial, commercial, agricultural and stock-raising establishment. Unfortunately, before these archives could be removed, the galleries containing them were rifled by the Arabs, and large numbers of the tablets were sold to antiquity dealers, by whom they have been scattered all over Europe and America. From the inscriptions found at Tello, it appears that Lagash was a city of great importance in the Sumerian period, some time probably in the 4th millennium B.C. It was at that time ruled by independent kings, Ur-Nina and his successors, who were engaged in contests with the Elamites on the east and the kings of Kengi and Kish on the north. With the Semitic conquest it lost its independence, its rulers becoming patesis, dependent rulers, under Sargon and his successors; but it still remained Sumerian and continued to be a city of much importance, and, above all, a centre of artistic development. Indeed, it was in this period and under the immediately succeeding supremacy of the kings of Ur, Ur-Gur and Dungi, that it reached its highest artistic development. At this period, also, under its patesis, Ur-bau and Gudea, Lagash had extensive commercial communications with distant realms. According to his own records, Gudea brought cedars from the Amanus and Lebanon mountains in Syria, diorite or dolorite from eastern Arabia, copper and gold from central and southern Arabia and from Sinai, while his armies, presumably under his overlord, Ur-Gur, were engaged in battles in Elam on the east. His was especially the era of artistic development. Some of the earlier works of Ur-Nina, En-anna-tum, Entemena and others, before the Semitic conquest, are also extremely interesting, especially the famous stele of the vultures and a great silver vase ornamented with what may be called the coat of arms of Lagash, a lion-headed eagle with wings outspread, grasping a lion in each talon. After the time of Gudea, Lagash seems to have lost its importance; at least we know nothing more about it until the construction of the Seleucid fortress mentioned, when it seems to have become part of the Greek kingdom of Characene. The objects found at Tello are the most valuable art treasures up to this time discovered in Babylonia.

See E. de Sarzec, Découvertes en Chaldée (1887 foll.).

(J. P. Pe.)

LAGHMAN, a district of Afghanistan, in the province of Jalalabad, between Jalalabad and Kabul, on the northern side of the Peshawar road, one of the richest and most fertile tracts in Afghanistan. It is the valley of the Kabul river between the Tagao and the Kunar and merges on the north into Kafiristan. The inhabitants, Ghilzais and Tajiks, are supposed to be the cleverest business people in the country. Sugar, cotton and rice are exported to Kabul. The Laghman route between Kabul and India crossing the Kunar river into the Mohmand country is the route followed by Alexander the Great and Baber; but it has now been supplanted by the Khyber.

LAGOON (Fr. lagune, Lat. lacuna, a pool), a term applied to (1) a sheet of salt or brackish water near the sea, (2) a sheet of fresh water of no great depth or extent, (3) the expanse of smooth water enclosed by an atoll. Sea lagoons are formed only where the shores are low and protected from wave action. Under these conditions a bar may be raised above sea-level or a spit may grow until its end touches the land. The enclosed shallow water is then isolated in a wide stretch, the seaward banks broaden, and the lagoon becomes a permanent area of still shallow water with peculiar faunal features. In the old lake plains of Australia there are occasional wide and shallow depressions where water collects permanently. Large numbers of aquatic birds, black swans, wild duck, teal, migrant spoon-bills or pelicans, resort to these fresh-water lagoons.

LAGOS, the western province of Southern Nigeria, a British colony and protectorate in West Africa. The province consists of three divisions: (1) the coast region, including Lagos Island, being the former colony of Lagos; (2) small native states adjacent to the colony; and (3) the Yoruba country, farther inland. The total area is some 27,000 sq. m., or about the size of Scotland. The province is bounded S. by the Gulf of Guinea, (from 2° 46′ 55″ to 4° 30′ E.); W. by the French colony of Dahomey; N. and E. by other provinces of Nigeria.

Physical Features.—The coast is low, marshy and malarious, and all along the shore the great Atlantic billows cause a dangerous surf. Behind the coast-line stretches a series of lagoons, in which are small islands, that of Lagos having an area of 3¾ sq. m. Beyond the lagoons and mangrove swamps is a broad zone of dense primeval forest—“the bush”—which completely separates the arable lands from the coast lagoons. The water-parting of the streams flowing north to the Niger, and south to the Gulf of Guinea, is the main physical feature. The general level of Yorubaland is under 2000 ft. But towards the east, about the upper course of the river Oshun, the elevation is higher. Southward from the divide the land, which is intersected by the nearly parallel courses of the rivers Ogun, Omi, Oshun, Oni and Oluwa, falls in continuous undulations to the coast, the open cultivated ground gradually giving place to forest tracts, where the most characteristic tree is the oil-palm. Flowering trees, certain kinds of rubber vines, and shrubs are plentiful. In the northern regions the shea-butter tree is found. The fauna resembles that of the other regions of the Guinea coast, but large game is becoming scarce. Leopards, antelopes and monkeys are common, and alligators infest the rivers.

The lagoons, lying between the outer surf-beaten beach and the inner shore line, form a navigable highway of still waters, many miles in extent. They are almost entirely free from rock, though they are often shallow, with numerous mud banks. The most extensive are Lekki in the east, and Ikoradu (Lagos) in the west. At its N.W. extremity the Lagos lagoon receives the Ogun, the largest river in Yorubaland, whose current is strong enough to keep the seaward channel open throughout the year. Hence the importance of the port of Lagos, which lies in smooth water at the northern end of this channel. The outer entrance is obstructed by a dangerous sand bar.

Climate and Health.—The climate is unhealthy, especially for Europeans. The rainfall has not been ascertained in the interior. In the northern districts it is probably considerably less than at Lagos, where it is about 70 in. a year. The variation is, however, very great. In 1901 the rainfall was 112 in., in 1902 but 47, these figures being respectively the highest and lowest recorded in a period of seventeen years. The mean temperature at Lagos is 82.5° F., the range being from 68° to 91°. At certain seasons sudden heavy squalls of wind and rain that last for a few hours are common. The hurricane and typhoon are unknown. The principal diseases are malarial fever, smallpox, rheumatism, peripheral neuritis, dysentery, chest diseases and guinea-worm. Fever not unfrequently assumes the dangerous form known as “black-water fever.” The frequency of smallpox is being much diminished outside the larger towns in the interior, in which vaccination is neglected. The absence of plague, yellow fever, cholera, typhoid fever and scarlatina is noteworthy. A mild form of yaws is endemic.

Inhabitants.—The population is estimated at 1,750,000. The Yoruba people, a Negro race divided into many tribes, form the majority of the inhabitants. Notwithstanding their political feuds and their proved capacity as fighting men, the Yoruba are distinguished above all the surrounding races for their generally peaceful disposition, industry, friendliness, courtesy and hospitality towards strangers. They are also intensely patriotic. Physically they resemble closely their Ewe and Dahomey neighbours, but are of somewhat lighter complexion, taller and of less pronounced Negro features. They exhibit high administrative ability, possess a marked capacity for trade, and have made remarkable progress in the industrial arts. The different tribes are distinguished by tattoo markings, usually some simple pattern of two or more parallel lines, disposed horizontally or vertically on the cheeks or other parts of the face. The feeling for religion is deeply implanted among the Yoruba. The majority are pagans, or dominated by pagan beliefs, but Islam has made great progress since the cessation of the Fula wars, while Protestant and Roman Catholic missions have been at work since 1848 at Abeokuta, Oyo, Ibadan and other large towns. Samuel Crowther, the first Negro bishop in the Anglican church, who was distinguished as an explorer, geographer and linguist, was a native of Yorubaland, rescued (1822) by the English from slavery and educated at Sierra Leone (see Yorubas).

Towns.—Besides Lagos (q.v.), pop. about 50,000, the chief towns in the colony proper are Epe, pop. 16,000, on the northern side of the lagoons, and Badagry (a notorious place during the slave-trade period) and Lekki, both on the coast. Inland the chief towns are Abeokuta (q.v.), pop. about 60,000, and Ibadan (q.v.), pop. estimated at 150,000.

Agriculture and Trade.—The chief wealth of the country consists in forest produce, the staple industries being the collection of palm-kernels and palm oil. Besides the oil-palm forests large areas are covered with timber trees, the wood chiefly cut for commercial purposes being a kind of mahogany. The destruction of immature trees and the fluctuations in price render this a very uncertain trade. The rubber industry was started in 1894, and in 1896 the rubber exported was valued at £347,000. In 1899, owing to reckless methods of tapping the vines, 75% of the rubber plants died. Precautions were then taken to preserve the remainder and allow young plants to grow. The collection of rubber recommenced in 1904 and the industry again became one of importance. A considerable area is devoted to cocoa plantations, all owned by native cultivators. Coffee and tobacco of good quality are cultivated and shea-butter is largely used as an illuminant. The Yoruba country is the greatest agricultural centre in West Africa. For home consumption the Yoruba grow yams, maize and millet, the chief articles of food, cassava, sweet potatoes, sesame and beans. Model farms have been established for experimental culture and for the tuition of the natives. A palatable wine is obtained from the Raphia vinifera and native beers are also brewed. Imported spirits are largely consumed. There are no manufactures on a large scale save the making of “country cloths” (from cotton grown, spun and woven in the country) and mats. Pottery and agricultural implements are made, and tanning, dyeing and forging practised in the towns, and along the rivers and lagoons boats and canoes are built. Fishing is extensively engaged in, the fish being dried and sent up country. Except iron there are no valuable minerals in the country.

The cotton plant from which the “country cloths” are made is native to the country, the soil of which is capable of producing the very finest grades of cotton. The Egba branch of the Yoruba have always grown the plant. In 1869 the cotton exported was valued at £76,957, but owing to low prices the natives ceased to grow cotton for export, so that in 1879 the value of exported cotton was only £526. In 1902 planting for export was recommenced by the Egba on scientific lines, and was started in the Abeokuta district with encouraging results.

The Yoruba profess to be unable to alienate land in perpetuity, but native custom does not preclude leasing, and land concessions have been taken up by Europeans on long leases. Some concessions are only for cutting and removing timber; others permit of cultivation. The northern parts of the protectorate are specially suitable for stock raising and poultry culture.

The chief exports are palm-kernels, palm-oil, timber, rubber and cocoa. Palm-kernels alone constitute more than a half in value of the total exports, and with palm-oil over three-fourths. The trade in these products is practically confined to Great Britain and Germany, the share of the first-named being 25% to Germany’s 75%. Minor exports are coffee, “country cloths,” maize, shea-butter and ivory.

Cotton goods are the most important of the imports, spirits coming next, followed by building material, haberdashery and hardware and tobacco. Over 90% of the cotton goods are imported from Great Britain, whilst nearly the same proportion of the spirit imports come from Germany. Nearly all the liquors consist of “Trade Spirits,” chiefly gin, rum and a concoction called “alcohol,” introduced (1901) to meet the growing taste of the people for stronger liquor. This stuff contained 90% of pure alcohol and sometimes over 4% of fusel oil. To hinder the sale of this noxious compound legislation was passed in 1903 prohibiting the import of liquor containing more than ½% of fusel oil, whilst the states of Abeokuta and Ibadan prohibited the importation of liquor stronger than proof. The total trade of the country in 1905 was valued at £2,224,754, the imports slightly exceeding the exports. There is a large transit trade with Dahomey.

Communications.—Lagos is well supplied with means of communication. A 3 ft. 6 in. gauge railway starts from Iddo Island, and extends past Abeokuta, 64 m. from Lagos, Ibadan (123 m.), Oshogbo (175 m.), to Illorin (247 m.) in Northern Nigeria, whence the line is continued to Jebba and Zunguru (see Nigeria). Abeokuta is served by a branch line, 1½ m. long, from Aro on the main line. Railway bridges connect Iddo Island both with the mainland and with Lagos Island (see Lagos, town). This line was begun in 1896 and opened to Ibadan in 1901. In 1905 the building of the section Ibadan-Illorin was undertaken. The railway was built by the government and cost about £7000 per mile. The lagoons offer convenient channels for numerous small craft, which, with the exception of steam-launches, are almost entirely native-built canoes. Branch steamers run between the Forcados mouth of the Niger and Lagos, and also between Lagos and Porto Novo, in French territory, and do a large transit trade. Various roads through the bush have been made by the government. There is telegraphic communication with Europe, Northern Nigeria and South Africa, and steamships ply regularly between Lagos and Liverpool, and Lagos and Hamburg (see Lagos, town).

Administration, Justice, Education, &c.—The small part of the province which constitutes “the colony of Southern Nigeria” is governed as a crown colony. Elsewhere the native governments are retained, the chiefs and councils of elders receiving the advice and support of British commissioners. There is also an advisory native central council which meets at Lagos. The great majority of the civil servants are natives of the country, some of whom have been educated in England. The legal status of slavery is not recognized by the law courts and dealing in slaves is suppressed. As an institution slavery is dying out, and only exists in a domestic form.

The cost of administration is met, mainly, by customs, largely derived from the duties on imported spirits. From the railways, a government monopoly, a considerable net profit is earned. Expenditure is mainly under the heads of railway administration, other public works, military and police, health, and education. The revenue increased in the ten years 1895-1905 from £142,049 to £410,250. In the same period the expenditure rose from £144,484 to £354,254.

The defence of the province is entrusted to the Lagos battalion of the West African Frontier Force, a body under the control of the Colonial Office in London and composed of Hausa (four-fifths) and Yoruba. It is officered from the British army.

The judicial system in the colony proper is based on that of England. The colonial supreme court, by agreement with the rulers of Abeokuta, Ibadan and other states in the protectorate, tries, with the aid of native assessors, all cases of importance in those countries. Other cases are tried by mixed courts, or, where Yoruba alone are concerned, by native courts.

There is a government board of education which maintains a few schools and supervises those voluntarily established. These are chiefly those of various missionary societies, who, besides primary schools, have a few secondary schools. The Mahommedans have their own schools. Grants from public funds are made to the voluntary schools. Considerable attention is paid to manual training, the laws of health and the teaching of English, which is spoken by about one-fourth of the native population.

History.—Lagos Island was so named by the Portuguese explorers of the 15th century, because of the numerous lagoons or lakes on this part of the coast. The Portuguese, and after them the French, had settlements here at various points. In the 18th century Lagos Lagoon became the chief resort of slavers frequenting the Bight of Benin, this portion of the Gulf of Guinea becoming known pre-eminently as the Slave Coast. British traders established themselves at Badagry, 40 m. W. of Lagos, where in 1851 they were attacked by Kosoko, the Yoruba king of Lagos Island. As a result a British naval force seized Lagos after a sharp fight and deposed the king, placing his cousin, Akitoye, on the throne. A treaty was concluded under which Akitoye bound himself to put down the slave trade. This treaty was not adhered to, and in 1861 Akitoye’s son and successor, King Docemo, was induced to give up his territorial jurisdiction and accept a pension of 1200 bags of cowries, afterwards commuted to £1000 a year, which pension he drew until his death in 1885. Immediately after the proclamation of the British annexation, a steady current of immigration from the mainland set in, and a flourishing town arose on Lagos Island. Iddo Island was acquired at the same time as Lagos Island, and from 1862 to 1894 various additions by purchase or cession were made to the colony. In 1879 the small kingdom of Kotonu was placed under British protection. Kotonu lies south and east of the Denham Lagoon (see Dahomey). In 1889 it was exchanged with the French for the kingdom of Pokra which is to the north of Badagry. In the early years of the colony Sir John Glover, R.N., who was twice governor (1864-1866 and 1871-1872), did much pioneer work and earned the confidence of the natives to a remarkable degree. Later Sir C. A. Moloney (governor 1886-1890) opened up relations with the Yoruba and other tribes in the hinterland. He despatched two commissioners whose duty it was to conclude commercial treaties and use British influence to put a stop to inter-tribal fighting and the closing of the trade routes. In 1892 the Jebu, who acted as middlemen between the colony and the Yoruba, closed several trade routes. An expedition sent against them resulted in their subjugation and the annexation of part of their country. An order in council issued in 1899 extended the protectorate over Yorubaland. The tribes of the hinterland have largely welcomed the British protectorate and military expeditions have been few and unimportant. (For the history of the Yoruba states see Yorubas.)

Lagos was made a separate government in 1863; in 1866 it was placed in political dependence upon Sierra Leone; in 1874 it became (politically) an integral part of the Gold Coast Colony, whilst in 1886 it was again made a separate government, administered as a crown colony. In Sir William Macgregor, M.D., formerly administrator of British New Guinea, governor 1899-1904, the colony found an enlightened ruler. He inaugurated the railway system, and drew much closer the friendly ties between the British and the tribes of the protectorate. Meantime, since 1884, the whole of the Niger delta, lying immediately east of Lagos, as well as the Hausa states and Bornu, had been acquired by Great Britain. Unification of the British possessions in Nigeria being desirable, the delta regions and Lagos were formed in 1906 into one government (see Nigeria).

See C. P. Lucas, Historical Geography of the British Colonies, vol. iii. West Africa (Oxford, 1896); the annual Reports issued by the Colonial Office, London; A. B. Ellis, The Yoruba-speaking Peoples (London, 1894); Lady Glover, The Life of Sir John Hawley Glover (London, 1897). Consult also the works cited under Nigeria and Dahomey.

LAGOS, a seaport of West Africa, capital of the British colony and protectorate of Southern Nigeria, in 6° 26′ N., 3° 23′ E. on an island in a lagoon named Lagos also. Between Lagos and the mainland is Iddo Island. An iron bridge for road and railway traffic 2600 ft. long connects Lagos and Iddo Islands, and another iron bridge, 917 ft. long, joins Iddo Island to the mainland. The town lies but a foot or two above sea-level. The principal buildings are a large government house, the law courts, the memorial hall erected to commemorate the services of Sir John Glover, used for public meetings and entertainments, an elaborate club-house provided from public funds, and the police quarters. There are many substantial villas that serve as quarters for the officers of the civil service, as well as numerous solidly-built handsome private buildings. The streets are well kept; the town is supplied with electric light, and there is a good water service. The chief stores and depôts for goods are all on the banks of the lagoon. The swamps of which originally Lagos Island entirely consisted have been reclaimed. In connexion with this work a canal, 25 ft. wide, has been cut right through the island and a sea-wall built round its western half. There is a commodious public hospital, of the cottage type, on a good site. There is a racecourse, which also serves as a general public recreation ground. Shifting banks of sand form a bar at the sea entrance of the lagoon. Extensive works were undertaken in 1908 with a view to making Lagos an open port. A mole has been built at the eastern entrance to the harbour and dredgers are at work on the bar, which can be crossed by vessels drawing 13 ft. Large ocean-going steamers anchor not less than 2 m. from land, and goods and passengers are there transhipped into smaller steamers for Lagos. Heavy cargo is carried by the large steamers to Forcados, 200 m. farther down the coast, transhipped there into branch boats, and taken via the lagoons to Lagos. The port is 4279 m. from Liverpool, 1203 from Freetown, Sierra Leone (the nearest safe port westward), and 315 from Cape Coast.

The inhabitants, about 50,000, include, besides the native tribes, Sierra Leonis, Fanti, Krumen and the descendants of some 6000 Brazilian emancipados who were settled here in the early days of British rule. The Europeans number about 400. Rather more than half the populace are Moslems.

LAGOS, a seaport of southern Portugal, in the district of Faro (formerly the province of Algarve); on the Atlantic Ocean, and on the estuary of the small river Lagos, here spanned by a fine stone bridge. Pop. (1900) 8291. The city is defended by fortifications erected in the 17th century. It is supplied with water by an aqueduct 800 yds. long. The harbour is deep, capacious, and completely sheltered on the north and west; it is frequently visited by the British Channel fleet. Vines and figs are extensively cultivated in the neighbourhood, and Lagos is the centre of important sardine and tunny fisheries. Its trade is chiefly carried on by small coasting vessels, as there is no railway. Lagos is on or near the site of the Roman Lacobriga. Since the 15th century it has held the formal rank and title of city. Cape St Vincent, the ancient Promontorium Sacrum, and the south-western extremity of the kingdom, is 22 m. W. It is famous for its connexion with Prince Henry (q.v.), the Navigator, who here founded the town of Sagres in 1421; and for several British naval victories, the most celebrated of which was won in 1797 by Admiral Jervis (afterwards Earl St Vincent) over a larger Spanish squadron. In 1759 Admiral Boscawen defeated a French fleet off Lagos. The great earthquake of 1755 destroyed a large part of the city.

LA GRÂCE, or Les Grâces, a game invented in France during the first quarter of the 19th century and called there le jeu des Grâces. It is played with two light sticks about 16 in. long and a wicker ring, which is projected into the air by placing it over the sticks crossed and then separating them rapidly. The ring is caught upon the stick of another player and thrown back, the object being to prevent it from falling to the ground.

LA GRAND’ COMBE, a town of southern France, in the department of Gard on the Gardon, 39 m. N.N.W. of Nîmes by rail. Pop. (1906) town, 6406; commune, 11,292. There are extensive coal mines in the vicinity.

LAGRANGE, JOSEPH LOUIS (1736-1813), French mathematician, was born at Turin, on the 25th of January 1736. He was of French extraction, his great grandfather, a cavalry captain, having passed from the service of France to that of Sardinia, and settled in Turin under Emmanuel II. His father, Joseph Louis Lagrange, married Maria Theresa Gros, only daughter of a rich physician at Cambiano, and had by her eleven children, of whom only the eldest (the subject of this notice) and the youngest survived infancy. His emoluments as treasurer at war, together with his wife’s fortune, provided him with ample means, which he lost by rash speculations, a circumstance regarded by his son as the prelude to his own good fortune; for had he been rich, he used to say, he might never have known mathematics.

