Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Lefebvre, Tanneguy" to "Letronne, Jean Antoine" (part 4)

Classification.—The order Lepidoptera contains more than fifty families, the discussion of whose mutual relationships has given rise to much difference of opinion. The generally received distinction is between butterflies or Rhopalocera (Lepidoptera with clubbed feelers, whose habit is to fly by day) and moths or Heterocera (Lepidoptera with variously shaped feelers, mostly crepuscular or nocturnal in habit). This distinction is quite untenable as a zoological conception, for the relationship of butterflies to some moths is closer than that of many families of Heterocera to each other. Still more objectionable is the division of the order into Macrolepidoptera (including the butterflies and large moths) and the Microlepidoptera (comprising the smaller moths). Most of the recent suggestions for the division of the Lepidoptera into sub-orders depend upon some single character. Thus J. H. Comstock has proposed to separate the three lowest families, which have—like caddis-flies (Trichoptera)—a jugum on each forewing, as a suborder Jugatae, distinct from all the rest of the Lepidoptera—the Frenatae, mostly possessing a frenulum on the hindwing. A. S. Packard places one family (Micropterygidae) with functional mandibles and a lacinia in the first maxilla alone in a suborder Laciniata, all the rest of the order forming the suborder Haustellata. T. A. Chapman divides the families with free or incompletely obtect and mobile pupae (Incompletae) from those with obtect pupae which never leave the cocoon (Obtectae), and this is probably the most natural primary division of the Lepidoptera that has as yet been suggested. Dyar puts forward a classification founded entirely on the structure of the larva, while Tutt divides the Lepidoptera into three great stirps characterized by the shape of the chorion of the egg. The primitive form of the egg is oval, globular, or flattened with the micropyle at one end; from this has apparently been derived the upright form of egg with the micropyle on top which characterizes the butterflies and the higher moths. These schemes, though helpful in pointing out important differences, are unnatural in that they lay stress on single, often adaptive, characters to the exclusion of others equally important. Although it is perhaps best to establish no division among the Lepidoptera between the order and the family, an attempt has been made in the classification adopted in this article to group the families into tribes or super-families which may indicate their probable affinities. The systematic work of G. F. Hampson, A. R. Grote and E. Meyrick has done much to place the classification of the Lepidoptera on a sound basis, so far as the characters of the imago are concerned, but attention must also be paid to the preparatory stages if a truly natural system is to be reached.

Jugatae.

Three families are included in this group having in common certain primitive characters of the wings and neuration (see fig. 6), as well as of the larva and pupa. There is a membranous lobe or jugum near the base of the wing, and the neuration of the hindwing is closely like that of the forewing, the radial nervure being five-branched in both. The pupa has four or five movable segments, and the larval prolegs have complete circles of hooklets.

The three families of the Jugatae are not very closely related to each other. The Micropterygidae (often known as Eriocephalidae), comprising a few small moths with metallic wings, are the most primitive of all Lepidoptera. They are provided with functional mandibles, while the maxillae have distinct laciniae, well-developed palps and galeae not modified for suction (see fig. 3). The larva is remarkable on account of its long feelers, the presence of pairs of jointed prolegs on the first eight abdominal segments, an anal sucker beneath the last segment and bladder-like outgrowths on the cuticle. These curious larvae feed on wet moss. The family has only a few genera scattered widely over the earth’s surface (Europe, America, Australia, New Zealand).

The Eriocraniidae resemble the Micropterygidae in appearance, but the imago has no mandibles, and the maxillae, though short and provided with conspicuous palps, have no laciniae and form a proboscis as in Lepidoptera generally. The abdomen of the female carries a serrate piercing process, and the eggs are laid in the leaves of deciduous trees, the white larvae, with aborted legs, mining in the leaf tissue. The fully-fed larva winters in an underground cocoon and then changes into the most remarkable of all known lepidopterous pupae, with relatively enormous toothed mandibles which bite a way out of the cocoon in preparation for the final change. These pupal mandibles of the Eriocraniidae, together with the nature of the imaginal maxillae in the Micropterygidae (Eriocephalidae) and the wing-neuration in both families, point strongly to a relationship between the Lepidoptera and the Trichoptera.

The Hepialidae or swift moths—the third family of the Jugatae—are in some respects specialized. The moths are of large or moderate size with the maxillae in a vestigial condition, no food being taken after the attainment of the perfect state. The larvae (fig. 12) feed either on roots or in the wood of trees and shrubs, not attaining their growth in less than a year and some large exotic species living for two or three. The family is world-wide in range, and Australia possesses some almost gigantic and strangely coloured genera.

Tineides.

A large assemblage of moths, mostly of small size, are included in this group. The wings have no jugum, but there is a frenulum on the hindwing, which has, as in all the groups above the Jugatae, only a single radial nervure. Three anal nervures are present in the hindwing in those families whose wings are well developed, but in several families of small moths the wings of both pairs are very narrow and pointed, and the neuration is consequently reduced. The sub-costal nervure of the hindwing is usually present and distinct from the radial nervure. The egg is flat except in the Cossidae and Castniidae in which it is upright. The larval prolegs, with few exceptions, have a complete circle of hooklets, and the larvae usually feed in some concealed situation. The pupa is incompletely obtect, with three (in some females only two) to five free abdominal segments, and emerges partly from the cocoon before the moth appears. The cremaster serves to anchor the pupa to its cocoon at the correct degree of emergence, and thus facilitates the eclosion of the imago.

The Cossidae are a small family of large moths (figs. 8, 18, 19) belonging to this section, characterized by their heads with erect rough scales or hairs, the pectinate feelers of the males, their reduced maxillae so that no food is taken in the perfect state, and their wings with the fifth radial nervure arising from the third, and the main median nervure forking in the discoidal areolet. The larvae feed in plant stems, often in the wood of trees, forming tunnels and galleries, and usually taking a year or more to reach maturity. The pupa which has three or four free segments in the male and four or five in the female, rests in a cocoon within the food plant, often strengthened by chips of wood, or in a subterranean cocoon. The family is fairly well represented in the tropics; the British fauna possesses only three species, of which the “goat” (Cossus cossus) and the “leopard” (Zeuzera pyrina) are well known, the caterpillars of both being often injurious to timber and fruit trees.

The Tortricidae are a large family of small moths (see fig. 1), nearly allied to the Cossidae. The fifth radial nervure does not arise from the third, the maxillae are well developed, but their palps are obsolete; the head is densely clothed with erect scales; the terminal segment of the labial palp is short and obtuse. The female pupa has three, the male four, free segments. All the larvae of these moths have some method of concealing themselves while feeding. A frequent plan is to roll up a leaf of the food-plant, fastening the twisted portion with silken threads so as to make a tubular retreat; this is the habit of the caterpillar of the green bell moth (Tortrix viridana) which often ravages the foliage of oak plantations. The larvae of the pine-shoot moths (Retinia) shelter in solidified resinous exudations from their coniferous food-plants, while the codlin-moth caterpillar (Carpocapsa pomonella) feeds in apples and pears, growing with the growth of the fruit which affords them both provender and home. The antics of “jumping-beans” are due to the movements of tortricid caterpillars within the substance of the seed.

The Psychidae are a small but widely-distributed family of moths whose males have the head, densely clothed with rough hairs, bearing complex, bipectinated feelers, but with the maxillae reduced and useless. The larvae live in portable cases made of grass, pieces of leaf or stick, with a silken lining, and these cases serve as cocoons for the pupae which agree in structure with those of the Tortricidae. But the most remarkable feature of the family is the extreme degradation of the female, which, wingless, legless and without jaws or feelers, never emerges from the cocoon.

The Castniidae are a small family of large, conspicuous, day-flying exotic moths (fig. 20) whose clubbed feelers and bright colours give them a resemblance to butterflies, although their wing-neuration is of the primitive tineoid type; the smooth larvae feed on the stems or roots of plants and the pupal structure agrees with that of the Tortricidae and Psychidae. The distribution of the family is confined to Tropical America and the Indo-Malayan and Australian regions.

Fig. 22.—A, Sesia asiliformis (Gad-fly Hawk Moth). Europe. B, Larva.

The Zygaenidae (burnet moths) are a large family of day-flying moths (fig. 21) adorned with brilliant metallic colours. The feelers are long, stout in the middle and tapering, bearing numerous long or short pectinations. The well-developed maxillae have vestigial palps. The larvae—often very conspicuously coloured—are remarkable among the Tineides in having incomplete circles of hooks on the prolegs, and they feed exposed on the leaves of various plants. The pupa, enclosed in a silken cocoon, has four or five free segments. The Limacodidae are a small family of brownish nocturnal moths, allied to the Zygaenidae and agreeing with them in the structure of the pupa. The larva in this family also is an exposed feeder, but it is remarkable in form, being flattened and slug-like, without prolegs and adorned with curious spinous processes.

The Sesiidae are a large family of small, narrow-winged moths, the sub-costal nervure of the hindwing being absent and the wings being for the most part destitute of scales (fig. 22). The maxillae are developed but their palps are vestigial, while the terminal segment of the labial palp is short and pointed. Many of these insects have their bodies banded with black and yellow; this in conjunction with the transparent wings makes some of them like wasps or hornets in appearance. The larvae feed in the woody stems of various plants. The pupa, with three or four free abdominal segments, remains within its cocoon, formed with chips of wood, until the time for its final change draws near; then it works itself partly out of the tree by means of the spines on its abdominal segments.

The Nepticulidae are the smallest of all the Lepidoptera, measuring only 3-8 mm. across the outspread wings, which are all lanceolate and pointed at the tip. The sucking portions of the maxillae are vestigial, but the palps are long and jointed. The larvae, without thoracic limbs or prolegs, but sometimes with paired rudimentary processes on some of the segments, mine in the leaves of plants. The pupa, with four free abdominal segments in the female and five in the male, rests in a cocoon usually outside the mine.

The Adelidae are a family of delicate, but larger, moths with very long feelers (fig. 23) especially in the males. The larvae feed, when young, in flowers; later, protected by a flat case, they devour leaves; the pupa resembles that of the Nepticulidae in structure. The female has an ovipositor adapted for piercing plant tissues.

The Tineidae are a large and important family of small moths (figs. 14, 24, 25) with rough-haired heads, and with the maxillae and their palps usually well developed. Many of the genera have narrow pointed wings with degraded neuration. The larvae differ in their habits, some—Gracilaria for example—mine in leaves, while others, like the well-known caterpillars of the clothes moth (Tinea) surround themselves with portable cases (fig. 14) formed by spinning together their own excrement. The female pupa has three, the male four free abdominal segments.

Plutellides.

This group includes a few large families of small moths that are linked by their imaginal and larval structure to the Tineidae (in which they have often been included) and by their pupal structure to the higher groups that have yet to be considered. The moths have labial palps with slender pointed terminal segments, and narrow pointed wings, but the neuration (except in the Elachistidae) is less degenerate than in most Tineidae. The hairy covering of the head is smooth, and the maxillary palps are usually vestigial. The egg is flat, and the larval prolegs have complete circles of hooklets. The pupa is obtect with only two free abdominal segments (fifth and sixth) in both sexes and does not move out of the cocoon.

Four families are included in this group. The Plutellidae (fig. 26) have the maxillary palps developed, in some genera, as slender threadlike appendages directed straight forward. The larvae do not usually mine in leaves, but feed openly, keeping to the underside for protection (Plutella), or spinning by their united labour a mass of web over the food-plant (Hyponomeuta). In the other three families the maxillary palps are vestigial or obsolete. The Elachistidae have remarkably narrow, pointed wings and their larvae mine in leaves or form portable cases and feed among seeds. In the Oecophoridae (fig. 27) the sub-costal nervure of the hindwing is free and distinct throughout its length, and the larvae usually feed among spun leaves or seeds, or in decayed wood. The Gelechiidae are a large family with similar larval habits; the moths are distinguished by the sinuate termen of the hindwing and the connexion of its sub-costal nervure with the discoidal areolet.

Pyralides.

This group includes a number of moths of delicate build with elongate legs, the maxillae and their palps being usually well developed. The forewings have two anal nervures, the hindwings three (fig. 30, h, i); in the hindwing the sub-costal nervure bends towards and often connects with the radial, and the frenulum is usually present. The egg is flat. The larva has complete circles of hooklets on its five pairs of prolegs, and the pupa (usually completely obtect) does not move at all from its cocoon. This group includes the only Lepidoptera that have aquatic larvae.

Of the families comprised in this division three deserve special mention. The Pterophoridae (plume moths, fig. 28) usually have the wings deeply cleft—a single cleft in the forewing and two in the hindwing. The hairy larvae feed openly on leaves, while the soft and hairy pupa remains attached to its cocoon by the cremaster, although it is incompletely obtect and has three or four free abdominal segments. The Orneodidae (multiplume moths) have all the wings six-cleft. Our British species, Orneodes hexadactyla (fig. 29), is an exquisite little insect, whose larva feeds on the blossoms of honeysuckle. The pupa is completely obtect, with only two free abdominal segments. The Pyralidae (figs. 13, 30), a large family with numerous divisions, have entire wings, and their pupae are obtect. The caterpillars feed in some kind of shelter, some spinning a loose case among the leaves of their food-plant, others burrowing into dry vegetable substances or eating the waxen cells of bees. Several species of this group, such as the Mediterranean flour moth, Ephestia kühniella (fig. 30), become serious pests in storehouses and granaries, their larvae devouring flour and similar food-stuffs.

After Riley and Howard, Insect Life, vol. 2 (U.S. Dept. Agr.).

c, With wings spread.

f, At rest.

g, h, i, Marking and neuration of wings.

a, Larva.

b, Pupa.

d, Head and front body-segments of larva.

e, 2nd and 3rd abdominal segments.

Noctuides.

In this group may be included a number of families of moths with the second median nervure of the forewing arising close to the third. This feature of neuration characterizes also the Jugatae (see fig. 6), Tineides, Plutellides and Pyralides. But the Noctuides differ from these groups in having only two anal nervures in the hindwing. The maxillary palps are absent or vestigial, and a frenulum is usually present on the hindwing. The larva has usually ten prolegs, whose hooklets are arranged only along the inner edge, while the immobile pupa is always obtect with only two free abdominal segments (the fifth and sixth). The Lasiocampidae and their allies have flat eggs, but in the Noctuidae, Arctiidae and their allies the egg is upright.

Fig. 31.—Claterna cydonia. India.

The Lasiocampidae, together with a few small families, differ from the majority of this group in wanting a frenulum. The maxillae of the Lasiocampidae are so reduced that no food is taken in the imaginal state, and in correlation with this condition the feelers of the male are strongly (those of the female more feebly) bipectinated. The moths are stout, hairy insects, usually brown or yellow in the pattern of their wings. The caterpillars are densely hairy and many species hibernate in the larval stage. The pupa is enclosed in a hard, dense cocoon, whence the name “eggars” is often applied to the family, which has a wide distribution, but is absent from New Zealand. The Drepanulidae are an allied family, in which the frenulum is usually present, while the hindmost pair of larval prolegs are absent, their segment being prolonged into a pointed process which is raised up when the caterpillar is at rest. The hook-tip moths represent this family in the British fauna.

The Lymantriidae resemble the Lasiocampidae in their hairy bodies ana vestigial maxillae, but the frenulum is usually present on the hindwing and the feelers are bipectinate only in the males. Some females of this family—the vapourer moths (Orgyia and allies, fig. 17), for example—are degenerate creatures with vestigial wings. The larvae (fig. 15) are very hairy, and often carry dense tufts on some of their segments; hence the name of “tussocks” frequently applied to them. The pupae are also often hairy (fig. 16)—an exceptional condition—and are protected by a cocoon of silk mixed with some of the larval hairs, while the female sheds some hairs from her own abdomen to cover the eggs. The family is widely distributed, its headquarters being the eastern tropics. To that part of the world is restricted the allied family of the Hypsidae, distinguished from the “tussocks” by the slender upturned terminal segment of the labial palps and by the development of the maxillae.

From Mally, Bull. 24, Div. Ent. U.S. Dept. Agr.

The Noctuidae are the largest and most dominant family of the Lepidoptera, comprising some 10,000 known species. They are mostly moths of dull coloration, flying at dusk or by night. The maxillae are well developed, the hindwing has a frenulum, and its sub-costal nervure touches the radial near the base. The larvae of the Noctuidae (fig. 34, c) are rarely hairy and the pupa (fig. 34, d) usually rests in an earthen cell, being often the wintering stage for the species; sometimes the pupa is enclosed in a loose cocoon of silk and leaves. In some Noctuidae (fig. 32) the hindwings are brightly coloured, but these are concealed beneath the dull, inconspicuous forewings when the insect rests (fig. 34, f). Nearly allied to the Noctuidae, but very different in appearance, are the gaily-coloured Agaristidae, a family of day-flying moths (figs. 35, 36), confined to the warmer regions of the globe and distinguished by their thickened feelers, those of the Noctuids being thread-like or slightly pectinate.

The Arctiidae (tiger moths, footmen, &c.) are allied to the Noctuidae, but their wing-neuration is more specialized, the sub-costal nervure of the hindwing being confluent with the radial for the basal part of its course. These moths (fig. 37) have gaily coloured wings, and the caterpillars are often densely covered with long smooth hairs. The pupae are enclosed in silken cocoons (fig. 38). The highest specialization of structure in this group of the Lepidoptera is reached by the Syntomidae, a family nearly allied to the Arctiidae, but with the sub-costal nervure in the hindwing absent. The Syntomidae have elongate narrow forewings and short hindwings, usually dark in colour with clear spots and dashes destitute of scales (fig. 40). The body, on the other hand, is often brilliantly adorned. The family, abundant in the tropics of the Old World, has only two European species.

Sphingides.

After Lugger, Riley and Howard, Insect Life, vol. 2 (U.S. Dept. Agr.).

This group includes a series of families which agree with the Noctuides in most points, but are distinguished by the origin of the second median nervure of the forewing close to the first, or from the discocellular nervure midway between the first and third medians (see fig. 5). These neurational characters may appear somewhat insignificant, but such slight though constant distinctions in structures of no adaptational value may be safely regarded as truly significant of relationship. Several of the families in this group have lost the frenulum. In larval and pupal characters the Sphingides generally resemble the Noctuides, but in some families there is a reduction in the number of the larval prolegs. The egg is spherical or flat, upright only in the Notodontidae.

The Notodontidae are stout, hairy moths (figs. 5, 41, 42 a) with maxillae and frenulum developed. In the larva the prolegs on the hindmost segment are sometimes modified into pointed outgrowths which are carried erect when the caterpillar moves about. From these structures whip-like, coloured processes are protruded by the caterpillar (fig. 42 b) of the puss moth (Cerura) when alarmed; these processes are believed to help in “terrifying” the caterpillar’s enemies. Allied to the Notodontidae are the Cymatophoridae—a family of moths agreeing with the Noctuidae in appearance and habits—and the large and important family of the Geometridae. The moths (fig. 43) of this family are distinguished from the Notodontidae by their delicate build and elongate feet, the caterpillars (fig. 43, c) by the absence or vestigial condition of the three anterior pairs of prolegs. The two hinder pairs of prolegs are therefore alone functional and the larva progresses by “looping,” i.e. bending the body so as to bring these prolegs close up to the thoracic legs, and then, taking a fresh grip on the twig whereon it walks, stretching the body straight out again. Many of these larvae have a striking resemblance both in form and colour to the twigs of their food-plant. In some of the species the female has the wings reduced to useless vestiges. The family is world-wide in its range. The tropical Uraniidae are large handsome moths (figs. 44, 45), often with exquisite wing-patterns, allied to the Geometridae, but distinguished by the absence of a frenulum in the moth and the presence of the normal ten prolegs in the larva.

After Grote, Natural Science (J. M. Dent & Co.).

The Sphingidae (hawk moths) are insects often of large size (figs. 46a, 47), with spindle-shaped feelers, elongate and powerful forewings and the maxillae very well developed. The hindwing carries a frenulum and has its sub-costal nervure connected with the radial by a short bar. The caterpillars have the full number of prolegs, and, in many genera, carry a prominent dorsal horn on the eighth abdominal segment (fig. 46b). The pupa lies in an earthen cell. On account of their powerful flight the moths of this family have a wide range; certain species—like Acherontia atropos and Protoparce convolvuli—migrate into the British Islands in numbers almost every summer.

A group of families in which the first maxillae are vestigial, the feelers bipectinate and the pupa enclosed in a dense silken cocoon, have been regarded as the most highly specialized of all the moths, though according to other views the whole series of the Lepidoptera culminates in the Syntomidae. Of these cocoon-spinning families may be specially mentioned the Eupterotidae, large brown or yellow moths inhabiting tropical Asia and Africa, and represented in Europe only by the “processionary moth” (Cnethocampa processionea). In this family the frenulum is present, and the larvae are protected with tufts of long hair. The Bombycidae have no frenulum, and the larvae are smooth, with some of the segments humped and the eighth abdominal often carrying a dorsal spine. The family is tropical in its distribution, but the common silkworm (Bombyx mori, fig. 48) has become acclimatized in southern Europe and is the source of most of the silk used in manufacture and art. Of commercial value also is the silk spun by the great moths of the family Saturniidae, well represented in warm countries and contributing a single species (Saturnia pavonia-minor) to the British fauna. These moths (fig. 49) have but a single anal nervure in the hindwing and only three radial nervures in the forewing. The wing-patterns are handsome and striking; usually an unsealed “eyespot” is conspicuous at the end of each discoidal areolet. The caterpillars are protected by remarkable spine-bearing tubercles (fig. 10, B).

After C.V. Riley, Bull. 14, Div. Ent. U.S. Dept. Agr.

Grypocera.

Fig. 50.—Tagiades sabadius. S. Africa.

This group stands at the base of the series of families that are usually distinguished as “butterflies.” The feelers are recurved at the tip, and thickened just before the extremity. The forewing has the full number of radial nervures, distinct and evenly spaced, and two anal nervures; the frenulum is usually absent. The larvae (fig. 51) have prolegs with complete circles of hooklets, and often feed in concealed situations, while the pupa is protected by a light cocoon. The affinities of this group are clearly not with the higher groups of moths just described, but with some of the lower families. According to Meyrick they are most closely related to the Pyralidae, but Hampson and most other students would derive them (through the Castniidae) from a primitive Tineoid stock allied to the Cossidae and Zygaenidae.

Three families are included in the section. The North American Megathymidae and the Australian Euschemonidae have a frenulum and are usually reckoned among the “moths.” The Hesperiidae in which the frenulum is wanting form the large family of the skipper butterflies, represented in our own fauna by several species. They are insects with broad head—the feelers being widely separated—usually brown or grey wings (fig. 50) and a peculiar jerky flight. The family has an extensive range but is unknown in Greenland, New Zealand, and in many oceanic islands.

Rhopalocera.

This group comprises the typical butterflies which are much more highly specialized than the Grypocera, and may be readily distinguished by the knobbed or clubbed feelers and by the absence of a frenulum. Two or more of the radial nervures in the forewing arise from a common stalk or are suppressed. The egg is “upright.” The larvae have hooklets only on the inner edges of the prolegs. The pupa is very highly modified, only two free abdominal segments are ever recognizable, and in some genera even these have become consolidated. The cocoon is reduced to a pad of silk, to which the pupa is attached, suspended by the cremastral hooks; in some families there is also a silken girdle around the waist-region. In correlation with the exposed condition of the pupa, we find the presence of a specially developed “head-piece” or “nose-horn” to protect the head-region of the contained imago. Their bright colours and conspicuous flight in the sunshine has made the Rhopalocera the most admired of all insects by the casual observer.

A modification that has taken place in several families of butterflies is the reduction of the first pair of legs. H. W. Bates arranged the families in a series depending on this character, but neurational and pupal features must be taken into account as well, and the sequence followed here is modified from that proposed by A. R. Grote and J. W. Tutt.

The Lycaenidae are a large family including the small butterflies (figs. 52, 53, 54) popularly known as blues, coppers and hairstreaks. The forelegs in the female are normal, but in the male the tarsal segments are shortened and the claws sometimes are absent. The forewing has only three or four radial nervures (fig. 55), the last two of which arise from a common stalk; the feelers are inserted close together on the head. The larva is short and hairy, somewhat like a woodlouse in shape, the broad sides concealing the legs and prolegs, while the pupa, which is also hairy or bristly, is attached by the cremaster to a silken pad and cinctured with a silken thread. The upper surfaces of the wings of these insects are usually of a bright metallic hue—blue or coppery—while beneath there are often numerous dark centred “eye-spots.” The family is widely distributed. Nearly related are the Lemoniidae, a family abundantly represented in the Neotropical Region, but scarce in the Old World and having only a single European species (Nemeobius lucinia) which occurs also in England. In the Lemoniidae (figs. 56, 57) the forelegs of the male are reduced and useless for walking. The Libytheidae may be recognized by the elongate snout-like palps, the five-branched radial nervure of the forewing, the cylindrical hairy larva, and the pupa attached only by the cremaster.

After Grote, Natural Science, vol. 12 (J. M. Dent & Co.).

2, Sub-costal.

3, Radial.

4, Median.

5, Cubital.

7, 8, Anal nervures.

