OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Prinsep, James

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​PRINSEP, JAMES (1799–1840), Anglo-Indian scholar and antiquary, was born on the 20th of August 1799. In 1819 he was given an appointment in the Calcutta mint, where he ultimately became assay-master, succeeding H. H. Wilson, whom he likewise succeeded as secretary of the Asiatic Society. Apart from architectural work (chiefly at Benares), his leisure was devoted to Indian inscriptions and numismatics, and he is remembered as the first to decipher and translate the rock edicts of Asoka. Returning to England in 1838 in broken health, he died in London on the 22nd of April 1840. Prinsep’s Ghat, an archway on the banks of the Hugli, was erected to his memory by the citizens of Calcutta.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Print

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​PRINT, the colloquial abbreviation used to describe printed cloths generally, though it is most commonly applied to the staple kinds of cotton goods. The word must be distinguished from “printer,” which refers to the regular kinds of cotton cloths intended for printing. (See Textile Printing.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Principal

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PRINCIPAL, a person or thing first, or chief in rank or importance, or, more widely, prominent, leading. The Lat. adj. principalis, first, chief, original, also princely, is formed from princeps, the first, chief, prince, from Primus, first, and capere to hold. In Late Lat. principalis was used as a substitute for an overseer or superintendent, and also for the chief magistrate of a municipality (Symmachus, 9, 1). It is a common title for the head of educational institutions, universities, colleges and schools. It is thus used of the director, of some of the heads of newer universities in England, e.g. London and Birmingham, always so in Scotland, and frequently combined with the vice-chancellorship. At the university of Oxford the name occurs twice as the title of the head of a college, viz. of Brasenose and Jesus. It was always used of the heads of halls, of which St Edmund Hall alone remains. It is also the designation used of the head of the newer theological or denominational colleges, and also of the women's colleges. At Cambridge it does not occur. In law, it is used in distinction from "accessory," for the person who actually commits the crime, "principal in the first degree," or who is present, aiding and abetting at the commission of the crime,"principal in the second degree;" and also for the person for whom another acts by his authority (see Principal and Agent below). Finally as a shortened form of "principal sum," "principal money," &c., the term is used of the original sum lent or invested upon which interest is paid, and so, widely of any capital sum, as opposed to interest or income derived from it.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Prinsep, Valentine Cameron

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​PRINSEP, VALENTINE CAMERON (1838–1904), English artist, was born on the 4th of February 1838. His father, Henry Thoby Prinsep, who was for sixteen years a member of the Council of India, had settled at Little Holland House, which became a centre of artistic society. Henry Prinsep was an intimate friend of G. F. Watts, under whom his son first studied. Val Prinsep also worked in Paris in the atelier Gleyre; and “Taffy” in his friend Maurier’s novel Trilby, is said to have been sketched from him. He was an intimate friend of Millais and of Burne-Jones, with whom he travelled in Italy. He had a share with Rossetti and others in the decoration of the hall of the Oxford Union. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1862 with his “Bianca Capella,” his first picture, which attracted marked notice, being a portrait (1866) of General Gordon in Chinese costume; the best of his later exhibits were “À Versailles,” “The Emperor Theophilus chooses his Wife,” “The Broken Idol and “The Goose Girl.” He was elected A.R.A. in 1879 and R.A. in 1894. In 1877 he went to India and painted a huge picture of the Delhi durbar, exhibited in 1880, and afterwards hung at Buckingham Palace. He married in 1884 Florence, daughter of the well-known collector, Frederick Leyland. Prinsep wrote two plays, Cousin Dick and Monsieur le Duc, produced at the Court and the St James’s theatres respectively; two novels; and Imperial India: an Artist’s Journal (1879). He was an enthusiastic volunteer, and one of the founders of the Artists' Corps. He died on the 11th of November 1904.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Prior