The genius of Lagrange did not at once take its true bent. His earliest tastes were literary rather than scientific, and he learned the rudiments of geometry during his first year at the college of Turin, without difficulty, but without distinction. The perusal of a tract by Halley (Phil. Trans. xviii. 960) roused his enthusiasm for the analytical method, of which he was destined to develop the utmost capabilities. He now entered, unaided save by his own unerring tact and vivid apprehension, upon a course of study which, in two years, placed him on a level with the greatest of his contemporaries. At the age of nineteen he communicated to Leonhard Euler his idea of a general method of dealing with “isoperimetrical” problems, known later as the Calculus of Variations. It was eagerly welcomed by the Berlin mathematician, who had the generosity to withhold from publication his own further researches on the subject, until his youthful correspondent should have had time to complete and opportunity to claim the invention. This prosperous opening gave the key-note to Lagrange’s career. Appointed, in 1754, professor of geometry in the royal school of artillery, he formed with some of his pupils—for the most part his seniors—friendships based on community of scientific ardour. With the aid of the marquis de Saluces and the anatomist G. F. Cigna, he founded in 1758 a society which became the Turin Academy of Sciences. The first volume of its memoirs, published in the following year, contained a paper by Lagrange entitled Recherches sur la nature et la propagation du son, in which the power of his analysis and his address in its application were equally conspicuous. He made his first appearance in public as the critic of Newton, and the arbiter between d’Alembert and Euler. By considering only the particles of air found in a right line, he reduced the problem of the propagation of sound to the solution of the same partial differential equations that include the motions of vibrating strings, and demonstrated the insufficiency of the methods employed by both his great contemporaries in dealing with the latter subject. He further treated in a masterly manner of echoes and the mixture of sounds, and explained the phenomenon of grave harmonics as due to the occurrence of beats so rapid as to generate a musical note. This was followed, in the second volume of the Miscellanea Taurinensia (1762) by his “Essai d’une nouvelle méthode pour déterminer les maxima et les minima des formules intégrales indéfinies,” together with the application of this important development of analysis to the solution of several dynamical problems, as well as to the demonstration of the mechanical principle of “least action.” The essential point in his advance on Euler’s mode of investigating curves of maximum or minimum consisted in his purely analytical conception of the subject. He not only freed it from all trammels of geometrical construction, but by the introduction of the symbol δ gave it the efficacy of a new calculus. He is thus justly regarded as the inventor of the “method of variations”—a name supplied by Euler in 1766.

By these performances Lagrange found himself, at the age of twenty-six, on the summit of European fame. Such a height had not been reached without cost. Intense application during early youth had weakened a constitution never robust, and led to accesses of feverish exaltation culminating, in the spring of 1761, in an attack of bilious hypochondria, which permanently lowered the tone of his nervous system. Rest and exercise, however, temporarily restored his health, and he gave proof of the undiminished vigour of his powers by carrying off, in 1764, the prize offered by the Paris Academy of Sciences for the best essay on the libration of the moon. His treatise was remarkable, not only as offering a satisfactory explanation of the coincidence between the lunar periods of rotation and revolution, but as containing the first employment of his radical formula of mechanics, obtained by combining with the principle of d’Alembert that of virtual velocities. His success encouraged the Academy to propose, in 1766, as a theme for competition, the hitherto unattempted theory of the Jovian system. The prize was again awarded to Lagrange; and he earned the same distinction with essays on the problem of three bodies in 1772, on the secular equation of the moon in 1774, and in 1778 on the theory of cometary perturbations.

He had in the meantime gratified a long felt desire by a visit to Paris, where he enjoyed the stimulating delight of conversing with such mathematicians as A. C. Clairault, d’Alembert, Condorcet and the Abbé Marie. Illness prevented him from visiting London. The post of director of the mathematical department of the Berlin Academy (of which he had been a member since 1759) becoming vacant by the removal of Euler to St Petersburg, the latter and d’Alembert united to recommend Lagrange as his successor. Euler’s eulogium was enhanced by his desire to quit Berlin, d’Alembert’s by his dread of a royal command to repair thither; and the result was that an invitation, conveying the wish of the “greatest king in Europe” to have the “greatest mathematician” at his court, was sent to Turin. On the 6th of November 1766, Lagrange was installed in his new position, with a salary of 6000 francs, ample leisure for scientific research, and royal favour sufficient to secure him respect without exciting envy. The national jealousy of foreigners, was at first a source of annoyance to him; but such prejudices were gradually disarmed by the inoffensiveness of his demeanour. We are told that the universal example of his colleagues, rather than any desire for female society, impelled him to matrimony; his choice being a lady of the Conti family, who, by his request, joined him at Berlin. Soon after marriage his wife was attacked by a lingering illness, to which she succumbed, Lagrange devoting all his time, and a considerable store of medical knowledge, to her care.

The long series of memoirs—some of them complete treatises of great moment in the history of science—communicated by Lagrange to the Berlin Academy between the years 1767 and 1787 were not the only fruits of his exile. His Mécanique analytique, in which his genius most fully displayed itself, was produced during the same period. This great work was the perfect realization of a design conceived by the author almost in boyhood, and clearly sketched in his first published essay. Its scope may be briefly described as the reduction of the theory of mechanics to certain general formulae, from the simple development of which should be derived the equations necessary for the solution of each separate problem. From the fundamental principle of virtual velocities, which thus acquired a new significance, Lagrange deduced, with the aid of the calculus of variations, the whole system of mechanical truths, by processes so elegant, lucid and harmonious as to constitute, in Sir William Hamilton’s words, “a kind of scientific poem.” This unification of method was one of matter also. By his mode of regarding a liquid as a material system characterized by the unshackled mobility of its minutest parts, the separation between the mechanics of matter in different forms of aggregation finally disappeared, and the fundamental equation of forces was for the first time extended to hydrostatics and hydrodynamics. Thus a universal science of matter and motion was derived, by an unbroken sequence of deduction, from one radical principle; and analytical mechanics assumed the clear and complete form of logical perfection which it now wears.

A publisher having with some difficulty been found, the book appeared at Paris in 1788 under the supervision of A. M. Legendre. But before that time Lagrange himself was on the spot. After the death of Frederick the Great, his presence was competed for by the courts of France, Spain and Naples, and a residence in Berlin having ceased to possess any attraction for him, he removed to Paris in 1787. Marie Antoinette warmly patronized him. He was lodged in the Louvre, received the grant of an income equal to that he had hitherto enjoyed, and, with the title of “veteran pensioner” in lieu of that of “foreign associate” (conferred in 1772), the right of voting at the deliberations of the Academy. In the midst of these distinctions, a profound melancholy seized upon him. His mathematical enthusiasm was for the time completely quenched, and during two years the printed volume of his Mécanique, which he had seen only in manuscript, lay unopened beside him. He relieved his dejection with miscellaneous studies, especially with that of chemistry, which, in the new form given to it by Lavoisier, he found “aisée comme l’algèbre.” The Revolution roused him once more to activity and cheerfulness. Curiosity impelled him to remain and watch the progress of such a novel phenomenon; but curiosity was changed into dismay as the terrific character of the phenomenon unfolded itself. He now bitterly regretted his temerity in braving the danger. “Tu l’as voulu” he would repeat self-reproachfully. Even from revolutionary tribunals, however, the name of Lagrange uniformly commanded respect. His pension was continued by the National Assembly, and he was partially indemnified for the depreciation of the currency by remunerative appointments. Nominated president of the Academical commission for the reform of weights and measures, his services were retained when its “purification” by the Jacobins removed his most distinguished colleagues. He again sat on the commission of 1799 for the construction of the metric system, and by his zealous advocacy of the decimal principle largely contributed to its adoption.

Meanwhile, on the 31st of May 1792 he married Mademoiselle Lemonnier, daughter of the astronomer of that name, a young and beautiful girl, whose devotion ignored disparity of years, and formed the one tie with life which Lagrange found it hard to break. He had no children by either marriage. Although specially exempted from the operation of the decree of October 1793, imposing banishment on foreign residents, he took alarm at the fate of J. S. Bailly and A. L. Lavoisier, and prepared to resume his former situation in Berlin. His design was frustrated by the establishment of and his official connexion with the École Normale, and the École Polytechnique. The former institution had an ephemeral existence; but amongst the benefits derived from the foundation of the École Polytechnique one of the greatest, it has been observed, was the restoration of Lagrange to mathematics. The remembrance of his teachings was long treasured by such of his auditors—amongst whom were J. B. J. Delambre and S. F. Lacroix—as were capable of appreciating them. In expounding the principles of the differential calculus, he started, as it were, from the level of his pupils, and ascended with them by almost insensible gradations from elementary to abstruse conceptions. He seemed, not a professor amongst students, but a learner amongst learners; pauses for thought alternated with luminous exposition; invention accompanied demonstration; and thus originated his Théorie des fonctions analytiques (Paris, 1797). The leading idea of this work was contained in a paper published in the Berlin Memoirs for 1772. Its object was the elimination of the, to some minds, unsatisfactory conception of the infinite from the metaphysics of the higher mathematics, and the substitution for the differential and integral calculus of an analogous method depending wholly on the serial development of algebraical functions. By means of this “calculus of derived functions” Lagrange hoped to give to the solution of all analytical problems the utmost “rigour of the demonstrations of the ancients”; but it cannot be said that the attempt was successful. The validity of his fundamental position was impaired by the absence of a well-constituted theory of series; the notation employed was inconvenient, and was abandoned by its inventor in the second edition of his Mécanique; while his scruples as to the admission into analytical investigations of the idea of limits or vanishing ratios have long since been laid aside as idle. Nowhere, however, were the keenness and clearness of his intellect more conspicuous than in this brilliant effort, which, if it failed in its immediate object, was highly effective in secondary results. His purely abstract mode of regarding functions, apart from any mechanical or geometrical considerations, led the way to a new and sharply characterized development of the higher analysis in the hands of A. Cauchy, C. G. Jacobi, and others. The Théorie des fonctions is divided into three parts, of which the first explains the general doctrine of functions, the second deals with its application to geometry, and the third with its bearings on mechanics.

On the establishment of the Institute, Lagrange was placed at the head of the section of geometry; he was one of the first members of the Bureau des Longitudes; and his name appeared in 1791 on the list of foreign members of the Royal Society. On the annexation of Piedmont to France in 1796, a touching compliment was paid to him in the person of his aged father. By direction of Talleyrand, then minister for foreign affairs, the French commissary repaired in state to the old man’s residence in Turin, to congratulate him on the merits of his son, whom they declared “to have done honour to mankind by his genius, and whom Piedmont was proud to have produced, and France to possess.” Bonaparte, who styled him “la haute pyramide des sciences mathématiques,” loaded him with personal favours and official distinctions. He became a senator, a count of the empire, a grand officer of the legion of honour, and just before his death received the grand cross of the order of réunion.

The preparation of a new edition of his Mécanique exhausted his already falling powers. Frequent fainting fits gave presage of a speedy end, and on the 8th of April 1813 he had a final interview with his friends B. Lacépède, G. Monge and J. A. Chaptal. He spoke with the utmost calm of his approaching death; “c’est une dernière fonction,” he said, “qui n’est ni pénible ni désagréable.” He nevertheless looked forward to a future meeting, when he promised to complete the autobiographical details which weakness obliged him to interrupt. They remained untold, for he died two days later on the 10th of April, and was buried in the Pantheon, the funeral oration being pronounced by Laplace and Lacépède.

Amongst the brilliant group of mathematicians whose magnanimous rivalry contributed to accomplish the task of generalization and deduction reserved for the 18th century, Lagrange occupies an eminent place. It is indeed by no means easy to distinguish and apportion the respective merits of the competitors. This is especially the case between Lagrange and Euler on the one side, and between Lagrange and Laplace on the other. The calculus of variations lay undeveloped in Euler’s mode of treating isoperimetrical problems. The fruitful method, again, of the variation of elements was introduced by Euler, but adopted and perfected by Lagrange, who first recognized its supreme importance to the analytical investigation of the planetary movements. Finally, of the grand series of researches by which the stability of the solar system was ascertained, the glory must be almost equally divided between Lagrange and Laplace. In analytical invention, and mastery over the calculus, the Turin mathematician was admittedly unrivalled. Laplace owned that he had despaired of effecting the integration of the differential equations relative to secular inequalities until Lagrange showed him the way. But Laplace unquestionably surpassed his rival in practical sagacity and the intuition of physical truth. Lagrange saw in the problems of nature so many occasions for analytical triumphs; Laplace regarded analytical triumphs as the means of solving the problems of nature. One mind seemed the complement of the other; and both, united in honourable rivalry, formed an instrument of unexampled perfection for the investigation of the celestial machinery. What may be called Lagrange’s first period of research into planetary perturbations extended from 1774 to 1784 (see Astronomy: History). The notable group of treatises communicated, 1781-1784, to the Berlin Academy was designed, but did not prove to be his final contribution to the theory of the planets. After an interval of twenty-four years the subject, re-opened by S. D. Poisson in a paper read on the 20th of June 1808, was once more attacked by Lagrange with all his pristine vigour and fertility of invention. Resuming the inquiry into the invariability of mean motions, Poisson carried the approximation, with Lagrange’s formulae, as far as the squares of the disturbing forces, hitherto neglected, with the same result as to the stability of the system. He had not attempted to include in his calculations the orbital variations of the disturbing bodies; but Lagrange, by the happy artifice of transferring the origin of coordinates from the centre of the sun to the centre of gravity of the sun and planets, obtained a simplification of the formulae, by which the same analysis was rendered equally applicable to each of the planets severally. It deserves to be recorded as one of the numerous coincidences of discovery that Laplace, on being made acquainted by Lagrange with his new method, produced analogous expressions, to which his independent researches had led him. The final achievement of Lagrange in this direction was the extension of the method of the variation of arbitrary constants, successfully used by him in the investigation of periodical as well as of secular inequalities, to any system whatever of mutually interacting bodies. “Not without astonishment,” even to himself, regard being had to the great generality of the differential equations, he reached a result so wide as to include, as a particular case, the solution of the planetary problem recently obtained by him. He proposed to apply the same principles to the calculation of the disturbances produced in the rotation of the planets by external action on their equatorial protuberances, but was anticipated by Poisson, who gave formulae for the variation of the elements of rotation strictly corresponding with those found by Lagrange for the variation of the elements of revolution. The revision of the Mécanique analytique was undertaken mainly for the purpose of embodying in it these new methods and final results, but was interrupted, when two-thirds completed, by the death of its author.

In the advancement of almost every branch of pure mathematics Lagrange took a conspicuous part. The calculus of variations is indissolubly associated with his name. In the theory of numbers he furnished solutions of many of P. Fermat’s theorems, and added some of his own. In algebra he discovered the method of approximating to the real roots of an equation by means of continued fractions, and imagined a general process of solving algebraical equations of every degree. The method indeed fails for equations of an order above the fourth, because it then involves the solution of an equation of higher dimensions than they proposed. Yet it possesses the great and characteristic merit of generalizing the solutions of his predecessors, exhibiting them all as modifications of one principle. To Lagrange, perhaps more than to any other, the theory of differential equations is indebted for its position as a science, rather than a collection of ingenious artifices for the solution of particular problems. To the calculus of finite differences he contributed the beautiful formula of interpolation which bears his name; although substantially the same result seems to have been previously obtained by Euler. But it was in the application to mechanical questions of the instrument which he thus helped to form that his singular merit lay. It was his just boast to have transformed mechanics (defined by him as a “geometry of four dimensions”) into a branch of analysis, and to have exhibited the so-called mechanical “principles” as simple results of the calculus. The method of “generalized coordinates,” as it is now called, by which he attained this result, is the most brilliant achievement of the analytical method. Instead of following the motion of each individual part of a material system, he showed that, if we determine its configuration by a sufficient number of variables, whose number is that of the degrees of freedom to move (there being as many equations as the system has degrees of freedom), the kinetic and potential energies of the system can be expressed in terms of these, and the differential equations of motion thence deduced by simple differentiation. Besides this most important contribution to the general fabric of dynamical science, we owe to Lagrange several minor theorems of great elegance,—among which may be mentioned his theorem that the kinetic energy imparted by given impulses to a material system under given constraints is a maximum. To this entire branch of knowledge, in short, he successfully imparted that character of generality and completeness towards which his labours invariably tended.

His share in the gigantic task of verifying the Newtonian theory would alone suffice to immortalize his name. His co-operation was indeed more indispensable than at first sight appears. Much as was done by him, what was done through him was still more important. Some of his brilliant rival’s most conspicuous discoveries were implicitly contained in his writings, and wanted but one step for completion. But that one step, from the abstract to the concrete, was precisely that which the character of Lagrange’s mind indisposed him to make. As notable instances may be mentioned Laplace’s discoveries relating to the velocity of sound and the secular acceleration of the moon, both of which were led close up to by Lagrange’s analytical demonstrations. In the Berlin Memoirs for 1778 and 1783 Lagrange gave the first direct and theoretically perfect method of determining cometary orbits. It has not indeed proved practically available; but his system of calculating cometary perturbations by means of “mechanical quadratures” has formed the starting-point of all subsequent researches on the subject. His determination of maximum and minimum values for the slowly varying planetary eccentricities was the earliest attempt to deal with the problem. Without a more accurate knowledge of the masses of the planets than was then possessed a satisfactory solution was impossible; but the upper limits assigned by him agreed closely with those obtained later by U. J. J. Leverrier. As a mathematical writer Lagrange has perhaps never been surpassed. His treatises are not only storehouses of ingenious methods, but models of symmetrical form. The clearness, elegance and originality of his mode of presentation give lucidity to what is obscure, novelty to what is familiar, and simplicity to what is abstruse. His genius was one of generalization and abstraction; and the aspirations of the time towards unity and perfection received, by his serene labours, an embodiment denied to them in the troubled world of politics.

Bibliography.—Lagrange’s numerous scattered memoirs have been collected and published in seven 4to volumes, under the title Œuvres de Lagrange, publiées sous les soins de M. J. A. Serret (Paris, 1867-1877). The first, second and third sections of this publication comprise respectively the papers communicated by him to the Academies of Sciences of Turin, Berlin and Paris; the fourth includes his miscellaneous contributions to other scientific collections, together with his additions to Euler’s Algebra, and his Leçons élémentaires at the École Normale in 1795. Delambre’s notice of his life, extracted from the Mém. de l’Institut, 1812, is prefixed to the first volume. Besides the separate works already named are Résolution des équations numériques (1798, 2nd ed., 1808, 3rd ed., 1826), and Leçons sur le calcul des fonctions (1805, 2nd ed., 1806), designed as a commentary and supplement to the first part of the Théorie des fonctions. The first volume of the enlarged edition of the Mécanique appeared in 1811, the second, of which the revision was completed by MM Prony and Binet, in 1815. A third edition, in 2 vols., 4to, was issued in 1853-1855, and a second of the Théorie des fonctions in 1813.

See also J. J. Virey and Potel, Précis historique (1813); Th. Thomson’s Annals of Philosophy (1813-1820), vols. ii. and iv.; H. Suter, Geschichte der math. Wiss. (1873); E. Dühring, Kritische Gesch. der allgemeinen Principien der Mechanik (1877, 2nd ed.); A. Gautier, Essai historique sur le problème des trois corps (1817); R. Grant, History of Physical Astronomy, &c.; Pietro Cossali, Éloge (Padua, 1813); L. Martini, Cenni biográfici (1840); Moniteur du 26 Février (1814); W. Whewell, Hist. of the Inductive Sciences, ii. passim; J. Clerk Maxwell, Electricity and Magnetism, ii. 184; A. Berry, Short Hist. of Astr., p. 313; J. S. Bailly, Hist. de l’astr. moderne, iii. 156, 185, 232; J. C. Poggendorff, Biog. Lit. Handwörterbuch.

(A. M. C.)

Œuvres, i. 15.

Méc. An., Advertisement to 1st ed.

E. Dühring, Kritische Gesch. der Mechanik, 220, 367; Lagrange, Méc. An. i. 166-172, 3rd ed.

Notice by J. Delambre, Œuvres de Lagrange, i. p. xlii.

Œuvres, iii. 441.

Théorie des fonctions, p. 6.

H. Suter, Geschichte der math. Wiss. ii. 222-223.

Œuvres, vi. 771.

Œuvres, v. 211 seq.

Grant, History of Physical Astronomy, p. 117.

LAGRANGE-CHANCEL [Chancel], FRANÇOIS JOSEPH (1677-1758), French dramatist and satirist, was born at Périgueux on the 1st of January 1677. He was an extremely precocious boy, and at Bordeaux, where he was educated, he produced a play when he was nine years old. Five years later his mother took him to Paris, where he found a patron in the princesse de Conti, to whom he dedicated his tragedy of Jugurtha or, as it was called later, Adherbal (1694). Racine had given him advice and was present at the first performance, although he had long lived in complete retirement. Other plays followed: Oreste et Pylade (1697), Méléagre (1699), Amasis (1701), and Ino et Mélicerte (1715). Lagrange hardly realized the high hopes raised by his precocity, although his only serious rival on the tragic stage was Campistron, but he obtained high favour at court, becoming maître d’hôtel to the duchess of Orleans. This prosperity ended with the publication in 1720 of his Philippiques, odes accusing the regent, Philip, duke of Orleans, of the most odious crimes. He might have escaped the consequences of this libel but for the bitter enmity of a former patron, the duc de La Force. Lagrange found sanctuary at Avignon, but was enticed beyond the boundary of the papal jurisdiction, when he was arrested and sent as a prisoner to the isles of Sainte Marguerite. He contrived, however, to escape to Sardinia and thence to Spain and Holland, where he produced his fourth and fifth Philippiques. On the death of the Regent he was able to return to France. He was part author of a Histoire de Périgord left unfinished, and made a further contribution to history, or perhaps, more exactly, to romance, in a letter to Élie Fréron on the identity of the Man with the Iron Mask. Lagrange’s family life was embittered by a long lawsuit against his son. He died at Périgueux at the end of December 1758.