The Papilionidae are large butterflies with ample wings, and all six legs fully developed in both sexes. The forewing has five radial and two anal nervures, the second of the latter being free from the first and running to the dorsum of the wing, while the hindwing has but a single anal, and is frequently prolonged into a “tail” at the third median nervure (fig. 58). The larva is cylindrical, never hairy but often tuberculate and provided with a dorsal retractile tentacle (osmaterium) on the prothorax. The pupa, which has a double “nose-horn,” is attached by the cremaster and a waist-girdle to the food-plant in the Papilioninae (fig. 58), but lies in a web on the ground among the Parnasiinae (figs. 59, 60). The latter sub-family includes the well-known Apollo butterflies of the Alps. The former is represented in the British fauna by the East Anglian swallow-tail (Papilio machaon), and is very abundant in the warmer regions of the world, including some of the most magnificent and brilliant of insects.

Agreeing with the Papilionidae in the six perfect legs of both sexes and the cincture-support of the pupa we find the Pieridae—the family of the white and yellow butterflies (figs. 61, 62)—represented by ten species in the British fauna and very widely spread over the earth’s surface. In the Pieridae there are two anal nervures in the hindwing, while the second anal nervure in the forewing runs into the first; the larva is cylindrical and hairy without an osmaterium. The pupa has a single “nose-horn,” and in the more highly organized genera there is no mobility whatever between its abdominal segments. The wintering pupae of the common cabbage butterflies (Pieris brassicae and P. rapae) are common objects attached to walls and fences and their colour harmonizes, to a great extent, with that of their surroundings.

After A. R. Grote, Natural Science, vol. 12 (J. M. Dent & Co.).

2, Sub-costal.

3, Radial.

4, Median.

5, Cubital.

6, 7, 8, Anal nervures.

The Nymphalidae are by far the largest and most dominant family of butterflies. In both sexes the forelegs are useless for walking (fig. 63), the tarsal segments being absent and the short shins clothed with long hairs, whence the name of brush-footed butterflies is often applied to the family. The neuration of the wings resembles that found among the Pieridae, but in the Nymphalidae the pupa, which has a double nose-horn (fig. 65)—as in Papilio—is suspended from the cremaster only, no girdling thread being present, or it lies simply on the ground. The egg is elongate and sub-conical in form and ornamented with numerous ribs, while the larva is usually protected by numerous spines (fig. 64) arising from the segmental tubercles. To this family belong our common gaily-coloured butterflies—the tortoiseshells, peacock (fig. 65), admirals, fritillaries and emperors. In most cases the bright colouring is confined to the upper surface of the wings, the under-side being mottled and often inconspicuous. Most members of the group Vanessidi—the peacock and tortoiseshells (Vanessa) and the red admiral (Pyrameis) for example—hibernate in the imaginal state. This large family is divided into several sub-families whose characters may be briefly given, as they are considered to be distinct families by many entomologists. The Danainae (or Euploeinae, fig. 66) have the anal nervures of the forewing arising from a common stalk, the discoidal areolets in both wings closed, and the front feet of the female thickened; their larvae are smooth with fleshy processes. The danaine butterflies range over all the warmer parts of the world, becoming most numerous in the eastern tropics, where flourish the handsome purple Euploeae whose males often have “brands” on the wings; these insects are conspicuously marked and are believed to be distasteful to birds and lizards. So are the South American Ithomiinae, distinguished from the Danainae by the slender feet of the females; the narrow winged, tawny Acraeinae, with simple anal nervures, thick hairy palps and spiny larvae; and the Heliconiinae whose palps are compressed, scaly at the sides and hairy in front. This last named sub-family is confined to the Neotropical Region, while the Acraeinae are most numerous in the Ethiopian. The Nymphalinae include the British vanessids (fig. 65), and a vast assemblage of exotic genera (figs. 68, 70), characterized by the “open” discoidal areolets (fig. 67) owing to the absence of the transverse “disco-cellular” nervules. In the Morphinae—including some magnificent South American insects with deep or azure blue wings, and a few rather dull-coloured Oriental genera—the areolets are closed in the forewings and often in the hindwings. The larvae of the Morphinae (fig. 71) are smooth or hairy with a curiously forked tail-segment. A similar larva characterizes the South American Brassolinae or owl-butterflies—robust insects (figs. 72, 73) with the areolets closed in both wings, which are adorned with large “eye-spots” beneath. The Satyrinae, including our native browns and the Alpine Erebiae, resemble the foregoing group in many respects of structure, but the sub-costal nervure is greatly thickened at the base (fig. 74). This sub-family is world-wide in its distribution. One genus (Oeneis, fig. 75) is found in high northern latitudes, but reappears in South America. The dark, spotted species of Erebia are familiar insects to travellers among the Alps; yet butterflies nearly related to these Alpine insects occur in Patagonia, in South Africa and in New Zealand. Such facts of distribution clearly show that though the Nymphalidae have attained a high degree of specialization among the Lepidoptera, some of their genera have a history which goes back to a time when the distribution of land and water on the earth’s surface must have been very different from what it is to-day.

After A. R. Grote, Natural Science, vol. 12 (J. M. Dent & Co.).

2, Sub-costal.

3, Radial.

4, Median.

5, Cubital.

7, 8, Anal nervures.

Bibliography.—The handsome Lepidoptera, with their interesting and easily observed life-histories, have naturally attracted many students, and the literature of the order is enormous. M. Malpighi’s treatise on the anatomy of the silkworm (De Bombycibus, London, 1669) and P. Lyonnet’s memoir on the Goat-caterpillar, are among the earliest and most famous of entomological writings. W. F. Kirby’s Handbook to the Order Lepidoptera (5 vols., London, 1894-1897) should be consulted for references to the older systematic writers such as Linnaeus, J. C. Fabricius, J. Hübner, P. Cramer, E. Doubleday and W. C. Hewitson. Kirby’s Catalogues are also invaluable for the systematist. For the jaws of the Lepidoptera see F. Darwin, Quart. Journ. Mic. Sci. xv. (1875); E. Burgess, Amer. Nat. xiv. (1880); A. Walter, Jen. Zeits. f. Naturw. xviii. (1885); W. Breitenbach, Ib. xv. (1882); V. L. Kellogg, Amer. Nat. xxix. (1895). The last-named deals also with wing structure, which is further described by A. Spuler, Zeits. wiss. Zool. liii. (1892) and Zool. Jahrb. Anat. viii. (1895); A. R. Grote, Mitt. aus dem Roemer-Museum (Hildesheim, 1896-1897); G. Enderlein, Zool. Jahrb. Anat. xvi. (1903), and many others. For scales see A. G. Mayer, Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool. Harvard, xxix. (1896). For internal anatomy W. H. Jackson, Trans. Linn. Soc. Zool. (2) v. (1891), and W. Petersen, Mem. Acad. Imp. Sci. St Petersburg (8) ix. (1900). The early stages and transformations of Lepidoptera are described by J. Gonin, Bull. Soc. Vaud. Sci. Nat. xxx. (1894); E. B. Poulton, Trans. Linn. Soc. Zool. (2) v. (1891); H. G. Dyar, Ann. New York Acad. Sci. viii. (1894); T. A. Chapman, Trans. Entom. Soc. Lond. (1893), &c. For habits and life-relations see A. Seitz, Zool. Jahrb. Syst. v., vii. (1890, 1894); A. Weismann, Studies in the Theory of Descent (London, 1882) and Entomologist, xxix. (1896); F. Merrifield, Trans. Entom. Soc. Lond. (1890, 1893, 1905); M. Standfuss, Handbuch der paläarktischen Gross-schmetterlinge (Jena, 1896); R. Trimen, Proc. Ent. Soc. Lond. (1898); E. B. Poulton, Colours of Animals (London, 1890); Trans. Entom. Soc. (1892 and 1903), and Journ. Linn. Soc. Zool. xxvi. (1898); F. E. Beddard, Animal Coloration (London, 1892). For distribution see H. J. Elwes, Proc. Entom. Soc. Lond. (1894); J. W. Tutt, Migration and Dispersal of Insects (London, 1902); Fossil Lepidoptera, S. H. Scudder, 8th Rep. U.S. Geol. Survey (1889). Among recent general works on the Lepidoptera, most of which contain numerous references to the older literature, may be mentioned A. S. Packard’s unfinished work on the Bombycine Moths of N. America, Mem. Nat. Acad. Sci. Philadelphia, vii. (1895), and Mem. Acad. Sci. Washington, lx. (1905); D. Sharp’s chapter in Cambridge Nat. Hist. vi. (London, 1898); G. F. Hampson, Moths of India (4 vols., London, 1892-1896), and Catalogue of the Lepidoptera Phalaenae (1895) and onwards; S. H. Scudder, Butterflies of New England (3 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1888-1889); W. J. Holland, Butterfly Book (New York, 1899). Works on the British Lepidoptera are numerous, for example, those of H. T. Stainton (1851), C. G. Barrett (1893-1907), E. Meyrick (1895), and J. W. Tutt (1899 and onwards). For recent general systematic works, the student should consult the catalogues mentioned above and the Zoological Record. The writings of O. Staudinger, E. Schatz, C. Oberthür, K. Jordan, C. Aurivillius and P. Mabille may be specially mentioned.

(G. H. C.)

LEPIDUS, the name of a Roman patrician family in the Aemilian gens.

1. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, one of the three ambassadors sent to Egypt in 201 B.C. as guardians of the infant king Ptolemy V. He was consul in 187 and 175, censor 179, pontifex maximus from 180 onwards, and was six times chosen by the censors princeps senatus. He died in 152. He distinguished himself in the war with Antiochus III. of Syria, and against the Ligurians. He made the Via Aemilia from Ariminum to Placentia, and led colonies to Mutina and Parma.

Livy xl. 42-46, epit. 48; Polybius xvi. 34.

2. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, surnamed Porcina (probably from his personal appearance), consul 137 B.C. Being sent to Spain to conduct the Numantine war, he began against the will of the senate to attack the Vaccaei. This enterprise was so unsuccessful that he was deprived of his command in 136 and condemned to pay a fine. He was among the greatest of the earlier Roman orators, and Cicero praises him for having introduced the well-constructed sentence and even flow of language from Greek into Roman oratory.

Cicero, Brutus, 25, 27, 86, 97; Vell. Pat. ii. 10; Appian, Hisp. 80-83; Livy, epit. 56.

3. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, father of the triumvir. In 81 B.C. he was praetor of Sicily, where he made himself detested by oppression and extortion. In the civil wars he sided with Sulla and bought much of the confiscated property of the Marian partisans. Afterwards he became leader of the popular party, and with the help of Pompey was elected consul for 78, in spite of the opposition of Sulla. When the dictator died, Lepidus tried in vain to prevent the burial of his body in the Campus Martius, and to alter the constitution established by him. His colleague Lutatius Catulus found a tribune to place his veto on Lepidus’s proposals; and the quarrel between the two parties in the state became so acute that the senate made the consuls swear not to take up arms. Lepidus was then ordered by the senate to go to his province, Transalpine Gaul; but he stopped in Etruria on his way from the city and began to levy an army. He was declared a public enemy early in 77, and forthwith marched against Rome. A battle took place in the Campus Martius, Pompey and Catulus commanding the senatorial army, and Lepidus was defeated. He sailed to Sardinia, in order to put himself into connexion with Sertorius in Spain, but here also suffered a repulse, and died shortly afterwards.

Plutarch, Sulla, 34, 38, Pompey, 15; Appian, B.C. i. 105, 107; Livy, epit. 90; Florus iii. 23; Cicero, Balbus, 15.

4. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, the triumvir. He joined the party of Julius Caesar in the civil wars, and was by the dictator thrice nominated magister equitum and raised to the consulship in 46 B.C. He was a man of great wealth and influence, and it was probably more on this ground than on account of his ability that Caesar raised him to such honours. In the beginning of 44 B.C. he was sent to Gallia Narbonensis, but before he had left the city with his army Caesar was murdered. Lepidus, as commander of the only army near Rome, became a man of great importance in the troubles which followed. Taking part with Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony), he joined in the reconciliation which the latter effected with the senatorial party, and afterwards sided with him when open war broke out. Antony, after his defeat at Mutina, joined Lepidus in Gaul, and in August 43 Octavian (afterwards the emperor Augustus), who had forced the senate to make him consul, effected an arrangement with Antony and Lepidus, and their triumvirate was organized at Bononia. Antony and Octavian soon reduced Lepidus to an inferior position. His province of Gaul and Spain was taken from him; and, though he was included in the triumvirate when it was renewed in 37, his power was only nominal. He made an effort in the following year to regain some reality of power, conquered part of Sicily, and claimed the whole island as his province, but Octavian found means to sap the fidelity of his soldiers, and he was obliged to supplicate for his life. He was allowed to retain his fortune and the office of pontifex maximus to which he had been appointed in 44, but had to retire into private life. According to Suetonius (Augustus, 16) he died at Circeii in the year 13.

See Rome: History ii., “The Republic,” Period C, ad fin.; Appian, Bell. Civ. ii.-v.; Dio Cassius xli.-xlix.; Vell. Pat. ii. 64, 80; Orelli’s Onomasticon to Cicero.

LE PLAY, PIERRE GUILLAUME FRÉDÉRIC (1806-1882), French engineer and economist, was born at La Rivière-Saint-Sauveur (Calvados) on the 11th of April 1806, the son of a custom-house official. He was educated at the École Polytechnique, and from there passed into the State Department of Mines. In 1834 he was appointed head of the permanent committee of mining statistics, and in 1840 engineer-in-chief and professor of metallurgy at the school of mines, where he became inspector in 1848. For nearly a quarter of a century Le Play spent his vacations travelling in the various countries of Europe, and collected a vast quantity of material bearing upon the social condition of the working classes. In 1855 he published Les Ouvriers européens, which comprised a series of thirty-six monographs on the budgets of typical families selected from the most diverse industries. The Académie des Sciences conferred on him the Montyon prize. Napoleon III., who held him in high esteem, entrusted him with the organization of the Exhibition of 1855, and appointed him counsellor of state, commissioner general of the Exhibition of 1867, senator of the empire and grand officer of the Legion of Honour. He died in Paris on the 5th of April 1882.

In 1856 Le Play founded the Société internationale des études pratiques d’Économie sociale, which has devoted its energies principally to forwarding social studies on the lines laid down by its founder. The journal of the society, La Réforme sociale, founded in 1881, is published fortnightly. Other works of Le Play are La Réforme sociale (2 vols., 1864; 7th ed., 3 vols., 1887); L’Organisation de la famille (1871); La Constitution de l’Angleterre (in collaboration with M. Delaire, 1875). See article in Harvard Quarterly Journal of Economics (June 1890), by H. Higgs.

LEPROSY (Lepra Arabum, Elephantiasis Graecorum, Aussatz, Spedalskhed), the greatest disease of medieval Christendom, identified, on the one hand, with a disease endemic from the earliest historical times (1500 B.C.) in the delta and valley of the Nile, and, on the other hand, with a disease now common in Asia, Africa, South America, the West Indies, and certain isolated localities of Europe. An authentic representation of the leprosy of the middle ages exists in a picture at Munich by Holbein, painted at Augsburg in 1516; St Elizabeth gives bread and wine to a prostrate group of lepers, including a bearded man whose face is covered with large round reddish knobs, an old woman whose arm is covered with brown blotches, the leg swathed in bandages through which matter oozes, the bare knee also marked with discoloured spots, and on the head a white rag or plaster, and, thirdly, a young man whose neck and face (especially round the somewhat hairless eyebrows) are spotted with brown patches of various size. It is conjectured by Virchow that the painter had made studies of lepers from the leper-houses then existing at Augsburg. These external characters of medieval leprosy agree with the descriptions of it by the ancients, and with the pictures of modern leprosy given by Danielssen and Boeck for Norway, by various authors for sporadic European cases, by Anderson for Malacca, by Carter for India, by Wolff for Madeira and by Hillis for British Guiana. There has been some confusion in the technical naming of the disease; it is called Elephantiasis (Leontiasis, Satyriasis) by the Greek writers, and Lepra by the Arabians.

Leprosy is now included among the parasitic diseases (see Parasitic Diseases). The cause is believed to be infection by the bacillus leprae, a specific microbe discovered by Armauer Hansen in 1871. It is worthy of note that tuberculosis is very common among lepers, and especially attacks the serous membranes. The essential character of leprosy is a great multiplication of cells, resembling the “granulation cells” of lupus and syphilis, in the tissues affected, which become infiltrated and thickened, with degeneration and destruction of their normal elements. The new cells vary in size from ordinary leucocytes to giant cells three or four times larger. The bacilli are found in these cells, sometimes in small numbers, sometimes in masses. The structures most affected are the skin, nerves, mucous membranes and lymphatic glands.

The symptoms arise from the anatomical changes indicated, and they vary according to the parts attacked. Three types of disease are usually described—(1) nodular, (2) smooth or anaesthetic, (3) mixed. In the first the skin is chiefly affected, in the second the nerves; the third combines the features of both. It should be understood that this classification is purely a matter of convenience, and is based on the relative prominence of symptoms, which may be combined in all degrees. The incubation period of leprosy—assuming it to be due to infection—is unknown, but cases are on record which can only be explained on the hypothesis that it may be many years. The invasion is usually slow and intermittent. There are occasional feverish attacks, with the usual constitutional disturbance and other slight premonitory signs, such as changes in the colour of the skin and in its sensibility. Sometimes, but rarely, the onset is acute and the characteristic symptoms develop rapidly. These begin with an eruption which differs markedly according to the type of disease. In the nodular form dark red or coppery patches appear on the face, backs of the hands, and feet or on the body; they are generally symmetrical, and vary from the size of a shilling upwards. They come with one of the feverish attacks and fade away when it has gone, but only to return. After a time infiltration and thickening of the skin become noticeable, and the nodules appear. They are lumpy excrescences, at first pink but changing to brown. Thickening of the skin of the face produces a highly characteristic appearance, recalling the aspect of a lion. The tissues of the eye undergo degenerative changes; the mucous membrane of the nose and throat is thickened, impairing the breathing and the voice; the eyebrows fall off; the ears and nose become thickened and enlarged. As the disease progresses the nodules tend to break down and ulcerate, leaving open sores. The patient, whose condition is extremely wretched, gradually becomes weaker, and eventually succumbs to exhaustion or is carried off by some intercurrent disease, usually inflammation of the kidneys or tuberculosis. A severe case may end fatally in two years, but, as a rule, when patients are well cared for the illness lasts several years. There is often temporary improvement, but complete recovery from this form of leprosy rarely or never occurs. The smooth type is less severe and more chronic. The eruption consists of patches of dry, slightly discoloured skin, not elevated above the surface. These patches are the result of morbid changes affecting the cutaneous nerves, and are accompanied by diminished sensibility over the areas of skin affected. At the same time certain nerve trunks in the arm and leg, and particularly the ulnar nerve, are found to be thickened. In the further stages the symptoms are those of increasing degeneration of the nerves. Bullae form on the skin, and the discoloured patches become enlarged; sensation is lost, muscular power diminished, with wasting, contraction of tendons, and all the signs of impaired nutrition. The nails become hard and clawed; perforating ulcers of the feet are common; portions of the extremities, including whole fingers and toes, die and drop off. Later, paralysis becomes more marked, affecting the muscles of the face and limbs. The disease runs a very chronic course, and may last twenty or thirty years. Recovery occasionally occurs. In the mixed form, which is probably the most common, the symptoms described are combined in varying degrees. Leprosy may be mistaken for syphilis, tuberculosis, ainhum (an obscure disease affecting negroes, in which the little toe drops off), and several affections of the skin. Diagnosis is established by the presence of the bacillus leprae in the nodules or bullae, and by the signs of nerve degeneration exhibited in the anaesthetic patches of skin and the thickened nerve trunks.

In former times leprosy was often confounded with other skin diseases, especially psoriasis and leucoderma; the white leprosy of the Old Testament was probably a form of the latter. But there is no doubt that true leprosy has existed from time immemorial. Prescriptions for treating it have been found in Egypt, to which a date of about 4600 B.C. is assigned. The disease is described by Aristotle and by later Greek writers, but not by Hippocrates, though leprosy derives its name from his “lepra” or “scaly” disease, which was no doubt psoriasis. In ancient times it was widely prevalent throughout Asia as well as in Egypt, and among the Greeks and Romans. In the middle ages it became extensively diffused in Europe, and in some countries—France, England, Germany and Spain—every considerable town had its leper-house, in which the patients were segregated. The total number of such houses has been reckoned at 19,000. The earliest one in England was established at Canterbury in 1096, and the latest at Highgate in 1472. At one time there were at least 95 religious hospitals for lepers in Great Britain and 14 in Ireland (Sir James Simpson). During the 15th century the disease underwent a remarkable diminution. It practically disappeared in the civilized parts of Europe, and the leper-houses were given up. It is a singular fact that this diminution was coincident with the great extension of syphilis (see Prostitution). The general disappearance of leprosy at this time is the more unintelligible because it did not take effect everywhere. In Scotland the disease lingered until the 19th century, and in some other parts it has never died out at all. At the present time it still exists in Norway, Iceland, along the shores of the Baltic, in South Russia, Greece, Turkey, several Mediterranean islands, the Riviera, Spain and Portugal. Isolated cases occasionally occur elsewhere, but they are usually imported. The Teutonic races seem to be especially free from the taint. Leper asylums are maintained in Norway and at two or three places in the Baltic, San Remo, Cyprus, Constantinople, Alicante and Lisbon. Except in Spain, where some increase has taken place, the disease is dying out. The number of lepers in Norway was 3000 in 1856, but has now dwindled to a few hundreds. They are no longer numerous in any part of Europe. On the other hand, leprosy prevails extensively throughout Asia, from the Mediterranean to Japan, and from Arabia to Siberia. It is also found in nearly all parts of Africa, particularly on the east and west coasts near the equator. In South Africa it has greatly increased, and attacks the Dutch as well as natives. Leper asylums have been established at Robben Island near Cape Town, and in Tembuland. In Australia, where it was introduced by Chinese, it has also spread to Europeans. In New Zealand the Maoris are affected; but the amount of leprosy is not large in either country. A much more remarkable case is that of the Hawaiian Islands, where the disease is believed to have been imported by Chinese. It was unknown before 1848, but in 1866 the number of lepers had risen to 230 and in 1882 to 4000 (Liveing). All attempts to stop it by segregating lepers in the settlement of Molokai appear to have been fruitless. In the West Indies and on the American continent, again, leprosy has a wide distribution. It is found in nearly all parts of South and Central America, and in certain parts of North America—namely, Louisiana, California (among Chinese), Minnesota, Wisconsin and North and South Dakota (Norwegians), New Brunswick (French Canadians).

It is difficult to find any explanation of the geographical distribution and behaviour of leprosy. It seems to affect islands and the sea-coast more than the interior, and to some extent this gives colour to the old belief that it is caused or fostered by a fish diet, which has been revived by Mr Jonathan Hutchinson, but is not generally accepted. Leprosy is found in interiors where fish is not an article of diet. Climate, again, has obviously little, if any, influence. The theory of heredity is equally at fault, whether it be applied to account for the spread of the disease by transmission or for its disappearance by the elimination of susceptible persons. The latter is the manner in which heredity might be expected to act, if at all, for lepers are remarkably sterile. But we see the disease persisting among the Eastern races, who have been continuously exposed to its selective influence from the earliest times, while it has disappeared among the Europeans, who were affected very much later. The opposite theory of hereditary transmission from parents to offspring is also at variance with many observed facts. Leprosy is very rarely congenital, and no cases have occurred among the descendants to the third generation of 160 Norwegian lepers settled in the United States. Again, if hereditary transmission were an effective influence, the disease could hardly have died down so rapidly as it did in Europe in the 15th century. Then we have the theory of contagion. There is no doubt that human beings are inoculable with leprosy, and that the disease may be communicated by close contact. Cases have been recorded which prove it conclusively; for instance, that of a man who had never been out of the British islands, but developed leprosy after sharing for a time the bed and clothes of his brother, who had contracted the disease in the West Indies. Some of the facts noted, such as the extensive dissemination of the disease in Europe during the middle ages, and its subsequent rapid decline, suggest the existence of some unknown epidemic factor. Poverty and insanitation are said to go with the prevalence of leprosy, but they go with every malady, and there is nothing to show that they have any special influence. Vaccination has been blamed for spreading it, and a few cases of communication by arm-to-arm inoculation are recorded. The influence of this factor, however, can only be trifling. Vaccination is a new thing, leprosy a very old one; where there is most vaccination there is no leprosy, and where there is most leprosy there is little or no vaccination. In India 78% of the lepers are unvaccinated, and in Canton since vaccination was introduced leprosy has declined (Cantlie). On the whole we must conclude that there is still much to be learnt about the conditions which govern the prevalence of leprosy.