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​PRIOR (from Lat. prior—former, and hence superior, through O. Fr. priour), a title applied generally to certain monastic superiors, but also in the middle ages to other persons in authority. Under the Roman Empire the word prior is found signifying “ancestor.” In the early middle ages it was commonly applied to secular officials and magistrates, and it remained all though the middle ages as the title of certain officials in the ​Italian city states. Noteworthy among these were the famous priores artis at Florence. These were appointed governors of the Florentine republic when the Companies of the Arts seized the government in 1282.
The term prior was most commonly used to denote the superiors in a monastery, at first with an indefinite significance, but later, as monastic institutions crystallized, describing certain definite officials. In the Rule of St Benedict and other early rules the titles praepositus and praelatus (see Prelate) are generally used, but 'prior is also found signifying in a general way the superiors and elders in a monastery. When used by St Benedict in the singular number it seems (according to the commentator Ménard) to denote the abbot himself. At a later date in the order of St Benedict the title was applied to the monk next in authority to the abbot, though this usage was not adopted technically until the 13th century. In some monasteries several priors were to be found and generally at least two. Thus we find the terms prior, sub-prior, tertius prior, quarlus prior, quintus prior. The first prior was sometimes called prior major, sometimes prior claustralis. Occasionally both titles are found in one house, the latter ranking below the former. The first prior acted as vicar in all matters in the absence of the abbot, and was generally charged with the details of the discipline of the monastery. With the foundation of the order of Cluny in the 10th century there appeared the conventual prior who ruled as head of a monastery, but was subject in some degree to the archiabbas of the mother-house of Cluny. The Regular Canons later gave this title of prior to the heads of their houses, as did also the Carthusians and the Dominicans. It was in houses of these orders that the sub-prior became a regular official. Among the Dominicans the head of a province is known as the “prior provincial.” In the order of St John of Jerusalem (q.v.) a priory was a group of commanderies ruled by a “grand prior.”
The term prior was applied also in the middle ages in a very general manner. Thus there was the prior scholoe or leader of the choir, prior scriniariorum, &c.,
See Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, new edition by L. Favre (Niort, 1883, &c.); Sir William Smith and S. Cheetham, edd. Dictionary of Christian Antiquities (1875-1880).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Merobaudes, Flavius

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​MEROBAUDES, FLAVIUS (5th century A.D.), Latin rhetorician and poet, probably a native of Baetica in Spain. He was the official laureate of Valentinian III. and Aëtius. Till the beginning of the 19th century he was known only from the notice of him in the Chronicle (year 443) of his contemporary Idacius, where he is praised as a poet and orator, and mention is made of statues set up in his honour. In 1813 the base of a statue was discovered at Rome, with a long inscription belonging to the year 435 (C.I.L. vi. 1724) upon Flavius Merobaudes, celebrating his merits as warrior and poet., Ten years later, Niebuhr discovered some Latin verses on a palimpsest in the monastery of St Gall, the authorship of, which was traced to Merobaudes, owing to the great similarity of the language in the prose preface to that of the inscription. Formerly the only piece known under the name of Merobaudes was a short poem (30 hexameters) De Christo, attributed to him by one MS., to Claudian by another; but Ebert is inclined to dispute the claim of Merobaudes to be considered either the author of the De Christo or a Christian.
The “Panegyric” and minor poems have been edited by B. G. Niebuhr (1824); by I. Bekker in the Bonn Corpus scriptorum hist. Byz. (1836); the “De Christo” in T. Birt’s Claudian (1892), where the authorship of Merobaudes is upheld; see also A. Ebert, Geschichte der Literatur des Mittelalters im Abendlande (1889).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Merlon

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​MERLON, in architecture, the solid part of an embattled parapet between the embrasures, sometimes pierced by loopholes. The word is French, adapted from Ital. merlone, possibly a shortened form of mergola, connected with Lat. mergae, pitchfork, or from a diminutive moerulus, from murus (moerus), a wall.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Merkara

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​MERKARA, the capital of the province of Coorg, in Southern India, situated on a plateau about 4000 ft. above the sea. Pop. (1901), 6732. It consists of two quarters: the fort, containing the public offices, the old palace, and the residence of the commissioner; and the native town of Mahadevapet. Here are the headquarters of the Coorg and Mysore Rifles, a body of volunteers chiefly composed of coffee planters.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Merlin, Antoine Christophe