He had collected his own works (5 vols., 1758) some months before his death. His most famous work, the Philippiques, was edited by M. de Lescure in 1858, and a sixth philippic by M. Diancourt in 1886.

LA GRANJA, or San Ildefonso, a summer palace of the kings of Spain; on the south-eastern border of the province of Segovia, and on the western slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama, 7 m. by road S.E. of the city of Segovia. The royal estate is 3905 ft. above sea-level. The scenery of this region, especially in the gorge of the river Lozoya, with its granite rocks, its dense forest of pines, firs and birches, and its red-tiled farms, more nearly resembles the highlands of northern Europe than any other part of Spain. La Granja has an almost alpine climate, with a clear, cool atmosphere and abundant sunshine. Above the palace rise the wooded summits of the Guadarrama, culminating in the peak of Peñalara (7891 ft.); in front of it the wide plains of Segovia extend northwards. The village of San Ildefonso, the oldest part of the estate, was founded in 1450 by Henry IV., who built a hunting lodge and chapel here. In 1477 the chapel was presented by Ferdinand and Isabella to the monks of the Parral, a neighbouring Hieronymite monastery. The original granja (i.e. grange or farm), established by the monks, was purchased in 1719 by Philip V., after the destruction of his summer palace at Valsain, the ancient Vallis Sapinorum, 2 m. S. Philip determined to convert the estate into a second Versailles. The palace was built between 1721 and 1723. Its façade is fronted by a colonnade in which the pillars reach to the roof. The state apartments contain some valuable 18th-century furniture, but the famous collection of sculptures was removed to Madrid in 1836, and is preserved there in the Museo del Prado. At La Granja it is represented by facsimiles in plaster. The collegiate church adjoining the palace dates from 1724, and contains the tombs of Philip V. and his consort Isabella Farnese. An artificial lake called El Mar, 4095 ft. above sea-level, irrigates the gardens, which are imitated from those of Versailles, and supplies water for the fountains. These, despite the antiquated and sometimes tasteless style of their ornamentation, are probably the finest in the world; it is noteworthy that, owing to the high level of the lake, no pumps or other mechanism are needed to supply pressure. There are twenty-six fountains besides lakes and waterfalls. Among the most remarkable are the group of “Perseus, Andromeda and the Sea-Monster,” which sends up a jet of water 110 ft. high, the “Fame,” which reaches 125 ft., and the very elaborate “Baths of Diana.” It is of the last that Philip V. is said to have remarked, “It has cost me three millions and amused me three minutes.” Most of the fountains were made by order of Queen Isabella in 1727, during the king’s absence. The glass factory of San Ildefonso was founded by Charles III.

It was in La Granja that Philip V. resigned the crown to his son in January 1724, to resume it after his son’s death seven months later; that the treaties of 1777, 1778, 1796 and 1800 were signed (see Spain: History); that Ferdinand VII. summoned Don Carlos to the throne in 1832, but was induced to alter the succession in favour of his own infant daughter Isabella, thus involving Spain in civil war; and that in 1836 a military revolt compelled the Queen-regent Christina to restore the constitution of 1812.

LAGRENÉE, LOUIS JEAN FRANÇOIS (1724-1805), French painter, was a pupil of Carle Vanloo. Born at Paris on the 30th of December 1724, in 1755 he became a member of the Royal Academy, presenting as his diploma picture the “Rape of Deianira” (Louvre). He visited St Petersburg at the call of the empress Elizabeth, and on his return was named in 1781 director of the French Academy at Rome; he there painted the “Indian Widow,” one of his best-known works. In 1804 Napoleon conferred on him the cross of the legion of honour, and on the 19th of June 1805 he died in the Louvre, of which he was honorary keeper.

LA GUAIRA, or La Guayra (sometimes Laguaira, &c.), a town and port of Venezuela, in the Federal district, 23 m. by rail and 6½ m. in a direct line N. of Caracas. Pop. (1904, estimate) 14,000. It is situated between a precipitous mountain side and a broad, semicircular indentation of the coast line which forms the roadstead of the port. The anchorage was long considered one of the most dangerous on the Caribbean coast, and landing was attended with much danger. The harbour has been improved by the construction of a concrete breakwater running out from the eastern shore line 2044 ft., built up from an extreme depth of 46 ft. or from an average depth of 29½ ft., and rising 19½ ft. above sea-level. This encloses an area of 76½ acres, having an average depth of nearly 28 ft. The harbour is further improved by 1870 ft. of concrete quays and 1397 ft. of retaining sea-wall, with several piers (three covered) projecting into deep water. These works were executed by a British company, known as the La Guaira Harbour Corporation, Ltd., and were completed in 1891 at a cost of about one million sterling. The concession is for 99 years and the additional charges which the company is authorized to impose are necessarily heavy. These improvements and the restrictions placed upon the direct trade between West Indian ports and the Orinoco have greatly increased the foreign trade of La Guaira, which in 1903 was 52% of that of the four puertos habilitados of the republic. The shipping entries of that year numbered 217, of which 203 entered with general cargo and 14 with coal exclusively. The exports included 152,625 bags coffee, 114,947 bags cacao and 152,891 hides. For 1905-1906 the imports at La Guaira were valued officially at £767,365 and the exports at £663,708. The city stands on sloping ground stretching along the circular coast line with a varying width of 130 to 330 ft. and having the appearance of an amphitheatre. The port improvements added 18 acres of reclaimed land to La Guaira’s area, and the removal of old shore batteries likewise increased its available breadth. In this narrow space is built the town, composed in great part of small, roughly-made cabins, and narrow, badly-paved streets, but with good business houses on its principal street. From the mountain side, reddish-brown in colour and bare of vegetation, the solar heat is reflected with tremendous force, the mean annual temperature being 84° F. The seaside towns of Maiquetia, 2 m. W. and Macuto, 3 m. E., which have better climatic and sanitary conditions and are connected by a narrow-gauge railway, are the residences of many of the wealthier merchants of La Guaira.

La Guaira was founded in 1588, was sacked by filibusters under Amias Preston in 1595, and by the French under Grammont in 1680, was destroyed by the great earthquake of the 26th of March 1812, and suffered severely in the war for independence. In 1903, pending the settlement of claims of Great Britain, Germany and Italy against Venezuela, La Guaira was blockaded by a British-German-Italian fleet.

LA GUÉRONNIÈRE, LOUIS ÉTIENNE ARTHUR DUBREUIL HÉLION, Vicomte de (1816-1875), French politician, was the scion of a noble Poitevin family. Although by birth and education attached to Legitimist principles, he became closely associated with Lamartine, to whose organ, Le Bien Public, he was a principal contributor. After the stoppage of this paper he wrote for La Presse, and in 1850 edited Le Pays. A character sketch of Louis Napoleon in this journal caused differences with Lamartine, and La Guéronnière became more and more closely identified with the policy of the prince president. Under the Empire he was a member of the council of state (1853), senator (1861), ambassador at Brussels (1868), and at Constantinople (1870), and grand officer of the legion of honour (1866). He died in Paris on the 23rd of December 1875. Besides his Études et portraits politiques contemporains (1856) his most important works are those on the foreign policy of the Empire: La France, Rome et Italie (1851), L’Abandon de Rome (1862), De la politique intérieure et extérieure de la France (1862).

His elder brother, Alfred Dubreuil Hélion, Comte de La Guéronnière (1810-1884), who remained faithful to the Legitimist party, was also a well-known writer and journalist. He was consistent in his opposition to the July Monarchy and the Empire, but in a series of books on the crisis of 1870-1871 showed a more favourable attitude to the Republic.

LAGUERRE, JEAN HENRI GEORGES (1858- ), French lawyer and politician, was born in Paris on the 24th of June 1858. Called to the bar in 1879, he distinguished himself by brilliant pleadings in favour of socialist and anarchist leaders, defending Prince Kropotkine at Lyons in 1883, Louise Michel in the same year; and in 1886, with A. Millerand as colleague he defended Ernest Roche and Duc Quercy, the instigators of the Decazeville strike. His strictures on the procureur de la République on this occasion being declared libellous he was suspended for six months and in 1890 he again incurred suspension for an attack on the attorney-general, Quesnay de Beaurepaire. He also pleaded in the greatest criminal cases of his time, though from 1893 onwards exclusively in the provinces, his exclusion from the Parisian bar having been secured on the pretext of his connexion with La Presse. He entered the Chamber of Deputies for Apt in 1883 as a representative of the extreme revisionist programme, and was one of the leaders of the Boulangist agitation. He had formerly written for Georges Clemenceau’s organ La Justice, but when Clemenceau refused to impose any shibboleth on the radical party he became director of La Presse. He rallied to the republican party in May 1801, some months before General Boulanger’s suicide. He was not re-elected to the Chamber in 1893. Laguerre was an excellent lecturer on the revolutionary period of French history, concerning which he had collected many valuable and rare documents. He interested himself in the fate of the “Little Dauphin” (Louis XVII.), whose supposed remains, buried at Ste Marguerite, he proved to be those of a boy of fourteen.

LAGUNA, or La Laguna, an episcopal city and formerly the capital of the island of Teneriffe, in the Spanish archipelago of the Canary Islands. Pop. (1900) 13,074. Laguna is 4 m. N. by W. of Santa Cruz, in a plain 1800 ft. above sea-level, surrounded by mountains. Snow is unknown here, and the mean annual temperature exceeds 63° F.; but the rainfall is very heavy, and in winter the plain is sometimes flooded. The humidity of the atmosphere, combined with the warm climate and rich volcanic soil, renders the district exceptionally fertile; wheat, wine and tobacco, oranges and other fruits, are produced in abundance. Laguna is the favourite summer residence of the wealthier inhabitants of Santa Cruz. Besides the cathedral, the city contains several picturesque convents, now secularized, a fine modern town hall, hospitals, a large public library and some ancient palaces of the Spanish nobility. Even the modern buildings have often an appearance of antiquity, owing to the decay caused by damp, and the luxuriant growth of climbing plants.

LA HARPE, JEAN FRANÇOIS DE (1739-1803), French critic, was born in Paris of poor parents on the 20th of November 1739. His father, who signed himself Delharpe, was a descendant of a noble family originally of Vaud. Left an orphan at the age of nine, La Harpe was taken care of for six months by the sisters of charity, and his education was provided for by a scholarship at the Collège d’Harcourt. When nineteen he was imprisoned for some months on the charge of having written a satire against his protectors at the college. La Harpe always denied his guilt, but this culminating misfortune of an early life spent entirely in the position of a dependent had possibly something to do with the bitterness he evinced in later life. In 1763 his tragedy of Warwick was played before the court. This, his first play, was perhaps the best he ever wrote. The many authors whom he afterwards offended were always able to observe that the critic’s own plays did not reach the standard of excellence he set up. Timoléon (1764), Pharamond (1765) and Gustave Wasa (1766) were failures. Mélanie was a better play, but was never represented. The success of Warwick led to a correspondence with Voltaire, who conceived a high opinion of La Harpe, even allowing him to correct his verses. In 1764 La Harpe married the daughter of a coffee house keeper. This marriage, which proved very unhappy and was dissolved, did not improve his position. They were very poor, and for some time were guests of Voltaire at Ferney. When, after Voltaire’s death, La Harpe in his praise of the philosopher ventured on some reasonable, but rather ill-timed, criticism of individual works, he was accused of treachery to one who had been his constant friend. In 1768 he returned from Ferney to Paris, where he began to write for the Mercure. He was a born fighter and had small mercy on the authors whose work he handled. But he was himself violently attacked, and suffered under many epigrams, especially those of Lebrun-Pindare. No more striking proof of the general hostility can be given than his reception (1776) at the Academy, which Sainte-Beuve calls his “execution.” Marmontel, who received him, used the occasion to eulogize La Harpe’s predecessor, Charles Pierre Colardeau, especially for his pacific, modest and indulgent disposition. The speech was punctuated by the applause of the audience, who chose to regard it as a series of sarcasms on the new member. Eventually La Harpe was compelled to resign from the Mercure, which he had edited from 1770. On the stage he produced Les Barmécides (1778), Philoctète, Jeanne de Naples (1781), Les Brames (1783), Coriolan (1784), Virginie (1786). In 1786 he began a course of literature at the newly-established Lycée. In these lectures, published as the Cours de littérature ancienne et moderne, La Harpe is at his best, for he found a standpoint more or less independent of contemporary polemics. He is said to be inexact in dealing with the ancients, and he had only a superficial knowledge of the middle ages, but he is excellent in his analysis of 17th-century writers. Sainte-Beuve found in him the best critic of the French school of tragedy, which reached its perfection in Racine. La Harpe was a disciple of the “philosophes”; he supported the extreme party through the excesses of 1792 and 1793. In 1793 he edited the Mercure de France which adhered blindly to the revolutionary leaders. But in April 1794 he was nevertheless seized as a “suspect.” In prison he underwent a spiritual crisis which he described in convincing language, and he emerged an ardent Catholic and a reactionist in politics. When he resumed his chair at the Lycée, he attacked his former friends in politics and literature. He was imprudent enough to begin the publication (1801-1807) of his Correspondance littéraire (1774-1791) with the grand-duke, afterwards the emperor Paul of Russia. In these letters he surpassed the brutalities of the Mercure. He contracted a second marriage, which was dissolved after a few weeks by his wife. He died on the 11th of February 1803 in Paris, leaving in his will an incongruous exhortation to his fellow countrymen to maintain peace and concord. Among his posthumous works was a Prophétie de Cazotte which Sainte-Beuve pronounces his best work. It is a sombre description of a dinner-party of notables long before the Revolution, when Jacques Cazotte is made to prophesy the frightful fates awaiting the various individuals of the company.

Among his works not already mentioned are:—Commentaire sur Racine (1795-1796), published in 1807; Commentaire sur le théâtre de Voltaire of earlier date (published posthumously in 1814), and an epic poem La Religion (1814). His Cours de littérature has been often reprinted. To the edition of 1825-1826 is prefixed a notice by Pierre Daunou. See also Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, vol. v.; G. Peignot, Recherches historiques, bibliographiques et littéraires ... sur La Harpe (1820).

LAHIRE, LAURENT DE (1606-1656), French painter, was born at Paris on the 27th of February 1606. He became a pupil of Lallemand, studied the works of Primaticcio at Fontainebleau, but never visited Italy, and belongs wholly to that transition period which preceded the school of Simon Vouet. His picture of Nicolas V. opening the crypt in which he discovers the corpse of St Francis of Assisi standing (Louvre) was executed in 1630 for the Capuchins of the Marais; it shows a gravity and sobriety of character which marked Lahire’s best work, and seems not to have been without influence on Le Sueur. The Louvre contains eight other works, and paintings by Lahire are in the museums of Strasburg, Rouen and Le Mans. His drawings, of which the British Museum possesses a fine example, “Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple,” are treated as seriously as his paintings, and sometimes show simplicity and dignity of effect. The example of the Capuchins, for whom he executed several other works in Paris, Rouen and Fécamp, was followed by the goldsmiths’ company, for whom he produced in 1635 “St Peter healing the Sick” (Louvre) and the “Conversion of St Paul” in 1637. In 1646, with eleven other artists, he founded the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Richelieu called Lahire to the Palais Royal; Chancellor Séguier, Tallemant de Réaux and many others entrusted him with important works of decoration; for the Gobelins he designed a series of large compositions. Lahire painted also a great number of portraits, and in 1654 united in one work for the town-hall of Paris those of the principal dignitaries of the municipality. He died on the 28th of December 1656.

LAHN, a river of Germany, a right-bank tributary of the Rhine. Its source is on the Jagdberg, a summit of the Rothaar Mountains, in the cellar of a house (Lahnhof), at an elevation of 1975 ft. It flows at first eastward and then southward to Giessen, then turns south-westward and with a winding course reaches the Rhine between the towns of Oberlahnstein and Niederlahnstein. Its valley, the lower part of which divides the Taunus hills from the Westerwald, is often very narrow and picturesque; among the towns and sites of interest on its banks are Marburg and Giessen with their universities, Wetzlar with its cathedral, Runkel with its castle, Limburg with its cathedral, the castles of Schaumburg, Balduinstein, Laurenburg, Langenau, Burgstein and Nassau, and the well-known health resort of Ems. The Lahn is about 135 m. long; it is navigable from its mouth to Giessen, and is partly canalized. A railway follows the valley practically throughout. In 1796 there were here several encounters between the French under General Jourdan and the troops of the archduke Johan, which resulted in the retreat of the French across the Rhine.

LAHNDA (properly Lahndā or Lahindā, western, or Lahndē-dī bōlī, the language of the West), an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the western Punjab. In 1901 the number of speakers was 3,337,917. Its eastern boundary is very indefinite as the language gradually merges into the Panjabi immediately to the east, but it is conventionally taken as the river Chenab from the Kashmir frontier to the town of Ramnagar, and thence as a straight line to the south-west corner of the district of Montgomery. Lahnda is also spoken in the north of the state of Bahawalpur and of the province of Sind, in which latter locality it is known as Siraiki. Its western boundary is, roughly speaking, the river Indus, across which the language of the Afghan population is Pashto (Pushtu), while the Hindu settlers still speak Lahnda. In the Derajat, however, Lahnda is the principal language of all classes in the plains west of the river.

Lahnda is also known as Western Panjabi and as Jatki, or the language of the Jats, who form the bulk of the population whose mother-tongue it is. In the Derajat it is called Hindko or the language of Hindus. In 1819 the Serampur missionaries published a Lahnda version of the New Testament. They called the language Uchchī, from the important town of Uch near the confluence of the Jhelam and the Chenab. This name is commonly met with in old writings. It has numerous dialects, which fall into two main groups, a northern and a southern, the speakers of which are separated by the Salt Range. The principal varieties of the northern group are Hindki (the same in meaning as Hindko) and Pōthwārī. In the southern group the most important are Khētrānī, Multānī, and the dialect of Shahpur. The language possesses no literature.

Lahnda belongs to the north-western group of the outer band of Indo-Aryan languages (q.v.), the other members being Kashmiri (q.v.) and Sindhi, with both of which it is closely connected. See Sindhi; also Hindostani.

(G. A. Gr.)

LA HOGUE, BATTLE OF, the name now given to a series of encounters which took place from the 19th to the 23rd (O.S.) of May 1692, between an allied British and Dutch fleet and a French force, on the northern and eastern sides of the Cotentin in Normandy. A body of French troops, and a number of Jacobite exiles, had been collected in the Cotentin. The government of Louis XIV. prepared a naval armament to cover their passage across the Channel. This force was to have been composed of the French ships at Brest commanded by the count of Tourville, and of a squadron which was to have joined him from Toulon. But the Toulon ships were scattered by a gale, and the combination was not effected. The count of Tourville, who had put to sea to meet them, had with him only 45 or 47 ships of the line. Yet when the reinforcement failed to join him, he steered up Channel to meet the allies, who were known to be in strength. On the 15th of May the British fleet of 63 sail of the line, under command of Edward Russell, afterwards earl of Orford, was joined at St Helens by the Dutch squadron of 36 sail under Admiral van Allemonde. The apparent rashness of the French admiral in seeking an encounter with very superior numbers is explained by the existence of a general belief that many British captains were discontented, and would pass over from the service of the government established by the Revolution of 1688 to their exiled king, James II. It is said that Tourville had orders from Louis XIV. to attack in any case, but the story is of doubtful authority. The British government, aware of the Jacobite intrigues in its fleet, and of the prevalence of discontent, took the bold course of appealing to the loyalty and patriotism of its officers. At a meeting of the flag-officers on board the “Britannia,” Russell’s flag-ship, on the 15th of May, they protested their loyalty, and the whole allied fleet put to sea on the 18th. On the 19th of May, when Cape Barfleur, the north-eastern point of the Cotentin, was 21 m. S.W. of them, they sighted Tourville, who was then 20 m. to the north of Cape La Hague, the north-western extremity of the peninsula, which must not be confounded with La Houque, or La Hogue, the place at which the fighting ended. The allies were formed in a line from S.S.W. to N.N.E. heading towards the English coast, the Dutch forming the White or van division, while the Red or centre division under Russell, and the Blue or rear under Sir John Ashby, were wholly composed of British ships. The wind was from the S.W. and the weather hazy. Tourville bore down and attacked about mid-day, directing his main assault on the centre of the allies, but telling off some ships to watch the van and rear of his enemy. As this first encounter took place off Cape Barfleur, the battle was formerly often called by the name. On the centre, where Tourville was directly opposed to Russell, the fighting was severe. The British flag-ship the “Britannia” (100), and the French, the “Soleil Royal” (100), were both completely crippled. After several hours of conflict, the French admiral, seeing himself outnumbered, and that the allies could outflank him and pass through the necessarily wide intervals in his extended line, drew off without the loss of a ship. The wind now fell and the haze became a fog. Till the 23rd, the two fleets remained off the north coast of the Cotentin, drifting west with the ebb tide or east with the flood, save when they anchored. During the night of the 19th/20th some British ships became entangled, in the fog, with the French, and drifted through them on the tide, with loss. On the 23rd both fleets were near La Hague. About half the French, under D’Amfreville, rounded the cape, and fled to St Malo through the dangerous passage known as the Race of Alderney (le Ras Blanchard). The others were unable to get round the cape before the flood tide set in, and were carried to the eastward. Tourville now transferred his own flag, and left his captains free to save themselves as they best could. He left the “Soleil Royal,” and sent her with two others to Cherbourg, where they were destroyed by Sir Ralph Delaval. The others now ran round Cape Barfleur, and sought refuge on the east side of the Cotentin at the anchorage of La Houque, called by the English La Hogue, where the troops destined for the invasion were encamped. Here 13 of them were burnt by Sir George Rooke, in the presence of the French generals and of the exiled king James II. From the name of the place where the last blow was struck, the battle has come to be known by the name of La Hogue.