With regard to prevention, the isolation of patients is obviously desirable, especially in the later stages, when open sores may disseminate the bacilli; but complete segregation, which has been urged, is regarded as impracticable by those who have had most experience in leprous districts. Scrupulous cleanliness should be exercised by persons attending on lepers or brought into close contact with them. In treatment the most essential thing is general care of the health, with good food and clothing. The tendency of modern therapeutics to attach increasing importance to nutrition in various morbid states, and notably in diseases of degeneration, such as tuberculosis and affections of the nervous system, is borne out by experience in leprosy, which has affinities to both; and this suggests the application to it of modern methods for improving local as well as general nutrition by physical means. A large number of internal remedies have been tried with varying results; those most recommended are chaulmoogra oil, arsenic, salicylate of soda, salol and chlorate of potash. Vergueira uses Collargol intravenously and subcutaneously, and states that in all the cases treated there was marked improvement, and hair that had been lost grew again. Calmette’s Anterenene injected subcutaneously has been followed by good results. Deycke together with R. Bey isolated from a non-ulcerated leprous nodule a streptothrix which they call S. leproides. Its relation to the bacillus is uncertain. They found that injections of this organism had marked curative effects, due to a neutral fat which they named “Nastin.” Injections of Nastin together with Benzoyl Chloride directly act on the lepra bacilli. Some cases were unaffected by this treatment, but with others the effect was marvellous. Dr W. A. Pusey of Chicago uses applications of carbon dioxide snow with good effect. In the later stages of the disease there is a wide field for surgery, which is able to give much relief to sufferers.

Literature.—For history and geographical distribution, see Hirsch, Handbuch der historisch-geographischen Pathologie (1st ed., Erlangen, 1860, with exhaustive literature). For pathology, Virchow, Die krankhaften Geschwülste (Berlin, 1863-1867), vol. ii. For clinical histories, R. Liveing, Elephantiasis Graecorum or True Leprosy (London, 1873), ch. iv. For medieval leprosy—in Germany, Virchow, in Virchow’s Archiv, five articles, vols. xviii.-xx. (1860-1861); in the Netherlands, Israëls, in Nederl. Tijdschr. voor Geneeskunde, vol. i. (1857); in Britain, J. Y. Simpson, Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ., three articles, vols. lxvi. and lxvii. (1846-1847). Treatises on modern leprosy in particular localities: Danielssen and Boeck (Norway), Traité de la Spédalskhed, with atlas of twenty-four coloured plates (Paris, 1848); A. F. Anderson, Leprosy as met with in the Straits Settlements, coloured photographs with explanatory notes (London, 1872); H. Vandyke Carter (Bombay), On Leprosy and Elephantiasis, with coloured plates (London, 1874); Hillis, Leprosy in British Guiana, an account of West Indian leprosy, with twenty-two coloured plates (London, 1882). See also the dermatological works of Hebra, Erasmus Wilson, Bazin and Jonathan Hutchinson (also the latter’s letters to The Times of the 11th of April and the 25th of May 1903); British Medical Journal (April 1, 1908); American Journal of Dermatology (Dec. 1907); The Practitioner (February 1910). An important early work is that of P. G. Hensler, Vom abendländischen Aussatze im Mittelalter (Hamburg, 1790).

LEPSIUS, KARL RICHARD (1810-1884), German Egyptologist, was born at Naumburg-am-Saale on the 23rd of December 1810, and in 1823 was sent to the “Schulpforta” school near Naumburg, where he came under the influence of Professor Lange. In 1829 he entered the university of Leipzig, and one year later that of Göttingen, where, under the influence of Otfried Müller, he finally decided to devote himself to the archaeological side of philology. From Göttingen he proceeded to Berlin, where he graduated in 1833 as doctor with the thesis De tabulis Eugubinis. In the same year he proceeded to study in Paris, and was commissioned by the duc de Luynes to collect material from the Greek and Latin writers for his work on the weapons of the ancients. In 1834 he took the Volney prize with his Paläographie als Mittel der Sprachforschung. Befriended by Bunsen and Humboldt, Lepsius threw himself with great ardour into Egyptological studies, which, since the death of Champollion in 1832, had attracted no scholar of eminence and weight. Here Lepsius found an ample field for his powers. After four years spent in visiting the Egyptian collections of Italy, Holland and England, he returned to Germany, where Humboldt and Bunsen united their influence to make his projected visit to Egypt a scientific expedition with royal support. For three years Lepsius and his party explored the whole of the region in which monuments of ancient Egyptian and Ethiopian occupation are found, from the Sudan above Khartum to the Syrian coast. At the end of 1845 they returned home, and the results of the expedition, consisting of casts, drawings and squeezes of inscriptions and scenes, maps and plans collected with the utmost thoroughness, as well as antiquities and papyri, far surpassed expectations. In 1846 he married Elisabeth Klein, and his appointment to a professorship in Berlin University in the following August afforded him the leisure necessary for the completion of his work. In 1859 the twelve volumes of his vast Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien were finished, supplemented later by a text prepared from the note-books of the expedition; they comprise its entire archaeological, palaeographical and historical results. In 1866 Lepsius again went to Egypt, and discovered the famous Decree of Tanis or Table of Canopus, an inscription of the same character as the Rosetta Stone, in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. In 1873 he was appointed keeper of the Royal Library, Berlin, which, like the Berlin Museum, owes much to his care. About ten years later he was appointed Geheimer Oberregierungsrath. He died at Berlin on the 10th of July 1884. Besides the colossal Denkmäler and other publications of texts such as the Todtenbuch der Ägypter (Book of the Dead, 1842) his other works, amongst which may be specially named his Königsbuch der Ägypter (1858) and Chronologie der Ägypter (1849), are characterized by a quality of permanence that is very remarkable in a subject of such rapid development as Egyptology. In spite of his scientific training in philology Lepsius left behind few translations of inscriptions or discussions of the meanings of words: by preference he attacked historical and archaeological problems connected with the ancient texts, the alphabet, the metrology, the names of metals and minerals, the chronology, the royal names. On the other hand one of his latest works, the Nubische Grammatik (1880), is an elaborate grammar of the then little-known Nubian language, preceded by a linguistic sketch of the African continent. Throughout his life he profited by the gift of attaching to himself the right men, whether as patrons or, like Weidenbach and Stern, as assistants. Lepsius was a fine specimen of the best type of German scholar.

See Richard Lepsius, by Georg Ebers (New York, 1887), and art. Egypt, section Exploration and Research.

LEPTINES, an Athenian orator, known as the proposer of a law that no Athenian, whether citizen or resident alien (with the sole exception of the descendants of Harmodius and Aristogeiton), should be exempt from the public charges (λειτουργίαι) for the state festivals. The object was to provide funds for the festivals and public spectacles at a time when both the treasury and the citizens generally were short of money. It was further asserted that many of the recipients of immunity were really unworthy of it. Against this law Demosthenes delivered (354 B.C.) his well-known speech Against Leptines in support of the proposal of Ctesippus that all the cases of immunity should be carefully investigated. Great stress is laid on the reputation for ingratitude and breach of faith which the abolition of immunities would bring upon the state. Besides, the law itself had been passed unconstitutionally, for an existing law confirmed these privileges, and by the constitution of Solon no law could be enacted until any existing law which it contravened had been repealed. The law was probably condemned. Nothing further is known of Leptines.

See the edition of the speech by J. E. Sandys (1890).

LEPTIS, the name of two towns in ancient Africa. The first, Leptis Magna (Λεπτίμαγνα), the modern Lebda, was in Tripolitana between Tripolis and Mesrata at the mouth of the Cinyps; the second, Leptis Parva (Λέπτις ἡ μικρά), known also as Leptiminus or Leptis minor, the modern Lamta, was a small harbour of Byzacena between Ruspina (Monastir) and Thapsus (Dimas).

1. Leptis Magna was one of the oldest and most flourishing of the Phoenician emporia established on the coasts of the greater Syrtis, the chief commercial entrepot for the interior of the African continent. It was founded by the Sidonians (Sallust, Jug. 78) who were joined later by people of Tyre (Pliny, Hist. Nat. v. 17). Herodotus enlarges on the fertility of its territory (iv. 175, v. 42). It was tributary to Carthage to which it paid a contribution of a talent a day (Livy xxxiv. 62). After the Second Punic War Massinissa made himself master of it (Sallust, Jug. 78; Livy xxxiv. 62; Appian viii. 106). During the Jugurthine War it appealed for protection to Rome (Sallust, Jug. 78). Though captured and plundered by Juba, it maintained its allegiance to Rome, supported the senatorial cause, received Cato the younger with the remains of the Pompeian forces after Pharsalus 48 B.C. After his victory Julius Caesar imposed upon it an annual contribution of 300,000 measures of oil. Nevertheless, it preserved its position as a free city governed by its own magistrates (C.I.L. viii. 7). It received the title of municipium (C.I.L. viii. 8), and was subsequently made a colonia by Trajan (C.I.L. viii. 10). Septimius Severus, who was born there, beautified the place and conferred upon it the Ius Italicum. Leptis Magna was the limit of the Roman state, the last station of the limes Tripolitanus; hence, especially during the last centuries of the Empire, it suffered much from the Nomads of the desert, the Garamantes, the Austuriani and the Levathae (Ammian. Marc. xxviii. 6; Procop. De Aedif. vi. 4). Its commerce declined and its harbour silted up. Justinian made a vain attempt to rebuild it (Procop. ibid.; Ch. Diehl, L’Afrique byzantine, p. 388). It was the seat of a bishopric, but no mention is made of its bishops after 462.

Leptis Magna had a citadel which protected the commercial city which was generally called Neapolis, the situation of which may be compared with that of Carthage at the foot of Byrsa. Its ruins are still imposing; remains of ramparts and docks, a theatre, a circus and various buildings of the Roman period still exist. Inscriptions show that the current pronunciation of the name was Lepcis, Lepcitana, instead of Leptis, Leptitana (Tissot, Géogr. comp. de la prov. d’Afrique, ii. 219; Clermont-Ganneau, Recueil d’archéologie orientale, vi. 41; Comptes rendus de l’Acad. des Inscr. et B.-Lettres, 1903, p. 333; Cagnat, C.R. Acad., 1905, p. 531). The coins of Leptis Magna, like the majority of the emporia in the neighbourhood, present a series from the Punic period. They are of bronze with the legend לפקי (Lepqi). They have on one side the head of Bacchus, Hercules or Cybele, and on the other various emblems of these deities. From the Roman period we have also coins bearing the heads of Augustus, Livia and Tiberius, which still have the name of the town in Neo-Punic script (Lud. Müller, Numism. de l’anc. Afrique, ii. 3).

The ruins of Leptis Magna have been visited by numerous travellers since the time of Frederick William and Henry William Beechey (Travels, pp. 51 and 74) and Heinrich Barth (Wanderungen, pp. 306, 360); they are described by Ch. Tissot (Géogr. comp. ii. 219 et seq.); Cl. Perroud, De Syrticis emporiis, p. 33 (Paris, 1881, in 8°); see also a description in the New York journal, The Nation (1877), vol. xxvii. No. 683. M. Méhier de Mathuisieulx explored the site afresh in 1901; his account is inserted in the Nouvelles Archives des missions, x. 245-277; cf. vol. xii. See also J. Toutain, “Le Limes Tripolitanus en Tripolitaine,” in the Bulletin archéologique áu comité des travaux historiques (1905).

2. Leptis Parva (Lamta), 7½ m. from Monastir, which is often confused by modern writers with Leptis Magna in their interpretations of ancient texts (Tissot, Géogr. comp. ii. 169), was, according to the Tabula Peutingeriana, 18 m. south of Hadrumetum. Evidently Phoenician in origin like Leptis Magna, it was in the Punic period of comparatively slight importance. Nevertheless, it had fortifications, and the French engineer, A. Daux, has discovered a probable line of ramparts. Like its neighbour Hadrumetum, Leptis Parva declared for Rome after the last Punic War. Also after the fall of Carthage in 146 it preserved its autonomy and was declared a civitas libera et immunis (Appian, Punica, 94; C.I.L. i. 200; De bell. Afric. c. xii.). Julius Caesar made it the base of his operations before the battle of Thapsus in 46 (Ch. Tissot, Géogr. comp. ii. 728). Under the Empire Leptis Parva became extremely prosperous; its bishops appeared in the African councils from 258 onwards. In Justinian’s reorganization of Africa we find that Leptis Parva was with Capsa one of the two residences of the Dux Byzacenae (Tissot, op. cit. p. 171). The town had coins under Augustus and Tiberius. On the obverse is the imperial effigy with a Latin legend, and on the reverse the Greek legend ΛΕΠΤΙC with the bust of Mercury (Lud. Müller, Numism. de l’anc. Afrique, ii. 49). The ruins extend along the sea-coast to the north-west of Lemta; the remains of docks, the amphitheatre and the acropolis can be distinguished; a Christian cemetery has furnished tombs adorned with curious mosaics.

See Comptes rendus de l’Acad. des Inscrip. et B.-Lettres (1883), p. 189; Cagnat and Saladin, “Notes d’archéol. tunisiennes,” in the Bulletin monumental of 1884; Archives des missions, xii. 111; Cagnat, Explorations archéol. en Tunisie, 3me fasc. pp. 9-16, and Tour du monde (1881), i. 292; Saladin, Rapport sur une mission en Tunisie (1886), pp. 9-20; Bulletin archéol. du comité de travaux historiques (1895), pp. 69-71 (inscriptions of Lamta); Bulletin de la Soc. archéol. de Sousse (1905; plan of the ruins of Lamta).

(E. B.*)

LE PUY, or Le Puy en Velay, a town of south-eastern France, capital of the department of Haute-Loire, 90 m. S.W. of Lyons on the Paris-Lyon railway. Pop. (1906) town, 17,291; commune, 21,420. Le Puy rises in the form of an amphitheatre from a height of 2050 ft. above sea-level upon Mont Anis, a hill that divides the left bank of the Dolézon from the right bank of the Borne (a rapid stream joining the Loire 3 m. below). From the new town, which lies east and west in the valley of the Dolézon, the traveller ascends the old feudal and ecclesiastical town through narrow steep streets, paved with pebbles of lava, to the cathedral commanded by the fantastic pinnacle of Mont Corneille. Mont Corneille, which is 433 ft. above the Place de Breuil (in the lower town), is a steep rock of volcanic breccia, surmounted by an iron statue of the Virgin (53 ft. high) cast, after a model by Bonassieux, out of guns taken at Sebastopol. Another statue, that of Msgr de Morlhon, bishop of Le Puy, also sculptured by Bonassieux, faces that of the Virgin. From the platform of Mont Corneille a magnificent panoramic view is obtained of the town and of the volcanic mountains, which make this region one of the most interesting parts of France.

The Romanesque cathedral (Notre-Dame), dating chiefly from the first half of the 12th century, has a particoloured façade of white sandstone and black volcanic breccia, which is reached by a flight of sixty steps, and consists of three tiers, the lowest composed of three high arcades opening into the porch, which extends beneath the first bays of the nave; above are three windows lighting the nave; and these in turn are surmounted by three gables, two of which, those to the right and the left, are of open work. The staircase continues within the porch, where it divides, leading on the left to the cloister, on the right into the church. The doorway of the south transept is sheltered by a fine Romanesque porch. The isolated bell-tower (184 ft.), which rises behind the choir in seven storeys, is one of the most beautiful examples of the Romanesque transition period. The bays of the nave are covered in by octagonal cupolas, the central cupola forming a lantern. The choir and transepts are barrel-vaulted. Much veneration is paid to a small image of the Virgin on the high altar, a modern copy of the medieval image destroyed at the Revolution. The cloister, to the north of the choir, is striking, owing to its variously-coloured materials and elegant shafts. Viollet-le-Duc considered one of its galleries to belong to the oldest known type of cathedral cloister (8th or 9th century). Connected with the cloister are remains of fortifications of the 13th century, by which it was separated from the rest of the city. Near the cathedral the baptistery of St John (11th century), built on the foundations of a Roman building, is surrounded by walls and numerous remains of the period, partly uncovered by excavations. The church of St Lawrence (14th century) contains the tomb and statue of Bertrand du Guesclin, whose ashes were afterwards carried to St Denis.

Le Puy possesses fragmentary remains of its old line of fortifications, among them a machicolated tower, which has been restored, and a few curious old houses dating from the 12th to the 17th century. In front of the hospital there is a fine medieval porch under which a street passes. Of the modern monuments the statue of Marie Joseph Paul, marquis of La Fayette, and a fountain in the Place de Breuil, executed in marble, bronze and syenite, may be specially mentioned. The museum, named after Charles Crozatier, a native sculptor and metal-worker to whose munificence it principally owes its existence, contains antiquities, engravings, a collection of lace, and ethnographical and natural history collections. Among the curiosities of Le Puy should be noted the church of St Michel d’Aiguilhe, beside the gate of the town, perched on an isolated rock like Mont Corneille, the top of which is reached by a staircase of 271 steps. The church dates from the end of the 10th century and its chancel is still older. The steeple is of the same type as that of the cathedral. Three miles from Le Puy are the ruins of the Château de Polignac, one of the most important feudal strongholds of France.

Le Puy is the seat of a bishopric, a prefect and a court of assizes, and has tribunals of first instance and of commerce, a board of trade arbitration, a chamber of commerce, and a branch of the Bank of France. Its educational institutions include ecclesiastical seminaries, lycées and training colleges for both sexes and municipal industrial schools of drawing, architecture and mathematics applied to arts and industries. The principal manufacture is that of lace and guipure (in woollen, linen, cotton, silk and gold and silver threads), and distilling, leather-dressing, malting and the manufacture of chocolate and cloth are carried on. Cattle, woollens, grain and vegetables are the chief articles of trade.

It is not known whether Le Puy existed previously to the Roman invasion. Towards the end of the 4th or beginning of the 5th century it became the capital of the country of the Vellavi, at which period the bishopric, originally at Revession, now St Paulien, was transferred hither. Gregory of Tours speaks of it by the name of Anicium, because a chapel “ad Deum” had been built on the mountain, whence the name of Mont Adidon or Anis, which it still retains. In the 10th century it was called Podium Sanctae Mariae, whence Le Puy. In the middle ages there was a double enclosure, one for the cloister, the other for the town. The sanctuary of Nôtre Dame was much frequented by pilgrims, and the city grew famous and populous. Rivalries between the bishops who held directly of the see of Rome and had the right of coining money, and the lords of Polignac, revolts of the town against the royal authority, and the encroachments of the feudal superiors on municipal prerogatives often disturbed the quiet of the town. The Saracens in the 8th century, the Routiers in the 12th, the English in the 14th, the Burgundians in the 15th, successively ravaged the neighbourhood. Le Puy sent the flower of its chivalry to the Crusades in 1096, and Raymond d’Aiguille, called d’Agiles, one of its sons, was their historian. Many councils and various assemblies of the states of Languedoc met within its walls; popes and sovereigns, among the latter Charlemagne and Francis I., visited its sanctuary. Pestilence and the religious wars put an end to its prosperity. Long occupied by the Leaguers, it did not submit to Henry IV. until many years after his accession.

LERDO DE TEJADA, SEBASTIAN (1825-1889), president of Mexico, was born at Jalapa on the 25th of April 1825. He was educated as a lawyer and became a member of the supreme court. He became known as a liberal leader and a supporter of President Juarez. He was minister of foreign affairs for three months in 1857, and became president of the Chamber of Deputies in 1861. During the French intervention and the reign of the emperor Maximilian he continued loyal to the patriotic party, and had an active share in conducting the national resistance. He was minister of foreign affairs to President Juarez, and he showed an implacable resolution in carrying out the execution of Maximilian at Querétaro. When Juarez died in 1872 Lerdo succeeded him in office in the midst of a confused civil war. He achieved some success in pacifying the country and began the construction of railways. He was re-elected on the 24th of July 1876, but was expelled in January of the following year by Porfirio Diaz. He had made himself unpopular by the means he took to secure his re-election and by his disposition to limit state rights in favour of a strongly centralized government. He fled to the United States and died in obscurity at New York in 1889.

See H. H. Bancroft, Pacific States, vol. 9 (San Francisco, 1882-1890).

LERICI, a village of Liguria, Italy, situated on the N.E. side of the Gulf of Spezia, about 12 m. E.S.E. of Spezia, and 4 m. W.S.W. of Sarzana by road, 17 ft. above sea-level. Pop. (1901) 9326. Its small harbour is guarded by an old castle, said to have been built by Tancred; in the middle ages it was the chief place on the gulf. S. Terenzo, a hamlet belonging to Lerici, was the residence of Shelley during his last days. Farther north-west is the Bay of Pertusola, with its large lead-smelting works.

LÉRIDA, a province of northern Spain, formed in 1833 of districts previously included in the ancient province of Catalonia, and bounded on the N. by France and Andorra, E. by Gerona and Barcelona, S. by Tarragona and W. by Saragossa and Huesca. Pop. (1900) 274,590; area 4690 sq. m. The northern half of Lérida belongs entirely to the Mediterranean or eastern section of the Pyrenees, and comprises some of the finest scenery in the whole chain, including the valleys of Aran and La Cerdaña, and large tracts of forest. It is watered by many rivers, the largest of which is the Segre, a left-hand tributary of the Ebro. South of the point at which the Segre is joined on the right by the Noguera Pallaresa, the character of the country completely alters. The Llaños de Urgel, which comprise the greater part of southern Lérida, are extensive plains forming part of the Ebro valley, but redeemed by an elaborate system of canals from the sterility which characterizes so much of that region in Aragon. Lérida is traversed by the main railway from Barcelona to Saragossa, and by a line from Tarragona to the city of Lérida. In 1904 the Spanish government agreed with France to carry another line to the mouth of an international tunnel through the Pyrenees. Industries are in a more backward condition than in any other province of Catalonia, despite the abundance of water-power. There are, however, many saw-mills, flour-mills, and distilleries of alcohol and liqueurs, besides a smaller number of cotton and linen factories, paper-mills, soap-works, and oil and leather factories. Zinc, lignite and common salt are mined, but the output is small and of slight value. There is a thriving trade in wine, oil, wool, timber, cattle, mules, horses and sheep, but agriculture is far less prosperous than in the maritime provinces of Catalonia. Lérida (q.v.) is the capital (pop. 21,432), and the only town with more than 5000 inhabitants. Séo de Urgel, near the headwaters of the Segre, is a fortified city which has been an episcopal see since 840, and has had a close historical connexion with Andorra (q.v.). Solsona, on a small tributary of the Cardoner, which flows through Barcelona to the Mediterranean, is the Setelix of the Romans, and contains in its parish church an image of the Virgin said to possess miraculous powers, and visited every year by many hundreds of pilgrims. Cervera, on a small river of the same name, contains the buildings of a university which Philip V. established here in 1717. This university had originally been founded at Barcelona in the 15th century, and was reopened there in 1842. In character, and especially in their industry, intelligence and keen local patriotism, the inhabitants of Lérida are typical Catalans. (See Catalonia.)

LÉRIDA, the capital of the Spanish province of Lérida, on the river Segre and the Barcelona-Saragossa and Lérida-Tarragona railways. Pop. (1900) 21,432. The older parts of the city, on the right bank of the river, are a maze of narrow and crooked streets, surrounded by ruined walls and a moat, and commanded by the ancient citadel, which stands on a height overlooking the plains of Noguera on the north and of Urgel on the south. On the left bank, connected with the older quarters by a fine stone bridge and an iron railway bridge, are the suburbs, laid out after 1880 in broad and regular avenues of modern houses. The old cathedral, last used for public worship in 1707, is a very interesting late Romanesque building, with Gothic and Mauresque additions; but the interior was much defaced by its conversion into barracks after 1717. It was founded in 1203 by Pedro II. of Aragon, and consecrated in 1278. The fine octagonal belfry was built early in the 15th century. A second cathedral, with a Corinthian façade, was completed in 1781. The church of San Lorenzo (1270-1300) is noteworthy for the beautiful tracery of its Gothic windows; its nave is said to have been a Roman temple, converted by the Moors into a mosque and by Ramon Berenguer IV., last count of Barcelona, into a church. Other interesting buildings are the Romanesque town hall, founded in the 13th century but several times restored, the bishop’s palace and the military hospital, formerly a convent. The museum contains a good collection of Roman and Romanesque antiquities; and there are a school for teachers, a theological seminary and academies of literature and science. Leather, paper, glass, silk, linen and cloth are manufactured in the city, which has also some trade in agricultural produce.

Lérida is the Ilerda of the Romans, and was the capital of the people whom they called Ilerdenses (Pliny) or Ilergetes (Ptolemy). By situation the key of Catalonia and Aragon, it was from a very early period an important military station. In the Punic wars it sided with the Carthaginians and suffered much from the Roman arms. In its immediate neighbourhood Hanno was defeated by Scipio in 216 B.C., and it afterwards became famous as the scene of Caesar’s arduous struggle with Pompey’s generals Afranius and Petreius in the first year of the civil war (49 B.C.). It was already a municipium in the time of Augustus, and enjoyed great prosperity under later emperors. Under the Visigoths it became an episcopal see, and at least one ecclesiastical council is recorded to have met here (in 546). Under the Moors Lareda became one of the principal cities of the province of Saragossa; it became tributary to the Franks in 793, but was reconquered in 797. In 1149 it fell into the hands of Ramon Berenguer IV. In modern times it has come through numerous sieges, having been taken by the French in November 1707 during the War of Succession, and again in 1810. In 1300 James II. of Aragon founded a university at Lérida, which achieved some repute in its day, but was suppressed in 1717, when the university of Cervera was founded.

