OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Oldmixon, John

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​OLDMIXON, JOHN (1673–1742), English historian, was a son of John Oldmixon of Oldmixon, near Bridgwater. His first writings were poems and dramas, among them being Amores Britannici; Epistles historical and gallant (1703); and a tragedy, The Governor of Cyprus. His earliest historical work was The British Empire in America (1708 and again 1741), which was followed by The Secret History of Europe (1712–1715); by Arcana Gallica, or the Secret History of France for the last Century (1714); and by other smaller writings. More important, however, although of a very partisan character, are Oldmixon’s works on English history. His Critical history of England (1724–1726) contains attacks on Clarendon and a defence of Bishop Burnet, and its publication led to a controversy between Dr Zachary Grey (1688–1766) and the author, who replied to Grey in his Clarendon and Whitlock compared (1727). On the same, lines he wrote his History of England during the Reigns of the Royal House of Stuart (1730). Herein he charged Bishop Atterbury and other of Clarendon’s editors with tampering with the text of the . History. From his exile Atterbury replied to this charge in a Vindication, and although Oldmixon continued the controversy it is practically certain that he was in the wrong. He completed a continuous history of England by writing the History of England during the Reigns of William and Mary, Anne and George I. (1735); and the History of England during the Reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary and Elizabeth (1739). Among his other writings are, Memoirs of North Britain (1715), Essay on Criticism (1728) and Memoirs of the Press 1710–1740 (1742), which was only published after his death. Oldmixon had much to do with editing two periodicals. The Muses Mercury and The Medley, and he often complained that his services were overlooked by the government. He died on the 9th of July 1742.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Oldys, William

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​OLDYS, WILLIAM (1696–1761), English antiquary and bibliographer, natural son of Dr William Oldys, chancellor of Lincoln, was born on the 14th of July 1696, probably in London. His father had also held the office of advocate of the admiralty, but lost it in 1693 because he would not prosecute as traitors and pirates the sailors who had served against England under James II. William Oldys, the younger, lost part of his small patrimony in the South Sea Bubble, and in 1724 went to Yorkshire, spending the greater part of the next six years as the guest of the earl of Malton. On his return to London he found that his landlord had disposed of the books and papers left in his charge. Among these was an annotated copy of Gerard Langbaine’s Dramatick Poets. The book came into the hands of Thomas Coxeter (1689–1747), and subsequently into Theophilus Cibber’s possession, and furnished the basis of the Lives of the Poets (1753) published with Cibber’s name on the title page, though most of it was written by Robert Shiels. In 1731 Oldys sold his collections to Edward Harley, second earl of Oxford, who appointed him his literary secretary in 1738. Three years later his patron died, and from that time he worked for the booksellers. His habits were irregular, and in 1751 his debts drove him to the Fleet prison. After two years' imprisonment he was released through the kindness of friends who paid his debts, and in April 1755 he was appointed Norroy king-at-arms by the duke of Norfolk. He died on the 15th of April 1761.
Oldys’s chief works are: The British Librarian, a review of scarce and valuable books in print and in manuscript (1737–1738); the Harleian Miscellany (1744–1746), a collection of tracts and pamphlets in the earl of Oxford’s library, undertaken in conjunction with Dr Johnson; twenty-two articles contributed to the Biographia Britannica (1747–1760); an edition of Raleigh’s History of the World, with a Life of the author (1736); Life of Charles Cotton prefixed to Sir John Hawkins’s edition (1760) of the Compleat Angler. In 1727 Oldys began to annotate another Langbaine to replace the one he had lost. This valuable book, with a MS. collection of notes by Oldys on various bibliographical subjects, is preserved in the British Museum.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Oleaster