Sufficient accounts of the battle may be found in Lediard’s Naval History (London, 1735), and for the French side in Tronde’s Batailles navales de la France (Paris, 1867). The escape of D’Amfreville’s squadron is the subject of Browning’s poem “Hervé Riel.”

(D. H.)

LAHORE, an ancient city of British India, the capital of the Punjab, which gives its name to a district and division. It lies in 31° 35′ N. and 74° 20′ E. near the left bank of the River Ravi, 1706 ft. above the sea, and 1252 m. by rail from Calcutta. It is thus in about the same latitude as Cairo, but owing to its inland position is considerably hotter than that city, being one of the hottest places in India in the summer time. In the cold season the climate is pleasantly cool and bright. The native city is walled, about 1¼ m. in length W. to E. and about ¾ m. in breadth N. to S. Its site has been occupied from early times, and much of it stands high above the level of the surrounding country, raised on the remains of a succession of former habitations. Some old buildings, which have been preserved, stand now below the present surface of the ground. This is well seen in the mosque now called Masjid Niwin (or sunken) built in 1560, the mosque of Mullah Rahmat, 7 ft. below, and the Shivali, a very old Hindu temple, about 12 ft. below the surrounding ground. Hindu tradition traces the origin of Lahore to Loh or Lava, son of Rama, the hero of the Ramayana. The absence of mention of Lahore by Alexander’s historians, and the fact that coins of the Graeco-Bactrian kings are not found among the ruins, lead to the belief that it was not a place of any importance during the earliest period of Indian history. On the other hand, Hsüan Tsang, the Chinese Buddhist, notices the city in his Itinerary (A.D. 630); and it seems probable, therefore, that Lahore first rose into prominence between the 1st and 7th centuries A.D. Governed originally by a family of Chauhan Rajputs, a branch of the house of Ajmere, Lahore fell successively under the dominion of the Ghazni and Ghori sultans, who made it the capital of their Indian conquests, and adorned it with numerous buildings, almost all now in ruins. But it was under the Mogul empire that Lahore reached its greatest size and magnificence. The reigns of Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb form the golden period in the annals and architecture of the city. Akbar enlarged and repaired the fort, and surrounded the town with a wall, portions of which remain, built into the modern work of Ranjit Singh. Lahore formed the capital of the Sikh empire of that monarch. At the end of the second Sikh War, with the rest of the Punjab, it came under the British dominion.

The architecture of Lahore cannot compare with that of Delhi. Jahangir in 1622-1627 erected the Khwabgah or “sleeping-place,” a fine palace much defaced by the Sikhs but to some extent restored in modern times; the Moti Masjid or “pearl mosque” in the fort, used by Ranjit Singh and afterwards by the British as a treasure-house; and also the tomb of Anarkali, used formerly as the station church and now as a library. Shah Jahan erected a palace and other buildings near the Khwabgah, including the beautiful pavilion called the Naulakha from its cost of nine lakhs, which was inlaid with precious stones. The mosque of Wazir Khan (1634) provides the finest example of kashi or encaustic tile work. Aurangzeb’s Jama Masjid, or “great mosque,” is a huge bare building, stiff in design, and lacking the detailed ornament typical of buildings at Delhi. The buildings of Ranjit Singh, especially his mausoleum, are common and meretricious in style. He was, moreover, responsible for much of the despoiling of the earlier buildings. The streets of the native city are narrow and tortuous, and are best seen from the back of an elephant. Two of the chief features of Lahore lie outside its walls at Shahdara and Shalamar Gardens respectively. Shahdara, which contains the tomb of the emperor Jahangir, lies across the Ravi some 6 m. N. of the city. It consists of a splendid marble cenotaph surrounded by a grove of trees and gardens. The Shalamar Gardens, which were laid out in A.D. 1637 by Shah Jahan, lie 6 m. E. of the city. They are somewhat neglected except on festive occasions, when the fountains are playing and the trees are lit up by lamps at night.

The modern city of Lahore, which contained a population of 202,964 in 1901, may be divided into four parts: the native city, already described; the civil station or European quarter, known as Donald Town; the Anarkali bazaar, a suburb S. of the city wall; and the cantonment, formerly called Mian Mir. The main street of the civil station is a portion of the grand trunk road from Calcutta to Peshawar, locally known as the Mall. The chief modern buildings along this road, west to east, are the Lahore museum, containing a fine collection of Graeco-Buddhist sculptures, found by General Cunningham in the Yusufzai country, and arranged by Mr Lockwood Kipling, a former curator of the museum; the cathedral, begun by Bishop French, in Early English style, and consecrated in 1887; the Lawrence Gardens and Montgomery Halls, surrounded by a garden that forms the chief meeting-place of Europeans in the afternoon; and opposite this government house, the official residence of the lieutenant-governor of the Punjab; next to this is the Punjab club for military men and civilians. Three miles beyond is the Lahore cantonment, where the garrison is stationed, except a company of British infantry, which occupies the fort. It is the headquarters of the 3rd division of the northern army. Lahore is an important junction on the North-Western railway system, but has little local trade or manufacture. The chief industries are silk goods, gold and silver lace, metal work and carpets which are made in the Lahore gaol. There are also cotton mills, flour mills, an ice-factory, and several factories for mineral waters, oils, soap, leather goods, &c. Lahore is an important educational centre. Here are the Punjab University with five colleges, medical and law colleges, a central training college, the Aitchison Chiefs’ College for the sons of native noblemen, and a number of other high schools and technical and special schools.

The District of Lahore has an area of 3704 sq. m., and its population in 1901 was 1,162,109, consisting chiefly of Punjabi Mahommedans with a large admixture of Hindus and Sikhs. In the north-west the district includes a large part of the barren Rechna Doab, while south of the Ravi is a desolate alluvial tract, liable to floods. The Manjha plateau, however, between the Ravi and the Beas, has been rendered fertile by the Bari Doab canal. The principal crops are wheat, pulse, millets, maize, oil-seeds and cotton. There are numerous factories for ginning and pressing cotton. Irrigation is provided by the main line of the Bari Doab canal and its branches, and by inundation-cuts from the Sutlej. The district is crossed in several directions by lines of the North-Western railway. Lahore, Kasur, Chunian and Raiwind are the chief trade centres.

The Division of Lahore extends along the right bank of the Sutlej from the Himalayas to Multan. It comprises the six districts of Sialkot, Gujranwala, Montgomery, Lahore, Amritsar and Gurdaspur. Total area, 17,154 sq. m.; pop. (1901) 5,598,463. The commissioner for the division also exercises political control over the hill slate of Chamba. The common language of the rural population and of artisans is Punjabi; while Urdu or Hindustani is spoken by the educated classes. So far from the seaboard, the range between extremes of winter and summer temperature in the sub-tropics is great. The mean temperature in the shade in June is about 92° F., in January about 50°. In midsummer the thermometer sometimes rises to 115° in the shade, and remains on some occasions as high as 105° throughout the night. In winter the morning temperature is sometimes as low as 20°. The rainfall is uncertain, ranging from 8 in. to 25, with an average of 15 in. The country as a whole is parched and arid, and greatly dependent on irrigation.

LA HOZ Y MOTA, JUAN CLAUDIO DE (1630?-1710?), Spanish dramatist, was born in Madrid. He became a knight of Santiago in 1653, and soon afterwards succeeded his father as regidor of Burgos. In 1665 he was nominated to an important post at the Treasury, and in his later years acted as official censor of the Madrid theatres. On the 13th of August 1709 he signed his play entitled Josef, salvador de Egipto, and is presumed to have died in the following year. Hoz is not remarkable for originality of conception, but his recasts of plays by earlier writers are distinguished by an adroitness which accounts for the esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries. El Montañés Juan Pascal and El castigo de la miseria, reprinted in the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, give a just idea of his adaptable talent.

LAHR, a town in the grand-duchy of Baden, on the Schutter, about 9 m. S. of Offenburg, and on the railway Dinglingen-Lahr. Pop. (1900) 13,577. One of the busiest towns in Baden, it carries on manufactures of tobacco and cigars, woollen goods, chicory, leather, pasteboard, hats and numerous other articles, has considerable trade in wine, while among its other industries are printing and lithography. Lahr first appears as a town in 1278, and after several vicissitudes it passed wholly to Baden in 1803.

See Stein, Geschichte und Beschreibung der Stadt Lahr (Lahr, 1827); and Sütterlin, Lahr und seine Umgebung (Lahr, 1904).

LAIBACH (Slovenian, Ljubljana), capital of the Austrian duchy of Carniola, 237 m. S.S.W. of Vienna by rail. Pop. (1900) 36,547, mostly Slovene. It is situated on the Laibach, near its influx into the Save, and consists of the town proper and eight suburbs. Laibach is an episcopal see, and possesses a cathedral in the Italian style, several beautiful churches, a town hall in Renaissance style and a castle, built in the 15th century, on the Schlossberg, an eminence which commands the town. Laibach is the principal centre of the national Slovenian movement, and it contains a Slovene theatre and several societies for the promotion of science and literature in the native tongue. The Slovenian language is in general official use, and the municipal administration is purely Slovenian. The industries include manufactures of pottery, bricks, oil, linen and woollen cloth, fire-hose and paper.

Laibach is supposed to occupy the site of the ancient Emona or Aemona, founded by the emperor Augustus in 34 B.C. It was besieged by Alaric in 400, and in 451 it was desolated by the Huns. In 900 Laibach suffered much from the Magyars, who were, however, defeated there in 914. In the 12th century the town passed into the hands of the dukes of Carinthia; in 1270 it was taken by Ottocar of Bohemia; and in 1277 it came under the Habsburgs. In the early part of the 15th century the town was several times besieged by the Turks. The bishopric was founded in 1461. On the 17th of March 1797 and again on the 3rd of June 1809 Laibach was taken by the French, and from 1809 to 1813 it became the seat of their general government of the Illyrian provinces. From 1816 to 1849 Laibach was the capital of the kingdom of Illyria. The town is also historically known from the congress of Laibach, which assembled here in 1821 (see below). Laibach suffered severely on the 14th of April 1895 from an earthquake.

Congress or Conference of Laibach.—Before the break-up of the conference of Troppau (q.v.), it had been decided to adjourn it till the following January, and to invite the attendance of the king of Naples, Laibach being chosen as the place of meeting. Castlereagh, in the name of Great Britain, had cordially approved this invitation, as “implying negotiation” and therefore as a retreat from the position taken up in the Troppau Protocol. Before leaving Troppau, however, the three autocratic powers, Russia, Austria and Prussia, had issued, on the 8th of December 1820, a circular letter, in which they reiterated the principles of the Protocol, i.e. the right and duty of the powers responsible for the peace of Europe to intervene to suppress any revolutionary movement by which they might conceive that peace to be endangered (Hertslet, No. 105). Against this view Castlereagh once more protested in a circular despatch of the 19th of January 1821, in which he clearly differentiated between the objectionable general principles advanced by the three powers, and the particular case of the unrest in Italy, the immediate concern not of Europe at large, but of Austria and of any other Italian powers which might consider themselves endangered (Hertslet, No. 107).

The conference opened on the 26th of January 1821, and its constitution emphasized the divergences revealed in the above circulars. The emperors of Russia and Austria were present in person, and with them were Counts Nesselrode and Capo d’Istria, Metternich and Baron Vincent; Prussia and France were represented by plenipotentiaries. But Great Britain, on the ground that she had no immediate interest in the Italian question, was represented only by Lord Stewart, the ambassador at Vienna, who was not armed with full powers, his mission being to watch the proceedings and to see that nothing was done beyond or in violation of the treaties. Of the Italian princes, Ferdinand of Naples and the duke of Modena came in person; the rest were represented by plenipotentiaries.

It was soon clear that a more or less open breach between Great Britain and the other powers was inevitable, Metternich was anxious to secure an apparent unanimity of the powers to back the Austrian intervention in Naples, and every device was used to entrap the English representative into subscribing a formula which would have seemed to commit Great Britain to the principles of the other allies. When these devices failed, attempts were made unsuccessfully to exclude Lord Stewart from the conferences on the ground of defective powers. Finally he was forced to an open protest, which he caused to be inscribed on the journals, but the action of Capo d’Istria in reading to the assembled Italian ministers, who were by no means reconciled to the large claims implied in the Austrian intervention, a declaration in which as the result of the “intimate union established by solemn acts between all the European powers” the Russian emperor offered to the allies “the aid of his arms, should new revolutions threaten new dangers,” an attempt to revive that idea of a “universal union” based on the Holy Alliance (q.v.) against which Great Britain had consistently protested.

The objections of Great Britain were, however, not so much to an Austrian intervention in Naples as to the far-reaching principles by which it was sought to justify it. King Ferdinand had been invited to Laibach, according to the circular of the 8th of December, in order that he might be free to act as “mediator between his erring peoples and the states whose tranquillity they threatened.” The cynical use he made of his “freedom” to repudiate obligations solemnly contracted is described elsewhere (see Naples, History). The result of this action was the Neapolitan declaration of war and the occupation of Naples by Austria, with the sanction of the congress. This was preceded, on the 10th of March, by the revolt of the garrison of Alessandria and the military revolution in Piedmont, which in its turn was suppressed, as a result of negotiations at Laibach, by Austrian troops. It was at Laibach, too, that, on the 19th of March, the emperor Alexander received the news of Ypsilanti’s invasion of the Danubian principalities, which heralded the outbreak of the War of Greek Independence, and from Laibach Capo d’Istria addressed to the Greek leader the tsar’s repudiation of his action.

The conference closed on the 12th of May, on which date Russia, Austria and Prussia issued a declaration (Hertslet, No. 108) “to proclaim to the world the principles which guided them” in coming “to the assistance of subdued peoples,” a declaration which once more affirmed the principles of the Troppau Protocol. In this lay the European significance of the Laibach conference, of which the activities had been mainly confined to Italy. The issue of the declaration without the signatures of the representatives of Great Britain and France proclaimed the disunion of the alliance, within which—to use Lord Stewart’s words—there existed “a triple understanding which bound the parties to carry forward their own views in spite of any difference of opinion between them and the two great constitutional governments.”

No separate history of the congress exists, but innumerable references are to be found in general histories and in memoirs, correspondence, &c., of the time. See Sir E. Hertslet, Map of Europe (London, 1875); Castlereagh, Correspondence; Metternich, Memoirs; N. Bianchi, Storia documentata della diplomazia Europea in Italia (8 vols., Turin, 1865-1872); Gentz’s correspondence (see Gentz, F. von). Valuable unpublished correspondence is preserved at the Record Office in the volumes marked F. O., Austria, Lord Stewart, January to February 1821, and March to September 1821.

(W. A. P.)

LAIDLAW, WILLIAM (1780-1845), friend and amanuensis of Sir Walter Scott, was born at Blackhouse, Selkirkshire, on the 19th of November 1780, the son of a sheep farmer. After an elementary education in Peebles he returned to work upon his father’s farm. James Hogg, the shepherd poet, who was employed at Blackhouse for some years, became Laidlaw’s friend and appreciative critic. Together they assisted Scott by supplying material for his Border Minstrelsy, and Laidlaw, after two failures as a farmer in Midlothian and Peebleshire, became Scott’s steward at Abbotsford. He also acted as Scott’s amanuensis at different times, taking down a large part of The Bride of Lammermoor, The Legend of Montrose and Ivanhoe from the author’s dictation. He died at Contin near Dingwall, Ross-shire, on the 18th of May 1845. Of his poetry, little is known except Lucy’s Flittin’ in Hogg’s Forest Minstrel.

LAING, ALEXANDER GORDON (1793-1826), Scottish explorer, the first European to reach Timbuktu, was born at Edinburgh on the 27th of December 1793. He was educated by his father, William Laing, a private teacher of classics, and at Edinburgh University. In 1811 he went to Barbados as clerk to his maternal uncle Colonel (afterwards General) Gabriel Gordon. Through General Sir George Beckwith, governor of Barbados, he obtained an ensigncy in the York Light Infantry. He was employed in the West Indies, and in 1822 was promoted to a company in the Royal African Corps. In that year, while with his regiment at Sierra Leone, he was sent by the governor, Sir Charles MacCarthy, to the Mandingo country, with the double object of opening up commerce and endeavouring to abolish the slave trade in that region. Later in the same year Laing visited Falaba, the capital of the Sulima country, and ascertained the source of the Rokell. He endeavoured to reach the source of the Niger, but was stopped by the natives. He was, however, enabled to fix it with approximate accuracy. He took an active part in the Ashanti War of 1823-24, and was sent home with the despatches containing the news of the death in action of Sir Charles MacCarthy. Henry, 3rd Earl Bathurst, then secretary for the colonies, instructed Captain Laing to undertake a journey, via Tripoli and Timbuktu, to further elucidate the hydrography of the Niger basin. Laing left England in February 1825, and at Tripoli on the 14th of July following he married Emma Warrington, daughter of the British consul. Two days later, leaving his bride behind, he started to cross the Sahara, being accompanied by a sheikh who was subsequently accused of planning his murder. Ghadames was reached, by an indirect route, in October 1825, and in December Laing was in the Tuat territory, where he was well received by the Tuareg. On the 10th of January 1826 he left Tuat, and made for Timbuktu across the desert of Tanezroft. Letters from him written in May and July following told of sufferings from fever and the plundering of his caravan by Tuareg, Laing being wounded in twenty-four places in the fighting. Another letter dated from Timbuktu on the 21st of September announced his arrival in that city on the preceding 18th of August, and the insecurity of his position owing to the hostility of the Fula chieftain Bello, then ruling the city. He added that he intended leaving Timbuktu in three days’ time. No further news was received from the traveller. From native information it was ascertained that he left Timbuktu on the day he had planned and was murdered on the night of the 26th of September 1826. His papers were never recovered, though it is believed that they were secretly brought to Tripoli in 1828. In 1903 the French government placed a tablet bearing the name of the explorer and the date of his visit on the house occupied by him during his thirty-eight days’ stay in Timbuktu.

While in England in 1824 Laing prepared a narrative of his earlier journeys, which was published in 1825 and entitled Travels in the Timannee, Kooranko and Soolima Countries, in Western Africa.

LAING, DAVID (1793-1878), Scottish antiquary, the son of William Laing, a bookseller in Edinburgh, was born in that city on the 20th of April 1793. Educated at the Canongate Grammar School, when fourteen he was apprenticed to his father. Shortly after the death of the latter in 1837, Laing was elected to the librarianship of the Signet Library, which post he retained till his death. Apart from an extraordinary general bibliographical knowledge, Laing was best known as a lifelong student of the literary and artistic history of Scotland. He published no original volumes, but contented himself with editing the works of others. Of these, the chief are—Dunbar’s Works (2 vols., 1834), with a supplement added in 1865; Robert Baillie’s Letters and Journals (3 vols., 1841-1842); John Knox’s Works (6 vols., 1846-1864); Poems and Fables of Robert Henryson (1865); Andrew of Wyntoun’s Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland (3 vols., 1872-1879); Sir David Lyndsay’s Poetical Works (3 vols., 1879). Laing was for more than fifty years a member of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and he contributed upwards of a hundred separate papers to their Proceedings. He was also for more than forty years secretary to the Bannatyne Club, many of the publications of which were edited by him. He was struck with paralysis in 1878 while in the Signet Library, and it is related that, on recovering consciousness, he looked about and asked if a proof of Wyntoun had been sent from the printers. He died a few days afterwards, on the 18th of October, in his eighty-sixth year. His library was sold by auction, and realized £16,137. To the university of Edinburgh he bequeathed his collection of MSS.

See the Biographical Memoir prefixed to Select Remains of Ancient, Popular and Romance Poetry of Scotland, edited by John Small (Edinburgh, 1885); also T. G. Stevenson, Notices of David Laing with List of his Publications, &c. (privately printed 1878).