LERMA, FRANCISCO DE SANDOVAL Y ROJAS, Duke of (1552-1625), Spanish minister, was born in 1552. At the age of thirteen he entered the royal palace as a page. The family of Sandoval was ancient and powerful, but under Philip II. (1556-1598) the nobles, with the exception of a few who held viceroyalties or commanded armies abroad, had little share in the government. The future duke of Lerma, who was by descent marquis of Denia, passed his life as a courtier, and possessed no political power till the accession of Philip III. in 1598. He had already made himself a favourite with the prince, and was in fact one of the incapable men who, as the dying king Philip II. foresaw, were likely to mislead the new sovereign. The old king’s fears were fully justified. No sooner was Philip III. king than he entrusted all authority to his favourite, whom he created duke of Lerma in 1599 and on whom he lavished an immense list of offices and grants. The favour of Lerma lasted for twenty years, till it was destroyed by a palace intrigue carried out by his own son. Philip III. not only entrusted the entire direction of his government to Lerma, but authorized him to affix the royal signature to documents, and to take whatever presents were made to him. No royal favourite was ever more amply trusted, or made a worse use of power. At a time when the state was practically bankrupt, he encouraged the king in extravagance, and accumulated for himself a fortune estimated by contemporaries at forty-four millions of ducats. Lerma was pious withal, spending largely on religious houses, and he carried out the ruinous measures for the expulsion of the Moriscoes in 1610—a policy which secured him the admiration of the clergy and was popular with the mass of the nation. He persisted in costly and useless hostilities with England till, in 1604, Spain was forced by exhaustion to make peace, and he used all his influence against a recognition of the independence of the Low Countries. The fleet was neglected, the army reduced to a remnant, and the finances ruined beyond recovery. His only resources as a finance minister were the debasing of the coinage, and foolish edicts against luxury and the making of silver plate. Yet it is probable that he would never have lost the confidence of Philip III., who divided his life between festivals and prayers, but for the domestic treachery of his son, the duke of Uceda, who combined with the king’s confessor, Aliaga, whom Lerma had introduced to the place, to turn him out. After a long intrigue in which the king was all but entirely dumb and passive, Lerma was at last compelled to leave the court, on the 4th of October 1618. As a protection, and as a means of retaining some measure of power in case he fell from favour, he had persuaded Pope Paul V. to create him cardinal, in the year of his fall. He retired to the town of Lerma in Old Castile, where he had built himself a splendid palace, and then to Valladolid. Under the reign of Philip IV., which began in 1621 he was despoiled of part of his wealth, and he died in 1625.

The history of Lerma’s tenure of office is in vol. xv. of the Historia General de España of Modesto Lafuente (Madrid, 1855)—with references to contemporary authorities.

LERMONTOV, MIKHAIL YUREVICH (1814-1841), Russian poet and novelist, often styled the poet of the Caucasus, was born in Moscow, of Scottish descent, but belonged to a respectable family of the Tula government, and was brought up in the village of Tarkhanui (in the Penzensk government), which now preserves his dust. By his grandmother—on whom the whole care of his childhood was devolved by his mother’s early death and his father’s military service—no cost nor pains was spared to give him the best education she could think of. The intellectual atmosphere which he breathed in his youth differed little from that in which Pushkin had grown up, though the domination of French had begun to give way before the fancy for English, and Lamartine shared his popularity with Byron. From the academic gymnasium in Moscow Lermontov passed in 1830 to the university, but there his career came to an untimely close through the part he took in some acts of insubordination to an obnoxious teacher. From 1830 to 1834 he attended the school of cadets at St Petersburg, and in due course he became an officer in the guards. To his own and the nation’s anger at the loss of Pushkin (1837) the young soldier gave vent in a passionate poem addressed to the tsar, and the very voice which proclaimed that, if Russia took no vengeance on the assassin of her poet, no second poet would be given her, was itself an intimation that a poet had come already. The tsar, however, seems to have found more impertinence than inspiration in the address, for Lermontov was forthwith sent off to the Caucasus as an officer of dragoons. He had been in the Caucasus with his grandmother as a boy of ten, and he found himself at home by yet deeper sympathies than those of childish recollection. The stern and rocky virtues of the mountaineers against whom he had to fight, no less than the scenery of the rocks and mountains themselves, proved akin to his heart; the emperor had exiled him to his native land. He was in St Petersburg in 1838 and 1839, and in the latter year wrote the novel, A Hero of Our Time, which is said to have been the occasion of the duel in which he lost his life in July 1841. In this contest he had purposely selected the edge of a precipice, so that if either combatant was wounded so as to fall his fate should be sealed.

Lermontov published only one small collection of poems in 1840. Three volumes, much mutilated by the censorship, were issued in 1842 by Glazounov; and there have been full editions of his works in 1860 and 1863. To Bodenstedt’s German translation of his poems (Michail Lermontov’s poetischer Nachlass, Berlin, 1842, 2 vols.), which indeed was the first satisfactory collection, he is indebted for a wide reputation outside of Russia. His novel has found several translators (August Boltz, Berlin, 1852, &c.). Among his best-known pieces are “Ismail-Bey,” “Hadji Abrek,” “Walerik,” “The Novice,” and, remarkable as an imitation of the old Russian ballad, “The song of the tsar Ivan Vasilivitch, his young bodyguard, and the bold merchant Kalashnikov.”

See Taillandier, “Le Poète du Caucase,” in Revue des deux mondes (February 1855), reprinted in Allemagne et Russie (Paris, 1856); Duduishkin’s “Materials for the Biography of Lermontov,” prefixed to the 1863 edition of his works. The Demon, translated by Sir Alexander Condie Stephen (1875), is an English version of one of his longer poems.

(W. R. S. R.)

LEROUX, PIERRE (1798-1871), French philosopher and economist, was born at Bercy near Paris on the 7th of April 1798, the son of an artisan. His education was interrupted by the death of his father, which compelled him to support his mother and family. Having worked first as a mason and then as a compositor, he joined P. Dubois in the foundation of Le Globe which became in 1831 the official organ of the Saint-Simonian community, of which he became a prominent member. In November of the same year, when Enfantin preached the enfranchisement of women and the functions of the couple-prêtre, Leroux separated himself from the sect. In 1838, with J. Regnaud, who had seceded with him, he founded the Encyclopédie nouvelle (eds. 1838-1841). Amongst the articles which he inserted in it were De l’égalité and Réfutation de l’éclectisme, which afterwards appeared as separate works. In 1840 he published his treatise De l’humanité (2nd ed. 1845), which contains the fullest exposition of his system, and was regarded as the philosophical manifesto of the Humanitarians. In 1841 he established the Revue indépendante, with the aid of George Sand, over whom he had great influence. Her Spiridion, which was dedicated to him, Sept cordes de la lyre, Consuelo, and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, were written under the Humanitarian inspiration. In 1843 he established at Boussac (Creuse) a printing association organized according to his systematic ideas, and founded the Revue sociale. After the outbreak of the revolution of 1848 he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, and in 1849 to the Legislative Assembly, but his speeches on behalf of the extreme socialist wing were of so abstract and mystical a character that they had no effect. After the coup d’état of 1851 he settled with his family in Jersey, where he pursued agricultural experiments and wrote his socialist poem La Grève de Samarez. On the definitive amnesty of 1869 he returned to Paris, where he died in April 1871, during the Commune.

The writings of Leroux have no permanent significance in the history of thought. He was the propagandist of sentiments and aspirations rather than the expounder of a systematic theory. He has, indeed, a system, but it is a singular medley of doctrines borrowed, not only from Saint-Simonian, but from Pythagorean and Buddhistic sources. In philosophy his fundamental principle is that of what he calls the “triad”—a triplicity which he finds to pervade all things, which in God is “power, intelligence and love,” in man “sensation, sentiment and knowledge.” His religious doctrine is Pantheistic; and, rejecting the belief in a future life as commonly conceived, he substitutes for it a theory of metempsychosis. In social economy his views are very vague; he preserves the family, country and property, but finds in all three, as they now are, a despotism which must be eliminated. He imagines certain combinations by which this triple tyranny can be abolished, but his solution seems to require the creation of families without heads, countries without governments and property without rights of possession. In politics he advocates absolute equality—a democracy pushed to anarchy.

See Raillard, Pierre Leroux et ses œuvres (Paris, 1899); Thomas, Pierre Leroux: sa vie, son œuvre, sa doctrine (Paris, 1904); L. Reybaud, Études sur les réformateurs et socialistes modernes; article in R. H. Inglis Palgrave’s Dictionary of Pol. Econ.

LEROY-BEAULIEU, HENRI JEAN BAPTISTE ANATOLE (1842- ), French publicist, was born at Lisieux, on the 12th of February 1842. In 1866 he published Une troupe de comédiens, and afterwards Essai sur la restauration de nos monuments historiques devant l’art et devant le budget, which deals particularly with the restoration of the cathedral of Evreux. He visited Russia in order to collect documents on the political and economic organization of the Slav nations, and on his return published in the Revue des deux mondes (1882-1889) a series of articles, which appeared shortly afterwards in book form under the title L’Empire des tsars et les Russes (4th ed., revised in 3 vols., 1897-1898). The work entitled Un empereur, un roi, un pape, une restauration. published in 1879, was an analysis and criticism of the politics of the Second Empire. Un homme d’état russe (1884) gave the history of the emancipation of the serfs by Alexander II. Other works are Les Catholiques libéraux, l’église et le libéralisme (1890), La Papauté, le socialisme et la démocracie (1892), Les Juifs et l’antisémitisme; Israël chez les nations (1893), Les Arméniens et la question arménienne (1896), L’Antisémitisme (1897), Études russes et européennes (1897). These writings, mainly collections of articles and lectures intended for the general public, display enlightened views and wide information. In 1881 Leroy-Beaulieu was elected professor of contemporary history and eastern affairs at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, becoming director of this institution on the death of Albert Sorel in 1906, and in 1887 he became a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.

Two of Leroy-Beaulieu’s works have been translated into English: one as the Empire of the Tsars and the Russians, by Z. A. Regozin (New York, 1893-1896), and another as Papacy, Socialism, Democracy, by B. L. O’Donnell (1892). See W. E. H. Lecky, Historical and Political Essays (1908).

LEROY-BEAULIEU, PIERRE PAUL (1843- ), French economist, brother of the preceding, was born at Saumur on the 9th of December 1843, and educated in Paris at the Lycée Bonaparte and the École de Droit. He afterwards studied at Bonn and Berlin, and on his return to Paris began to write for Le Temps, Revue nationale and Revue contemporaine. In 1867 he won a prize offered by the Academy of Moral Science with an essay entitled “L’Influence de l’état moral et intellectuel des populations ouvrières sur le taux des salaires.” In 1870 he gained three prizes for essays on “La Colonization chez les peuples modernes,” “L’Administration en France et en Angleterre,” and “L’Impôt foncier et ses conséquences économiques.” In 1872 Leroy-Beaulieu became professor of finance at the newly-founded École Libre des Sciences Politiques, and in 1880 he succeeded his father-in-law, Michel Chevalier, in the chair of political economy in the Collège de France. Several of his works have made their mark beyond the borders of his own country. Among these may be mentioned his Recherches économiques, historiques et statistiques sur les guerres contemporaines, a series of studies published between 1863 and 1869, in which he calculated the loss of men and capital caused by the great European conflicts. Other works by him are—La Question monnaie au dix-neuvième siècle (1861), Le Travail des femmes au dix-neuvième siècle (1873), Traité de la science des finances (1877), Essai sur la repartition des richesses (1882), L’Algérie et la Tunisie (1888), Précis d’économie politique (1888), and L’État moderne et ses fonctions (1889). He also founded in 1873 the Économiste français, on the model of the English Economist. Leroy-Beaulieu may be regarded as the leading representative in France of orthodox political economy, and the most pronounced opponent of protectionist and collectivist doctrines.

LERWICK, a municipal and police burgh of Shetland, Scotland, the most northerly town in the British Isles. Pop. (1901) 4281. It is situated on Brassay Sound, a fine natural harbour, on the east coast of the island called Mainland, 115 m. N.E. of Kirkwall, in Orkney, and 340 m. from Leith by steamer. The town dates from the beginning of the 17th century, and the older part consists of a flagged causeway called Commercial Street, running for 1 m. parallel with the sea (in which the gable ends of several of the quaint-looking houses stand), and so narrow in places as not to allow of two vehicles passing each other. At right angles to this street lanes ascend the hill-side to Hillhead, where the more modern structures and villas have been built. At the north end stands Fort Charlotte, erected by Cromwell, repaired in 1665 by Charles II. and altered in 1781 by George III., after whose queen it was named. It is now used as a depôt for the Naval Reserve, for whom a large drill hall was added. The Anderson Institute, at the south end, was constructed as a secondary school in 1862 by Arthur Anderson, a native, who also presented the Widows’ Asylum in the same quarter, an institution intended by preference for widows of Shetland sailors. The town-hall, built in 1881, contains several stained-glass windows, two of which were the gift of citizens of Amsterdam and Hamburg, in gratitude for services rendered by the islanders to fishermen and seamen of those ports. Lerwick’s main industries are connected with the fisheries, of which it is an important centre. Docks, wharves, piers, curing stations and warehouses have been provided or enlarged to cope with the growth of the trade, and an esplanade has been constructed along the front. The town is also the chief distributing agency for the islands, and carries on some business in knitted woollen goods. One mile west of Lerwick is Clickimin Loch, separated from the sea by a narrow strip of land. On an islet in the lake stands a ruined “broch” or round tower.

LE SAGE, ALAIN RENÉ (1668-1747), French novelist and dramatist, was born at Sarzeau in the peninsula of Rhuys, between the Morbihan and the sea, on the 13th of December 1668. Rhuys was a legal district, and Claude le Sage, the father of the novelist, held the united positions of advocate, notary and registrar of its royal court. His wife’s name was Jeanne Brenugat. Both father and mother died when Le Sage was very young, and his property was wasted or embezzled by his guardians. Little is known of his youth except that he went to school with the Jesuits at Vannes until he was eighteen. Conjecture has it that he continued his studies at Paris, and it is certain that he was called to the bar at the capital in 1692. In August 1694 he married the daughter of a joiner, Marie Elizabeth Huyard. She was beautiful but had no fortune, and Le Sage had little practice. About this time he met his old schoolfellow, the dramatist Danchet, and is said to have been advised by him to betake himself to literature. He began modestly as a translator, and published in 1695 a French version of the Epistles of Aristaenetus, which was not successful. Shortly afterwards he found a valuable patron and adviser in the abbé de Lyonne, who bestowed on him an annuity of 600 livres, and recommended him to exchange the classics for Spanish literature, of which he was himself a student and collector.

Le Sage began by translating plays chiefly from Rojas and Lope de Vega. Le Traitre puni and Le Point d’honneur from the former, Don Félix de Mendoce from the latter, were acted or published in the first two or three years of the 18th century. In 1704 he translated the continuation of Don Quixote by Avellaneda, and soon afterwards adapted a play from Calderon, Don César Ursin, which had a divided fate, being successful at court and damned in the city. He was, however, nearly forty before he obtained anything like decided success. But in 1707 his admirable farce of Crispin rival de son maître was acted with great applause, and Le Diable boiteux was published. This latter went through several editions in the same year, and was frequently reprinted till 1725, when Le Sage altered and improved it considerably, giving it its present form. Notwithstanding the success of Crispin, the actors did not like Le Sage, and refused a small piece of his called Les Étrennes (1707). He thereupon altered it into Turcaret, his theatrical masterpiece, and one of the best comedies in French literature. This appeared in 1709. Some years passed before he again attempted romance writing, and then the first two parts of Gil Blas de Santillane appeared in 1715. Strange to say, it was not so popular as Le Diable boiteux. Le Sage worked at it for a long time, and did not bring out the third part till 1724, nor the fourth till 1735. For this last he had been part paid to the extent of a hundred pistoles some years before its appearance. During these twenty years he was, however, continually busy. Notwithstanding the great merit and success of Turcaret and Crispin, the Théâtre Français did not welcome him, and in the year of the publication of Gil Blas he began to write for the Théâtre de la Foire—the comic opera held in booths at festival time. This, though not a very dignified occupation, was followed by many writers of distinction at this date, and by none more assiduously than by Le Sage. According to one computation he produced, either alone or with others, about a hundred pieces, varying from strings of songs with no regular dialogues, to comediettas only distinguished from regular plays by the introduction of music. He was also industrious in prose fiction. Besides finishing Gil Blas he translated the Orlando innamorato (1721), rearranged Guzman d’Alfarache (1732), published two more or less original novels, Le Bachelier de Salamanque and Estévanille Gonzales, and in 1733 produced the Vie et aventures de M. de Beauchesne, which is curiously like certain works of Defoe. Besides all this, Le Sage was also the author of La Valise trouvée, a collection of imaginary letters, and of some minor pieces, of which Une journée des parques is the most remarkable. This laborious life he continued until 1740, when he was more than seventy years of age. His eldest son had become an actor, and Le Sage had disowned him, but the second was a canon at Boulogne in comfortable circumstances. In the year just mentioned his father and mother went to live with him. At Boulogne Le Sage spent the last seven years of his life, dying on the 17th of November 1747. His last work, Mélange amusant de saillies d’esprit et de traits historiques les plus frappants, had appeared in 1743.

Not much is known of Le Sage’s life and personality, and the foregoing paragraph contains not only the most important but almost the only facts available for it. The few anecdotes which we have of him represent him as a man of very independent temper, declining to accept the condescending patronage which in the earlier part of the century was still the portion of men of letters. Thus it is said that, on being remonstrated with, as he thought impolitely, for an unavoidable delay in appearing at the duchess of Bouillon’s house to read Turcaret, he at once put the play in his pocket and retired, refusing absolutely to return. It may, however, be said that as in time so in position he occupies a place apart from most of the great writers of the 17th and 18th centuries respectively. He was not the object of royal patronage like the first, nor the pet of salons and coteries like the second. Indeed, he seems all his life to have been purely domestic in his habits, and purely literary in his interests.

The importance of Le Sage in French and in European literature is not entirely the same, and he has the rare distinction of being more important in the latter than in the former. His literary work may be divided into three parts. The first contains his Théâtre de la Foire and his few miscellaneous writings, the second his two remarkable plays Crispin and Turcaret, the third his prose fictions. In the first two he swims within the general literary current in France; he can be and must be compared with others of his own nation. But in the third he emerges altogether from merely national comparison. It is not with Frenchmen that he is to be measured. He formed no school in France; he followed no French models. His work, admirable as it is from the mere point of view of style and form, is a parenthesis in the general development of the French novel. That product works its way from Madame de la Fayette through Marivaux and Prévost, not through Le Sage. His literary ancestors are Spaniards, his literary contemporaries and successors are Englishmen. The position is almost unique; it is certainly interesting and remarkable in the highest degree.

Of Le Sage’s miscellaneous work, including his numerous farce-operettas, there is not much to be said except that they are the very best kind of literary hack-work. The pure and original style of the author, his abundant wit, his cool, humoristic attitude towards human life, which wanted only greater earnestness and a wider conception of that life to turn it into true humour, are discernible throughout. But this portion of his work is practically forgotten, and its examination is incumbent only on the critic. Crispin and Turcaret show a stronger and more deeply marked genius, which, but for the ill-will of the actors, might have gone far in this direction. But Le Sage’s peculiar unwillingness to attempt anything absolutely new discovered itself here. Even when he had devoted himself to the Foire theatre, it seems that he was unwilling to attempt, when occasion called for it, the absolute innovation of a piece with only one actor, a crux which Alexis Piron, a lesser but a bolder genius, accepted and carried through. Crispin and Turcaret are unquestionably Molièresque, though they are perhaps more original in their following of Molière than any other plays that can be named. For this also was part of Le Sage’s idiosyncrasy that, while he was apparently unable or unwilling to strike out an entirely novel line for himself, he had no sooner entered upon the beaten path than he left it to follow his own devices. Crispin rival de son maître is a farce in one act and many scenes, after the earlier manner of motion. Its plot is somewhat extravagant, inasmuch as it lies in the effort of a knavish valet, not as usual to further his master’s interests, but to supplant that master in love and gain. But the charm of the piece consists first in the lively bustling action of the short scenes which take each other up so promptly and smartly that the spectator has not time to cavil at the improbability of the action, and secondly in the abundant wit of the dialogue. Turcaret is a far more important piece of work and ranks high among comedies dealing with the actual society of their time. The only thing which prevents it from holding the very highest place is a certain want of unity in the plot. This want, however, is compensated in Turcaret by the most masterly profusion of character-drawing in the separate parts. Turcaret, the ruthless, dishonest and dissolute financier, his vulgar wife as dissolute as himself, the harebrained marquis, the knavish chevalier, the baroness (a coquette with the finer edge taken off her fine-ladyhood, yet by no means unlovable), are each and all finished portraits of the best comic type, while almost as much may be said of the minor characters. The style and dialogue are also worthy of the highest praise; the wit never degenerates into mere “wit-combats.”

It is, however, as a novelist that the world has agreed to remember Le Sage. A great deal of unnecessary labour has been spent on the discussion of his claims to originality. What has been already said will give a sufficient clue through this thorny ground. In mere form Le Sage is not original. He does little more than adopt that of the Spanish picaroon romance of the 16th and 17th century. Often, too, he prefers merely to rearrange and adapt existing work, and still oftener to give himself a kind of start by adopting the work of a preceding writer as a basis. But it may be laid down as a positive truth that he never, in any work that pretends to originality at all, is guilty of anything that can fairly be called plagiarism. Indeed we may go further, and say that he is very fond of asserting or suggesting his indebtedness when he is really dealing with his own funds. Thus the Diable boiteux borrows the title, and for a chapter or two the plan and almost the words, of the Diablo Cojuelo of Luis Velez de Guevara. But after a few pages Le Sage leaves his predecessor alone. Even the plan of the Spanish original is entirely discarded, and the incidents, the episodes, the style, are as independent as if such a book as the Diablo Cojuelo had never existed. The case of Gil Blas is still more remarkable. It was at first alleged that Le Sage had borrowed it from the Marcos de Obregon of Vincent Espinel, a curiously rash assertion, inasmuch as that work exists and is easily accessible, and as the slightest consultation of it proves that, though it furnished Le Sage with separate incidents and hints for more than one of his books, Gil Blas as a whole is not in the least indebted to it. Afterwards Father Isla asserted that Gil Blas was a mere translation from an actual Spanish book—an assertion at once incapable of proof and disproof, inasmuch as there is no trace whatever of any such book. A third hypothesis is that there was some manuscript original which Le Sage may have worked up in his usual way, in the same way, for instance, as he professes himself to have worked up the Bachelor of Salamanca. This also is in the nature of it incapable of refutation, though the argument from the Bachelor is strong against it, for there could be no reason why Le Sage should be more reticent of his obligations in the one case than in the other. Except, however, for historical reasons, the controversy is one which may be safely neglected, nor is there very much importance in the more impartial indication of sources—chiefly works on the history of Olivares—which has sometimes been attempted. That Le Sage knew Spanish literature well is of course obvious; but there is as little doubt (with the limitations already laid down) of his real originality as of that of any great writer in the world. Gil Blas then remains his property, and it is admittedly the capital example of its own style. For Le Sage has not only the characteristic, which Homer and Shakespeare have, of absolute truth to human nature as distinguished from truth to this or that national character, but he has what has been called the quality of detachment, which they also have. He never takes sides with his characters as Fielding (whose master, with Cervantes, he certainly was) sometimes does. Asmodeus and Don Cleofas, Gil Blas and the Archbishop and Doctor Sangrado, are produced by him with exactly the same impartiality of attitude. Except that he brought into novel writing this highest quality of artistic truth, it perhaps cannot be said that he did much to advance prose fiction in itself. He invented, as has been said, no new genre; he did not, as Marivaux and Prévost did, help on the novel as distinguished from the romance. In form his books are undistinguishable, not merely from the Spanish romances which are, as has been said, their direct originals, but from the medieval romans d’aventures and the Greek prose romances. But in individual excellence they have few rivals. Nor should it be forgotten, as it sometimes is, that Le Sage was a great master of French style, the greatest unquestionably between the classics of the 17th century and the classics of the 18th. He is perhaps the last great writer before the decadence (for since the time of Paul Louis Courier it has not been denied that the philosophe period is in point of style a period of decadence). His style is perfectly easy at the same time that it is often admirably epigrammatic. It has plenty of colour, plenty of flexibility, and may be said to be exceptionally well fitted for general literary work.

The dates of the original editions of Le Sage’s most important works have already been given. He published during his life a collection of his regular dramatic works, and also one of his pieces for the Foire, but the latter is far from exhaustive; nor is there any edition which can be called so, though the Œuvres choisies of 1782 and 1818 are useful, and there are so-called Œuvres complètes of 1821 and 1840. Besides critical articles by the chief literary critics and historians, the work of Eugène Lintilhac, in the Grands écrivains français (1893), should be consulted. The Diable boiteux and Gil Blas have been reprinted and translated numberless times. Both will be found conveniently printed, together with Estévanille Gonzales and Guzman d’Alfarache, the best of the minor novels, in four volumes of Garnier’s Bibliothèque amusante (Paris, 1865). Turcaret and Crispin are to be found in all collected editions of the French drama. There is a useful edition of them, with ample specimens of Le Sage’s work for the Foire, in two volumes (Paris, 1821).

(G. Sa.)