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​OLEASTER, known botanically as Elaeagnus hortensis, a handsome deciduous tree, 15 to 20 ft. high, growing in the Mediterranean region and temperate Asia, where it is commonly cultivated for its edible fruit. The brown smooth branches are more or less spiny; the narrow leaves have a hoary look from the presence of a dense covering of star-shaped hairs; the small fragrant yellow flowers, which are borne in the axils of the leaves, are scaly on the outside. The genus contains other species of ornamental deciduous or evergreen shrubs or small trees. E. argentea, a native of North America, has leaves and fruit covered with shining silvery scales. In E. glabra, from Japan, the evergreen leaves are clothed beneath with rust-coloured scales; variegated forms of this are cultivated, as also of E. pungens, another Japanese species, a spiny shrub with leaves silvery beneath.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Oldham

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​OLDHAM, a municipal county and parliamentary borough of Lancashire, England, 7 m. N.E. of Manchester, on the London & North-Western, Great Central and Lancashire & Yorkshire railways and the Oldham canal. Pop. (1891) 131,463; (1901) 137,246. The principal railway station is called Mumps, but there are several others. The town lies high, near the source of the small river Medlock. Its growth as a manufacturing centre gives it a wholly modern appearance. Among several handsome churches the oldest dates only from the later 18th century. The principal buildings and institutions include the town-hall, with tetrastyle portico copied from the Ionic temple of Ceres near Athens, the reference library, art gallery and museum, the Union Street baths, commemorating Sir Robert Peel the statesman, and the county court. Of educational establishments the chief are the Lyceum, a building in Italian style, containing schools of art and science, and including an observatory; the largely-endowed blue-coat school founded in 1808 by Thomas Henshaw, a wealthy manufacturer of hats; the Hulme grammar school (1895), and municipal technical schools. The Alexandra Park, opened in 1865, was laid out by operatives who were thrown out of employment owing to the cotton famine in the years previous to that date. The site is picturesquely undulating and terraced. Oldham is one of the most important centres of the cotton manufactures, the consumption of cotton being about one-fifth of the total importation into the United Kingdom, the factories numbering some 230, and the spindles over 13 millions, while some 35,000 operatives are employed. The principal manufactures are fustians, velvets, cords, shirtings, sheetings and nankeens. There are also large foundries and mill and cotton machinery works; and works for the construction of gas-meters and sewing-machines; while all these industries are assisted by the immediate presence of collieries. There are extensive markets and numerous fairs are held. Oldham was incorporated in 1849, and became a county borough in 1888. The corporation consists of a mayor, 12 aldermen and 36 councillors. The parliamentary borough has returned two members since 1832. Area of municipal borough, 4736 acres.
A Roman road, of which some traces are still left, passes through the site of the township, but it does not appear to have been a Roman station. It is not mentioned in Domesday; but in the reign of Henry III. Alwardus de Aldholme is referred to as holding land in Vernet (Werneth). A daughter and co-heiress of this Alwardus conveyed Werneth Hall and its manor to the Cudworths, a branch of the Yorkshire family, with whom it remained till the early part of the 18th century. From the Oldhams was descended Hugh Oldham, who died bishop of Exeter in 1519. From entries in the church registers it would appear that linens were manufactured in Oldham as early as 1630. Watermills were introduced in 1770, and with the adoption of Arkwright’s inventions the cotton industry grew with great rapidity.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Oldham, Thomas

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OLDHAM, JOHN (1816–1878) British geologist, was born in Dublin on the 4th of May 1816. He was educated there at Trinity College, graduating B.A. in 1836, and afterwards studied engineering in Edinburgh, where he gained a good knowledge of geology and mineralogy under Jameson. On his return to Ireland in 1839 he became chief assistant to Captain (afterwards Major General) Portlock, who conducted the geological department of the Ordnance Survey, and he rendered much help in the field and office in the preparation of Report of the Geology of Londonderry, &c. (1843). Subsequently he served under Captain (afterwards Sir Henry) James, the first local director of the Geological Survey of Ireland, whom he succeeded in 1846. Meanwhile in 1845 he was appointed professor of Geology in the university of Dublin. In 1848 he was elected F.R.S. In 1849 he discovered in the Cambrian rocks of Bray Head the problematical fossil named Oldhamia. In 1850 he was selected to take charge of the Geological Survey of India, which he organized, and in due course he established the Memoirs, the Paleontologia Indica and the Records, to which he contributed many important articles. In 1864 he published an elaborate report On the Coal Reserves of India. He retired in 1876, and died at Rugby on the 17th of July 1878.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Olean