LAING, MALCOLM (1762-1818), Scottish historian, son of Robert Laing, and elder brother of Samuel Laing the elder, was born on his paternal estate on the Mainland of Orkney. Having studied at the grammar school of Kirkwall and at Edinburgh University, he was called to the Scotch bar in 1785, but devoted his time mainly to historical studies. In 1793 he completed the sixth and last volume of Robert Henry’s History of Great Britain, the portion which he wrote being in its strongly liberal tone at variance with the preceding part of the work; and in 1802 he published his History of Scotland from the Union of the Crowns to the Union of the Kingdoms, a work showing considerable research. Attached to the History was a dissertation on the Gowrie conspiracy, and another on the supposed authenticity of Ossian’s poems. In another dissertation, prefixed to a second and corrected edition of the History published in 1804, Laing endeavoured to prove that Mary, queen of Scots, wrote the Casket Letters, and was partly responsible for the murder of Lord Darnley. In the same year he edited the Life and Historie of King James VI., and in 1805 brought out in two volumes an edition of Ossian’s poems. Laing, who was a friend of Charles James Fox, was member of parliament for Orkney and Shetland from 1807 to 1812. He died on the 6th of November 1818.

LAING, SAMUEL (1810-1897), British author and railway administrator, was born at Edinburgh on the 12th of December 1810. He was the nephew of Malcolm Laing, the historian of Scotland; and his father, Samuel Laing (1780-1868), was also a well-known author, whose books on Norway and Sweden attracted much attention. Samuel Laing the younger entered St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1827, and after graduating as second wrangler and Smith’s prizeman, was elected a fellow, and remained at Cambridge temporarily as a coach. He was called to the bar in 1837, and became private secretary to Mr Labouchere (afterwards Lord Taunton), the president of the Board of Trade. In 1842 he was made secretary to the railway department, and retained this post till 1847. He had by then become an authority on railway working, and had been a member of the Dalhousie Railway Commission; it was at his suggestion that the “parliamentary” rate of a penny a mile was instituted. In 1848 he was appointed chairman and managing director of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, and his business faculty showed itself in the largely increased prosperity of the line. He also became chairman (1852) of the Crystal Palace Company, but retired from both posts in 1855. In 1852 he entered parliament as a Liberal for Wick, and after losing his seat in 1857, was re-elected in 1859, in which year he was appointed financial secretary to the Treasury; in 1860 he was made finance minister in India. On returning from India, he was re-elected to parliament for Wick in 1865. He was defeated in 1868, but in 1873 he was returned for Orkney and Shetland, and retained his seat till 1885. Meanwhile he had been reappointed chairman of the Brighton line in 1867, and continued in that post till 1894, being generally recognized as an admirable administrator. He was also chairman of the Railway Debenture Trust and the Railway Share Trust. In later life he became well known as an author, his Modern Science and Modern Thought (1885), Problems of the Future (1889) and Human Origins (1892) being widely read, not only by reason of the writer’s influential position, experience of affairs and clear style, but also through their popular and at the same time well-informed treatment of the scientific problems of the day. Laing died at Sydenham on the 6th of August 1897.

LAING’S [or Lang’s] NEK, a pass through the Drakensberg, South Africa, immediately north of Majuba (q.v.), at an elevation of 5400 to 6000 ft. It is the lowest part of a ridge which slopes from Majuba to the Buffalo river, and before the opening of the railway in 1891 the road over the nek was the main artery of communication between Durban and Pretoria. The railway pierces the nek by a tunnel 2213 ft. long. When the Boers rose in revolt in December 1880 they occupied Laing’s Nek to oppose the entry of British reinforcements into the Transvaal. On the 28th of January 1881 a small British force endeavoured to drive the Boers from the pass, but was forced to retire.

LAIRD, MACGREGOR (1808-1861), Scottish merchant, pioneer of British trade on the Niger, was born at Greenock in 1808, the younger son of William Laird, founder of the Birkenhead firm of shipbuilders of that name. In 1831 Laird and certain Liverpool merchants formed a company for the commercial development of the Niger regions, the lower course of the Niger having been made known that year by Richard and John Lander. In 1832 the company despatched two small ships to the Niger, one, the “Alburkah,” a paddle-wheel steamer of 55 tons designed by Laird, being the first iron vessel to make an ocean voyage. Macgregor Laird went with the expedition, which was led by Richard Lander and numbered forty-eight Europeans, of whom all but nine died from fever or, in the case of Lander, from wounds. Laird went up the Niger to the confluence of the Benue (then called the Shary or Tchadda), which he was the first white man to ascend. He did not go far up the river but formed an accurate idea as to its source and course. The expedition returned to Liverpool in 1834, Laird and Surgeon R. A. K. Oldfield being the only surviving officers besides Captain (then Lieut.) William Allen, R.N., who accompanied the expedition by order of the Admiralty to survey the river. Laird and Oldfield published in 1837 in two volumes the Narrative of an Expedition into the Interior of Africa by the River Niger ... in 1832, 1833, 1834. Commercially the expedition had been unsuccessful, but Laird had gained experience invaluable to his successors. He never returned to Africa but henceforth devoted himself largely to the development of trade with West Africa and especially to the opening up of the countries now forming the British protectorates of Nigeria. One of his principal reasons for so doing was his belief that this method was the best means of stopping the slave trade and raising the social condition of the Africans. In 1854 he sent out at his own charges, but with the support of the British government, a small steamer, the “Pleiad,” which under W. B. Baikie made so successful a voyage that Laird induced the government to sign contracts for annual trading trips by steamers specially built for navigation of the Niger and Benue. Various stations were founded on the Niger, and though government support was withdrawn after the death of Laird and Baikie, British traders continued to frequent the river, which Laird had opened up with little or no personal advantage. Laird’s interests were not, however, wholly African. In 1837 he was one of the promoters of a company formed to run steamships between England and New York, and in 1838 the “Sirius,” sent out by this company, was the first ship to cross the Atlantic from Europe entirely under steam. Laird died in London on the 9th of January 1861.

His elder brother, John Laird (1805-1874), was one of the first to use iron in the construction of ships; in 1829 he made an iron lighter of 60 tons which was used on canals and lakes in Ireland; in 1834 he built the paddle steamer “John Randolph” for Savannah, U.S.A., stated to be the first iron ship seen in America. For the East India Company he built in 1839 the first iron vessel carrying guns and he was also the designer of the famous “Birkenhead.” A Conservative in politics, he represented Birkenhead in the House of Commons from 1861 to his death.

LAÏS, the name of two Greek courtesans, generally distinguished as follows. (1) The elder, a native of Corinth, born c. 480 B.C., was famous for her greed and hardheartedness, which gained her the nickname of Axinē (the axe). Among her lovers were the philosophers Aristippus and Diogenes, and Eubatas (or Aristoteles) of Cyrene, a famous runner. In her old age she became a drunkard. Her grave was shown in the Craneion near Corinth, surmounted by a lioness tearing a ram. (2) The younger, daughter of Timandra the mistress of Alcibiades, born at Hyccara in Sicily c. 420 B.C., taken to Corinth during the Sicilian expedition. The painter Apelles, who saw her drawing water from the fountain of Peirene, was struck by her beauty, and took her as a model. Having followed a handsome Thessalian to his native land, she was slain in the temple of Aphrodite by women who were jealous of her beauty. Many anecdotes are told of a Laïs by Athenaeus, Aelian, Pausanias, and she forms the subject of many epigrams in the Greek Anthology; but, owing to the similarity of names, there is considerable uncertainty to whom they refer. The name itself, like Phryne, was used as a general term for a courtesan.

See F. Jacobs, Vermischte Schriften, iv. (1830).

LAISANT, CHARLES ANNE (1841- ), French politician, was born at Nantes on the 1st of November 1841, and was educated at the École Polytechnique as a military engineer. He defended the fort of Issy at the siege of Paris, and served in Corsica and in Algeria in 1873. In 1876 he resigned his commission to enter the Chamber as deputy for Nantes in the republican interest, and in 1879 he became director of the Petit Parisien. For alleged libel on General Courtot de Cissey in this paper he was heavily fined. In the Chamber he spoke chiefly on army questions; and was chairman of a commission appointed to consider army legislation, resigning in 1887 on the refusal of the Chamber to sanction the abolition of exemptions of any kind. He then became an adherent of the revisionist policy of General Boulanger and a member of the League of Patriots. He was elected Boulangist deputy for the 18th Parisian arrondissement in 1889. He did not seek re-election in 1893, but devoted himself thenceforward to mathematics, helping to make known in France the theories of Giusto Bellavitis. He was attached to the staff of the École Polytechnique, and in 1903-1904 was president of the French Association for the Advancement of Science.

In addition to his political pamphlets Pourquoi et comment je suis Boulangiste (1887) and L’Anarchie bourgeoise (1887), he published mathematical works, among them Introduction à l’étude des quarternions (1881) and Théorie et applications des équipollences (1887).

LAI-YANG, a city in the Chinese province of Shan-tung, in 37° N., 120° 55′ E., about the middle of the eastern peninsula, on the highway running south from Chi-fu to Kin-Kia or Ting-tsu harbour. It is surrounded by well-kept walls of great antiquity, and its main streets are spanned by large pailous or monumental arches, some dating from the time of the emperor Tai-ting-ti of the Yuan dynasty (1324). There are extensive suburbs both to the north and south, and the total population is estimated at 50,000. The so-called Ailanthus silk produced by Saturnia cynthia is woven at Lai-yang into a strong fabric; and the manufacture of the peculiar kind of wax obtained from the la-shu or wax-tree insect is largely carried on in the vicinity.

LAKANAL, JOSEPH (1762-1845), French politician, was born at Serres (Ariège) on the 14th of July 1762. His name, originally Lacanal, was altered to distinguish him from his Royalist brothers. He joined one of the teaching congregations, and for fourteen years taught in their schools. When elected by his native department to the Convention in 1792 he was acting as vicar to his uncle Bernard Font (1723-1800), the constitutional bishop of Pamiers. In the Convention he held apart from the various party sections, although he voted for the death of Louis XVI. He rendered great service to the Revolution by his practical knowledge of education. He became a member of the Committee of Public Instruction early in 1793, and after carrying many useful decrees on the preservation of national monuments, on the military schools, on the reorganization of the Museum of Natural History and other matters, he brought forward on the 26th of June his Projet d’éducation nationale (printed at the Imprimerie Nationale), which proposed to lay the burden or primary education on the public funds, but to leave secondary education to private enterprise. Provision was also made for public festivals, and a central commission was to be entrusted with educational questions. The scheme, in the main the work of Sieyès, was refused by the Convention, who submitted the whole question to a special commission of six, which under the influence of Robespierre adopted a report by Michel le Peletier de Saint Fargeau shortly before his tragic death. Lakanal, who was a member of the commission, now began to work for the organization of higher education, and abandoning the principle of his Projet advocated the establishment of state-aided schools for primary, secondary and university education. In October 1793 he was sent by the Convention to the south-western departments and did not return to Paris until after the revolution of Thermidor. He now became president of the Education Committee and promptly abolished the system which had had Robespierre’s support. He drew up schemes for departmental normal schools, for primary schools (reviving in substance the Projet) and central schools. He presently acquiesced in the supersession of his own system, but continued his educational reports after his election to the Council of the Five Hundred. In 1799 he was sent by the Directory to organize the defence of the four departments on the left bank of the Rhine threatened by invasion. Under the Consulate he resumed his professional work, and after Waterloo retired to America, where he became president of the university of Louisiana. He returned to France in 1834, and shortly afterwards, in spite of his advanced age, married a second time. He died in Paris on the 14th of February 1845; his widow survived till 1881. Lakanal was an original member of the Institute of France. He published in 1838 an Exposé sommaire des travaux de Joseph Lakanal.

His éloge at the Academy of Moral and Political Science, of which he was a member, was pronounced by the comte de Rémusat (February 16, 1845), and a Notice historique by F. A. M. Mignet was read on the 2nd of May 1857. See also notices by Émile Darnaud (Paris, 1874), “Marcus” (Paris, 1879), P. Legendre in Hommes de la révolution (Paris, 1882), E. Guillon, Lakanal et l’instruction publique (Paris, 1881). For details of the reports submitted by him to the government see M. Tourneux, “Histoire de l’instruction publique, actes et déliberations de la convention, &c.” in Bibliog. de l’hist. de Paris (vol. iii., 1900); also A. Robert and G. Cougny, Dictionnaire des parlementaires (vol. ii., 1890).

LAKE, GERARD LAKE, 1st Viscount (1744-1808), British general, was born on the 27th of July 1744. He entered the foot guards in 1758, becoming lieutenant (captain in the army) 1762, captain (lieut.-colonel) in 1776, major 1784, and lieut.-colonel in 1792, by which time he was a general officer in the army. He served with his regiment in Germany in 1760-1762 and with a composite battalion in the Yorktown campaign of 1781. After this he was equerry to the prince of Wales, afterwards George IV. In 1790 he became a major-general, and in 1793 was appointed to command the Guards Brigade in the duke of York’s army in Flanders. He was in command at the brilliant affair of Lincelles, on the 18th of August 1793, and served on the continent (except for a short time when seriously ill) until April 1794. He had now sold his lieut.-colonelcy in the guards, and had become colonel of the 53rd foot and governor of Limerick. In 1797 he was promoted lieut.-general. In the following year the Irish rebellion broke out. Lake, who was then serving in Ireland, succeeded Sir Ralph Abercromby in command of the troops in April 1798, issued a proclamation ordering the surrender of all arms by the civil population of Ulster, and on the 21st of June routed the rebels at Vinegar Hill (near Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford). He exercised great, but perhaps not unjustified, severity towards all rebels found in arms. Lord Cornwallis now assumed the chief command in Ireland, and in August sent Lake to oppose the French expedition which landed at Killala Bay. On the 29th of the same month Lake arrived at Castlebar, but only in time to witness the disgraceful rout of the troops under General Hely-Hutchinson (afterwards 2nd earl of Donoughmore); but he retrieved this disaster by compelling the surrender of the French at Ballinamuck, near Cloone, on the 8th of September. In 1799 Lake returned to England, and soon afterwards obtained the command in chief in India. He took over his duties at Calcutta in July 1801, and applied himself to the improvement of the Indian army, especially in the direction of making all arms, infantry, cavalry and artillery, more mobile and more manageable. In 1802 he was made a full general.

On the outbreak of war with the Mahratta confederacy in 1803 General Lake took the field against Sindhia, and within two months defeated the Mahrattas at Coel, stormed Aligahr, took Delhi and Agra, and won the great victory of Laswari (November 1st, 1803), where the power of Sindhia was completely broken, with the loss of thirty-one disciplined battalions, trained and officered by Frenchmen, and 426 pieces of ordnance. This defeat, followed a few days later by Major-General Arthur Wellesley’s victory at Argaum, compelled Sindhia to come to terms, and a treaty with him was signed in December 1803. Operations were, however, continued against his confederate, Holkar, who, on the 17th of November 1804, was defeated by Lake at Farrukhabad. But the fortress of Bhurtpore held out against four assaults early in 1805, and Cornwallis, who succeeded Wellesley as governor-general in July of that year—superseding Lake at the same time as commander-in-chief—determined to put an end to the war. But after the death of Cornwallis in October of the same year, Lake pursued Holkar into the Punjab and compelled him to surrender at Amritsar in December 1805. Wellesley in a despatch attributed much of the success of the war to Lake’s “matchless energy, ability and valour.” For his services Lake received the thanks of parliament, and was rewarded by a peerage in September 1804. At the conclusion of the war he returned to England, and in 1807 he was created a viscount. He represented Aylesbury in the House of Commons from 1790 to 1802, and he also was brought into the Irish parliament by the government as member for Armagh in 1799 to vote for the Union. He died in London on the 20th of February 1808.

See H. Pearse, Memoir of the Life and Services of Viscount Lake (London, 1908); G. B. Malleson, Decisive Battles of India (1883); J. Grant Duff, History of the Mahrattas (1873); short memoir in From Cromwell to Wellington, ed. Spenser Wilkinson.

LAKE. Professor Forel of Switzerland, the founder of the science of limnology (Gr. λίμνη, a lake), defines a lake (Lat. lacus) as a mass of still water situated in a depression of the ground, without direct communication with the sea. The term is sometimes applied to widened parts of rivers, and sometimes to bodies of water which lie along sea-coasts, even at sea-level and in direct communication with the sea. The terms pond, tarn, loch and mere are applied to smaller lakes according to size and position. Some lakes are so large that an observer cannot see low objects situated on the opposite shore, owing to the lake-surface assuming the general curvature of the earth’s surface. Lakes are nearly universally distributed, but are more abundant in high than in low latitudes. They are abundant in mountainous regions, especially in those which have been recently glaciated. They are frequent along rivers which have low gradients and wide flats, where they are clearly connected with the changing channel of the river. Low lands in proximity to the sea, especially in wet climates, have numerous lakes, as, for instance, Florida. Lakes may be either fresh or salt, according to the nature of the climate, some being much more salt than the sea itself. They occur in all altitudes; Lake Titicaca in South America is 12,500 ft. above sea-level, and Yellowstone Lake in the United States is 7741 ft. above the sea; on the other hand, the surface of the Caspian Sea is 86 ft., the Sea of Tiberias 682 ft. and the Dead Sea 1292 ft. below the level of the ocean.

The primary source of lake water is atmospheric precipitation, which may reach the lakes through rain, melting ice and snow, springs, rivers and immediate run-off from the land-surfaces. The surface of the earth, with which we are directly in touch, is composed of lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, and these interpenetrate. Lakes, rivers, the water-vapour of the atmosphere and the water of hydration of the lithosphere, must all be regarded as outlying portions of the hydrosphere, which is chiefly made up of the great oceans. Lakes may be compared to oceanic islands. Just as an oceanic island presents many peculiarities in its rocks, soil, fauna and flora, due to its isolation from the larger terrestrial masses, so does a lake present peculiarities and an individuality in its physical, chemical and biological features, owing to its position and separation from the waters of the great oceans.

Origin of Lakes.—From the geological point of view, lakes may be arranged into three groups: (A) Rock-Basins, (B) Barrier-Basins and (C) Organic Basins.

A. Rock-Basins have been formed in several ways:—

1. By slow movements of the earth’s crust, during the formation of mountains; the Lake of Geneva in Switzerland and the Lake of Annecy in France are due to the subsidence or warping of part of the Alps; on the other hand, Lakes Stefanie, Rudolf, Albert Nyanza, Tanganyika and Nyasa in Africa, and the Dead Sea in Asia Minor, are all believed to lie in a great rift or sunken valley.

2. By Volcanic Agencies.—Crater-lakes formed on the sites of dormant volcanoes may be from a few yards to several miles in width, have generally a circular form, and are often without visible outlet. Excellent examples of such lakes are to be seen in the province of Rome (Italy) and in the central plateau of France, where M. Delebecque found the Lake of Issarlès 329 ft. in depth. The most splendid crater-lake is found on the summit of the Cascade range of Southern Oregon (U.S.A.). This lake is 2000 ft. in depth.

3. By Subsidence due to Subterranean Channels and Caves in Limestone Rocks.—When the roofs of great limestone caves or underground lakes fall in, they produce at the surface what are called limestone sinks. Lakes similar to these are also found in regions abounding in rock-salt deposits; the Jura range offers many such lakes.

4. By Glacier Erosion.—A. C. Ramsay has shown that innumerable lakes of the northern hemisphere do not lie in fissures produced by underground disturbances, nor in areas of subsidence, nor in synclinal folds of strata, but are the results of glacial erosion. Many flat alluvial plains above gorges in Switzerland, as well as in the Highlands of Scotland, were, without doubt, what Sir Archibald Geikie calls glen-lakes, or true rock-basins, which have been filled up by sand and mud brought into them by their tributary streams.

B. Barrier-Basins.—These may be due to the following causes:—

1. A landslip often occurs in mountainous regions, where strata, dipping towards the valley, rest on soft layers; the hard rocks slip into the valley after heavy rains, damming back the drainage, which then forms a barrier-basin. Many small lakes high up in the Alps and Pyrenees are formed by a river being dammed back in this way.

2. By a Glacier.—In Alaska, in Scandinavia and in the Alps a glacier often bars the mouth of a tributary valley, the stream flowing therein is dammed back, and a lake is thus formed. The best-known lake of this kind is the Märjelen Lake in the Alps, near the great Aletsch Glacier. Lake Castain in Alaska is barred by the Malaspina Glacier; it is 2 or 3 m. long and 1 m. in width when at its highest level; it discharges through a tunnel 9 m. in length beneath the ice-sheet. The famous parallel roads of Glen Roy in Scotland are successive terraces formed along the shores of a glacial lake during the waning glacial epoch. Lake Agassiz, which during the glacial period occupied the valley of the Red River, and of which the present Lake Winnipeg is a remnant, was formed by an ice-dam along the margin of two great ice-sheets. It is estimated to have been 700 m. in length, and to have covered an area of 110,000 sq. m., thus exceeding the total area of the five great North American lakes: Superior (31,200), Michigan (22,450), Huron with Georgian Bay (23,800), Erie (9960) and Ontario (7240).

3. By the Lateral Moraine of an Actual Glacier.—These lakes sometimes occur in the Alps of Central Europe and in the Pyrenees Mountains.

4. By the Frontal Moraine of an Ancient Glacier.—The barrier in this case consists of the last moraine left by the retreating glacier. Such lakes are abundant in the northern hemisphere, especially in Scotland and the Alps.

5. By Irregular Deposition of Glacial Drift.—After the retreat of continental glaciers great masses of glacial drift are left on the land-surfaces, but, on account of the manner in which these masses were deposited, they abound in depressions that become filled with water. Often these lakes are without visible outlets, the water frequently percolating through the glacial drift. These lakes are so numerous in the north-eastern part of North America that one can trace the southern boundary of the great ice-sheet by following the southern limit of the lake-strewn region, where lakes may be counted by tens of thousands, varying from the size of a tarn to that of the great Laurentian lakes above mentioned.