LES ANDELYS, a town of northern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Eure about 30 m. S.E. of Rouen by rail. Pop. (1906) 3955. Les Andelys is formed by the union of Le Grand Andely and Le Petit Andely, the latter situated on the right bank of the Seine, the former about half a mile from the river. Grand Andely, founded, according to tradition, in the 6th century, has a church (13th, 14th and 15th centuries) parts of which are of fine late Gothic and Renaissance architecture. The works of art in the interior include beautiful stained glass of the latter period. Other interesting buildings are the hôtel du Grand Cerf dating from the first half of the 16th century, and the chapel of Sainte-Clotilde, close by a spring which, owing to its supposed healing powers, is the object of a pilgrimage. Grand Andely has a statue of Nicolas Poussin, a native of the place. Petit Andely sprang up at the foot of the eminence on which stands the château Gaillard, now in ruins, but formerly one of the strongest fortresses in France (see Fortification and Siegecraft and Castle). It was built by Richard Cœur de Lion at the end of the 12th century to protect the Norman frontier, was captured by the French in 1204 and passed finally into their possession in 1449. The church of St Sauveur at Petit Andely also dates from the end of the 12th century. Les Andelys is the seat of a sub-prefect and of a tribunal of first instance, has a preparatory infantry school; it carries on silk milling, and the manufacture of leather, organs and sugar. It has trade in cattle, grain, flour, &c.

LES BAUX, a village of south-eastern France, in the department of Bouches-du-Rhône, 11 m. N.E. of Arles by road. Pop. (1906) 111. Les Baux, which in the middle ages was a flourishing town, is now almost deserted. Apart from a few inhabited dwellings, it consists of an assemblage of ruined towers, fallen walls and other débris, which cover the slope of a hill crowned by the remains of a huge château, once the seat of a celebrated “court of love.” The ramparts, a medieval church, the château, parts of which date to the 11th century, and many of the dwellings are, in great part, hollowed out of the white friable limestone on which they stand. Here and there may be found houses preserving carved façades of Renaissance workmanship. Les Baux has given its name to the reddish rock (bauxite) which is plentiful in the neighbourhood and from which aluminium is obtained. In the middle ages Les Baux was the seat of a powerful family which owned the Terre Baussenques, extensive domains in Provence and Dauphiné. The influence of the seigneurs de Baux in Provence declined before the power of the house of Anjou, to which they abandoned many of their possessions. In 1632 the château and the ramparts were dismantled.

LESBONAX, of Mytilene, Greek sophist and rhetorician, flourished in the time of Augustus. According to Photius (cod. 74) he was the author of sixteen political speeches, of which two are extant, a hortatory speech after the style of Thucydides, and a speech on the Corinthian War. In the first he exhorts the Athenians against the Spartans, in the second (the title of which is misleading) against the Thebans (edition by F. Kiehr, Lesbonactis quae supersunt, Leipzig, 1907). Some erotic letters are also attributed to him.

The Lesbonax described in Suidas as the author of a large number of philosophical works is probably of much earlier date; on the other hand, the author of a small treatise Περὶ Σχημάτων on grammatical figures (ed. Rudolf Müller, Leipzig, 1900), is probably later.

LESBOS (Mytilene, Turk. Midullu), an island in the Aegean sea, off the coast of Mysia, N. of the entrance of the Gulf of Smyrna, forming the main part of a sanjak in the archipelago vilayet of European Turkey. It is divided into three districts, Mytilene or Kastro in the E., Molyvo in the N., and Calloni in the W. Since the middle ages it has been known as Mytilene, from the name of its principal town. Strabo estimated the circumference of the island at 1100 stadia, or about 138 m., and Scylax reckoned it seventh in size of the islands of the Mediterranean. The width of the channel between it and the mainland varies from 7 to 10 m. The island is roughly triangular in shape; the three points are Argennum on the N.E., Sigrium (Sigri) on the W., and Malea (Maria) on the S.E. The Euripus Pyrrhaeus (Calloni) is a deep gulf on the west between Sigrium and Malea. The country though mountainous is very fertile, Lesbos being celebrated in ancient times for its wine, oil and grain. Homer refers to its wealth. Its chief produce now is olives, which also form its principal export. Soap, skins and valonea are also exported, and mules and cattle are extensively bred. The sardine fishery is an important trade, and antimony, marble and coal are found on the island. The surface is rugged and mountainous, the highest point, Mount Olympus (Hagios Elias) being 3080 ft. The island has suffered from periodical earthquakes. The roads were remade in 1889, and there is telegraphic communication on the island, and to the mainland by cable. The ports are Sigri and Mytilene. The Gulf of Calloni and Hiera or Olivieri can only be entered by vessels of small draught.

The chief town, called Mytilene, is built in amphitheatre shape round a small hill crowned by remains of an ancient fortress. There are now 14 mosques and 7 churches, including a cathedral. It was originally built on an island close to the eastern coast of Lesbos, and afterwards when the town became too large for the island, it was joined to Lesbos by a causeway, and the city spread along the coast. There was a harbour on each side of the small island. Maloeis, by some surmised to be the northern of these, was not far away. Besides the five cities which gave the island the name of Pentapolis (Mytilene, Methymna, Antissa, Eresus, Pyrrha), there was a town called Arisba, destroyed by an earthquake in the time of Herodotus. Professor Conze thinks that this is the site now called Palaikastro, N.E. of Calloni. Pyrrha lay S.E. of Calloni, and is now also called Palaikastro. Antissa was on the N. coast near Sigri. It was destroyed by the Romans in 168 B.C. Eresus was also near Sigri on the S. coast. Methymna was on the N. coast, on the site of Molyvo, still the second city of the island. The name Methymna is derived from the wine (Gr. μέθυ) for which it was famous. Considerable remains of town walls and other buildings are to be seen on all these sites.

(E. Gr.)

History.—Although the position of Lesbos near the old-established trade-route to the Hellespont marks it out as an important site even in pre-historic days, no evidence on the early condition of the island is as yet obtainable, beyond the Greek tradition which represented it at the time of the Trojan war as inhabited by an original stock of Pelasgi and an immigrant population of Ionians. In historic times it was peopled by an “Aeolian” race who reckoned Boeotia as their motherland and claimed to have migrated about 1050 B.C.; its principal nobles traced their pedigree to Orestes, son of Agamemnon. Lesbos was the most prominent of Aeolian settlements, and indeed played a large part in the early development of Greek life. Its commercial activity is attested by several colonies in Thrace and the Troad, and by the participation of its traders in the settlement of Naucratis in Egypt; hence also the town of Mytilene, by virtue of its good harbour, became the political capital of the island. The climax of its prosperity was reached about 600 B.C., when a citizen named Pittacus was appointed as aesymnetes (dictator) to adjust the balance between the governing nobility and the insurgent commons and by his wise administration and legislation won a place among the Seven Sages of Greece. These years also constitute the golden age of Lesbian culture. The lyric poetry of Greece, which owed much to two Lesbians of the 7th century, the musician Terpander and the dithyrambist Arion, attained the standard of classical excellence under Pittacus’ contemporaries Alcaeus and Sappho. In the 6th century the importance of the island declined, partly through a protracted and unsuccessful struggle with Athens for the possession of Sigeum near the Hellespont, partly through a crushing naval defeat inflicted by Polycrates of Samos (about 550). The Lesbians readily submitted to Persia after the fall of Croesus of Lydia, and although hatred of their tyrant Coës, a Persian protégé, drove them to take part in the Ionic revolt (499-493), they made little use of their large navy and displayed poor spirit at the decisive battle of Lade. In the 5th century Lesbos for a long time remained a privileged member of the Delian League (q.v.), with full rights of self-administration, and under the sole obligation of assisting Athens with naval contingents. Nevertheless at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War the ruling oligarchy of Mytilene forced on a revolt, which was ended after a two years’ siege of that town (429-427). The Athenians, who had intended to punish the rebels by a wholesale execution, contented themselves with killing the ringleaders, confiscating the land and establishing a garrison. In the later years of the war Lesbos was repeatedly attacked by the Peloponnesians, and in 405 the harbour of Mytilene was the scene of a battle between the admirals Callicratidas and Conon. In 389 most of the island was recovered for the Athenians by Thrasybulus; in 377 it joined the Second Delian League, and remained throughout a loyal member, although in the second half of the century the dominant democracy was for a while supplanted by a tyranny. In 334 Lesbos served as a base for the Persian admiral Memnon against Alexander the Great. During the Third Macedonian war the Lesbians sided with Perseus against Rome; similarly in 88 they became eager allies of Mithradates VI. of Pontus, and Mytilene stood a protracted siege on his behalf. This town, nevertheless, was raised by Pompey to the status of a free community, thanks no doubt to his confidant Theophanes, a native of Mytilene.

Of the other towns on the island, Antissa, Eresus and Pyrrha possess no separate history. Methymna in the 5th and 4th centuries sometimes figures as a rival of Mytilene, with an independent policy. Among the distinguished Lesbians, in addition to those cited, may be mentioned the cyclic poet Lesches, the historian Hellanicus and the philosophers Theophrastus and Cratippus.

During the Byzantine age the island, which now assumes the name of Mytilene, continued to flourish. In 1091 it fell for a while into the hands of the Seljuks, and in the following century was repeatedly occupied by the Venetians. In 1224 it was recovered by the Byzantine emperors, who in 1354 gave it as a dowry to the Genoese family Gattilusio. After prospering under their administration Mytilene passed in 1462 under Turkish control, and has since had an uneventful history. The present population is about 130,000 of whom 13,000 are Turks and Moslems and 117,000 Greeks.

See Strabo xiii. pp. 617-619; Herodotus ii. 178, iii. 39, vi. 8, 14; Thucydides iii. 2-50; Xenophon, Hellenica, i., ii.; S. Plehn, Lesbiacorum Liber (Berlin, 1828); C. T. Newton, Travels and Discoveries in the Levant (London, 1865); B. V. Head, Historia Numorum (Oxford, 1887), pp. 487-488; E. L. Hicks and G. F. Hill, Greek Historical Inscriptions (Oxford, 1901), Nos. 61, 94, 101, 139, 164; Conze, Reise auf der Insel Lesbos (1865); Koldewey, Antike Baureste auf Lesbos (Berlin, 1890).

(M. O. B. C.)

LESCHES (Lescheos in Pausanias x. 25. 5), the reputed author of the Little Iliad (Ἰλιὰς μικρά), one of the “cyclic” poems. According to the usually accepted tradition, he was a native of Pyrrha in Lesbos, and flourished about 660 B.C. (others place him about 50 years earlier). The Little Iliad took up the story of the Homeric Iliad, and, beginning with the contest between Ajax and Odysseus for the arms of Achilles, carried it down to the fall of Troy (Aristotle, Poetics, 23). According to the epitome in the Chrestomathy of Proclus, it ended with the admission of the wooden horse within the walls of the city. Some ancient authorities ascribe the work to a Lacedaemonian named Cinaethon, and even to Homer.

See F. G. Welcker, Der epische Cyclus (1865-1882); Müller and Donaldson, Hist. of Greek Literature, i. ch. 6; G. H. Bode, Geschichte der hellenischen Dichtkunst, i.

LESCURE, LOUIS MARIE JOSEPH, Marquis de (1766-1793), French soldier and anti-revolutionary, was born near Bressuire. He was educated at the École Militaire, which he left at the age of sixteen. He was in command of a company of cavalry in the Régiment de Royal-Piémont, but being opposed to the ideas of the Revolution he emigrated in 1791; he soon, however, returned to France, and on the 10th of August 1792 took part in the defence of the Tuileries against the mob of Paris. The day after, he was forced to leave Paris, and took refuge in the château of Clisson near Bressuire. On the outbreak of the revolt of Vendée against the Republic, he was arrested and imprisoned with all his family, as one of the promoters of the rising. He was set at liberty by the Royalists, and became one of their leaders, fighting at Thouars, taking Fontenay and Saumur (May-June 1793), and, after an unsuccessful attack on Nantes, joining H. du Verger de la Rochejaquelein, another famous Vendean leader. Their peasant troops, opposed to the republican general F. J. Westermann, sustained various defeats, but finally gained a victory between Tiffauges and Cholet on the 19th of September 1793. The struggle was then concentrated round Chatillon, which was time after time taken and lost by the Republicans. Lescure was killed on the 15th of October 1793 near the château of La Tremblaye between Einée and Fougères.

See Marquise de la Rochejaquelein (Lescure’s widow, who afterwards married La Rochejaquelein), Mémoires (Paris, 1817); Jullien de Courcelles, Dictionnaire des généraux français, tome vii. (1823); T. Muret, Histoire des guerres de l’ouest (Paris, 1848); and J. A. M. Crétineau-Joly, Guerres de Vendée (1834).

LESDIGUIÈRES, FRANÇOIS DE BONNE, Duc de (1543-1626), constable of France, was born at Saint-Bonnet de Champsaur on the 1st of April 1543, of a family of notaries with pretensions to nobility. He was educated at Avignon under a Protestant tutor, and had begun the study of law in Paris when he enlisted as an archer. He served under the lieutenant-general of his native province of Dauphiné, Bertrand de Simiane, baron de Gordes, but when the Huguenots raised troops in Dauphiné Lesdiguières threw in his lot with them, and under his kinsman Antoine Rambaud de Furmeyer, whom he succeeded in 1570, distinguished himself in the mountain warfare that followed by his bold yet prudent handling of troops. He fought at Jarnac and Moncontour, and was a guest at the wedding of Henry IV. of Navarre. Warned of the impending massacre he retired hastily to Dauphiné, where he secretly equipped and drilled a determined body of Huguenots, and in 1575, after the execution of Montbrun, became the acknowledged leader of the Huguenot resistance in the district with the title of commandant general, confirmed in 1577 by Marshal Damville, by Condé in 1580, and by Henry of Navarre in 1582. He seized Gap by a lucky night attack on the 3rd of January 1577, re-established the reformed religion there, and fortified the town. He refused to acquiesce in the treaty of Poitiers (1578) which involved the surrender of Gap, and after two years of fighting secured better terms for the province. Nevertheless in 1580 he was compelled to hand the place over to Mayenne and to see the fortifications dismantled. He took up arms for Henry IV. in 1585, capturing Chorges, Embrun, Châteauroux and other places, and after the truce of 1588-1589 secured the complete submission of Dauphiné. In 1590 he beat down the resistance of Grenoble, and was now able to threaten the leaguers and to support the governor of Provence against the raids of Charles Emmanuel I. of Savoy. He defeated the Savoyards at Esparron in April 1591, and in 1592 began the reconquest of the marquessate of Saluzzo which had been seized by Charles Emmanuel. After his defeat of the Spanish allies of Savoy at Salebertrano in June 1593 there was a truce, during which Lesdiguières was occupied in maintaining the royal authority against Éperon in Provence. The war with Savoy proceeded intermittently until 1601, when Henry IV. concluded peace, much to the dissatisfaction of Lesdiguières. The king regarded his lieutenant’s domination in Dauphiné with some distrust, although he was counted among the best of his captains. Nevertheless he made him a marshal of France in 1609, and ensured the succession to the lieutenant-generalship of Dauphiné, vested in Lesdiguières since 1597, to his son-in-law Charles de Créquy. Sincerely devoted to the throne, Lesdiguières took no part in the intrigues which disturbed the minority of Louis XIII., and he moderated the political claims made by his co-religionists under the terms of the Edict of Nantes. After the death of his first wife, Claudine de Bérenger, he married the widow of Ennemond Matel, a Grenoble shopkeeper, who was murdered in 1617. Lesdiguières was then 73, and this lady, Marie Vignon, had long been his mistress. He had two daughters, one of whom, Françoise, married Charles de Créquy. In 1622 he formally abjured the Protestant faith, his conversion being partly due to the influence of Marie Vignon. He was already a duke and peer of France; he now became constable of France, and received the order of the Saint Esprit. He had long since lost the confidence of the Huguenots, but he nevertheless helped the Vaudois against the duke of Savoy. Lesdiguières had the qualities of a great general, but circumstances limited him to the mountain warfare of Dauphiné, Provence and Savoy. He had almost unvarying success through sixty years of fighting. His last campaign, fought in alliance with Savoy to drive the Spaniards from the Valtelline, was the least successful of his enterprises. He died of fever at Valence on the 21st of September 1626.

The life of the Huguenot captain has been written in detail by Ch. Dufuyard, Le Connétable de Lesdiguières (Paris, 1892). His first biographer was his secretary Louis Videl, Histoire de la vie du connestable de Lesdiguières (Paris, 1638). Much of his official correspondence, with an admirable sketch of his life, is contained in Actes et correspondance du connétable de Lesdiguières, edited by Comte Douglas and J. Roman in Documents historiques inédits pour servir à l’histoire de Dauphiné (Grenoble, 1878). Other letters are in the Lettres et mémoires (Paris, 1647) of Duplessis-Mornay.

LESGHIANS, or Lesghis (from the Persian Leksi, called Leki by the Grusians or Georgians, Armenians and Ossetes), the collective name for a number of tribes of the eastern Caucasus, who, with their kinsfolk the Chechenzes, have inhabited Daghestan from time immemorial. They spread southward into the Transcaucasian circles Kuba, Shemakha, Nukha and Sakataly. They are mentioned as Λῆχαι by Strabo and Plutarch along with the Γῆλαι (perhaps the modern Galgai, a Chechenzian tribe), and their name occurs frequently in the chronicles of the Georgians, whose territory was exposed to their raids for centuries, until, on the surrender (1859) to Russia of the Chechenzian chieftain Shamyl, they became Russian subjects. Moses of Chorene mentions a battle in the reign of the Armenian king Baba (A.D. 370-377), in which Shagir, king of the Lekians, was slain. The most important of the Lesghian tribes are the Avars (q.v.), the Kasimukhians or Lakians, the Darghis and the Kurins or Lesghians proper. Komarov gives the total number of the tribes as twenty-seven, all speaking distinct dialects. Despite this, the Lesghian peoples, with the exception of the Udi and Kubatschi, are held to be ethnically identical. The Lesghians are not usually so good-looking as the Circassians or the Chechenzes. They are tall, powerfully built, and their hybrid descent is suggested by the range of colouring, some of the tribes exhibiting quite fair, others quite dark, individuals. Among some there is an obvious mongoloid strain. In disposition they are intelligent, bold and persistent, and capable of reckless bravery, as was proved in their struggle to maintain their independence. They are capable of enduring great physical fatigue. They live a semi-savage life on their mountain slopes, for the most part living by hunting and stock-breeding. Little agriculture is possible. Their industries are mainly restricted to smith-work and cutlery and the making of felt cloaks, and the women weave excellent shawls. They are for the most part fanatical Mahommedans.

See Moritz Wagner, Schamyl (Leipzig, 1854); von Seidlitz, “Ethnographie des Kaukasus,” in Petermann’s Mitteilungen (1880); Ernest Chantre, Recherches anthropologiques dans le Caucase (Lyon, 1885-1887); J. de Morgan, Recherches sur les origines des peuples du Caucase (Paris, 1889).

Ethnological Map of Daghestan.

LESINA (Serbo-Croatian, Hvar), an island in the Adriatic Sea, forming part of Dalmatia, Austria. Lesina lies between the islands of Brazza on the north and Curzola on the south; and is divided from the peninsula of Sabbioncello by the Narenta channel. Its length is 41 m.; its greatest breadth less than 4 m. It has a steep rocky coast with a chain of thinly wooded limestone hills. The climate is mild, and not only the grape and olive, but dates, figs and the carob or locust-bean flourish. The cultivation of these fruits, boat-building, fishing and the preparation of rosemary essence and liqueurs are the principal resources of the islanders. Lesina (Hvar) and Cittavecchia (Starigrad) are the principal towns and seaports, having respectively 2138 and 3120 inhabitants. Lesina, the capital, contains an arsenal, an observatory and some interesting old buildings of the 16th century. It is a Roman Catholic bishopric, and the centre of an administrative district, which includes Cittavecchia, Lissa, and some small neighbouring islands. Pop. (1900) of island 18,091, of district 27,928.

To the primitive “Illyrian” race, whose stone cists and bronze implements have been disinterred from barrows near the capital, may perhaps be attributed the “Cyclopean” walls at Cittavecchia. About 385 B.C., a Greek colony from Paros built a city on the site of the present Lesina, naming it Paros or Pharos. The forms Phara, Pharia (common among Latin writers), and Pityeia, also occur. In 229 B.C. the island was betrayed to the Romans by Demetrius, lieutenant of the Illyrian queen Teuta; but in 219, as Demetrius proved false to Rome also, his capital was razed by Lucius Aemilius Paullus. Neos Pharos, now Cittavecchia, took its place, and flourished until the 6th century, when the island was laid waste by barbarian invaders. Constantine Porphyrogenitus mentions Lesina as a colony of pagan Slavs, in the 10th century. Throughout the middle ages it remained a purely Slavonic community; and its name, which appears in old documents as Lisna, Lesna or Lyesena, “wooded” is almost certainly derived from the Slavonic lyés, “forest,” not from the Italian lesina, “an awl.” But the old form Pharia persisted, as Far or Hvar, with the curious result that the modern Serbo-Croatian name is Greek, and the modern Italian name Slavonic in origin. Lesina became a bishopric in 1145, and received a charter from Venice in 1331. It was sacked by the enemies of Venice in 1354 and 1358; ceded to Hungary in the same year; held by Ragusa from 1413 to 1416; and incorporated in the Venetian dominions in 1420. During the 16th century Lesina city had a considerable maritime trade, and, though sacked and partly burned by the Turks in 1571, it remained the chief naval station of Venice, in these waters, until 1776, when it was superseded by Curzola. Passing to Austria in 1797, and to France in 1805, it withstood a Russian attack in 1807, but was surrendered by the French in 1813, and finally annexed to Austria in 1815.

LESION (through Fr. from Lat. laesio, injury, laedere, to hurt), an injury, hurt, damage. In Scots law the term is used of damage suffered by a party in a contract sufficient to enable him to bring an action for setting it aside. In pathology, the chief use, the word is applied to any morbid change in the structure of an organ, whether shown by visible changes or by disturbance of function.

LESKOVATS (Leskovatz or Leskovac), a town in Servia, between Nish and Vranya, on the railway line from Nish to Salonica. Pop. (1901) 13,707. It is the headquarters of the Servian hemp industry, the extensive plain in which the town lies growing the best flax and hemp in all the Balkan peninsula. The plain is not only the most fertile portion of Servia, but also the best cultivated. Besides flax and hemp, excellent tobacco is grown. Five valleys converge on the plain from different directions, and the inhabitants of the villages in these valleys are all occupied in growing flax and hemp, which they send to Leskovats to be stored or manufactured into ropes. After Belgrade and Nish, Leskovats is the most prosperous town in Servia.

LESLEY, JOHN (1527-1596), Scottish bishop and historian, was born in 1527. His father was Gavin Lesley, rector of Kingussie. He was educated at the university of Aberdeen, where he took the degree of M.A. In 1538 he obtained a dispensation permitting him to hold a benefice, notwithstanding his being a natural son, and in June 1546 he was made an acolyte in the cathedral church of Aberdeen, of which he was afterwards appointed a canon and prebendary. He also studied at Poitiers, at Toulouse and at Paris, where he was made doctor of laws in 1553. In 1558 he took orders and was appointed Official of Aberdeen, and inducted into the parsonage and prebend of Oyne. At the Reformation Lesley became a champion of Catholicism. He was present at the disputation held in Edinburgh in 1561, when Knox and Willox were his antagonists. He was one of the commissioners sent the same year to bring over the young Queen Mary to take the government of Scotland. He returned in her train, and was appointed a privy councillor and professor of canon law in King’s College, Aberdeen, and in 1565 one of the senators of the college of justice. Shortly afterwards he was made abbot of Lindores, and in 1565 bishop of Ross, the election to the see being confirmed in the following year. He was one of the sixteen commissioners appointed to revise the laws of Scotland, and the volume of the Actis and Constitutionis of the Realme of Scotland known as the Black Acts was, chiefly owing to his care, printed in 1566.

The bishop was one of the most steadfast friends of Queen Mary. After the failure of the royal cause, and whilst Mary was a captive in England, Lesley (who had gone to her at Bolton) continued to exert himself on her behalf. He was one of the commissioners at the conference at York in 1568. He appeared as her ambassador at the court of Elizabeth to complain of the injustice done to her, and when he found he was not listened to, he laid plans for her escape. He also projected a marriage for her with the duke of Norfolk, which ended in the execution of that nobleman. For this he was put under the charge of the bishop of London, and then of the bishop of Ely (in Holborn), and afterwards imprisoned in the Tower of London. During his confinement he collected materials for his history of Scotland, by which his name is now chiefly known. In 1571 he presented the latter portion of this work, written in Scots, to Queen Mary to amuse her in her captivity. He also wrote for her use his Piae Consolationes, and the queen devoted some of the hours of her captivity to translating a portion of it into French verse.

In 1573 he was liberated from prison, but was banished from England. For two years he attempted unsuccessfully to obtain the assistance of Continental princes in favour of Queen Mary. While at Rome in 1578 he published his Latin history De Origine, Moribus, et Rebus Gestis Scotorum. In 1579 he went to France, and was made suffragan and vicar-general of the archbishopric of Rouen. Whilst visiting his diocese, however, he was thrown into prison, and had to pay 3000 pistoles to prevent his being given up to Elizabeth. During the remainder of the reign of Henry III. he lived unmolested, but on the accession of the Protestant Henry IV. he again fell into trouble. In 1590 he was thrown into prison, and had to purchase his freedom at the same expense as before. In 1593 he was made bishop of Coutances in Normandy, and had licence to hold the bishopric of Ross till he should obtain peaceable possession of the former see. He retired to an Augustinian monastery near Brussels, where he died on the 31st of May 1596.