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​MERLIN, ANTOINE CHRISTOPHE (1762–1833), French revolutionist, called “of Thionville” to distinguish him from his namesake of Douai (see below), was born at Thionville on the 13th of September 1762, being the son of a procureur in the bailliage of Thionville. After studying theology, he devoted himself to law, and in 1788 was an avocat at the parlement of Metz. In 1790 he was elected municipal officer of Thionville, and was sent by the department of Moselle to the Legislative Assembly. On the 23rd of October 1791 he moved and carried the institution of a committee of surveillance, of which he became a member. It was he who proposed the law sequestrating the property of the émigrés, and he took an important part in the émeute of the 20th of June 1792 and in the revolution of the 10th of August of the same year. He was elected deputy to the National Convention, and pressed for the execution of Louis XVI., but a mission to the army prevented his attendance at the trial. He displayed great bravery in the defence of Mainz. He took part in the reaction which followed the fall of Robespierre, sat in the Council of the Five Hundred under the Directory, and at the coup d’état of the 18th Fructidor (Sept. 4, 1797) demanded the deportation of certain republican members. In 1798 he ceased to be a member of the Council of Five Hundred, and was appointed director-general of posts, being sent subsequently to organize the army of Italy. He retired into private life at the proclamation of the consulate, and lived in retirement under the consulate and the empire. He died in Paris on the 14th of September 1833.
See J. Reynaud, Vie et correspondance de Merlin de Thionville (Paris, 1860).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Meristem

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​MERISTEM (Gr. μεριστός, divided or divisible), a botanical term for tissue which has the power of developing new ​forms of tissue, such as the cambium from which new wood is developed.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Merivale, Charles

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​MERIVALE, CHARLES (1808–1893), English historian and dean of Ely, the second son of John Herman Merivale and Louisa Heath Drury, daughter of Dr Drury, head master of Harrow, was born on the 8th of March 1808. His father (1779–1844) was an English barrister, and, from 1831, a commissioner in bankruptcy; he collaborated with Robert Bland (1779–1825) in his Collections from the Greek Anthology, and published some excellent translations from Italian and German. Charles Merivale was at Harrow School (1818 to 1824) under Dr Butler. His chief friends were Charles Wordsworth, afterwards bishop of St Andrews, and Richard Chenevix Trench, afterwards archbishop of Dublin. In 1824 he was offered a writership in the Indian civil service, and went for a short time to Haileybury College, where he was distinguished for proficiency in Oriental languages. But he eventually decided against an Indian career, and went up to St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1826. Among other distinctions he came out as fourth classic in 1830, and in 1833 was elected fellow of St John’s. He was a member of the Apostles’ Club, his fellow-members including Tennyson, A. H. Hallam, Monckton Milnes, W. H. Thompson, Trench and James Spedding. He was fond of athletic exercises, had played for Harrow against Eton in 1824, and in 1829 rowed in the first inter-university boat-race, when Oxford won. Having been ordained in 1833, he undertook college and university work successfully, and in 1839 was appointed select preacher at Whitehall. In 1848 he took the college living of Lawford, near Manningtree, in Essex; he married, in 1850, Judith Mary Sophia, youngest daughter of George Frere. In 1863 he was appointed chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons, declined the professorship of modern history at Cambridge in 1869, but in the same year accepted from Mr Gladstone the deanery of Ely, and until his death on the 27th of December 1893 devoted himself to the best interests of the cathedral. He received many honorary academical distinctions. His principal work was A History of the Romans under the Empire, in seven volumes, which came out between 1850 and 1862; but he wrote several smaller historical works, and published sermons, lectures and Latin verses. Merivale as a historian cannot be compared with Gibbon for virility, but he takes an eminently common-sense and appreciative view. The chief defect of his work, inevitable at the time it was composed, is that, drawing the materials from contemporary memoirs rather than from inscriptions, he relies on literary gossip rather than on numismatics and epigraphy; The dean was an elegant scholar, and his rendering of the Hyperion of Keats into Latin verse (1862) has received high praise.
See Autobiography of Dean Merivale, with selections from his correspondence, edited by his daughter, Judith A. Merivale (1899); and Family Memorials, by Anna W. Merivale (1884).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Merivale, Herman