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​OLEAN, a city of Cattaraugus county, in south-western New York, U.S.A., on Olean Creek and the N. side of the Allegheny river, 70 m. S.E. of Buffalo. Pop. (1880), 3036; (1890), 7358; (1900), 9462, of whom 1514 were foreign-born and 122 were negroes; (1910 census), 14,743. The city is served by the Erie, the Pittsburg, Shawmut & Northern, and the Pennsylvania railways (the last has large car shops here); and is connected with Bradford, Pa., Allegany, Pa., Salamanca, N.Y., Little Valley, N.Y., and Bolivar, N.Y. by electric lines. Olean is situated in a level valley 1440 ft. above sea-level. The surrounding country is rich in oil and natural gas. Six miles from Olean and 2000 ft. above the sea-level is Rock City, a group of immense, strangely regular, conglomerate rocks (some of them pure white) covering about 40 acres. They are remnants of a bed of Upper Devonian Conglomerate, which broke along the joint planes, leaving a group of huge blocks. In the city are a public library, a general hospital and a state armoury; and at Allegany (pop. 1905, 1330), about 3 m. W. of Olean, is St Bonaventure’s College (1859; Roman Catholic). Olean’s factory product was valued at $4,677,477 in 1905; the city is the terminus of an Ohio pipe line, and of a sea-board pipe line for petroleum; and among its industries are oil-refining and the refining of wood alcohol, tanning, currying, and finishing leather; and the manufacture of flour, glass (mostly bottles), lumber, &c. The vicinity was settled in 1804, and this was the first township organized (1808), being then coextensive with the county. Olean Greek was called Ischue (or Ischua); then Olean was suggested, possibly in reference to the oil-springs in the vicinity. The village was officially called Hamilton for a time, but Olean was the name given to the post-office in 1817, and Olean Point was the popular local name. In 1909 several suburbs, including the village of North Olean (pop. in 1905. 1761), were annexed to Olean, considerably increasing its area and population.
See History of Cattaraugus County, New York (Philadelphia, 1879).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Oleander

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​OLEANDER, the common name for the shrub known to botanists as Nerium Oleander. It is a native of Nerium Oleander.the Mediterranean and Levant, and is characterized by its tall shrubby habit and its thick lance-shaped opposite leaves, which exude a milky juice when punctured. The flowers are borne in terminal clusters, and are like those of the common periwinkle (Vinca), but are of a rose colour, rarely white, and the throat or upper edge of the tube of the corolla is occupied by outgrowths in the form of lobed and fringed petal-like scales. The hairy anthers adhere to the thickened stigma. The fruit or seed-vessel consists of two long pods, which, bursting along one edge, liberate a number of seeds, each of which has a tuft of silky hairs like thistle down at the upper end. The genus belongs to the natural order Apocynaceae, a family that, as is usual where the juice has a milky appearance, is marked by its poisonous properties. Cases are recorded by Lindley of children poisoned by the flowers. The same author also narrates how in the course of the Peninsular War some French soldiers died in consequence of employing skewers made from freshly-cut twigs of oleander for roasting their meat. The oleander was known to the Greeks under three names, viz. rhododendron, nerion and rhododaphne, and is well described by Pliny (xvi. 20), who mentions its rose-like flowers and poisonous qualities, at the same time stating that it was considered serviceable as a remedy against snake-bite. The name is supposed to be a corruption of lorandrum, lauridendrum (Du Cange), influenced by olea, the olive-tree, lorandrum being itself a corruption of rhododendron. The modern Greeks still know the plant as ῥοδοδάφνη), although in a figure in the Rinuccini MSS. of Dioscorides a plant is represented under this name, which, however, had rather the appearance of a willow herb (Epilobium). The oleander has long been cultivated in greenhouses in England, being, as Gerard says, “a small shrub of a gallant shewe”; numerous varieties, differing in the colour of their flowers, which are often double, have been introduced.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Oldham, John