The chief works of Lesley are as follows: A Defence of the Honour of ... Marie, Queene of Scotland, by Eusebius Dicaeophile (London, 1569), reprinted, with alterations, at Liége in 1571, under the title, A Treatise concerning the Defence of the Honour of Marie, Queene of Scotland, made by Morgan Philippes, Bachelar of Divinitie, Piae afflicti animi consolationes, ad Mariam Scot. Reg. (Paris, 1574); De origine, moribus et rebus gestis Scotorum libri decem (Rome, 1578; re-issued 1675); De illustrium feminarum in republica administranda authoritate libellus (Reims, 1580; a Latin version of a tract on “The Lawfulness of the Regiment of Women”: cf. Knox’s pamphlet); De titulo et jure Mariae Scot. Reg., quo regni Angliae successionem sibi juste vindicat (Reims, 1580; translated in 1584). The history of Scotland from 1436 to 1561 owes much, in its earlier chapters, to the accounts of Hector Boece (q.v.) and John Major (q.v.), though no small portion of the topographical matter is first-hand. In the later sections he gives an independent account (from the Catholic point of view) which is a valuable supplement and a corrective in many details, to the works of Buchanan and Knox. A Scots version of the history was written in 1596 by James Dalrymple of the Scottish Cloister at Regensburg. It has been printed for the Scottish Text Society (2 vols., 1888-1895) under the editorship of the Rev. E. G. Cody, O.S.B. A slight sketch by Lesley of Scottish history from 1562 to 1571 has been translated by Forbes-Leith in his Narrative of Scottish Catholics (1885), from the original MS. now in the Vatican.

LESLEY, J. PETER (1819-1903), American geologist, was born in Philadelphia on the 17th of September 1819. It is recorded by Sir A. Geikie that “He was christened Peter after his father and grandfather, and at first wrote his name ‘Peter Lesley, Jr.,’ but disliking the Christian appellation that had been given to him, he eventually transformed his signature by putting the J. of ‘Junior’ at the beginning.” He was educated for the ministry at the university of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1838; but the effects of close study having told upon his health, he served for a time as sub-assistant on the first geological survey of Pennsylvania under Professor H. D. Rogers, and was afterwards engaged in a special examination of the coal regions. On the termination of the survey in 1841 he entered Princeton seminary and renewed his theological studies, at the same time giving his leisure time to assist Professor Rogers in preparing the final report and map of Pennsylvania. He was licensed to preach in 1844; he then paid a visit to Europe and entered on a short course of study at the university of Halle. Returning to America he worked during two years for the American Tract Society, and at the close of 1847 he joined Professor Rogers again in preparing geological maps and sections at Boston. He then accepted the pastorate of the Congregational church at Milton, a suburb of Boston, where he remained until 1851, when, his views having become Unitarian, he abandoned the ministry and entered into practice as a consulting geologist. In the course of his work he made elaborate surveys of the Cape Breton coalfield, and of other coal and iron regions. From 1855 to 1859 he was secretary of the American Iron Association; for twenty-seven years (1858-1885) he was secretary and librarian of the American Philosophical Society; from 1872 to 1878 he was professor of geology and dean of the faculty of science in the university of Pennsylvania, and from 1874-1893 he was in charge of the second geological survey of the state. He then retired to Milton, Mass., where he died on the 1st of June 1903. He published Manual of Coal and its Topography (1856); The Iron Manufacturer’s Guide to the Furnaces, Forges and Rolling Mills of the United States (1859).

See Memoir by Sir A. Geikie in Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. (May 1904); and Memoir (with portrait) by B. S. Lyman, printed in advance with portrait, and afterwards in abstract only in Trans. Amer. Inst. Mining Engineers, xxxiv. (1904) p. 726.

LESLIE, CHARLES (1650-1722), Anglican nonjuring divine, son of John Leslie (1571-1671), bishop of Raphoe and afterwards of Clogher, was born in July 1650 in Dublin, and was educated at Enniskillen school and Trinity College, Dublin. Going to England he read law for a time, but soon turned his attention to theology, and took orders in 1680. In 1687 he became chancellor of the cathedral of Connor and a justice of the peace, and began a long career of public controversy by responding in public disputation at Monaghan to the challenge of the Roman Catholic bishop of Clogher. Although a vigorous opponent of Roman Catholicism, Leslie was a firm supporter of the Stuart dynasty, and, having declined at the Revolution to take the oath to William and Mary, he was on this account deprived of his benefice. In 1689 the growing troubles in Ireland induced him to withdraw to England, where he employed himself for the next twenty years in writing various controversial pamphlets in favour of the nonjuring cause, and in numerous polemics against the Quakers, Jews, Socinians and Roman Catholics, and especially in that against the Deists with which his name is now most commonly associated. He had the keenest scent for every form of heresy and was especially zealous in his defence of the sacraments. A warrant having been issued against him in 1710 for his pamphlet The Good Old Cause, or Lying in Truth, he resolved to quit England and to accept an offer made by the Pretender (with whom he had previously been in frequent correspondence) that he should reside with him at Bar-le-Duc. After the failure of the Stuart cause in 1715, Leslie accompanied his patron into Italy, where he remained until 1721, in which year, having found his sojourn amongst Roman Catholics extremely unpleasant, he sought and obtained permission to return to his native country. He died at Glaslough, Monaghan, on the 13th of April 1722.

The Theological Works of Leslie were collected and published by himself in 2 vols. folio in 1721; a later edition, slightly enlarged, appeared at Oxford in 1832 (7 vols. 8vo). Though marred by persistent arguing in a circle they are written in lively style and show considerable erudition. He had the somewhat rare distinction of making several converts by his reasonings, and Johnson declared that “Leslie was a reasoner, and a reasoner who was not to be reasoned against.” An historical interest in all that now attaches to his subjects and his methods, as may be seen when the promise given in the title of his best-known work is contrasted with the actual performance. The book professes to be A Short and Easy Method with the Deists, wherein the certainty of the Christian Religion is Demonstrated by Infallible Proof from Four Rules, which are incompatible to any imposture that ever yet has been, or that can possibly be (1697). The four rules which, according to Leslie, have only to be rigorously applied in order to establish not the probability merely but the absolute certainty of the truth of Christianity are simply these: (1) that the matter of fact be such as that men’s outward senses, their eyes and ears, may be judges of it; (2) that it be done publicly, in the face of the world; (3) that not only public monuments be kept up in memory of it, but some outward actions be performed; (4) that such monuments and such actions or observances be instituted and do commence from the time that the matter of fact was done. Other publications of Leslie are The Snake in the Grass (1696), against the Quakers; A Short Method with the Jews (1689); Gallienus Redivivus (an attack on William III., 1695); The Socinian Controversy Discussed (1697); The True Notion of the Catholic Church (1703); and The Case Stated between the Church of Rome and the Church of England (1713).

LESLIE, CHARLES ROBERT (1794-1859), English genre-painter, was born in London on the 19th of October 1794. His parents were American, and when he was five years of age he returned with them to their native country. They settled in Philadelphia, where their son was educated and afterwards apprenticed to a bookseller. He was, however, mainly interested in painting and the drama, and when George Frederick Cooke visited the city he executed a portrait of the actor, from recollection of him on the stage, which was considered a work of such promise that a fund was raised to enable the young artist to study in Europe. He left for London in 1811, bearing introductions which procured for him the friendship of West, Beechey, Allston, Coleridge and Washington Irving, and was admitted as a student of the Royal Academy, where he carried off two silver medals. At first, influenced by West and Fuseli, he essayed “high art,” and his earliest important subject depicted Saul and the Witch of Endor; but he soon discovered his true aptitude and became a painter of cabinet-pictures, dealing, not like those of Wilkie, with the contemporary life that surrounded him, but with scenes from the great masters of fiction, from Shakespeare and Cervantes, Addison and Molière, Swift, Sterne, Fielding and Smollett. Of individual paintings we may specify “Sir Roger de Coverley going to Church” (1819); “May-day in the Time of Queen Elizabeth” (1821); “Sancho Panza and the Duchess” (1824); “Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman” (1831); La Malade Imaginaire, act iii. sc. 6 (1843); and the “Duke’s Chaplain Enraged leaving the Table,” from Don Quixote (1849). Many of his more important subjects exist in varying replicas. He possessed a sympathetic imagination, which enabled him to enter freely into the spirit of the author whom he illustrated, a delicate perception for female beauty, an unfailing eye for character and its outward manifestation in face and figure, and a genial and sunny sense of humour, guided by an instinctive refinement which prevented it from overstepping the bounds of good taste. In 1821 Leslie was elected A.R.A., and five years later full academician. In 1833 he left for America to become teacher of drawing in the military academy at West Point, but the post proved an irksome one, and in some six months he returned to England. He died on the 5th of May 1859.

In addition to his skill as an artist, Leslie was a ready and pleasant writer. His Life of his friend Constable, the landscape painter, appeared in 1843, and his Handbook for Young Painters, a volume embodying the substance of his lectures as professor of painting to the Royal Academy, in 1855. In 1860 Tom Taylor edited his Autobiography and Letters, which contain interesting reminiscences of his distinguished friends and contemporaries.

LESLIE, FRED [Frederick Hobson] (1855-1892), English actor, was born at Woolwich on the 1st of April 1855. He made his first stage appearance in London as Colonel Hardy in Paul Pry in 1878. He had a good voice, and in 1882 made a great hit as Rip Van Winkle in Planquette’s opera of that name at the Comedy. In 1885 he appeared at the Gaiety as Jonathan Wild in H. P. Stephens and W. Yardley’s burlesque Little Jack Sheppard. His extraordinary success in this part determined his subsequent career, and for some years he and Nelly Farren, with whom he played in perfect association, were the pillars of Gaiety burlesque. Leslie’s “Don Caesar de Bazan” in Ruy Blas, or the Blasé Roué, was perhaps the most popular of his later parts. In all of them it was his own versatility and entertaining personality which formed the attraction; whether he sang, danced, whistled or “gagged,” his performance was an unending flow of high spirits and ludicrous charm. Under the pseudonym of “A. C. Torr” he was acknowledged on the programmes as part-author of these burlesques, and while on occasion he acted in more serious comedy, for which he had undoubted capacity, his fame rests on his connexion with them. In 1881 and 1883 he played in America. He died on the 7th of December 1892.

See W. T. Vincent, Recollections of Fred Leslie (1894).

LESLIE, SIR JOHN (1766-1832), Scottish mathematician and physicist, was born of humble parentage at Largo, Fifeshire, on the 16th of April 1766, and received his early education there and at Leven. In his thirteenth year, encouraged by friends who had even then remarked his aptitude for mathematical and physical science, he entered the university of St Andrews. On the completion of his arts course, he nominally studied divinity at Edinburgh until 1787; in 1788-1789 he spent rather more than a year as private tutor in a Virginian family, and from 1790 till the close of 1792 he held a similar appointment at Etruria in Staffordshire, with the family of Josiah Wedgwood, employing his spare time in experimental research and in preparing a translation of Buffon’s Natural History of Birds, which was published in nine 8vo vols. in 1793, and brought him some money. For the next twelve years (passed chiefly in London or at Largo, with an occasional visit to the continent of Europe) he continued his physical studies, which resulted in numerous papers contributed by him to Nicholson’s Philosophical Journal, and in the publication (1804) of the Experimental Inquiry into the Nature and Properties of Heat, a work which gained him the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society of London. In 1805 he was elected to succeed John Playfair in the chair of mathematics at Edinburgh, not, however, without violent though unsuccessful opposition on the part of a narrow-minded clerical party who accused him of heresy in something he had said as to the “unsophisticated notions of mankind” about the relation of cause and effect. During his tenure of this chair he published two volumes of a Course of Mathematics—the first, entitled Elements of Geometry, Geometrical Analysis and Plane Trigonometry, in 1809, and the second, Geometry of Curve Lines, in 1813; the third volume, on Descriptive Geometry and the Theory of Solids was never completed. With reference to his invention (in 1810) of a process of artificial congelation, he published in 1813 A Short Account of Experiments and Instruments depending on the relations of Air to Heat and Moisture; and in 1818 a paper by him “On certain impressions of cold transmitted from the higher atmosphere, with an instrument (the aethrioscope) adapted to measure them,” appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1819, on the death of Playfair, he was promoted to the more congenial chair of natural philosophy, which he continued to hold until his death, and in 1823 he published, chiefly for the use of his class, the first volume of his never-completed Elements of Natural Philosophy. Leslie’s main contributions to physics were made by the help of the “differential thermometer,” an instrument whose invention was contested with him by Count Rumford. By adapting to this instrument various ingenious devices he was enabled to employ it in a great variety of investigations, connected especially with photometry, hygroscopy and the temperature of space. In 1820 he was elected a corresponding member of the Institute of France, the only distinction of the kind which he valued, and early in 1832 he was created a knight. He died at Coates, a small property which he had acquired near Largo, on the 3rd of November 1832.

LESLIE, THOMAS EDWARD CLIFFE (1827-1882), English economist, was born in the county of Wexford in (as is believed) the year 1827. He was the second son of the Rev. Edward Leslie, prebendary of Dromore, and rector of Annahilt, in the county of Down. His family was of Scottish descent, but had been connected with Ireland since the reign of Charles I. Amongst his ancestors were that accomplished prelate, John Leslie (1571-1671), bishop first of Raphoe and afterwards of Clogher, who, when holding the former see, offered so stubborn a resistance to the Cromwellian forces, and the bishop’s son Charles (see above), the nonjuror. Cliffe Leslie received his elementary education from his father, who resided in England, though holding church preferment as well as possessing some landed property in Ireland; by him he was taught Latin, Greek and Hebrew, at an unusually early age; he was afterwards for a short time under the care of a clergyman at Clapham, and was then sent to King William’s College, in the Isle of Man, where he remained until, in 1842, being then only fifteen years of age, he entered Trinity College, Dublin. He was a distinguished student there, obtaining, besides other honours, a classical scholarship in 1845, and a senior moderatorship (gold medal) in mental and moral philosophy at his degree examination in 1846. He became a law student at Lincoln’s Inn, was for two years a pupil in a conveyancer’s chambers in London, and was called to the English bar. But his attention was soon turned from the pursuit of legal practice, for which he seems never to have had much inclination, by his appointment, in 1853, to the professorship of jurisprudence and political economy in Queen’s College, Belfast. The duties of this chair requiring only short visits to Ireland in certain terms of each year, he continued to reside and prosecute his studies in London, and became a frequent writer on economic and social questions in the principal reviews and other periodicals. In 1870 he collected a number of his essays, adding several new ones, into a volume entitled Land Systems and Industrial Economy of Ireland, England and Continental Countries. J. S. Mill gave a full account of the contents of this work in a paper in the Fortnightly Review, in which he pronounced Leslie to be “one of the best living writers on applied political economy.” Mill had sought his acquaintance on reading his first article in Macmillan’s Magazine; he admired his talents and took pleasure in his society, and treated him with a respect and kindness which Leslie always gratefully acknowledged.

In the frequent visits which Leslie made to the continent, especially to Belgium and some of the less-known districts of France and Germany, he occupied himself much in economic and social observation, studying the effects of the institutions and system of life which prevailed in each region, on the material and moral condition of its inhabitants. In this way he gained an extensive and accurate acquaintance with continental rural economy, of which he made excellent use in studying parallel phenomena at home. The accounts he gave of the results of his observations were among his happiest efforts; “no one,” said Mill, “was able to write narratives of foreign visits at once so instructive and so interesting.” In these excursions he made the acquaintance of several distinguished persons, amongst others of M. Léonce de Lavergne and M. Émile de Laveleye. To the memory of the former of these he afterwards paid a graceful tribute in a biographical sketch (Fortnightly Review, February 1881); and to the close of his life there existed between him and M. de Laveleye relations of mutual esteem and cordial intimacy.

Two essays of Leslie’s appeared in volumes published under the auspices of the Cobden Club, one on the “Land System of France” (2nd ed., 1870), containing an earnest defence of la petite culture and still more of la petite propriété; the other on “Financial Reform” (1871), in which he exhibited in detail the impediments to production and commerce arising from indirect taxation. Many other articles were contributed by him to reviews between 1875 and 1879, including several discussions of the history of prices and the movements of wages in Europe, and a sketch of life in Auvergne in his best manner; the most important of them, however, related to the philosophical method of political economy, notably a memorable one which appeared in the Dublin University periodical, Hermathena. In 1879 the provost and senior fellows of Trinity College published for him a volume in which a number of these articles were collected under the title of Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy. These and some later essays, together with the earlier volume on Land Systems, form the essential contribution of Leslie to economic literature. He had long contemplated, and had in part written, a work on English economic and legal history, which would have been his magnum opus—a more substantial fruit of his genius and his labours than anything he has left. But the MS. of this treatise, after much pains had already been spent on it, was unaccountably lost at Nancy in 1872; and, though he hoped to be able speedily to reproduce the missing portion and finish the work, no material was left in a state fit for publication. What the nature of it would have been may be gathered from an essay on the “History and Future of Profit” in the Fortnightly Review for November 1881, which is believed to have been in substance an extract from it.

That he was able to do so much may well be a subject of wonder when it is known that his labours had long been impeded by a painful and depressing malady, from which he suffered severely at intervals, whilst he never felt secure from its recurring attacks. To this disease he in the end succumbed at Belfast, on the 27th of January 1882.

Leslie’s work may be distributed under two heads, that of applied political economy and that of discussion on the philosophical method of the science. The Land Systems belonged principally to the former division. The author perceived the great and growing importance for the social welfare of both Ireland and England of what is called “the land question,” and treated it in this volume at once with breadth of view and with a rich variety of illustrative detail. His general purpose was to show that the territorial systems of both countries were so encumbered with elements of feudal origin as to be altogether unfitted to serve the purposes of a modern industrial society. The policy he recommended is summed up in the following list of requirements, “a simple jurisprudence relating to land, a law of equal intestate succession, a prohibition of entail, a legal security for tenants’ improvements, an open registration of title and transfer and a considerable number of peasant properties.” The volume is full of practical good sense, and exhibits a thorough knowledge of home and foreign agricultural economy; and in the handling of the subject is everywhere shown the special power which its author possessed of making what he wrote interesting as well as instructive. The way in which sagacious observation and shrewd comment are constantly intermingled in the discussion not seldom reminds us of Adam Smith, whose manner was more congenial to Leslie than the abstract and arid style of Ricardo.

But what, more than anything else, marks him as an original thinker and gives him a place apart among contemporary economists, is his exposition and defence of the historical method in political economy. Both at home and abroad there has for some time existed a profound and growing dissatisfaction with the method and many of the doctrines of the hitherto dominant school, which, it is alleged, under a “fictitious completeness, symmetry and exactness” disguises a real hollowness and discordance with fact. It is urged that the attempt to deduce the economic phenomena of a society from the so-called universal principle of “the desire of wealth” is illusory, and that they cannot be fruitfully studied apart from the general social conditions and historic development of which they are the outcome. Of this movement of thought Leslie was the principal representative, if not the originator, in England. There is no doubt, for he has himself placed it on record, that the first influence which impelled him in the direction of the historical method was that of Sir Henry Maine, by whose personal teaching of jurisprudence, as well as by the example of his writings, he was led “to look at the present economic structure and state of society as the result of a long evolution.” The study of those German economists who represent similar tendencies doubtless confirmed him in the new line of thought on which he had entered, though he does not seem to have been further indebted to any of them except, perhaps, in some small degree to Roscher. And the writings of Comte, whose “prodigious genius,” as exhibited in the Philosophie Positive, he admired and proclaimed, though he did not accept his system as a whole, must have powerfully co-operated to form in him the habit of regarding economic science as only a single branch of sociology, which should always be kept in close relation to the others. The earliest writing in which Leslie’s revolt against the so-called “orthodox school” distinctly appears is his Essay on Wages, which was first published in 1868 and was reproduced as an appendix to the volume on Land Tenures. In this, after exposing the inanity of the theory of the wage-fund, and showing the utter want of agreement between its results and the observed phenomena, he concludes by declaring that “political economy must be content to take rank as an inductive, instead of a purely deductive science,” and that, by this change of character, “it will gain in utility, interest and real truth far more than a full compensation for the forfeiture of a fictitious title to mathematical exactness and certainty.” But it is in the essays collected in the volume of 1879 that his attitude in relation to the question of method is most decisively marked. In one of these, on “the political economy of Adam Smith,” he exhibits in a very interesting way the co-existence in the Wealth of Nations of historical-inductive investigation in the manner of Montesquieu with a priori speculation founded on theologico-metaphysical bases, and points out the error of ignoring the former element, which is the really characteristic feature of Smith’s social philosophy, and places him in strong contrast with his soi-disant followers of the school of Ricardo. The essay, however, which contains the most brilliant polemic against the “orthodox school,” as well as the most luminous account and the most powerful vindication of the new direction, was that of which we have above spoken as having first appeared in Hermathena. It may be recommended as supplying the best extant presentation of one of the two contending views of economic method. On this essay mainly rests the claim of Leslie to be regarded as the founder and first head of the English historical school of political economy. Those who share his views on the philosophical constitution of the science regard the work he did, notwithstanding its unsystematic character, as in reality the most important done by any English economists in the latter half of the 19th century. But even the warmest partisans of the older school acknowledge that he did excellent service by insisting on a kind of inquiry, previously too much neglected, which was of the highest interest and value, in whatever relation it might be supposed to stand to the establishment of economic truth. The members of both groups alike recognized his great learning, his patient and conscientious habits of investigation and the large social spirit in which he treated the problems of his science.

(J. K. I.)

LESLIE, a police burgh of Fifeshire, Scotland. Pop. (1901) 3587. It lies on the Leven, the vale of which is overlooked by the town, 4 m. W. of Markinch by the North British railway. The industries include paper-making, flax-spinning, bleaching and linen-weaving. The old church claims to be the “Christ’s Kirk on the Green” of the ancient ballads of that name. A stone on the Green, called the Bull Stone, is said to have been used when bull-baiting was a popular pastime. Leslie House, the seat of the earl of Rothes, designed by Sir William Bruce, rivalled Holyrood in magnificence. It was noted for its tapestry and its gallery of family portraits and other pictures, including a portrait of Rembrandt by himself. Daniel Defoe considered its park the glory of the kingdom. The mansion sustained serious damage from fire in 1763. Norman Leslie, master of Rothes, was concerned in the killing of Cardinal Beaton (1546), and the dagger with which John Leslie, Norman’s uncle, struck the fatal blow is preserved in Leslie House.

Markinch (pop. 1499), a police burgh situated between Conland Burn and the Leven, 7¼ m. N. by E. of Kirkcaldy by the North British railway, is a place of great antiquity. A cell of the Culdees was established here by one of the last of the Celtic bishops, the site of which may possibly be marked by the ancient cross of Balgonie. Markinch is also believed to have been a residence of the earlier kings, where prior to the 11th century they occasionally administered justice; and in the reign of William the Lion (d. 1214) the warrantors of goods alleged to have been stolen were required to appear here. Its industries comprise bleaching, flax-spinning, paper-making, distilling and coal-mining. Balgonie Castle, close by, the keep of which is 80 ft. high, was a residence of Alexander Leslie, the first earl of Leven, and at Balfour Castle were born Cardinal Beaton and his uncle and nephew the archbishops of Glasgow.

LESPINASSE, JEANNE JULIE ÉLÉONORE DE (1732-1776), French author, was born at Lyons on the 9th of November 1732. A natural child of the comtesse d’Albon, she was brought up as the daughter of Claude Lespinasse of Lyons. On leaving her convent school she became governess in the house of her mother’s legitimate daughter, Mme de Vichy, who had married the brother of the marquise du Deffand. Here Mme du Deffand made her acquaintance, and, recognizing her extraordinary gifts, persuaded her to come to Paris as her companion. The alliance lasted ten years (1754-1764) until Mme du Deffand became jealous of the younger woman’s increasing influence, when a violent quarrel ensued. Mlle de Lespinasse set up a salon of her own which was joined by many of the most brilliant members of Mme du Deffand’s circle. D’Alembert was one of the most assiduous of her friends and eventually came to live under the same roof. There was no scandal attached to this arrangement, which ensured d’Alembert’s comfort and lent influence to Mlle de Lespinasse’s salon. Although she had neither beauty nor rank, her ability as a hostess made her reunions the most popular in Paris. She owes her distinction, however, not to her social success, but to circumstances which remained a secret during her lifetime from her closest friends. Two volumes of Lettres published in 1809 displayed her as the victim of a passion of a rare intensity. In virtue of this ardent, intense quality Sainte Beuve and other of her critics place her letters in the limited category to which belong the Latin letters of Héloïse and those of the Portuguese Nun. Her first passion, a reasonable and serious one, was for the marquis de Mora, son of the Spanish ambassador in Paris. De Mora had come to Paris in 1765, and with some intervals remained there until 1772 when he was ordered to Spain for his health. On the way to Paris in 1774 to fulfil promises exchanged with Mlle de Lespinasse, he died at Bordeaux. But her letters to the comte de Guibert, the worthless object of her fatal infatuation, begin from 1773. From the struggle between her affection for de Mora and her blind passion for her new lover they go on to describe her partial disenchantment on Guibert’s marriage and her final despair. Mlle de Lespinasse died on the 23rd of May 1776, her death being apparently hastened by the agitation and misery to which she had been for the last three years of her life a prey. In addition to the Lettres she was the author of two chapters intended as a kind of sequel to Sterne’s Sentimental Journey.