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​MERIVALE, HERMAN (1806–1874), English civil servant and author, elder brother of the preceding, was born at Dawlish, Devonshire, on the 8th of November 1806. He was educated at Harrow School, and in 1823 entered Oriel College, Oxford. In 1825 he became a scholar of Trinity College and also won the Ireland scholarship, and three years later he was elected fellow of Balliol College. He became a member of the Inner Temple and practised on the western circuit, being made in 1841 recorder of Falmouth, Helston and Penzance. From 1837 to 1842 he was professor of political economy at Oxford. In this capacity he delivered a course of lectures on the British Colonies in which he dealt with questions of emigration, employment of labour and the allotment of public lands. The reputation he secured by these lectures had much to do with his appointment in 1847 as assistant under-secretary for the colonies, and in the next year he became permanent under-secretary. In 1859 he was transferred to the permanent under-secretaryship for India, receiving the distinction of C.B. In 1870 Merivale was made D.C.L. of Oxford. He died on the 8th of February 1874. Besides his Lectures on Colonization and Colonies (1841), he published Historical Studies (1865), and completed the Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis (1867); he wrote the second volume of the Life of Sir Henry Lawrence (1872) in continuation of Sir Herbert Edwardes’s work.
A tribute to his powers as an original thinker by his chief at the Colonial Office, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, is printed with a notice of his career which his brother contributed to the Transactions (1884) of the Devonshire Association.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Roebourne

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​ROEBOURNE, a settlement of De Witt county, Western Australia, 8 m. from the N.W. coast, on the Harding river, 920 m. direct N. of Perth. It is the centre of one of the richest and most varied mineral districts in the colony; gold, silver, tin, lead, copper, diamonds and other precious stones are found. There are extensive pearl fisheries off its port at Cossack Bay.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Roebuck, John

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ROEBUCK, JOHN (1718–1794), English inventor, was born in 1718 at Sheffield, where his father had a prosperous manufacturing business. After attending the grammar school at Sheffield and Dr Philip Doddridge’s academy at Northhampton, he studied medicine at Edinburgh, where he was imbued with a taste for chemistry by the lectures of William Cullen and Joseph Black, and he finally graduated M.D. at Leiden in 1742. He started practice at Birmingham, but devoted much of his time to chemistry, especially in its practical applications. Among the most important of his early achievements in this field was the introduction, in 1746, of leaden condensing chambers for use in the manufacturing of sulfuric acid. Together with Samuel Garbett he erected a factory at Prestonpans, near Edinburgh, for the production of acid in 1749, and for some years enjoyed a monopoly; but ultimately his methods became known, and, having omitted to take out patents for them at the proper time, he was unable to restrain others from making use of them. Engaging next in the manufacture of iron, he in 1760 established the ironworks which still exist at Carron, in Stirlingshire. There he introduced various improvements in the methods of production, including the conversion (patented in 1762) of cast iron into malleable iron “by the action of a hollow pit-coal fire” urged by a powerful artificial blast. His next enterprise was less successful. He leased a colliery at Bo’ness to supply coal to the Carron works, but in sinking for new seams encountered such quantities of water that the Newcomen engine which he used was unable to keep the pit clear. In this difficulty he heard of James Watt’s engine and entered into communication with its inventor. This engine, then at an early stage of its development, also proved inadequate, but Roebuck became a strong believer in its future and in return for a two-thirds share in the invention assisted Watt in perfecting its details. His troubles at the colliery, however, aggravated by the failure of the attempt to manufacture alkali, brought him into pecuniary straits, and he parted with his share in Watt’s engine to Matthew Boulton in return for a cancellation of a debt of £1200 which he owed the latter. Subsequently, though he had to give up his interest in the Bo’ness works, he continued to manage them and to reside at the neighbouring Kinneil House, where he occupied himself with farming on a considerable scale. He died on the 17th of July 1794.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Roebuck, John Arthur

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​ROEBUCK, JOHN ARTHUR (1801-1879), British politician, was born at Madras on the 28th of December 1801. After the death of his father, a civil servant, his mother's second marriage transferred him to Canada, where he was chiefly brought up. He came to England in 1824, was called to the bar (Q.C. 1843), became intimate with the leading radical and utilitarian reformers, was elected M.P. for Bath in 1832, and took up that general attitude of hostility to the government of the day, be it what it might, which he retained throughout his life. At all times conspicuous for his eloquence, honesty and recalcitrance, he twice came with especial prominence before the public—in 1838, when, although at the time without a seat in parliament, he appeared at the bar of the Commons to protest, in the name of the Canadian Assembly, against the suspension of the Canadian constitution; and in 1855, when, having overthrown Lord Aberdeen's ministry by carrying a resolution for the appointment of a committee of inquiry into the mismanagement in the Crimean War, he presided over its proceedings. In his latter years his political opinions became greatly modified, but with one interruption he retained his seat for Sheffield, which he had won in 1849, until his death in London on the 30th of November 1879.