6. By Sand drifted into Dunes.—It is a well-known fact that sand may travel across a country for several miles in the direction of the prevailing winds. When these sand-dunes obstruct a valley a lake may be formed. A good example of such a lake is found in Moses Lake in the state of Washington; but the sand-dunes may also fill up or submerge river-valleys and lakes, for instance, in the Sahara, where the Shotts are like vast lakes in the early morning, and in the afternoon, when much evaporation has taken place, like vast plains of white salt.

7. By Alluvial Matter deposited by Lateral Streams.—If the current of a main river be not powerful enough to sweep away detrital matter brought down by a lateral stream, a dam is formed causing a lake. These lakes are frequently met with in the narrow valleys of the Highlands of Scotland.

8. By Flows of Lava.—Lakes of this kind are met with in volcanic regions.

C. Organic Basins.—In the vast tundras that skirt the Arctic Ocean in both the old and the new world, a great number of frozen ponds and lakes are met with, surrounded by banks of vegetation. Snow-banks are generally accumulated every season at the same spots. During summer the growth of the tundra vegetation is very rapid, and the snow-drifts that last longest are surrounded by luxuriant vegetation. When such accumulations of snow finally melt, the vegetation on the place they occupied is much less than along their borders. Year after year such places become more and more depressed, comparatively to the general surface, where vegetable growth is more abundant, and thus give origin to lakes.

It is well known that in coral-reef regions small bays are cut off from the ocean by the growth of corals, and thus ultimately fresh-water basins are formed.

Life History of Lakes.—From the time of its formation a lake is destined to disappear. The historical period has not been long enough to enable man to have watched the birth, life and death of any single lake of considerable size, still by studying the various stages of development a fairly good idea of the course they run can be obtained.

In humid regions two processes tend to the extinction of a lake, viz. the deposition of detrital matter in the lake, and the lowering of the lake by the cutting action of the outlet stream on the barrier. These outgoing streams, however, being very pure and clear, all detrital matter having been deposited in the lake, have less eroding power than inflowing streams. One of the best examples of the action of the filling-up process is presented by Lochs Doine, Voil and Lubnaig in the Callander district of Scotland. In post-glacial times these three lochs formed, without doubt, one continuous sheet of water, which subsequently became divided into three different basins by the deposition of sediment. Loch Doine has been separated from Loch Voil by alluvial cones laid down by two opposite streams. At the head of Loch Doine there is an alluvial flat that stretches for 1½ m., formed by the Lochlarig river and its tributaries. The long stretch of alluvium that separates Loch Voil from Loch Lubnaig has been laid down by Calair Burn in Glen Buckie, by the Kirkton Burn at Balquhidder, and by various streams on both sides of Strathyre. Loch Lubnaig once extended to a point ¾ m. beyond its present outlet, the level of the loch being lowered about 20 ft. by the denuding action of the river Leny on its rocky barrier.

In arid regions, where the rainfall is often less than 10 ins. in the year, the action of winds in the transport of sand and dust is more in evidence than that of rivers, and the effects of evaporation greater than of precipitation. Salt and bitter lakes prevail in these regions. Many salt lakes, such as the Dead Sea and the Great Salt Lake, are descended from fresh-water ancestors, while others, like the Caspian and Aral Seas, are isolated portions of the ocean. Lakes of the first group have usually become salt through a decrease in the rainfall of the region in which they occur. The water begins to get salt when the evaporation from the lake exceeds the inflow. The inflowing waters bring in a small amount of saline and alkaline matter, which becomes more and more concentrated as the evaporation increases. In lakes of the second group the waters were salt at the outset. If inflow exceeds evaporation they become fresher, and may ultimately become quite fresh. If the evaporation exceeds the inflow they diminish in size, and their waters become more and more salt and bitter. The first lake which occupied the basin of the Great Salt Lake of Utah appears to have been fresh, then with a change of climate to have become a salt lake. Another change of climate taking place, the level of the lake rose until it overflowed, the outlet being by the Snake river; the lake then became fresh. This expanded lake has been called Lake Bonneville, which covered an area of about 17,000 sq. m. Another change of climate in the direction of aridity reduced the level of the lake below the level of the outlet, the waters became gradually salt, and the former great fresh-water lake has been reduced gradually to the relatively small Great Salt Lake of the present day. The sites of extinct salt lakes yield salt in commercial quantities.

The Water of Lakes.—(a) Composition.—It is interesting to compare the quantity of solid matter in, and the chemical composition of, the water of fresh and salt lakes:—

Total Solids by Evaporation
expressed in Grams per Litre.

Great Salt Lake (Russell) 238.12

Lake of Geneva (Delebecque) 0.1775

The following analysis of a sample of the water of the Great Salt Lake (Utah, U.S.A.) is given by I. C. Russell:—

Grams per Litre. Probable Combination.

Na 75.825 NaCl 192.860

K 3.925 K2SO4 8.756

Li 0.021 Li2SO4 0.166

Mg 4.844 MgCl2 15.044

Ca 2.424 MgSO4 5.216

Cl 128.278 CaSO4 8.240

SO3 12.522 Fe2O3 + Al2O3 0.004

O in sulphate 2.494 SiO2 0.018

Fe2O3 + Al2O3 0.004 Surplus SO3 0.051

SiO2 0.018

Bo2O3 trace

Br3 faint trace

The following analyses of the waters of other salt lakes are given by Mr J. Y. Buchanan (Art. “Lake,” Ency. Brit., 9th Ed.), an analysis of sea-water from the Suez Canal being added for comparison:—

Koko-nor. Aral Sea Caspian Sea. Urmia Sea. Dead Sea. Lake Van. Suez Canal,
Ismailia.

Open. Karabugas.

Specific Gravity 1.00907 .. 1.01106 1.26217 1.17500 .. 1.01800 1.03898

Percentage of Salt 1.11 1.09 1.30 28.5 22.28 22.13 1.73 5.1

Name of Salt. Grams of Salt per 1000 Grams of Water.

Bicarbonate of Lime 0.6804 0.2185 0.1123 .. .. .. .. 0.0072

Bicarbonate of Iron 0.0053 .. 0.0014 .. .. .. .. 0.0069

Bicarbonate of Magnesia 0.6598 .. .. .. .. .. 0.4031 ..

Carbonate of Soda .. .. .. .. .. .. 5.3976 ..

Phosphate of Lime 0.0028 .. 0.0021 .. .. .. 5.3976 0.0029

Sulphate of Lime .. 1.3499 0.9004 .. 0.7570 0.8600 .. 1.8593

Sulphate of Magnesia 0.9324 2.9799 3.0855 61.9350 13.5460 .. 0.2592 3.2231

Sulphate of Soda 1.7241 .. .. .. .. .. 2.5673 ..

Sulphate of Potash .. .. .. .. .. .. 0.5363 ..

Chloride of Sodium 6.9008 6.2356 8.1163 83.2840 192.4100 76.5000 8.0500 40.4336

Chloride of Potassium 0.2209 0.1145 0.1339 9.9560 .. 23.3000 .. 0.6231

Chloride of Rubidium 0.0055 .. 0.0034 0.2510 .. .. .. 0.0265

Chloride of Magnesium .. 0.0003 0.6115 129.3770 15.4610 95.6000 .. 4.7632

Chloride of Calcium .. .. .. .. 0.5990 22.4500 .. ..

Bromide of Magnesium 0.0045 .. 0.0081 0.1930 .. 2.3100 .. 0.0779

Silica 0.0098 .. 0.0024 .. .. 0.2400 0.0761 0.0027

Total Solid Matter 11.1463 10.8987 12.9773 284.9960 222.2600 221.2600 17.2899 51.0264

This table embraces examples of several types of salt lakes. In the Koko-nor, Aral and open Caspian Seas we have examples of the moderately salt, non-saturated waters. In the Karabugas, a branch gulf of the Caspian, Urmia and the Dead Seas we have examples of saturated waters containing principally chlorides. Lake Van is an example of the alkaline seas which also occur in Egypt, Hungary and other countries. Their peculiarity consists in the quantity of carbonate of soda dissolved in their waters, which is collected by the inhabitants for domestic and commercial purposes.

The following analyses by Dr Bourcart give an idea of the chemical composition of the water of fresh-water lakes in grams per litre:—

Tanay. Bleu. Märjelen. St Gothard.

SiO2 0.003 0.0042 0.0014 0.0008

Fe2O3 + Al2O3 0.0012 0.0006 0.0008 trace

NaCl 0.0017 .. .. ..

Na2SO4 0.0011 0.0038 0.0031 0.00085

Na2CO3 .. .. .. 0.00128

K2SO4 0.0021 0.0028 0.0044 ..

K2CO3 .. .. 0.0003 0.00130

MgSO4 0.006 0.0305 .. ..

MgCO3 0.0046 0.0158 0.0008 0.00015

CaSO4 .. .. .. ..

CaCO3 0.107 0.1189 0.0061 0.00178

MnO 0.001 .. .. ..

(b) Movements and Temperature of Lake-Waters.—(1) In addition to the rise and fall of the surface-level of lakes due to rainfall and evaporation, there is a transference of water due to the action of wind which results in raising the level at the end to which the wind is blowing. In addition to the well-known progressive waves there are also stationary waves or “seiches” which are less apparent. A seiche is a standing oscillation of a lake, usually in the direction of the longest diameter, but occasionally transverse. In a motion of this kind every particle of the water of the lake oscillates synchronously with every other, the periods and phases being the same for all, and the orbits similar but of different dimensions and not similarly situated. Seiches were first discovered in 1730 by Fatio de Duillier, a well-known Swiss engineer, and were first systematically studied by Professor Forel in the Lake of Geneva. Large numbers of observations have been made by various observers in lakes in many parts of the world. Henry observed a fifteen-hour seiche in Lake Erie, which is 396 kilometres in length, and Endros recorded a seiche of fourteen seconds in a small pond only 111 metres in length. Although these waves cause periodical rising and falling of the water-level, they are generally inconspicuous, and can only be recorded by a registering apparatus, a limnograph. Standard work has been done in the study of seiches by the Lake Survey of Scotland under the immediate direction of Professor Chrystal, who has given much attention to the hydrodynamical theories of the phenomenon. Seiches are probably due to several factors acting together or separately, such as sudden variations of atmospheric pressure, changes in the strength or direction of the wind. Explanations such as lunar attraction and earthquakes have been shown to be untenable as a general cause of seiches.

2. The water temperature of lakes may change with the season from place to place and from layer to layer; these changes are brought about by insolation, by terrestrial radiation, by contract with the atmosphere, by rain, by the inflow of rivers and other factors, but the most important of all these are insolation and terrestrial radiation. Fresh water has its greatest density at a temperature of 39.2° F., so that water both above and below this temperature floats to the surface, and this physical fact largely determines the water stratification in a lake. In salt lakes the maximum density point is much lower, and does not come into play. In the tropical type of fresh-water lake the temperature is always higher than 39° F., and the temperature decreases as the depth increases. In the polar type the temperature is always lower than 39° F., and the temperature increases from the surface downwards. In the temperate type the distribution of temperature in winter resembles the polar type, and in summer the tropical type. In Loch Ness and other deep Scottish lochs the temperature in March and April is 41° to 42° F., and is then nearly uniform from top to bottom. As the sun comes north, and the mean air temperature begins to be higher than the surface temperature, the surface waters gain heat, and this heating goes on till the month of August. About this time the mean air temperature falls below the surface temperature, and the loch begins to part with its heat by radiation and conduction. The temperature of the deeper layers beyond 300 ft. is only slightly affected throughout the whole year. In the autumn the waters of the loch are divided into two compartments, the upper having a temperature from 49° to 55° F., the deeper a temperature from 41° to 45°. Between these lies the discontinuity-layer (Sprungschicht of the Germans), where there is a rapid fall of temperature within a very short distance. In August this discontinuity-layer is well marked, and lies at a depth of about 150 ft.; as the season advances this layer gradually sinks deeper, and the layer of uniform temperature above it increases in depth, and slowly loses heat, until finally the whole loch assumes a nearly uniform temperature. Many years ago Sir John Murray showed by means of temperature observations the manner in which large bodies of water were transferred from the windward to the leeward end of a loch, and subsequent observations seem to show that, before the discontinuity-layer makes its appearance, the currents produced by winds are distributed through the whole mass of the loch. When, however, this layer appears, the loch is divided into two current-systems, as shown in the following diagram:—

AB, Discontinuity layer.

C, Surface current.

D, Primary return current.

E, Secondary surface current.

F, Secondary return current.

Another effect of the separation of the loch into two compartments by the surface of discontinuity is to render possible the temperature-seiche. The surface-current produced by the wind transfers a large quantity of warm water to the lee end of the loch, with the result that the surface of discontinuity is deeper at the lee than at the windward end. When the wind ceases, a temperature-seiche is started, just as an ordinary seiche is started in a basin of water which has been tilted. This temperature-seiche has been studied experimentally and rendered visible by superimposing a layer of paraffin on a layer of water.

Wedderburn estimates the quantity of heat that enters Loch Ness and is given out again during the year to be approximately sufficient to raise about 30,000 million gallons of water from freezing-point to boiling-point. Lakes thus modify the climate of the region in which they occur, both by increasing its humidity and by decreasing its range of temperature. They cool and moisten the atmosphere by evaporation during summer, and when they freeze in winter a vast amount of latent heat is liberated, and moderates the fall of temperature.

Lakes act as reservoirs for water, and so tend to restrain floods, and to promote regularity of flow. They become sources of mechanical power, and as their waters are purified by allowing the sediment which enters them to settle, they become valuable sources of water-supply for towns and cities. In temperate regions small and shallow lakes are likely to freeze all over in winter, but deep lakes in similar regions do not generally freeze, owing to the fact that the low temperature of the air does not continue long enough to cool down the entire body of water to the maximum density point. Deep lakes are thus the best sources of water-supply for cities, for in summer they supply relatively cool water and in winter relatively warm water. Besides, the number of organisms in deep lakes is less than in small shallow lakes, in which there is a much higher temperature in summer, and consequently much greater organic growth. The deposits, which are formed along the shores and on the floors of lakes, depend on the geological structure and nature of the adjacent shores.

Biology.—Compared with the waters of the ocean those of lakes may safely be said to contain relatively few animals and plants. Whole groups of organisms—the Echinoderms, for instance—are unrepresented. In the oceans there is a much greater uniformity in the physical and chemical conditions than obtains in lakes. In lakes the temperature varies widely. To underground lakes light does not penetrate, and in these some of the organisms may be blind, for example, the blind crayfish (Cambarus pellucidus) and the blind fish (Amblyopsis spelaeus) of the Kentucky caves. The majority of lakes are fresh, while some are so salt that no organisms have been found in them. The peaty matter in other lakes is so abundant that light does not penetrate to any great depth, and the humic acids in solution prevent the development of some species. Indeed, every lake has an individuality of its own, depending upon climate, size, nature of the bottom, chemical composition and connexion with other lakes. While the ocean contains many families and genera not represented in lakes, almost every genus in lakes is represented in the ocean.

The vertebrates, insects and flowering plants inhabiting lakes vary much according to latitude, and are comparatively well known to zoologists and botanists. The micro-fauna and flora have only recently been studied in detail, and we cannot yet be said to know much about tropical lakes in this respect. Mr James Murray, who has studied the Scottish lakes, records in over 400 Scottish lochs 724 species (the fauna including 447 species, all invertebrates, and the flora comprising 277 species) belonging to the following groups; the list must not be regarded as in any way complete:—

Fauna. Flora.

Mollusca 7 species Phanerogamia 65 species

Hydrachnida 17 ” Equisetaceae 1 ”

Tardigrada 30 ” Selaginellaceae 1 ”

Insecta 7 ” Characeae 6 ”

Crustacea 78 ” Musci 18 ”

Bryozoa 7 ” Hepaticae 2 ”

Worms 25 ” Florideae 2 ”

Rotifera 181 ” Chlorophyceae 142 ”

Gastrotricha 2 ” Bacillariaceae 26 ”

Coelenterata 1 ” Myxophyceae 10 ”

Porifera 1 ” Peridiniaceae 4 ”

Protozoa 91 ”

447 ” 277 ”

These organisms are found along the shores, in the deep waters, and in the surface waters of the lakes.

The littoral region is the most populous part of lakes; the existence of a rooted vegetation is only possible there, and this in turn supports a rich littoral fauna. The greater heat of the water along the margins also favours growth. The great majority of the species in Scottish lochs are met with in this region. Insect larvae of many kinds are found under stones or among weeds. Most of the Cladocera, and the Copepoda of the genus Cyclops, and the Harpacticidae are only found in this region. Water-mites, nearly all the Rotifers, Gastrotricha, Tardigrada and Molluscs are found here, and Rhizopods are abundant. A large number of the littoral species in Loch Ness extends down to a depth of about 300 ft.

The abyssal region, in Scottish lochs, lies, as a rule, deeper than 300 ft., and in this deep region a well-marked association of animals appears in the muds on the bottom, but none of them are peculiar to it: they all extend into the littoral zone, from which they were originally derived. In Loch Ness the following sparse population was recorded:—

1 Mollusc: Pisidium pusillum (Gmel).

3 Crustacea: Cyclops viridis, Jurine.

Candona candida (Müll).

Cypria ophthalmica, Jurine.

3 Worms: Stylodrilus gabreteae, Vejd.

Oligochaete, not determined.

Automolos morgiensis (Du Plessis).

1 Insect: Chironomus (larva).

Infusoria: Several, ectoparasites on Pisidium and Cyclops, not determined.

In addition, the following were found casually at great depths in Loch Ness: Hydra, Limnaea peregra, Proales daphnicola and Lynceus affinis.

The pelagic region of the Scottish lakes is occupied by numerous microscopic organisms, belonging to the Zooplankton and Phytoplankton. Of the former group 30 species belonging to the Crustacea, Rotifera and Protozoa were recorded in Loch Ness. Belonging to the second group 150 species were recorded, of which 120 were Desmids. Some of these species of plankton organisms are almost universal in the Scottish lochs, while others are quite local. Some of the species occur all the year through, while others have only been recorded in summer or in winter. The great development of Algae in the surface waters, called “flowering of the water” (Wasserblüthe), was observed in August in Loch Lomond; a distinct “flowering,” due to Chlorophyceae, has been observed in shallow lochs as early as July. It is most common in August and September, but has also been observed in winter.

The plankton animals which are dominant or common, both over Scotland and the rest of Europe, are:—

Diaptomus gracilis.

Daphnia kyalina.

Diaphanosoma brachyurum.

Leptodora kindtii.

Conochilus unicornis.

Asplanchna priodonta.

Polyarthra platyptera.

Anuraea cochlearis.

Notholca longispina.

Ceratium hirundinella.

Asterionella.

All of these, according to Dr Lund, belong to the general plankton association of the European plain, or are even cosmopolitan.

The Scottish plankton on the whole differs from the plankton of the central European plateau, and from the cosmopolitan fresh-water plankton, in the extraordinary richness of the Phytoplankton in species of Desmids, in the conspicuous arctic element among the Crustacea, in the absence or comparative rarity of the species commonest in the general European plankton. Another peculiarity is the local distribution of some of the Crustacea and many of the Desmids.

The derivation of the whole lacustrine population of the Scottish lochs does not seem to present any difficulty. The abyssal forms have been traced to the littoral zone without any perceptible modifications. The plankton organisms are a mingling of European and arctic species. The cosmopolitan species may enter the lochs by ordinary migration. It is probable that if the whole plankton could be annihilated, it would be replaced by ordinary migration within a few years. The eggs and spores of many species can be dried up without injury, and may be carried through the air as dust from one lake to another; others, which would not bear desiccation, might be carried in mud adhering to the feet of aquatic birds and in various other ways. The arctic species may be survivors from a period when arctic conditions prevailed over a great part of Europe. What are known as “relicts” of a marine fauna have not been found in the Scottish fresh-water lochs.

It is somewhat remarkable that none of the organisms living in fresh-water lochs has been observed to exhibit the phenomenon of phosphorescence, although similar organisms in the salt-water lochs a few miles distant exhibit brilliant phosphorescence. At similar depths in the sea-lochs there is usually a great abundance of life when compared with that found in fresh-water lochs.

Length, Depth, Area and Volume of Lakes.—In the following table will be found the length, depth, area and volume of some of the principal lakes of the world. Sir John Murray estimates The volume of water in the 560 Scottish lochs recently surveyed at 7 cub. m., and the approximate volume of water in all the lakes of the world at about 2000 cub. m., so that this last number is but a small fraction of the volume of the ocean, which he previously estimated at 324 million cub. m. It may be recalled that the total rainfall on the land of the globe is estimated at 29,350 cub. m., and the total discharge from the rivers of the globe at 6524 cub. m.

British Lakes

Length
in
Miles. Depth
in
Feet. Area
in
sq. m. Volume in
million
cub. ft.