Her Lettres ... were published by Mme de Guibert in 1809 and a spurious additional collection appeared in 1820. Among modern editions may be mentioned that of Eugène Asse (1876-1877). Lettres inédites de Mademoiselle de Lespinasse à Condorcet, à D’Alembert, à Guibert, au comte de Crillon, edited by M. Charles Henry (1887), contains copies of the documents available for her biography. Mrs Humphry Ward’s novel, Lady Rose’s Daughter, owes something to the character of Mlle de Lespinasse.

LES SABLES D’OLONNE, a seaport of western France, capital of an arrondissement of the department of Vendée, on an inlet of the Atlantic seaboard, 23 m. S.W. of La Roche-sur-Yon by rail. Pop. (1906) 11,847. The town stands between the sea on the south and the port on the north, while on the west it is separated by a channel from the suburb of La Chaume, built at the foot of a range of dunes 65 ft. high, which terminates southwards in the rocky peninsula of L’Aiguille. The beautiful smoothly sloping beach, 1 m. in length, is much frequented by bathers. To the north of Sables extend salt-marshes and oyster-parks, yielding 6,000,000 to 8,000,000 oysters per annum. Sables has a church built in the Late Gothic style towards the middle of the 17th century. The port, consisting of a tidal basin and a wet-dock, is accessible to vessels of 2000 tons, but is dangerous when the winds are from the south-west. The lighthouse of Barges, a mile out at sea to the west, is visible for 17 to 18 nautical miles. The inhabitants are employed largely in sardine and tunny fishing; there are imports of coal, wood, petroleum and phosphates. Boat-building and sardine-preserving are carried on. The town has a sub-prefecture and a tribunal of first instance.

Founded by Basque or Spanish sailors, Sables was the first place in Poitou invaded by the Normans in 817. Louis XI., who went there in 1472, granted the inhabitants various privileges, improved the harbour, and fortified the entrance. Captured and recaptured during the Wars of Religion, the town afterwards became a nursery of hardy sailors and privateers, who harassed the Spaniards and afterwards the English. In 1696 Sables was bombarded by the combined fleets of England and Holland. In the middle of the 18th century hurricanes caused grievous damage to town and harbour.

LES SAINTES-MARIES, a coast village of south-eastern France in the department of Boûches-du-Rhône, 24 m. S.S.W. of Arles by rail. Pop. (1906) 544. Saintes-Maries is situated in the plain of the Camargue, 1½ m. E. of the mouth of the Petit-Rhône. It is the object of an ancient and famous pilgrimage due to the tradition that Mary, sister of the Virgin, and Mary, mother of James and John, together with their black servant Sara, Lazarus, Martha, Mary Magdalen and St Maximin fled thither to escape persecution in Judaea. The relics of the two Maries, who are said to have been buried at Saintes-Maries, are bestowed in the upper storey of the apse of the fortress-church, a remarkable building of the 12th century with crenelated and machicolated walls. Two festivals are held in the town, a less important one in October, the other, on the 24th and 25th of May, unique for its gathering of gipsies who come in large numbers to do honour to the tomb of their patroness Sara, contained in the crypt below the apse.

LESSE, one of the most romantic of the smaller rivers of Belgium. It rises at Ochamps in the Ardennes, and flowing in a north-westerly course reaches the Meuse at Anseremme, a few miles above Dinant. The river is only 49 m. long, but its meandering course may be judged by the fact that it is no more than 29 m. from Ochamps to Anseremme in a straight line. There is a good deal of pretty scenery along this river, as, for instance, at Ciergnon, but the most striking part of the valley is contained in the last 12 m. from Houyet to Anseremme. In this section the river is confined between opposing walls of cliff ranging from 300 to 500 ft. above the river. Here were discovered in the caves near Walzin the bones of prehistoric men, and other evidence of the primitive occupants of this globe at a period practically beyond computation. Another curious natural feature of the Lesse is that on reaching the hill of Han it disappears underground, reappearing about 1 m. farther on at the village of that name. Here are the curious and interesting Han grottoes. The Lesse receives altogether in its short course the water of thirteen tributaries.

LESSEPS, FERDINAND DE (1805-1894). French diplomatist and maker of the Suez Canal, was born at Versailles on the 19th of November 1805. The origin of his family has been traced back as far as the end of the 14th century. His ancestors, it is believed, came from Scotland, and settled at Bayonne when that region was occupied by the English. One of his great-grandfathers was town clerk and at the same time secretary to Queen Anne of Neuberg, widow of Charles II. of Spain, exiled to Bayonne after the accession of Philip V. From the middle of the 18th century the ancestors of Ferdinand de Lesseps followed the diplomatic career, and he himself occupied with real distinction several posts in the same calling from 1825 to 1849. His uncle was ennobled by King Louis XVI., and his father was made a count by Napoleon I. His father, Mathieu de Lesseps (1774-1832), was in the consular service; his mother, Catherine de Grivégnée, was Spanish, and aunt of the countess of Montijo, mother of the empress Eugénie. His first years were spent in Italy, where his father was occupied with his consular duties. He was educated at the College of Henry IV. in Paris. From the age of 18 years to 20 he was employed in the commissary department of the army. From 1825 to 1827 he acted as assistant vice-consul at Lisbon, where his uncle, Barthélemy de Lesseps, was the French chargé d’affaires. This uncle was an old companion of La Pérouse and a survivor of the expedition in which that navigator perished. In 1828 Ferdinand was sent as an assistant vice-consul to Tunis, where his father was consul-general. He courageously aided the escape of Youssouff, pursued by the soldiers of the bey, of whom he was one of the officers, for violation of the seraglio law. Youssouff acknowledged this protection given by a Frenchman by distinguishing himself in the ranks of the French army at the time of the conquest of Algeria. Ferdinand de Lesseps was also entrusted by his father with missions to Marshal Count Clausel, general-in-chief of the army of occupation in Algeria. The marshal wrote to Mathieu de Lesseps on the 18th of December 1830: “I have had the pleasure of meeting your son, who gives promise of sustaining with great credit the name he bears.” In 1832 Ferdinand de Lesseps was appointed vice-consul at Alexandria. To the placing in quarantine of the vessel which took him to Egypt is due the origin of his great conception of a canal across the isthmus of Suez. In order to help him to while away the time at the lazaretto, M. Mimaut, consul-general of France at Alexandria, sent him several books, among which was the memoir written upon the Suez Canal, according to Bonaparte’s instructions, by the civil engineer Lapère, one of the scientific members of the French expedition. This work struck de Lesseps’s imagination, and gave him the idea of piercing the African isthmus. This idea, moreover, was conceived in circumstances that were to prepare the way for its realization. Mehemet Ali, who was the viceroy of Egypt, owed his position, to a certain extent, to the recommendations made in his behalf to the French government by Mathieu de Lesseps, who was consul-general in Egypt when Mehemet Ali was a simple colonel. The viceroy therefore welcomed Ferdinand affectionately, while Said Pacha, Mehemet’s son, began those friendly relations that he did not forget later, when he gave him the concession for making the Suez Canal. In 1833 Ferdinand de Lesseps was sent as consul to Cairo, and soon afterwards given the management of the consulate-general at Alexandria, a post that he held until 1837. While he was there a terrible epidemic of the plague broke out and lasted for two years, carrying off more than a third of the inhabitants of Cairo and Alexandria. During this time he went from one city to the other, according as the danger was more pressing, and constantly displayed an admirable zeal and an imperturbable energy. Towards the close of the year 1837 he returned to France, and on the 21st of December married Mlle Agathe Delamalle, daughter of the government prosecuting attorney at the court of Angers. By this marriage M. de Lesseps became the father of five sons. In 1839 he was appointed consul at Rotterdam, and in the following year transferred to Malaga, the place of origin of his mother’s family. In 1842 he was sent to Barcelona, and soon afterwards promoted to the grade of consul-general. In the course of a bloody insurrection in Catalonia, which ended in the bombardment of Barcelona, Ferdinand de Lesseps showed the most persistent bravery, rescuing from death, without distinction, the men belonging to the rival factions, and protecting and sending away not only the Frenchmen who were in danger, but foreigners of all nationalities. From 1848 to 1849 he was minister of France at Madrid. In the latter year the government of the French Republic confided to him a mission to Rome at the moment when it was a question whether the expelled pope would return to the Vatican with or without bloodshed. Following his interpretation of the instructions he had received, de Lesseps began negotiations with the existing government at Rome, according to which Pius IX. should peacefully re-enter the Vatican and the independence of the Romans be assured at the same time. But while he was negotiating, the elections in France had caused a change in the foreign policy of the government. His course was disapproved; he was recalled and brought before the council of state, which blamed his conduct without giving him a chance to justify himself. Rome, attacked by the French army, was taken by assault after a month’s sanguinary siege. M. de Lesseps then retired from the diplomatic service, and never afterwards occupied any public office. In 1853 he lost his wife and daughter at a few days’ interval. Perhaps his energy would not have been sufficient to sustain him against these repeated blows of destiny if, in 1854, the accession to the viceroyalty of Egypt of his old friend, Said Pacha, had not given a new impulse to the ideas that had haunted him for the last twenty-two years concerning the Suez Canal. Said Pacha invited M. de Lesseps to pay him a visit, and on the 7th of November 1854 he landed at Alexandria; on the 30th of the same month Said Pacha signed the concession authorizing M. de Lesseps to pierce the isthmus of Suez.

A first scheme, indicated by him, was immediately drawn out by two French engineers who were in the Egyptian service, MM. Linant Bey and Mougel Bey. This project, differing from others that had been previously presented or that were in opposition to it, provided for a direct communication between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. After being slightly modified, the plan was adopted in 1856 by an international commission of civil engineers to which it had been submitted. Encouraged by this approval, de Lesseps no longer allowed anything to stop him. He listened to no adverse criticism and receded before no obstacle. Neither the opposition of Lord Palmerston, who considered the projected disturbance as too radical not to endanger the commercial position of Great Britain, nor the opinions entertained, in France as well as in England, that the sea in front of Port Said was full of mud which would obstruct the entrance to the canal, that the sands from the desert would fill the trenches—no adverse argument, in a word, could dishearten Ferdinand de Lesseps. His faith made him believe that his adversaries were in the wrong; but how great must have been this faith, which permitted him to undertake the work at a time when mechanical appliances for the execution of such an undertaking did not exist, and when for the utilization of the proposed canal there was as yet no steam mercantile marine! Impelled by his convictions and talent, supported by the emperor Napoleon III. and the empress Eugénie, he succeeded in rousing the patriotism of the French and obtaining by their subscriptions more than half of the capital of two hundred millions of francs which he needed in order to form a company. The Egyptian government subscribed for eighty millions’ worth of shares. The company was organized at the end of 1858. On the 25th of April 1859 the first blow of the pickaxe was given by Lesseps at Port Said, and on the 17th of November 1869 the canal was officially opened by the Khedive, Ismail Pacha (see Suez Canal). While in the interests of his canal Lesseps had resisted the opposition of British diplomacy to an enterprise which threatened to give to France control of the shortest route to India, he acted loyally towards Great Britain after Lord Beaconsfield had acquired the Suez shares belonging to the Khedive, by frankly admitting to the board of directors of the company three representatives of the British government. The consolidation of interests which resulted, and which has been developed by the addition in 1884 of seven other British directors, chosen from among shipping merchants and business men, has augmented, for the benefit of all concerned, the commercial character of the enterprise.

Ferdinand de Lesseps steadily endeavoured to keep out of politics. If in 1869 he appeared to deviate from this principle by being a candidate at Marseilles for the Corps Législatif, it was because he yielded to the entreaties of the Imperial government in order to strengthen its goodwill for the Suez Canal. Once this goodwill had been shown, he bore no malice towards those who rendered him his liberty by preferring Gambetta. He afterwards declined the other candidatures that were offered him: for the Senate in 1876, and for the Chamber in 1877. In 1873 he became interested in a project for uniting Europe and Asia by a railway to Bombay, with a branch to Peking. He subsequently encouraged Major Roudaire, who wished to transform the Sahara desert into an inland sea. The king of the Belgians having formed an International African Society, de Lesseps accepted the presidency of the French committee, facilitated M. de Brazza’s explorations, and acquired stations that he subsequently abandoned to the French government. These stations were the starting-point of French Congo. In 1879 a congress assembled in the rooms of the Geographical Society at Paris, under the presidency of Admiral de la Roncière le Noury, and voted in favour of the making of the Panama Canal. Public opinion, it may be declared, designated Ferdinand de Lesseps as the head of the enterprise. It was upon that occasion that Gambetta bestowed upon him the title of Le Grand Français. He was not a man to shirk responsibility, and notwithstanding that he had reached the age of 74, he undertook to carry out the Panama Canal project (see Panama Canal and France: History). Politics, which de Lesseps had always avoided, was his greatest enemy in this matter. The winding-up of the Panama Company having been declared in the month of December 1888, the adversaries of the French Republic, seeking for a scandal that would imperil the government, hoped to bring about the prosecution of the directors of the Panama Company. Their attacks were so vigorously made that the government was obliged, in self-defence, to have judicial proceedings taken against Ferdinand de Lesseps, his son Charles (b. 1849) and his co-workers Fontane and Cottu. Charles de Lesseps, a victim offered to the fury of the politicians, tried to divert the storm upon his head and prevent it from reaching his father. He managed to draw down upon himself alone the burden of the condemnations pronounced. One of the consequences of the persecutions of which he was the object was to oblige him to spend three years, from 1896 to 1899, in England, where his participation in the management of the Suez Canal had won for him some strong friendships, and where he was able to see the great respect in which the memory and name of his father were held by Englishmen.

Ferdinand de Lesseps died at La Chenaie on the 7th of December 1894. He had contracted a second marriage in 1869 with Mlle Autard de Bragard, daughter of a former magistrate of Mauritius; and eleven out of twelve children of this marriage survived him. M. de Lesseps was a member of the French Academy, of the Academy of Sciences, of numerous scientific societies, Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour and of the Star of India, and had received the freedom of the City of London. According to some accounts he was unconscious of the disastrous events that took place during the closing months of his life. Others report that, feeling himself powerless to scatter the gathered clouds, and aware of his physical feebleness, he had had the moral courage to pass in the eyes of his family, which he did not wish to afflict, as the dupe of the efforts they employed to conceal the truth from him. This last version would not be surprising if we relied upon the following portrait, sketched by a person who knew him intimately:—“Simple in his tastes, never thinking of himself, constantly preoccupied about others, supremely kind, he did not and would not recognize such a thing as evil. Of a confiding nature, he was inclined to judge others by himself. This naturally affectionate abandonment that every one felt in him had procured him profound attachments and rare devotions. He showed, while making the Suez Canal, what a gift he possessed for levying the pacific armies he conducted. He set duty above everything, had in the highest degree a reverence for honour, and placed his indomitable courage at the service of everything that was beneficial with an abnegation that nothing could tire. His marvellous physical and moral equilibrium gave him an evenness of temper which always rendered his society charming. Whatever his cares, his work or his troubles, I have never noticed in him aught but generous impulses and a love of humanity carried even to those heroic imprudences of which they alone are capable who devote themselves to the amelioration of humanity.” No doubt this eulogy requires some reservations. The striking and universal success which crowned his work on the Suez Canal gave him an absoluteness of thought which brooked no contradiction, a despotic temper before which every one must bow, and against which, when he had once taken a resolution, nothing could prevail, not even the most authoritative opposition or the most legitimate entreaties. He had resolved to construct the Panama Canal without locks, to make it an uninterrupted navigable way. All attempts to dissuade him from this resolution failed before his tenacious will. At his advanced age he went with his youngest child to Panama to see with his own eyes the field of his new enterprise. He there beheld the Culebra and the Chagres; he saw the mountain and the stream, those two greatest obstacles of nature that sought to bar his route. He paid no heed to them, but began the struggle against the Culebra and the Chagres. It was against them that was broken his invincible will, sweeping away in the defeat the work of Panama, his own fortune, his fame and almost an atom of his honour. But this atom, only grazed by calumny, has already been restored to him by posterity, for he died poor, having been the first to suffer by the disaster to his illusions. Political agitators, in order to sap the power of the Opportunist party, did not hesitate to drag in the mud one of the greatest citizens of France. But when the Panama “scandal” has been forgotten, for centuries to come the traveller in saluting the statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps at the entrance of the Suez Canal will pay homage to one of the most powerful embodiments of the creative genius of the 19th century.

See G. Barnett Smith, The Life and Enterprises of Ferdinand de Lesseps (London, 1893); and Souvenirs de quarante ans, by Ferdinand de Lesseps (trans. by C. B. Pitman). (de B.)

LESSING, GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM (1729-1781), German critic and dramatist, was born at Kamenz in Upper Lusatia (Oberlausitz), Saxony, on the 22nd of January 1729. His father, Johann Gottfried Lessing, was a clergyman, and, a few years after his son’s birth, became pastor primarius or chief pastor of Kamenz. After attending the Latin school of his native town, Gotthold was sent in 1741 to the famous school of St Afra at Meissen, where he made such rapid progress, especially in classics and mathematics, that, towards the end of his school career, he was described by the rector as “a steed that needed double fodder.” In 1746 he entered the university of Leipzig as a theological student. The philological lectures of Johann Friedrich Christ (1700-1756) and Johann August Ernesti (1707-1781) proved, however, more attractive than those on theology, and he attended the philosophical disputations presided over by his friend A. G. Kästner, professor of mathematics and also an epigrammatist of repute. Among Lessing’s chief friends in Leipzig were C. F. Weisse (1726-1804) the dramatist, and Christlob Mylius (1722-1754), who had made some name for himself as a journalist. He was particularly attracted by the theatre then directed by the talented actress Karoline Neuber (1697-1760), who had assisted Gottsched in his efforts to bring the German stage into touch with literature. Frau Neuber even accepted for performance Lessing’s first comedy, Der junge Gelehrte (1748), which he had begun at school. His father naturally did not approve of these new interests and acquaintances, and summoned him home. He was only allowed to return to Leipzig on the condition that he would devote himself to the study of medicine. Some medical lectures he did attend, but as long as Frau Neuber’s company kept together the theatre had an irresistible fascination for him.

In 1748, however, the company broke up, and Lessing, who had allowed himself to become surety for some of the actors’ debts, was obliged to leave Leipzig too, in order to escape their creditors. He went to Wittenberg, and afterwards, towards the end of the year, to Berlin, where his friend Mylius had established himself as a journalist. In Berlin Lessing now spent three years, maintaining himself chiefly by literary work. He translated three volumes of Charles Rollin’s Histoire ancienne, wrote several plays—Der Misogyn, Der Freigeist, Die Juden—and in association with Mylius, began the Beiträge zur Historie und Aufnahine des Theaters (1750), a periodical—which soon came to an end—for the discussion of matters connected with the drama. Early in 1751 he became literary critic to the Vossische Zeitung, and in this position laid the foundation for his reputation as a reviewer of learning, judgment and wit. At the end of 1751 he was in Wittenberg again, where he spent about a year engaged in unremitting study and research. He then returned to Berlin with a view to making literature his profession; and the next three years were among the busiest of his life. Besides translating for the booksellers, he issued several numbers of the Theatralische Bibliothek, a periodical similar to that which he had begun with Mylius; he also continued his work as critic to the Vossische Zeitung. In 1754 he gave a particularly brilliant proof of his critical powers in his Vademecum für Herrn S. G. Lange; as a retort to that writer’s overbearing criticism, Lessing exposed with scathing satire Lange’s errors in his popular translation of Horace.

By 1753 Lessing felt that his position was sufficiently assured to allow of him issuing an edition of his collected writings (Schriften, 6 vols., 1753-1755). They included his lyrics and epigrams, most of which had already appeared during his first residence in Berlin in a volume of Kleinigkeiten, published anonymously. Much more important were the papers entitled Rettungen, in which he undertook to vindicate the character of various writers—Horace and writers of the Reformation period, such as Cochlaeus and Cardanus—who had been misunderstood or falsely judged by preceding generations. The Schriften also contained Lessing’s early plays, and one new one, Miss Sara Sampson (1755). Hitherto Lessing had, as a dramatist, followed the methods of contemporary French comedy as cultivated in Leipzig; Miss Sara Sampson, however, marks the beginning of a new period in the history of the German drama. This play, based more or less on Lille’s Merchant of London, and influenced in its character-drawing by the novels of Richardson, is the first bürgerliches Trauerspiel, or “tragedy of common life” in German. It was performed for the first time at Frankfort-on-Oder in the summer of 1755, and received with great favour. Among Lessing’s chief friends during his second residence in Berlin were the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), in association with whom he wrote in 1755 an admirable treatise, Pope ein Metaphysiker! tracing sharply the lines which separate the poet from the philosopher. He was also on intimate terms with C. F. Nicolai (1733-1811), a Berlin bookseller and rationalistic writer, and with the “German Horace” K. W. Ramler (1725-1798); he had also made the acquaintance of J. W. L. Gleim (1719-1803), the Halberstadt poet, and E. C. von Kleist (1715-1759), a Prussian officer, whose fine poem. Der Frühling, had won for him Lessing’s warm esteem.

In October 1755 Lessing settled in Leipzig with a view to devoting himself more exclusively to the drama. In 1756 he accepted the invitation of Gottfried Winkler, a wealthy young merchant, to accompany him on a foreign tour for three years. They did not, however, get beyond Amsterdam, for the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War made it necessary for Winkler to return home without loss of time. A disagreement with his patron shortly after resulted in Lessing’s sudden dismissal; he demanded compensation and, although in the end the court decided in his favour, it was not until the case had dragged on for about six years. At this time Lessing began the study of medieval literature to which attention had been drawn by the Swiss critics, Bodmer and Breitinger, and wrote occasional criticisms for Nicolai’s Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften. In Leipzig Lessing had also an opportunity of developing his friendship with Kleist who happened to be stationed there. The two men were mutually attracted, and a warm affection sprang up between them. In 1758 Kleist’s regiment being ordered to new quarters, Lessing decided not to remain behind him and returned again to Berlin. Kleist was mortally wounded in the following year at the battle of Kunersdorf.

Lessing’s third residence in Berlin was made memorable by the Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend (1759-1765), a series of critical essays—written in the form of letters to a wounded officer—on the principal books that had appeared since the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. The scheme was suggested by Nicolai, by whom the Letters were published. In Lessing’s share in this publication, his critical powers and methods are to be seen at their best. He insisted especially on the necessity of truth to nature in the imaginative presentation of the facts of life, and in one letter he boldly proclaimed the superiority of Shakespeare to Corneille, Racine and Voltaire. At the same time he marked the immutable conditions to which even genius must submit if it is to succeed in its appeal to our sympathies. While in Berlin at this time, he edited with Ramler a selection from the writings of F. von Logau, an epigrammatist of the 17th century, and introduced to the German public the Lieder eines preussischen Grenadiers, by J. W. L. Gleim. In 1759 he published Philotas, a prose tragedy in one act, and also a complete collection of his fables, preceded by an essay on the nature of the fable. The latter is one of his best essays on criticism, defining with perfect lucidity what is meant by “action” in works of the imagination, and distinguishing the action of the fable from that of the epic and the drama.

In 1760, feeling the need of some change of scene and work, Lessing went to Breslau, where he obtained the post of secretary to General Tauentzien, to whom Kleist had introduced him in Leipzig. Tauentzien was not only a general in the Prussian army, but governor of Breslau, and director of the mint. During the four years which Lessing spent in Breslau, he associated chiefly with Prussian officers, went much into society, and developed a dangerous fondness for the gaming table. He did not, however, lose sight of his true goal; he collected a large library, and, after the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, in 1763, he resumed more enthusiastically than ever the studies which had been partially interrupted. He investigated the early history of Christianity and penetrated more deeply than any contemporary thinker into the significance of Spinoza’s philosophy. He also found time for the studies which were ultimately to appear in the volume entitled Laokoon, and in fresh spring mornings he sketched in a garden the plan of Minna von Barnhelm.

After resigning his Breslau appointment in 1765, he hoped for a time to obtain a congenial appointment in Dresden, but nothing came of this and he was again compelled, much against his will, to return to Berlin. His friends there exerted themselves to obtain for him the office of keeper of the royal library, but Frederick had not forgotten Lessing’s quarrel with Voltaire, and declined to consider his claims. During the two years which Lessing now spent in the Prussian capital, he was restless and unhappy, yet it was during this period that he published two of his greatest works, Laokoon, oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766) and Minna von Barnhelm (1767). The aim of Laokoon, which ranks as a classic, not only in German but in European literature, is to define by analysis the limitations of poetry and the plastic arts. Many of his conclusions have been corrected and extended by later criticism; but he indicated more decisively than any of his predecessors the fruitful principle that each art is subject to definite conditions, and that it can accomplish great results only by limiting itself to its special function. The most valuable parts of the work are those which relate to poetry, of which he had a much more intimate knowledge than of sculpture and painting. His exposition of the methods of Homer and Sophocles is especially suggestive, and he may be said to have marked an epoch in the appreciation of these writers, and of Greek literature generally. The power of Minna von Barnhelm, Lessing’s greatest drama, was also immediately recognized. Tellheim, the hero of the comedy, is an admirable study of a manly and sensitive soldier, with somewhat exaggerated ideas of conventional honour; and Minna, the heroine, is one of the brightest and most attractive figures in German comedy. The subordinate characters are conceived with even more force and vividness; and the plot, which reflects precisely the struggles and aspirations of the period that immediately followed the Seven Years’ War, is simply and naturally unfolded.