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​OLDHAM, JOHN (1653–1683), English satirist, son of a Presbyterian minister, was born at Shipton Moyne, near Tetbury, Gloucestershire, on the 9th of August 1653. He graduated from St Edmund Hall, Oxford, in 1674, and was for three years an usher in a school at Croydon. Some of his verses attracted the attention of the town, and the earl of Rochester, with Sir Charles Sedley and other wits, came down to see him. The visit did not affect his career apparently, for he stayed at Croydon until 1681, when he became tutor to the grandsons of Sir Edward Thurland, near Reigate. Meanwhile he had tried, he says, to conquer his inclination for the unprofitable trade of poetry, but in the panic caused by the revelations of Titus Oates, he found an opportunity for the exercise of his gift for rough satire. Garnet’s Ghost was published as a broadside in 1679, but the other Satires on the Jesuits, although written at the same time, were not printed until 1681. The success of these dramatic and unsparing invectives apparently gave Oldham hope that he might become independent of teaching. But his undoubted services to the Country Party brought no reward from its leaders. He became tutor to the son of Sir William Hickes, and was eventually glad to accept the patronage of William Pierrepont, earl of Kingston, whose kindly offer of a chaplaincy he had refused earlier. He died at Holme-Pierrepoint, near Nottingham, on the 9th of December 1683, of smallpox.
Oldham took Juvenal for his model, and in breadth of treatment and power of invective surpassed his English predecessors. He was original in the dramatic setting provided for his satires. Thomas Garnet, who suffered for supposed implication in the Gunpowder Plot, rose from the dead to encourage the Jesuits in the first satire, and in the third Ignatius Loyola is represented as dictating his wishes to his disciples from his death-bed. Oldham wrote other satires, notably one “addressed to a friend about to leave the university,” which contains a well-known description of the state of slavery of the private chaplain, and another “dissuading from poetry”, describing the ingratitude shown to Edmund Spenser, whose ghost is the speaker, to Samuel Butler and to Abraham Cowley. Oldham’s verse is rugged, and his rhymes often defective, but he met with a generous appreciation from Dryden, whose own satiric bent was perhaps influenced by his efforts. He says (“To the Memory of Mr Oldham,” Works, ed. Scott, vol. xi. p. 99):—
“For sure our souls were near allied, and thine Cast in the same poetic mould with mine.”
The real wit and rigour of Oldham’s satirical poetry are undeniable, while its faults—its frenzied extravagance and lack of metrical polish—might, as Dryden suggests, have been cured with time, for Oldham was only thirty when he died.
The best edition of his works is The Compositions in Prose and Verse of Mr John Oldham . . . (1770), with memoir and explanatory notes by Edward Thompson.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Kock, Charles Paul de

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​KOCK, CHARLES PAUL DE (1793–1871), French novelist, was born at Passy on the 21st of May 1793. He was a posthumous child, his father, a banker of Dutch extraction, having been a victim of the Terror. Paul de Kock began life as a banker’s clerk. For the most part he resided on the Boulevard St Martin, and was one of the most inveterate of Parisians. He died in Paris on the 27th of April 1871. He began to write for the stage very early, and composed many operatic libretti. His first novel, L’Enfant de ma femme (1811), was published at his own expense. In 1820 he began his long and successful series of novels dealing with Parisian life with Georgette, ou la mère du Tabellion. His period of greatest and most successful activity was the Restoration and the early days of Louis Philippe. He was relatively less popular in France itself than abroad, where he was considered as the special painter of life in Paris. Major Pendennis’s remark that he had read nothing of the novel kind for thirty years except Paul de Kock, “who certainly made him laugh,” is likely to remain one of the most durable of his testimonials, and may be classed with the legendary question of a foreign sovereign to a Frenchman who was paying his respects, “Vous venez de Paris et vous devez savoir des nouvelles. Comment se porte Paul de Kock?” The disappearance of the grisette and of the cheap dissipation described by Henri Murger practically made Paul de Kock obsolete. But to the student of manners his portraiture of low and middle class life in the first half of the 19th century at Paris still has its value.
The works of Paul de Kock are very numerous. With the exception of a few not very felicitous excursions into historical romance and some miscellaneous works of which his share in La Grande ville, Paris (1842), is the chief, they are all stories of middle-class Parisian life, of guinguettes and cabarets and equivocal adventures of one sort or another. The most famous are André le Savoyard (1825) and Le Barbier de Paris (1826).
His Mémoires were published in 1873. See also Th. Trimm, La Vie de Charles Paul de Kock (1873).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Knuckle