I. England— Max. Mean.

Windermere 10.50 219 78.5 5.69 12,250

Ullswater 7.35 205 83 3.44 7,870

Wastwater 3.00 258 134.5 1.12 4,128

Coniston Water 5.41 184 79 1.89 4,000

Crummock Water 2.50 144 87.5 0.97 2,343

Ennerdale Water 2.40 148 62 1.12 1,978

Bassenthwaite Water 3.83 70 18 2.06 1,023

Derwentwater 2.87 72 18 2.06 1,010

Haweswater 2.33 103 39.5 0.54 589

Buttermere 1.26 94 54.5 0.36 537

II. Wales—

Llyn Cawlyd 1.62 222 109.1 0.18 941

Llyn Cwellyn 1.20 122 74.1 0.35 713

Llyn Padarn 2.00 94 52.4 0.43 632

Llyn Llydaw 1.11 190 77.4 0.19 409

Llyn Peris 1.10 114 63.9 0.19 344

Llyn Dulyn 0.31 189 104.2 0.05 156

III. Scotland—

Ness 24.23 754 433.02 21.78 263,162

Lomond 22.64 623 121.29 27.45 92,805

Morar 11.68 1017 284.00 10.30 81,482

Tay 14.55 508 199.08 10.19 56,550

Awe 25.47 307 104.95 14.85 43,451

Maree 13.46 367 125.30 11.03 38,539

Lochy 9.78 531 228.95 5.91 37,726

Rannoch 9.70 440 167.46 7.37 34,387

Shiel 17.40 420 132.73 7.56 27,986

Arkaig 12.00 359 152.71 6.24 26,573

Earn 6.46 287 137.83 3.91 14,421

Treig 5.10 436 207.37 2.41 13,907

Shin 17.22 162 51.04 8.70 12,380

Fannich 6.92 282 108.76 3.60 10,920

Assynt 6.36 282 101.10 3.10 8,731

Quoich 6.95 281 104.60 2.86 8,345

Glass 4.03 365 159.07 1.86 8,265

Fionn (Carnmore) 5.76 144 57.79 3.52 5,667

Laggan 7.04 174 67.68 2.97 5,601

Loyal 4.46 217 65.21 2.55 4,628

IV. Ireland—

Neagh 17 102 40 153 161,000

Erne (Lower) 24 226 43 43 62,000

Erne (Upper) 13 89 10 15 5,000

Corrib 27 152 30 68 59,000

Mask 10 191 52 35 55,000

Derg 24 119 30 49 47,000

European Continental Lakes

Length
in
Miles. Depth
in
Feet. Area
in
sq. m. Volume in
million
cub. ft.

Max. Mean.

Ladoga 125 732 300 7000 43,200,000

Onega 145 740 200 3800 21,000,000

Vener 93 292 108 2149 6,357,000

Geneva 45 1015 506 225 3,175,000

Vetter 68 413 128 733 2,543,000

Mjösen 57 1483 .. 139 2,882,000

Garda 38 1124 446 143 1,766,000

Constance 42 827 295 208 1,711,000

Ochrida 19 942 479 105 1,391,000

Maggiore 42 1220 574 82 1,310,000

Como 30 1345 513 56 794,000

Hornafvan 7 1391 253 93 777,000

African Lakes

Length
in
Miles. Depth
in
Feet. Area
in
sq. m. Volume in
million
cub. ft.

Max. Mean.

Victoria Nyanza 200 240 .. 26,200 5,800,000

Nyasa 350 2580 .. 14,200 396,000,000

Tanganyika 420 2100 .. 12,700 283,000,000

Asiatic Lakes

Length
in
Miles. Depth
in
Feet. Area
in
sq. m. Volume in
million
cub. ft.

Max. Mean.

Aral 265 222 52 24,400 43,600,000

Baikal 330 5413 .. 11,580 274,000,000

Balkash 323 33 .. 7,000 4,880,000

Urmia 80 50 15 1,750 732,000

American Lakes

Length
in
Miles. Depth
in
Feet. Area
in
sq. m. Volume in
million
cub. ft.

Max. Mean.

Superior 412 1008 475 31,200 413,000,000

Huron 263 730 250 23,800 166,000,000

Michigan 335 870 325 22,450 203,000,000

Erie 240 210 70 9,960 19,500,000

Ontario 190 738 300 7,240 61,000,000

Titicaca 120 924 347 3,200 30,900,000

New Zealand Lakes

Length
in
Miles. Depth
in
Feet. Area
in
sq. m. Volume in
million
cub. ft.

Max. Mean.

Taupo 25 534 367 238.0 2,435,000

Wakatipu 49 1242 707 112.3 2,205,000

Manapouri 19 1458 328 56.0 512,000

Rotorua 7.5 120 39 31.6 34,000

Waikarimoana 7.25 846 397 14.7 166,000

Wairaumoana 5.25 375 175 6.1 30,000

Rotoiti 10.7 230 69 14.2 27,000

Authorities.—F. A. Forel, “Handbuch der Seenkunde: allgemeine Limnologie,” Bibliothek geogr. Handbücher (Stuttgart, 1901), Le Léman, monographie limnologique (3 vols., Lausanne, 1892-1901); A. Delebecque, Les Lacs français, text and plates (Paris, 1898); H. R. Mill, “Bathymetrical Survey of the English Lakes,” Geogr. Journ. vol. vi. pp. 46 and 135 (1895); Jehu, “Bathymetrical and Geological Study of the Lakes of Snowdonia,” Trans. Roy. Soc. Edin. vol. xl. p. 419 (1902); Sir John Murray and Laurence Pullar, “Bathymetrical Survey of the Freshwater Lochs of Scotland,” Geogr. Journ. (1900 to 1908, re-issued in six volumes, Edinburgh, 1910); W. Halbfass, “Die Morphometrie der europäischen Seen,” Zeitschr. Gesell. Erdkunde Berlin (Jahrg. 1903, p. 592; 1904, p. 204); I. C. Russell, Lakes of North America (Boston and London, 1895); O. Zacharias, “Forschungsberichte aus der biologischen Station zu Plön” (Stuttgart); F. E. Bourcart, Les Lacs alpins suisses: étude chimique et physique (Geneva, 1906); G. P. Magrini, Limnologia (Milan, 1907).

(J. Mu.)

Divergence between certain of these figures and those quoted elsewhere in this work may be accounted for by the slightly different results arrived at by various authorities.

LAKE CHARLES, a city of Louisiana, U.S.A., capital of Calcasieu Parish, 30 m. from the Gulf of Mexico and about 218 m. (by rail) W. of New Orleans. Pop. (1889) 838, (1890) 3442, (1900) 6680 (2407 negroes); (1910) 11,449. It is served by the Louisiana & Texas (Southern Pacific System), the St Louis, Watkins & Gulf, the Louisiana & Pacific and the Kansas City Southern railways. The city is charmingly situated on the shore of Lake Charles, and on the Calcasieu river, which with some dredging can be made navigable for large vessels for 132 m. from the Gulf. It is a winter resort. Among the principal buildings are a Carnegie library, the city hall, the Government building, the court house, St Patrick’s sanatorium, the masonic temple and the Elks’ club. Lake Charles is in the prairie region of southern Louisiana, to the N. of which, covering a large part of the state, are magnificent forests of long-leaf pine, and lesser lowland growths of oak, ash, magnolia, cypress and other valuable timber. The Watkins railway extending to the N.E. and the Kansas City Southern extending to the N.W. have opened up the very best of the forest. The country to the S. and W. is largely given over to rice culture. Lake Charles is the chief centre of lumber manufacture in the state, and has rice mills, car shops and an important trade in wool. Ten miles W. are sulphur mines (product in 1907 about 362,000 tons), which with those of Sicily produce a large part of the total product of the world. Jennings, about 34 m. to the E., is the centre of oil fields, once very productive but now of diminishing importance. Welsh, 23 m. E., is the centre of a newer field; and others lie to the N. Lake Charles was settled about 1852, largely by people from Iowa and neighbouring states, was incorporated as a town in 1857 under the name of Charleston and again in 1867 under its present name, and was chartered as a city in 1886. The city suffered severely by fire in April 1910.

LAKE CITY, a town and the county-seat of Columbia county, Florida, U.S.A., 59 m. by rail W. by S. of Jacksonville. Pop. (1900) 4013, of whom 2159 were negroes; (1905) 6509; (1910) 5032. Lake City is served by the Atlantic Coast Line, the Seaboard Air Line and the Georgia Southern & Florida railways. There are ten small lakes in the neighbourhood, and the town is a winter and health resort. It is the seat of Columbia College (Baptist, 1907); the Florida Agricultural College was opened here in 1883, became the university of Florida in 1903, and in 1905 was abolished by the Buckman Law. Vegetables and fruits grown for the northern markets, sea-island cotton and tobacco are important products of the surrounding country, and Lake City has some trade in cotton, lumber, phosphates and turpentine. The town was first settled about 1826 as Alligator; it was incorporated in 1854; adopted the present name in 1859; and in 1901, with an enlarged area, was re-incorporated.

LAKE DISTRICT, in England, a district containing all the principal English lakes, and variously termed the Lake Country, Lakeland and “the Lakes.” It falls within the north-western counties of Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire (Furness district), about one-half being within the first of these. Although celebrated far outside the confines of Great Britain as a district of remarkable and strongly individual physical beauty, its area is only some 700 sq. m., a circle with radius of 15 m. from the central point covering practically the whole. Within this circle, besides the largest lake, Windermere, is the highest point in England, Scafell Pike; yet Windermere is but 10½ m. in length, and covers an area of 5.69 sq. m., while Scafell Pike is only 3210 ft. in height. But the lakes show a wonderful variety of character, from open expanse and steep rock-bound shores to picturesque island-groups and soft wooded banks; while the mountains have always a remarkable dignity, less from the profile of their summits than from the bold sweeping lines of their flanks, unbroken by vegetation, and often culminating in sheer cliffs or crags. At their feet, the flat green valley floors of the higher elevations give place in the lower parts to lovely woods. The streams are swift and clear, and numerous small waterfalls are characteristic of the district. To the north, west and south, a flat coastal belt, bordering the Irish Sea, with its inlets Morecambe Bay and Solway Firth, and broadest in the north, marks off the Lake District, while to the east the valleys of the Eden and the Lune divide it from the Pennine mountain system. Geologically, too, it is individual. Its centre is of volcanic rocks, complex in character, while the Coal-measures and New Red Sandstone appear round the edges. The district as a whole is grooved by a main depression, running from north to south along the valleys of St John, Thirlmere, Grasmere and Windermere, surmounting a pass (Dunmail Raise) of only 783 ft.; while a secondary depression, in the same direction, runs along Derwentwater, Borrowdale, Wasdale and Wastwater, but here Sty Head Pass, between Borrowdale and Wasdale, rises to 1600 ft. The centre of the 15-m. radius lies on the lesser heights between Langstrath and Dunmail Raise, which may, however, be the crown of an ancient dome of rocks, “the dissected skeleton of which, worn by the warfare of air and rain and ice, now alone remains” (Dr H. R. Mill, “Bathymetrical Survey of the English Lakes,” Geographical Journal, vi. 48). The principal features of the district may be indicated by following this circle round from north, by west, south and east.

The river Derwent (q.v.), rising in the tarns and “gills” or “ghylls” (small streams running in deeply-grooved clefts) north of Sty Head Pass and the Scafell mass flows north through the wooded Borrowdale and forms Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite. These two lakes are in a class apart from all the rest, being broader for their length, and quite shallow (about 18 ft. average and 70 ft. maximum), as distinct from the long, narrow and deep troughs occupied by the other chief lakes, which average from 40 to 135 ft. deep. Derwentwater (q.v.), studded with many islands, is perhaps the most beautiful of all. Borrowdale is joined on the east by the bare wild dale of Langstrath, and the Greta joins the Derwent immediately below Derwentwater; the town of Keswick lying near the junction. Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite occupy a single depression, a flat alluvial plain separating them. From Seatoller in Borrowdale a road traverses Honister Pass (1100 ft.), whence it descends westward, beneath the majestic Honister Crags, where green slate is quarried, into the valley containing Buttermere (94 ft. max. depth) and Crummock Water (144 ft.), drained by the Cocker. Between this and the Derwent valley the principal height is Grasmoor (2791 ft.); southward a steep narrow ridge (High Style, 2643) divides it from Ennerdale, containing Ennerdale Water (148 ft. max. depth), which is fed by the Liza and drained by the Ehen. A splendid range separates this dale from Wasdale and its tributary Mosedale, including Great Gable (2949 ft.), Pillar (2927), with the precipitous Pillar Rock on the Ennerdale flank and Steeple (2746). Wasdale Head, between Gable and the Scafell range, is peculiarly grand, with dark grey screes and black crags frowning above its narrow bottom. On this side of Gable is the fine detached rock, Napes Needle. Wastwater, 3 m. in length, is the deepest lake of all (258 ft.), its floor, like those of Windermere and Ullswater, sinking below sea-level. Its east shore consists of a great range of screes. East of Wasdale lies the range of Scafell (q.v.), its chief points being Scafell (3162 ft.), Scafell Pike (3210), Lingmell (2649) and Great End (2984), while the line is continued over Esk Hause Pass (2490) along a fine line of heights (Bow Fell, 2960; Crinkle Crags, 2816), to embrace the head of Eskdale. The line then descends to Wrynose Pass (1270 ft.), from which the Duddon runs south through a vale of peculiar richness in its lower parts; while the range continues south to culminate in the Old Man of Coniston (2633) with the splendid Dow Crags above Goats Water. The pleasant vale of Yewdale drains south to Coniston Lake (5½ m. long, 184 ft. max. depth), east of which a lower, well-wooded tract, containing two beautiful lesser lakes, Tarn Hows and Esthwaite Water, extends to Windermere (q.v.). This lake collects waters by the Brathay from Langdale, the head of which, between Bow Fell and Langdale Pikes (2401 ft.), is very fine; and by the Rothay from Dunmail Raise and the small lakes of Grasmere and Rydal Water, embowered in woods. East of the Rothay valley and Thirlmere lies the mountain mass including Helvellyn (3118 ft.), Fairfield (2863) and other points, with magnificent crags at several places on the eastern side towards Grisedale and Patterdale. These dales drain to Ullswater (205 ft. max., second to Windermere in area), and so north-east to the Eden. To the east and south-east lies the ridge named High Street (2663 ft.), from the Roman road still traceable from south to north along its summit, and sloping east again to the sequestered Hawes Water (103 ft. max.), a curiously shaped lake nearly divided by the delta of the Measand Beck. There remains the Thirlmere valley. Thirlmere itself was raised in level, and adapted by means of a dam at the north end, as a reservoir for the water-supply of Manchester in 1890-1894. It drains north by St John’s Vale into the Greta, north of which again rises a mountain-group of which the chief summits are Saddleback or Blencathra (2847 ft.) and the graceful peak of Skiddaw (3054). The most noteworthy waterfalls are—Scale Force (Dano-Norwegian fors, foss), beside Crummock, Lodore near Derwentwater, Dungeon Gill Force, beside Langdale, Dalegarth Force in Eskdale, Aira near Ullswater, sung by Wordsworth, Stock Gill Force and Rydal Falls near Ambleside.

The principal centres in the Lake District are Keswick (Derwentwater), Ambleside, Bowness, Windermere and Lakeside (Windermere), Coniston and Boot (Eskdale), all of which, except Ambleside and Bowness (which nearly joins Windermere) are accessible by rail. The considerable village of Grasmere lies beautifully at the head of the lake of that name; and above Esthwaite is the small town of Hawkshead, with an ancient church, and picturesque houses curiously built on the hill-slope and sometimes spanning the streets. There are regular steamer services on Windermere and Ullswater. Coaches and cars traverse the main roads during the summer, but many of the finest dales and passes are accessible only on foot or by ponies. All the mountains offer easy routes to pedestrians, but some of them, as Scafell, Pillar, Gable (Napes Needle), Pavey Ark above Langdale and Dow Crags near Coniston, also afford ascents for experienced climbers.

This mountainous district, having the sea to the west, records an unusually heavy rainfall. Near Seathwaite, below Styhead Pass, the largest annual rainfall in the British Isles is recorded, the average (1870-1899) being 133.53 in., while 173.7 was measured in 1903 and 243.98 in. in 1872. At Keswick the annual mean is 60.02, at Grasmere about 80 ins. The months of maximum rainfall at Seathwaite are November, December and January and September.

Fish taken in the lakes include perch, pike, char and trout in Windermere, Ennerdale, Bassenthwaite, Derwentwater, &c., and the gwyniad or fresh-water herring in Ullswater. The industries of the Lake District include slate quarrying and some lead and zinc mining, and weaving, bobbin-making and pencil-making.

Setting aside London and Edinburgh, no locality in the British Isles is so intimately associated with the history of English literature as the Lake District. In point of time the poet whose name is first connected with the region is Gray, who wrote a journal of his tour in 1769. But it was Wordsworth, a native of Cumberland, born on the outskirts of the Lake District itself, who really made it a Mecca for lovers of English poetry. Out of his long life of eighty years, sixty were spent amid its lakes and mountains, first as a schoolboy at Hawkshead, and afterwards as a resident at Grasmere (1799-1813) and Rydal Mount (1813-1850). In the churchyard of Grasmere the poet and his wife lie buried; and very near to them are the remains of Hartley Coleridge (son of the poet), who himself lived many years at Keswick, Ambleside and Grasmere. Southey, the friend of Wordsworth, was a resident of Keswick for forty years (1803-1843), and was buried in Crosthwaite churchyard. Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived some time at Keswick, and also with the Wordsworths at Grasmere. From 1807 to 1815 Christopher North (John Wilson) was settled at Windermere. De Quincey spent the greater part of the years 1809 to 1828 at Grasmere, in the first cottage which Wordsworth had inhabited. Ambleside, or its environs, was also the place of residence of Dr Arnold (of Rugby), who spent there the vacations of the last ten years of his life; and of Harriet Martineau, who built herself a house there in 1845. At Keswick Mrs Lynn Linton was born in 1822. Brantwood, a house beside Coniston Lake, was the home of Ruskin during the last years of his life. In addition to these residents or natives of the locality, Shelley, Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Clough, Crabb Robinson, Carlyle, Keats, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Mrs Hemans, Gerald Massey and others of less reputation made longer or shorter visits, or were bound by ties of friendship with the poets already mentioned. The Vale of St John, near Keswick, recalls Scott’s Bridal of Triermain. But there is a deeper connexion than this between the Lake District and English letters. German literature tells of several literary schools, or groups of writers animated by the same ideas, and working in the spirit of the same principles and by the same poetic methods. The most notable instance—indeed it is almost the only instance—of the kind in English literature is the Lake School of Poets. Of this school the acknowledged head and founder was Wordsworth, and the tenets it professed are those laid down by the poet himself in the famous preface to the edition of The Lyrical Ballads which he published in 1800. Wordsworth’s theories of poetry—the objects best suited for poetic treatment, the characteristics of such treatment and the choice of diction suitable for the purpose—may be said to have grown out of the soil and substance of the lakes and mountains, and out of the homely lives of the people, of Cumberland and Westmoreland.

See Cumberland, Lancashire, Westmorland. The following is a selection from the literature of the subject: Harriet Martineau, The English Lakes (Windermere, 1858); Mrs Lynn Linton, The Lake Country (London, 1864); E. Waugh, Rambles in the Lake Country (1861) and In the Lake Country (1880); W. Knight, Through the Wordsworth Country (London, 1890); H. D. Rawnsley, Literary Associations of the English Lakes (2 vols., Glasgow, 1894) and Life and Nature of the English Lakes (Glasgow, 1899); Stopford Brooke, Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s Home from 1800 to 1808; A. G. Bradley, The Lake District, its Highways and Byeways (London, 1901); Sir John Harwood, History of the Thirlmere Water Scheme (1895); for mountain-climbing, Col. J. Brown, Mountain Ascents in Westmorland and Cumberland (London, 1888); Haskett-Smith, Climbing in the British Isles, part, i.; Owen G. Jones, Rock-climbing in the English Lake District, 2nd ed. by W. M. Crook (Keswick, 1900).

LAKE DWELLINGS, the term employed in archaeology for habitations constructed, not on the dry land, but within the margins of lakes or creeks at some distance from the shore.

The villages of the Guajiros in the Gulf of Maracaibo are described by Goering as composed of houses with low sloping roofs perched on lofty piles and connected with each other by bridges of planks. Each house consisted of two apartments; the floor was formed of split stems of trees set close together and covered with mats; they were reached from the shore by dug-out canoes poled over the shallow waters, and a notched tree trunk served as a ladder. The custom is also common in the estuaries of the Orinoco and Amazon. A similar system prevails in New Guinea. Dumont d’Urville describes four such villages in the Bay of Dorei, containing from eight to fifteen blocks or clusters of houses, each block separately built on piles, and consisting of a row of distinct dwellings. C. D. Cameron describes three villages thus built on piles in Lake Mohrya, or Moria, in Central Africa, the motive here being to prevent surprise by bands of slave-catchers. Similar constructions have been described by travellers, among the Dyaks of Borneo, in Celebes, in the Caroline Islands, on the Gold Coast of Africa, and in other places.

Hippocrates, writing in the 5th century B.C., says of the people of the Phasis that their country is hot and marshy and subject to frequent inundations, and that they live in houses of timber and reeds constructed in the midst of the waters, and use boats of a single tree trunk. Herodotus, writing also in the 5th century B.C., describes the people of Lake Prasias as living in houses constructed on platforms supported on piles in the middle of the lake, which are approached from the land by a single narrow bridge. Abulfeda the geographer, writing in the 13th century, notices the fact that part of the Apamaean Lake was inhabited by Christian fishermen who lived on the lake in wooden huts built on piles, and Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury) mentions that the Rumelian fishermen on Lake Prasias “still inhabit wooden cottages built over the water, as in the time of Herodotus.”