In 1767 Lessing settled in Hamburg, where he had been invited to take part in the establishment of a national theatre. The scheme promised well, and, as he associated himself with Johann Joachim Christoph Bode (1730-1793), a literary man whom he respected, in starting a printing establishment, he hoped that he might at last look forward to a peaceful and prosperous career. The theatre, however, was soon closed, and the printing establishment failed, leaving behind it a heavy burden of debt. In despair, Lessing determined towards the end of his residence in Hamburg to quit Germany, believing that in Italy he might find congenial labour that would suffice for his wants. The Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767-1768), Lessing’s commentary on the performances of the National Theatre, is the first modern handbook of the dramatist’s art. By his original interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, he delivered German dramatists from the yoke of the classic tragedy of France, and directed them to the Greek dramatists and to Shakespeare. Another result of Lessing’s labours in Hamburg was the Antiquarische Briefe (1768), a series of masterly letters in answer to Christian Adolf Klotz (1738-1771), a professor of the university of Halle, who, after flattering Lessing, had attacked him, and sought to establish a kind of intellectual despotism by means of critical journals which he directly or indirectly controlled. In connexion with this controversy Lessing wrote his brilliant little treatise, Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet (1769), contrasting the medieval representation of death as a skeleton with the Greek conception of death as the twin-brother of sleep.

Instead of settling in Italy, as he intended, Lessing accepted in 1770 the office of librarian at Wolfenbüttel, a post which was offered to him by the hereditary prince of Brunswick. In this position he passed his remaining years. For a time he was not unhappy, but the debts which he had contracted in Hamburg weighed heavily on him, and he missed the society of his friends; his health, too, which had hitherto been excellent, gradually gave way. In 1775 he travelled for nine months in Italy with Prince Leopold of Brunswick, and in the following year he married Eva König, the widow of a Hamburg merchant, with whom he had been on terms of intimate friendship. But their happiness lasted only for a brief period; in 1778 she died in childbed.

Soon after settling in Wolfenbüttel, Lessing found in the library the manuscript of a treatise by Berengarius of Tours on transubstantiation in reply to Lanfranc. This was the occasion of Lessing’s powerful essay on Berengarius, in which he vindicated the latter’s character as a serious and consistent thinker. In 1771 he published his Zerstreute Anmerkungen über das Epigramm, und einige der vornehmsten Epigrammatisten—a work which Herder described as “itself an epigram.” Lessing’s theory of the origin of the epigram is somewhat fanciful, but no other critic has offered so many pregnant hints as to the laws of epigrammatic verse, or defended with so much force and ingenuity the character of Martial. In 1772 he published Emilia Galotti, a tragedy which he had begun many years before in Leipzig. The subject was suggested by the Roman legend of Virginia, but the scene is laid in an Italian court, and the whole play is conceived in the spirit of the “tragedy of common life.” Its defect is that its tragic conclusion does not seem absolutely inevitable, but the characters—especially those of the Gräfin Orsina and Marinelli, the prince of Guastalla’s chamberlain who weaves the intrigue from which Emilia escapes by death, are powerfully drawn. Having completed Emilia Galotti, which the younger generation of playwrights at once accepted as a model, Lessing occupied himself for some years almost exclusively with the treasures of the Wolfenbüttel library. The results of these researches he embodied in a series of volumes, Zur Geschichte und Literatur, the first being issued in 1773, the last in the year of his death.

The last period of Lessing’s life was devoted chiefly to theological controversy. H. S. Reimarus (1694-1768), professor of oriental languages in Hamburg, who commanded general respect as a scholar and thinker, wrote a book entitled Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes. His standpoint was that of the English deists, and he investigated, without hesitation, the evidence for the miracles recorded in the Bible. The manuscript of this work was, after the author’s death, entrusted by his daughter to Lessing, who published extracts from it in his Zur Geschichte und Literatur in 1774-1778. These extracts, the authorship of which was not publicly avowed, were known as the Wolfenbütteler Fragmente. They created profound excitement among orthodox theologians, and evoked many replies, in which Lessing was bitterly condemned for having published writings of so dangerous a tendency. His most formidable assailant was Johann Melchior Goeze (1717-1786), the chief pastor of Hamburg, a sincere and earnest theologian, but utterly unscrupulous in his choice of weapons against an opponent. To him, therefore, Lessing addressed in 1778 his most elaborate answers—Eine Parabel, Axiomata, eleven letters with the title Anti-Goeze, and two pamphlets in reply to an inquiry by Goeze as to what Lessing meant by Christianity. These papers are not only full of thought and learning; they are written with a grace, vivacity and energy that make them hardly less interesting to-day than they were to Lessing’s contemporaries. He does not undertake to defend the conclusions of Reimarus; his immediate object is to claim the right of free criticism in regard even to the highest subjects of human thought. The argument on which he chiefly relies is that the Bible cannot be considered necessary to a belief in Christianity, since Christianity was a living and conquering power before the New Testament in its present form was recognized by the church. The true evidence for what is essential in Christianity, he contends, is its adaptation to the wants of human nature; hence the religious spirit is undisturbed by the speculations of the boldest thinkers. The effect of this controversy was to secure wider freedom for writers on theology, and to suggest new problems regarding the growth of Christianity, the formation of the canon and the essence of religion. The Brunswick government having, in deference to the consistory, confiscated the Fragments and ordered Lessing to discontinue the controversy, he resolved, as he wrote to Elise Reimarus, to try “whether they would let him preach undisturbed from his old pulpit, the stage.” In Nathan der Weise, written in the winter of 1778-1779, he gave poetic form to the ideas which he had already developed in prose. Its governing conception is that noble character may be associated with the most diverse creeds, and that there can, therefore, be no good reason why the holders of one sect of religious principles should not tolerate those who maintain wholly different doctrines. The play, which is written in blank verse, is too obviously a continuation of Lessing’s theological controversy to rank high as poetry, but the representatives of the three religions—the Mahommedan Saladin, the Jew Nathan and the Christian Knight Templar—are finely conceived, and show that Lessing’s dramatic instinct had, in spite of other interests, not deserted him. In 1780 appeared Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, the first half of which he had published in 1777 with one of the Fragments. This work, composed a hundred brief paragraphs, was the last, and is one of the most suggestive of Lessing’s writings. The doctrine on which its argument is based is that no dogmatic creed can be regarded as final, but that every historical religion had its share in the development of the spiritual life of mankind. Lessing also maintains that history reveals a definite law of progress, and that occasional retrogression may be necessary for the advance of the world towards its ultimate goal. These ideas formed a striking contrast to the principles both of orthodox and of sceptical writers in Lessing’s day, and gave a wholly new direction to religious philosophy. Another work of Lessing’s last years, Ernst und Falk (a series of five dialogues, of which the first three were published in 1777, the last two in 1780), also set forth many new points of view. Its nominal subject is freemasonry, but its real aim is to plead for a humane and charitable spirit in opposition to a narrow patriotism, an extravagant respect for rank, and exclusive devotion to any particular church.

Lessing’s theological opinions exposed him to much petty persecution, and he was in almost constant straits for money. Nothing, however, broke his manly and generous spirit. To the end he was always ready to help those who appealed to him for aid, and he devoted himself with growing ardour to the search for truth. He formed many new plans of work, but in the course of 1780 it became evident to his friends that he would not be able much longer to continue his labours. His health had been undermined by excessive work and anxiety, and after a short illness he died at Brunswick on the 15th of February 1781. “We lose much in him,” wrote Goethe after Lessing’s death, “more than we think.” It may be questioned whether there is any other writer to whom the Germans owe a deeper debt of gratitude. He was succeeded by poets and philosophers who gave Germany for a time the first place in the intellectual life of the world, and it was Lessing, as they themselves acknowledged, who prepared the way for their achievements. Without attaching himself to any particular system of philosophical doctrine, he fought error incessantly, and in regard to art, poetry and the drama and religion, suggested ideas which kindled the enthusiasm of aspiring minds, and stimulated their highest energies.

Bibliography.—The first edition of Lessing’s collected works, edited by his brother Karl Gotthelf Lessing (1740-1812), J. J. Eschenburg and F. Nicolai, appeared in 26 vols. between 1791 and 1794, as a continuation of the Vermischte Schriften, edited by Lessing himself in 4 vols. (1771-1785); the Sämtliche Schriften, edited by Karl Lachmann, were published in 13 vols. (1825-1828), this edition being subsequently re-edited by W. von Maltzahn (1853-1857) and by F. Muncker (21 vols., 1886 ff.), the last mentioned being the standard edition of Lessing’s works. Other editions are Lessings Werke, published by Hempel, under the editorship of various scholars (23 vols., 1868-1877); an illustrated edition published by Grote in 8 vols. (1875, new ed., 1882); Lessings Werke, edited by R. Boxberger and H. Blümner, in Kürschner’s Deutsche Nationalliteratur, vols. 58-71 (1883-1890). There are also many popular editions. Lessing’s correspondence is included in the Lachmann editions and in that of Hempel (edited by C. C. Redlich, 1879; Nachträge und Berichtigungen, 1886); his correspondence with his wife was published as early as 1789 (2 vols., new edition by A. Schöne, 1885). The chief biographies of Lessing are by K. G. Lessing (his brother), (1793-1795, a reprint in Reclam’s Universalbibliothek); by J. F. Schink (1825); T. W. Danzel and G. E. Guhrauer (1850-1853, 2nd ed. by W. von Maltzahn and R. Boxberger, 2 vols., 1880-1881); A. Stahr (2 vols., 1859, 9th ed., 1887); J. Sime, Lessing, his Life and Works (2 vols., 1877); H. Zimmern, Lessing’s Life and Works (1878); H. Düntzer, Lessings Leben (1882); E. Schmidt, Lessing, Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Schriften (2 vols., 1884-1892, 3rd ed., 1910)—this is the most complete biography; T. W. Rolleston, Lessing (in “Great Writers,” 1889); K. Borinski, Lessing (2 vols., 1900). Cf. also C. Hebler, Lessing-Studien (1862); A. Lehmann, Forschungen über Lessings Sprache (1875); W. Cosack, Materialien zu Lessings Hamburgischer Dramaturgie (1876, 2nd ed., 1891); H. Blümner, Lessings Laokoon (1876, 2nd ed., 1880); H. Blümner, Laokoon-Studien (2 vols., 1881-1882); K. Fischer, Lessing als Reformator der deutschen Literatur dargestellt (2 vols., 1881, 2nd ed., 1888); B. A. Wagner, Lessing-Forschungen (1881); J. W. Braun, Lessing im Urteile seiner Zeitgenossen (2 vols., 1884); P. Albrecht, Lessings Plagiate (6 vols., 1890 ff.); K. Werder, Vorlesungen über Lessings Nathan (1892); G. Kettner, Lessings Dramen im Lichte ihrer und unsrer Zeit (1904). Translations of Lessing’s Dramatic Works (2 vols., 1878), edited by E. Bell, and of Laokoon, Dramatic Notes and the Representation of Death by the Ancients, by E. C. Beasley and H. Zimmern (1 vol., 1879), will be found in Bohn’s “Standard Library.”

(J. Si.; J. G. R.)

LESSON (through Fr. leçon from Lat. lectio, reading; legere, to read), properly a certain portion of a book appointed to be read aloud, or learnt for repetition, hence anything learnt or studied, a course of instruction or study. A specific meaning of the word is that of a portion of Scripture or other religious writings appointed to be read at divine service, in accordance with a table known as a “lectionary.” In the Church of England the lectionary is so ordered that most of the Old Testament is read through during the year as the First Lesson at Morning and Evening Prayer, and as the Second Lesson the whole of the New Testament, except Revelation, of which only portions are read. (See Lection and Lectionary.)

LESTE, a desert wind, similar to the Leveche (q.v.), observed in Madeira. It blows from an easterly direction in autumn, winter and spring, rarely in summer, and is of intense dryness, sometimes reducing the relative humidity at Funchal to below 20%. The Leste is commonly accompanied by clouds of fine red sand.

L’ESTRANGE, SIR ROGER (1616-1704), English pamphleteer on the royalist and court side during the Restoration epoch, but principally remarkable as the first English man of letters of any distinction who made journalism a profession, was born at Hunstanton in Norfolk on the 17th of December 1616. In 1644, during the civil war, he headed a conspiracy to seize the town of Lynn for the king, under circumstances which led to his being condemned to death as a spy. The sentence, however, was not executed, and after four years’ imprisonment in Newgate he escaped to the Continent. He was excluded from the Act of Indemnity, but in 1653 was pardoned by Cromwell upon his personal solicitation, and lived quietly until the Restoration, when after some delay his services and sufferings were acknowledged by his appointment as licenser of the press. This office was administered by him in the spirit which might be expected from a zealous cavalier. He made himself notorious, not merely by the severity of his literary censorship, but by his vigilance in the suppression of clandestine printing. In 1663 (see Newspapers) he commenced the publication of the Public Intelligencer and the News, from which eventually developed the famous official paper the London Gazette in 1665. In 1679 he again became prominent with the Observator, a journal specially designed to vindicate the court from the charge of a secret inclination to popery. He discredited the Popish Plot, and the suspicion he thus incurred was increased by the conversion of his daughter to Roman Catholicism, but there seems no reason to question the sincerity of his own attachment to the Church of England. In 1687 he gave a further proof of independence by discontinuing the Observator from his unwillingness to advocate James II.’s Edict of Toleration, although he had previously gone all lengths in support of the measures of the court. The Revolution cost him his office as licenser, and the remainder of his life was spent in obscurity. He died in 1704. It is to L’Estrange’s credit that among the agitations of a busy political life he should have found time for much purely literary work as a translator of Josephus, Cicero, Seneca, Quevedo and other standard authors.

LESUEUR, DANIEL, the pseudonym of Jeanne Lapanze, née Loiseau (1860- ), French poet and novelist, who was born in Paris in 1860. She published a volume of poems, Fleurs d’avril (1882), which was crowned by the Academy. She also wrote some powerful novels dealing with contemporary life: Le Mariage de Gabrielle (1882); Un Mystérieux Amour (1892), with a series of philosophical sonnets; L’Amant de Geneviève (1883); Marcelle (1885); Une Vie tragique (1890); Justice de femme (1893); Comédienne Haine d’amour (1894); Honneur d’une femme (1901); La Force du passé (1905). Her poems were collected in 1895. She published in 1905 a book on the economic status of women, L’Évolution féminine; and in 1891-1893 a translation (2 vols.) of the works of Lord Byron, which was awarded a prize by the Academy. Her Masque d’amour, a five-act play based on her novel (1904) of the same name, was produced at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in 1905. She received the ribbon of the Legion of Honour in 1900, and the prix Vitet from the French Academy in 1905. She married in 1904 Henry Lapanze (b. 1867), a well-known writer on art.

LE SUEUR, EUSTACHE (1617-1655), one of the founders of the French Academy of painting, was born on the 19th of November 1617 at Paris, where he passed his whole life, and where he died on the 30th of April 1655. His early death and retired habits have combined to give an air of romance to his simple history, which has been decorated with as many fables as that of Claude. We are told that, persecuted by Le Brun, who was jealous of his ability, he became the intimate friend and correspondent of Poussin, and it is added that, broken-hearted at the death of his wife, Le Sueur retired to the monastery of the Chartreux and died in the arms of the prior. All this, however, is pure fiction. The facts of Le Sueur’s life are these. He was the son of Cathelin Le Sueur, a turner and sculptor in wood, who placed his son with Vouet, in whose studio he rapidly distinguished himself. Admitted at an early age into the guild of master-painters, he left them to take part in establishing the academy of painting and sculpture, and was one of the first twelve professors of that body. Some paintings, illustrative of the Hypnerotomachia Polyphili, which were reproduced in tapestry, brought him into notice, and his reputation was further enhanced by a series of decorations (Louvre) in the mansion of Lambert de Thorigny, which he left uncompleted, for their execution was frequently interrupted by other commissions. Amongst these were several pictures for the apartments of the king and queen in the Louvre, which are now missing, although they were entered in Bailly’s inventory (1710); but several works produced for minor patrons have come down to us. In the gallery of the Louvre are the “Angel and Hagar,” from the mansion of De Tonnay Charente; “Tobias and Tobit,” from the Fieubet collection; several pictures executed for the church of Saint Gervais; the “Martyrdom of St Lawrence,” from Saint Germain de l’Auxerrois; two very fine works from the destroyed abbey of Marmoutiers; “St Paul preaching at Ephesus,” one of Le Sueur’s most complete and thorough performances, painted for the goldsmith’s corporation in 1649; and his famous series of the “Life of St Bruno,” executed in the cloister of the Chartreux. These last have more personal character than anything else which Le Sueur produced, and much of their original beauty survives in spite of injuries and restorations and removal from the wall to canvas. The Louvre also possesses many fine drawings (reproduced by Braun), of which Le Sueur left an incredible quantity, chiefly executed in black and white chalk His pupils, who aided him much in his work, were his wife’s brother, Th. Goussé, and three brothers of his own, as well as Claude Lefebvre and Patel the landscape painter.

Most of his works have been engraved, chiefly by Picart, B. Audran, Seb. Leclerc, Drevet, Chauveau, Poilly and Desplaces. Le Sueur’s work lent itself readily to the engraver’s art, for he was a charming draughtsman; he had a truly delicate perception of varied shades of grave and elevated sentiment, and possessed the power to render them. His graceful facility in composition was always restrained by a very fine taste, but his works often fail to please completely, because, producing so much, he had too frequent recourse to conventional types, and partly because he rarely saw colour except with the cold and clayey quality proper to the school of Vouet; yet his “St Paul at Ephesus” and one or two other works show that he was not naturally deficient in this sense, and whenever we get direct reference to nature—as in the monks of the St Bruno series—we recognize his admirable power to read and render physiognomy of varied and serious type.

See Guillet de St Georges, Mém. inéd.; C. Blanc, Histoire des peintres; Vitet, Catalogue des tableaux du Louvre; d’Argenville, Vies des peintres.

LESUEUR, JEAN FRANÇOIS (1760 or 1763-1837), French musical composer, was born on the 15th of January 1760 (or 1763) at Drucat-Plessiel, near Abbeville. He was a choir boy in the cathedral of Amiens, and then became musical director at various churches. In 1786 he obtained by open competition the musical directorship of the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, where he gave successful performances of sacred music with a full orchestra. This place he resigned in 1787; and, after a retirement of five years in a friend’s country house, he produced La Caverne and two other operas at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris. At the foundation of the Paris Conservatoire (1795) Lesueur was appointed one of its inspectors of studies, but was dismissed in 1802, owing to his disagreements with Méhul. Lesueur succeeded G. Paisiello as Maestro di cappella to Napoleon, and produced (1804) his Ossian at the Opéra. He also composed for the emperor’s coronation a mass and a Te Deum. Louis XVIII., who had retained Lesueur in his court, appointed him (1818) professor of composition at the Conservatoire; and at this institution he had, among many other pupils, Hector Berlioz, Ambroise Thomas, Louis Désiré, Besozzi and Charles Gounod. He died on the 6th of October 1837. Lesueur composed eight operas and several masses, and other sacred music. All his works are written in a style of rigorous simplicity.

See Raoul Rochette, Les Ouvrages de M. Lesueur (Paris, 1839).

LE TELLIER, MICHEL (1603-1685), French statesman, was born in Paris on the 19th of April 1603. Having entered the public service he became maître des requêtes and in 1640 intendant of Piedmont; in 1643, owing to his friendship with Mazarin, he became secretary of state for military affairs, being an efficient administrator. In 1677 he was made chancellor of France and he was one of those who influenced Louis XIV. to revoke the Edict of Nantes. He died on the 30th of October 1685, a few days after the revocation had been signed. Le Tellier, who amassed great wealth, left two sons, one the famous statesman Louvois and another who became archbishop of Reims. His correspondence is in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris.

See L. Caron, Michel Le Tellier, intendant d’armée au Piémont (Paris, 1881).

Another Michel le Tellier (1643-1719) Was confessor of the French king Louis XIV. Born at Vire on the 16th of December 1643 he entered the Society of Jesus and later became prominent in consequence of his violent attacks on the Jansenists. He was appointed provincial of his order in France, but it was not until 1709 that he became the king’s confessor. In this capacity all his influence was directed towards urging Louis to further persecutions of the Protestants. He was exiled by the regent Orleans, but he had returned to France when he died at La Flèche on the 2nd of September 1719.

LETHAL (Lat. lethalis, for letalis, deadly, from letum, death; the spelling is due to a confusion with Gr. λήθη, forgetfulness), an adjective meaning “deadly,” “fatal,” especially as applied to weapons, drugs, &c. A “lethal chamber” is a room or receptacle in which animals may be put to death painlessly, by the admission of poisonous gases.

LETHARGY (Gr. ληθαργία, from λήθη, forgetfulness), drowsiness, torpor. In pathology the term is used of a morbid condition of deep and lasting sleep from which the sufferer can be with difficulty and only temporarily aroused. The term Negro or African lethargy was formerly applied to the disease now generally known as “sleeping sickness” (q.v.).

LETHE (“Oblivion”), in Greek mythology, the daughter of Eris (Hesiod, Theog. 227) and the personification of forgetfulness. It is also the name of a river in the infernal regions. Those initiated in the mysteries were taught to distinguish two streams in the lower world, one of memory and one of oblivion. Directions for this purpose, written on a gold plate, have been found in a tomb at Petilia, and near Lebadeia, at the oracle of Trophonius, which was counted an entrance to the lower world, the two springs Mnemosyne and Lethe were shown (Pausanias ix. 39. 8). This thought begins to appear in literature in the end of the 5th century B.C., when Aristophanes (Frogs, 186) speaks of the plain of Lethe. Plato (Rep. x.) embodies the idea in one of his finest myths.

LE TRÉPORT, a maritime town of northern France in the department of Seine-Inférieure, on the English Channel, at the mouth of the Bresle, 114 m. N.N.W. of Paris on the Northern railway. Pop. (1906) 4619. Owing to its nearness to the capital, Le Tréport is a favourite watering-place of the Parisians. A good view is obtained from Mont Huon, which rises to the south-west of the town. The mouth of the Bresle forms a small port, comprising an outer tidal harbour and an inner dock accessible to vessels drawing from 13 to 16 ft. The fisheries and oyster parks with their dependent industries, shipbuilding and glass manufacture, furnish the chief occupations of the inhabitants. Coal, timber, ice and jute are imported; articles de Paris, sugar, &c., are exported. The chief buildings are the church of St Jacques (16th century), which has finely carved vaulting and good modern stained glass, and the casino erected 1896-1897. About 1 m. north-east of Le Tréport is the small bathing resort of Mers. The Eu-Tréport canal, uniting the two towns, has a length of about 3 m., and is navigable by vessels drawing 14 ft. Le Tréport (the ancient Ulterior Portus) was a port of some note in the middle ages and suffered from the English invasions. Louis Philippe twice received Queen Victoria here.

LETRONNE, JEAN ANTOINE (1787-1848), French archaeologist, was born at Paris on the 25th of January 1787. His father, a poor engraver, sent him to study art under the painter David, but his own tastes were literary, and he became a student in the Collège de France, where it is said he used to exercise his already strongly developed critical faculty by correcting for his own amusement old and bad texts of Greek authors, afterwards comparing the results with the latest and most approved editions. From 1810 to 1812 he travelled in France, Switzerland and Italy, and on his return to Paris published an Essai critique sur la topographie de Syracuse (1812), designed to elucidate Thucydides. Two years later appeared his Recherches géographiques et critiques on the De Mensura Orbis Terrae of Dicuil. In 1815 he was commissioned by government to complete the translation of Strabo which had been begun by Laporte-Dutheil, and in March 1816 he was one of those who were admitted to the Academy of Inscriptions by royal ordinance, having previously contributed a Mémoire, “On the Metrical System of the Egyptians,” which had been crowned. Further promotion came rapidly; in 1817 he was appointed director of the École des Chartes, in 1819 inspector-general of the university, and in 1831 professor of history in the Collège de France. This chair he exchanged in 1838 for that of archaeology, and in 1840 he succeeded Pierre C. François Daunou (1761-1840) as keeper of the national archives. Meanwhile he had published, among other works, Considérations générales sur l’évaluation des monnaies grecques et romaines et sur la valeur de l’or et de l’argent avant la découverte de l’Amérique (1817), Recherches pour servir à l’histoire d’Égypte pendant la domination des Grecs et des Romains (1823), and Sur l’origine grecque des zodiaques prétendus égyptiens (1837). By the last-named he finally exploded a fallacy which had up to that time vitiated the chronology of contemporary Egyptologists. His Diplômes et Chartres de l’époque Mérovingienne sur papyrus et sur vélin were published in 1844. The most important work of Letronne is the Recueil des inscriptions grecques et latines de l’Égypte, of which the first volume appeared in 1842, and the second in 1848. He died at Paris on the 14th of December 1848.