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​KNUCKLE (apparently the diminutive of a word for “bone,” found in Ger. Knochen), the joint of a finger, which, when the hand is shut, is brought into prominence. In mechanical use the word is applied to the round projecting part of a hinge through which the pin is run, and in ship-building to an acute angle on some of the timbers. A “knuckle-duster,” said to have originally come from the criminal slang of the United States, is a brass or metal instrument fitting on to the hand across the knuckles, with projecting studs and used for inflicting a brutal blow.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Koch

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​KOCH, a tribe of north-eastern India, which has given its name to the state of Kuch Behar (q.v.). They are probably of Mongolian stock, akin to the Mech, Kachari, Garo and Tippera tribes, and originally spoke, like these, a language of the Bodo group. But since one of their chiefs established a powerful kingdom at Kuch Behar in the 16th century they have gradually become Hinduized, and now adopt the name of Rajbansi (= “of royal blood”). In 1901 the number in Eastern Bengal and Assam was returned at nearly 21/2 millions.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Kobell, Wolfgang Xaver Franz, Baron von

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​KOBELL, WOLFGANG XAVER FRANZ, Baron von (1803–1882), German mineralogist, was born at Munich on the 19th of July 1803. He studied chemistry and mineralogy at Landshut (1820–1823), and in 1826 became professor of mineralogy in the university of Munich. He introduced some new methods of mineral analyses, and in 1855 invented the stauroscope for the study of the optical properties of crystals. He contributed numerous papers to scientific journals, and described many new minerals. He died at Munich on the 11th of November, 1882.
Publications.—Charakteristik der Mineralien (2 vols. 1830–1831); Tafeln zur Bestimmung der Mineralien &c. (1833; and later editions, ed. 12, by K. Oebbeke, 1884); Grundzüge der Mineralogie (1838); Geschichte der Mineralogie von 1650–1860 (1864).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Kobdo

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​KOBDO, a town of the Chinese Empire, in north-west Mongolia, at the northern foot of the Mongolian Altai, on the right bank of the Buyantu River, 13 m. from its entrance into Lake Khara-usu; 500 m. E.S.E. of Biysk (Russian), and 470 m. W. of Ulyasutai. It is situated amidst a dreary plain, and consists of a fortress, the residence of the governor of the Kobdo district, and a small trading town, chiefly peopled by Chinese and a few Mongols. It is, however, an important centre for trade between the cattle-breeding nomads and Peking. It was founded by the Chinese in 1731, and pillaged by the Mussulmans in 1872. The district of Kobdo occupies the north-western corner of Mongolia, and is peopled chiefly by Mongols, and also by Kirghiz and a few Soyotes, Uryankhes and Khotons. It is governed by a Chinese commissioner, who has under him a special Mongol functionary (Mongol, dzurgan). The chief monastery is at Ulangom. Considerable numbers of sheep (about 1,000,000), sheepskins, sheep and camel wool are exported to China, while Chinese cottons, brick tea and various small goods are imported. Leather, velveteen, cotton, iron and copper goods boxes, &c., are imported from Russia in exchange for cattle, furs and wool. The absence of a cart road to Biysk hinders the development of this trade.