The records of the wars in Ireland in the 16th century show that the petty chieftains of that time had their defensive strongholds constructed in the “freshwater lochs” of the country, and there is record evidence of a similar system in the western parts of Scotland. The archaeological researches of the past fifty years have shown that such artificial constructions in lakes were used as defensive dwellings by the Celtic people from an early period to medieval times (see Crannog). Similar researches have also established the fact that in prehistoric times nearly all the lakes of Switzerland, and many in the adjoining countries—in Savoy and the north of Italy, in Austria and Hungary and in Mecklenburg and Pomerania—were peopled, so to speak, by lake-dwelling communities, living in villages constructed on platforms supported by piles at varying distances from the shores. The principal groups are those in the Lakes of Bourget, Geneva, Neuchâtel, Bienne, Zürich and Constance lying to the north of the Alps, and in the Lakes Maggiore, Varese, Iseo and Garda lying to the south of that mountain range. Many smaller lakes, however, contain them, and they are also found in peat moors on the sites of ancient lakes now drained or silted up, as at Laibach in Carniola. In some of the larger lakes the number of settlements has been very great. Fifty are enumerated in the Lake of Neuchâtel, thirty-two in the Lake of Constance, twenty-four in the Lake of Geneva, and twenty in the Lake of Bienne. The site of the lake dwelling of Wangen, in the Untersee, Lake of Constance, forms a parallelogram more than 700 paces in length by about 120 paces in breadth. The settlement at Morges, one of the largest in the Lake of Geneva, is 1200 ft. long by 150 ft. in breadth. The settlement of Sutz, one of the largest in the Lake of Bienne, extends over six acres, and was connected with the shore by a gangway nearly 100 yds. long and about 40 ft. wide.

The substructure which supported the platforms on which the dwellings were placed was most frequently of piles driven into the bottom of the lake. Less frequently it consisted of a stack of brushwood or fascines built up from the bottom and strengthened by stakes penetrating the mass so as to keep it from spreading. When piles were used they were the rough stems of trees of a length proportioned to the depth of the water, sharpened sometimes by fire and at other times chopped to a point by hatchets. On their level tops the beams supporting the platforms were laid and fastened by wooden pins, or inserted in mortices cut in the heads of the piles. In some cases the whole construction was further steadied and strengthened by cross beams, notched into the piles below the supports of the platform. The platform itself was usually composed of rough layers of unbarked stems, but occasionally it was formed of boards split from larger stems. When the mud was too soft to afford foothold for the piles they were mortised into a framework of tree trunks placed horizontally on the bottom of the lake. On the other hand, when the bottom was rocky so that the piles could not be driven, they were steadied at their bases by being enveloped in a mound of loose stones, in the manner in which the foundations of piers and breakwaters are now constructed. In cases where piles have not been used, as at Niederwil and Wauwyl, the substructure is a mass of fascines or faggots laid parallel and crosswise upon one another with intervening layers of brushwood or of clay and gravel, a few piles here and there being fixed throughout the mass to serve as guides or stays. At Niederwil the platform was formed of split boards, many of which were 2 ft. broad and 2 or 3 in. in thickness.

On these substructures were the huts composing the settlement; for the peculiarity of these lake dwellings is that they were pile villages, or clusters of huts occupying a common platform. The huts themselves were quadrilateral in form. The size of each dwelling is in some cases marked by boards resting edgeways on the platform, like the skirting boards over the flooring of the rooms in a modern house. The walls, which were supported by posts, or by piles of greater length, were formed of wattle-work, coated with clay. The floors were of clay, and in each floor there was a hearth constructed of flat slabs of stone. The roofs were thatched with bark, straw, reeds or rushes. As the superstructures are mostly gone, there is no evidence as to the position and form of the doorways, or the size, number and position of the windows, if there were any. In one case, at Schussenried, the house, which was of an oblong quadrangular form, about 33 by 23 ft., was divided into two rooms by a partition. The outer room, which was the smaller of the two, was entered by a doorway 3 ft. in width facing the south. The access to the inner room was by a similar door through the partition. The walls were formed of split tree-trunks set upright and plastered with clay; and the flooring of similar timbers bedded in clay. In other cases the remains of the gangways or bridges connecting the settlements with the shore have been discovered, but often the village appears to have been accessible only by canoes. Several of these single-tree canoes have been found, one of which is 43 ft. in length and 4 ft. 4 in. in its greatest width. It is impossible to estimate with any degree of certainty the number of separate dwellings of which any of these villages may have consisted, but at Niederwil they stood almost contiguously on the platform, the space between them not exceeding 3 ft. in width. The size of the huts also varied considerably. At Niederwil they were 20 ft. long and 12 ft. wide, while at Robenhausen they were about 27 ft. long by about 22 ft. wide.

The character of the relics shows that in some cases the settlements have been the dwellings of a people using no materials but stone, bone and wood for their implements, ornaments and weapons; in others, of a people using bronze as well as stone and bone; and in others again the occasional use of iron is disclosed. But, though the character of the relics is thus changed, there is no corresponding change in the construction and arrangements of the dwellings. The settlement in the Lake of Moosseedorf, near Bern, affords the most perfect example of a lake dwelling of the Stone age. It was a parallelogram 70 ft. long by 50 ft. wide, supported on piles, and having a gangway built on faggots connecting it with the land. The superstructure had been destroyed by fire. The implements found in the relic bed under it were axe-heads of stone, with their haftings of stag’s horn and wood; a flint saw, set in a handle of fir wood and fastened with asphalt; flint flakes and arrow-heads; harpoons of stag’s horn with barbs; awls, needles, chisels, fish-hooks and other implements of bone; a comb of yew wood 5 in. long; and a skate made out of the leg bone of a horse. The pottery consisted chiefly of roughly-made vessels, some of which were of large size, others had holes under the rims for suspension, and many were covered with soot, the result of their use as culinary vessels. Burnt wheat, barley and linseed, with many varieties of seeds and fruits, were plentifully mingled with the bones of the stag, the ox, the swine, the sheep and the goat, representing the ordinary food of the inhabitants, while remains of the beaver, the fox, the hare, the dog, the bear, the horse, the elk and the bison were also found.

The settlement of Robenhausen, in the moor which was formerly the bed of the ancient Lake of Pfäffikon, seems to have continued in occupation after the introduction of bronze. The site covers nearly 3 acres, and is estimated to have contained 100,000 piles. In some parts three distinct successions of inhabited platforms have been traced. The first had been destroyed by fire. It is represented at the bottom of the lake by a layer of charcoal mixed with implements of stone and bone and other relics highly carbonized. The second is represented above the bottom by a series of piles with burnt heads, and in the bottom by a layer of charcoal mixed with corn, apples, cloth, bones, pottery and implements of stone and bone, separated from the first layer of charcoal by 3 ft. of peaty sediment intermixed with relics of the occupation of the platform. The piles of the third settlement do not reach down to the shell marl, but are fixed in the layers representing the first and second settlements. They are formed of split oak trunks, while those of the two first settlements are round stems chiefly of soft wood. The huts of this last settlement appear to have had cattle stalls between them, the droppings and litter forming heaps at the lake bottom. The bones of the animals consumed as food at this station were found in such numbers that 5 tons were collected in the construction of a watercourse which crossed the site. Among the wooden objects recovered from the relic beds were tubs, plates, ladles and spoons, a flail for threshing corn, a last for stretching shoes of hide, celt handles, clubs, long-bows of yew, floats and implements of fishing and a dug-out canoe 12 ft. long. No spindle-whorls were found, but there were many varieties of cloth, platted and woven, bundles of yarn and balls of string. Among the tools of bone and stag’s horn were awls, needles, harpoons, scraping tools and haftings for stone axe-heads. The implements of stone were chiefly axe-heads and arrow-heads. Of clay and earthenware there were many varieties of domestic dishes, cups and pipkins, and crucibles or melting pots made of clay and horse dung and still retaining the drossy coating of the melted bronze.

The settlement of Auvernier in the Lake of Neuchâtel is one of the richest and most considerable stations of the Bronze age. It has yielded four bronze swords, ten socketed spear-heads, forty celts or axe-heads and sickles, fifty knives, twenty socketed chisels, four hammers and an anvil, sixty rings for the arms and legs, several highly ornate torques or twisted neck rings, and upwards of two hundred hair pins of various sizes up to 16 in. in length, some having spherical heads in which plates of gold were set. Moulds for sickles, lance-heads and bracelets were found cut in stone or made in baked clay. From four to five hundred vessels of pottery finely made and elegantly shaped are indicated by the fragments recovered from the relic bed. The Lac de Bourget, in Savoy, has eight settlements, all of the Bronze age. These have yielded upwards of 4000 implements, weapons and ornaments of bronze, among which were a large proportion of moulds and founders’ materials. A few stone implements suggest the transition from stone to bronze; and the occasional occurrence of iron weapons and pottery of Gallo-Roman origin indicates the survival of some of the settlements to Roman times.

The relative antiquity of the earlier settlements of the Stone and Bronze ages is not capable of being deduced from existing evidence. “We may venture to place them,” says Dr F. Keller, “in an age when iron and bronze had been long known, but had not come into our districts in such plenty as to be used for the common purposes of household life, at a time when amber had already taken its place as an ornament and had become an object of traffic.” It is now considered that the people who erected the lake dwellings of Central Europe were also the people who were spread over the mainland. The forms and the ornamentation of the implements and weapons of stone and bronze found in the lake dwellings are the same as those of the implements and weapons in these materials found in the soil of the adjacent regions, and both groups must therefore be ascribed to the industry of one and the same people. Whether dwelling on the land or dwelling in the lake, they have exhibited so many indications of capacity, intelligence, industry and social organization that they cannot be considered as presenting, even in their Stone age, a very low condition of culture or civilization. Their axes were made of tough stones, sawn from the block and ground to the fitting shape. They were fixed by the butt in a socket of stag’s horn, mortised into a handle of wood. Their knives and saws of flint were mounted in wooden handles and fixed with asphalt. They made and used an endless variety of bone tools. Their pottery, though roughly finished, is well made, the vessels often of large size and capable of standing the fire as cooking utensils. For domestic dishes they also made wooden tubs, plates, spoons, ladles and the like. The industries of spinning and weaving were largely practised. They made nets and fishing lines, and used canoes. They practised agriculture, cultivating several varieties of wheat and barley, besides millet and flax. They kept horses, cattle, sheep, goats and swine. Their clothing was partly of linen and partly of woollen fabrics and the skins of their beasts. Their food was nutritious and varied, their dwellings neither unhealthy nor incommodious. They lived in the security and comfort obtained by social organization, and were apparently intelligent, industrious and progressive communities.

There is no indication of an abrupt change from the use of stone to the use of metal such as might have occurred had the knowledge of copper and bronze, and the methods of working them, been introduced through the conquest of the original inhabitants by an alien race of superior culture and civilization. The improved cultural conditions become apparent in the multiplication of the varieties of tools, weapons and ornaments made possible by the more adaptable qualities of the new material; and that the development of the Bronze age culture in the lake dwellings followed the same course as in the surrounding regions where the people dwelt on the dry land is evident from the correspondence of the types of implements, weapons, ornaments and utensils common to both these conditions of life.

Other classes of prehistoric pile-structures akin to the lake dwellings are the Terremare of Italy and the Terpen of Holland. Both of these are settlements of wooden huts erected on piles, not over the water, but on flat land subject to inundations. The terremare (so named from the marly soil of which they are composed) appear as mounds, sometimes of very considerable extent, which when dug into disclose the remains and relic beds of the ancient settlements. They are most abundant in the plains of northern Italy traversed by the Po and its tributaries, though similar constructions have been found in Hungary in the valley of the Theiss. These pile-villages were often surrounded by an earthen rampart within which the huts were erected in more or less regular order. Many of them present evidence of having been more than once destroyed by fire and reconstructed, while others show one or more reconstructions at higher levels on the same site. The contents of the relic beds indicate that they belong for the most part to the age of bronze, although in some cases they may be referred to the latter part of the Stone age. Their inhabitants practised agriculture and kept the common domestic animals, while their tools, weapons and ornaments were mainly of similar character to those of the contemporary lake dwellers of the adjoining regions. Some of the Italian terremare show quadrangular constructions made like the modern log houses, of undressed tree trunks superposed longitudinally and overlapping at the ends, as at Castione in the province of Parma. A similar mode of construction is found in the pile-village on the banks of the Save, near Donja Dolina in Bosnia, described in 1904 by Dr Truhelka. Here the larger houses had platforms in front of them forming terraces at different levels descending towards the river. There was a cemetery adjacent to the village in which both unburnt and cremated interments occurred, the former predominating. From the general character of the relics this settlement appeared to belong to the early Iron age. The Terpen of Holland appear as mounds somewhat similar to those of the terremare, and were also pile structures, on low or marshy lands subject to inundations from the sea. Unlike the terremare and the lake dwellings they do not seem to belong to the prehistoric ages, but yield indications of occupation in post-Roman and medieval times.

Authorities.—The materials for the investigation of this singular phase of prehistoric life were first collected and systematized by Dr Ferdinand Keller (1800-1881), of Zürich, and printed in Mittheilungen der Antiquarischen Gesellschaft in Zürich, vols, ix.-xxii., 4to (1855-1886). The substance of these reports has been issued as a separate work in England, The Lake Dwellings of Switzerland and other parts of Europe, by Dr Ferdinand Keller, translated and arranged by John Edward Lee, 2nd ed. (2 vols. 8vo, London, 1878). Other works on the same subject are Frédéric Troyon, Habitations lacustres des temps anciens et modernes (Lausanne, 1860); E. Desor, Les Palafittes ou constructions lacustres du lac de Neuchâtel (Paris, 1865); E. Desor and L. Favre, Le Bel Âge du bronze lacustre en Suisse (Paris, 1874); A. Perrin, Étude préhistorique sur la Savoie spécialement à l’époque lacustre (Les Palafittes du lac de Bourget, Paris, 1870); Ernest Chantre, Les Palafittes ou constructions lacustres du lac de Paladru (Chambery, 1871); Bartolomeo Gastaldi, Lake Habitations and prehistoric Remains in the Turbaries and Marl-beds of Northern and Central Italy, translated by C. H. Chambers (London, 1865); Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), Prehistoric Times (4th ed., London, 1878); Robert Munro, The Lake-Dwellings of Europe (London, 1890), with a bibliography of the subject.

(J. An.)

LAKE GENEVA, a city of Walworth county, Wisconsin, U.S.A., 65 m. N.W. of Chicago. Pop. (1900) 2585, of whom 468 were foreign-born; (1905) 3449; (1910) 3079. It is served by the Chicago & Northwestern railway. The city is picturesquely situated on the shores of Lake Geneva (9 m. long and 1½ to 3 m. wide), a beautiful body of remarkably clear water, fed by springs, and encircled by rolling hills covered with thick groves of hardwood trees. The region is famous as a summer resort, particularly for Chicago people. The city is the seat of Oakwood Sanitarium, and at Williams Bay, 6 m. distant, is the Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago. Dairying is the most important industrial interest. The first settlement on Lake Geneva was made about 1833. The city was chartered in 1893.

LAKE OF THE WOODS, a lake in the south-west of the province of Ontario, Canada, bordering west on the province of Manitoba, and south on the state of Minnesota. It is of extremely irregular shape, and contains many islands. Its length is 70 m., breadth 10 to 50 m., area 1500 sq. m. It lies in the centre of the Laurentian region between Lakes Winnipeg and Superior, and an area of 36,000 sq. m. drains to it. It collects the waters of many rivers, the chief being Rainy river from the east, draining Rainy Lake. By the Winnipeg river on the north-east it discharges into Lake Winnipeg. At its source Winnipeg river is 1057 ft. above the sea, and drops 347 ft. in its course of 165 m. The scenery both on and around the lake is exceedingly beautiful, and the islands are largely occupied by the summer residences of city merchants. Kenora, a flourishing town at the source of the Winnipeg river, is the centre of the numerous lumbering and mining enterprises of the vicinity.

LAKE PLACID, a village in Essex county, New York, U.S.A., on the W. shore of Mirror Lake, near the S. end of Lake Placid, about 42 m. N.W. of Ticonderoga. Pop. (1905) 1514; (1910) 1682. The village is served by the Delaware & Hudson railway. The region is one of the most attractive in the Adirondacks, and is a much frequented summer resort. There are four good golf courses here, and the village has a well-built club house, called the “Neighborhood House.” The village lies on the narrow strip of land (about 1⁄3 m.) between Mirror Lake (about 1 m. long, N. and S., and 1⁄3 m. wide), and Lake Placid, about 5 m. long (N.N.E. by S.S.W.), and about 1½ m. (maximum) broad; its altitude is 1864 ft. The lake is roughly divided, from N. to S. by three islands—Moose, the largest, and Hawk, both privately owned, and Buck—and is a beautiful sheet of water in a picturesque setting of forests and heavily wooded hills and mountains. Among the principal peaks in the vicinity are Whiteface Mountain (4871 ft.), about 3 m. N.W. of the N. end of the lake; McKenzie Mountain (3872 ft.), about 1 m. to the W., and Pulpit Mountain (2658 ft.), on the E. shore. The summit of Whiteface Mountain commands a fine view, with Gothic (4738 ft.), Saddleback (4530 ft.), Basin (4825 ft.), Marcy (5344 ft.), and McIntyre (5210 ft.) mountains about 10 m. to the S. and Lake Champlain to the E., and to the N.E. may be seen, on clear days, the spires of Montreal. In the valleys E. and S. are the headwaters of the famous Ausable river. About 2 m. E. of the village, at North Elba, is the grave of the abolitionist, John Brown, with its huge boulder monument, and near it is another monument which bears the names of the 20 persons who bought the John Brown farm and gave it to the state. The railway to the village was completed in 1893. The village was incorporated in 1900.

LAKEWOOD, a village of Ocean county, New Jersey, U.S.A., in the township of Lakewood, 59 m. S. by W. of New York city, and 8 m. from the coast, on the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Pop. (1900) of the township, including the village, 3094; (1905) 4265; (1910) 5149. Lakewood is a fashionable health and winter resort, and is situated in the midst of a pine forest, with two small lakes, and many charming walks and drives. In the village there are a number of fine residences, large hotels, a library and a hospital. The winter temperature is 10-12° F. warmer than in New York. The township of Lakewood was incorporated in 1892.

LAKH (from the Sans. laksha, one hundred thousand), a term used in British India, in a colloquial sense to signify a lakh of rupees (written 1,00,000), which at the face value of the rupee would be worth £10,000, but now is worth only £6666. The term is also largely used in trade returns. A hundred lakhs make a crore.

LAKHIMPUR, a district of British India in the extreme east of the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. Area, 4529 sq. m. It lies along both banks of the Brahmaputra for about 400 m.; it is bounded N. by the Daphla, Miri, Abor and Mishmi hills, E. by the Mishmi and Kachin hills, S. by the watershed of the Patkai range and the Lohit branch of the Brahmaputra, and W. by the districts of Darrang and Sibsagar. The Brahmaputra is navigable for steamers in all seasons as far as Dibrugarh, in the rainy season as far as Sadiya; its navigable tributaries within the district are the Subansiri, Dibru and Dihing. The deputy-commissioner in charge exercises political control over numerous tribes beyond the inner surveyed border. The most important of these tribes are the Miris, Abors, Mishmis, Khamtis, Kachins and Nagas. In 1901 the population was 371,396, an increase of 46% in the decade. The district has enjoyed remarkable and continuous prosperity. At each successive census the percentage of increase has been over 40, the present population being more than three times as great as that of 1872. This increase is chiefly due to the numerous tea gardens and to the coal mines and other enterprises of the Assam Railways and Trading Company. Lakhimpur was the first district into which tea cultivation was introduced by the government, and the Assam Company began operations here in 1840. The railway, known as the Dibru-Sadiya line, runs from Dibrugarh to Makum, with two branches to Talap and Margherita, and has been connected across the hills with the Assam-Bengal railway. The coal is of excellent quality, and is exported by river as far as Calcutta. The chief oil-wells are at Digboi. The oil is refined at Margherita, producing a good quality of kerosene oil and first-class paraffin, with wax and other by-products. The company also manufactures bricks and pipes of various kinds. Another industry is cutting timber, for the manufacture of tea-chests, &c.

Lakhimpur figures largely in the annals of Assam as the region where successive invaders from the east first reached the Brahmaputra. The Bara Bhuiyas, originally from the western provinces of India, were driven out by the Chutias (a Shan race), and these in their turn gave place to their more powerful brethren, the Ahoms, in the 13th century. The Burmese, who had ruined the native kingdoms, at the end of the 18th century, were in 1825 expelled by the British, who placed the southern part of the country, together with Sibsagar under the rule of Raja Purandhar Singh; but it was not till 1838 that the whole was taken under direct British administration. The headquarters are at Dibrugarh.

See Lakhimpur District Gazetteer (Calcutta, 1905).

LAKSHMI (Sans. for “mark,” “sign,” generally used in composition with punya, “prosperous”; hence “good sign,” “good fortune”), in Hindu mythology, the wife of Vishnu worshipped as the goddess of love, beauty and prosperity. She has many other names, the chief being Loka mata (“mother of the world”), Padma (“the lotus”), Padma laya (“she who dwells on a lotus”) and Jaladhija (“the ocean-born”). She is represented as of a bright golden colour and seated on a lotus. She is said to have been born from the sea of milk when it was churned from ambrosia. Many quaint myths surround her birth. In the Rig Veda her name does not occur as a goddess.