OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mersey, John Charles Bigham, 1st Viscount

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​MERSEY, JOHN CHARLES BIGHAM, 1st Viscount (1840- ), English judge, was born at Liverpool, Aug. 3 1840, and was educated at the Liverpool Institute and later at Berlin and Paris. He was called to the bar in 1870, was made a Q.C. in 1883, and became leader of the northern circuit. He entered the House of Commons in 1895 as Unionist member for the Exchange division of Liverpool, but lost his seat in 1897. In the same year he was raised to the bench and knighted. In 1902 he was president of the Royal Commission for the revision of the South African martial law sentences, and from 1904 to 1908 president of the railway and canal commission. From 1904 to 1910 he was chief judge in bankruptcy, and in 1909 became president of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty division of the High Court, and was made a privy councillor. In 1910 he was raised to the peerage. He was recognized as one of the highest authorities on Admiralty and shipping questions, and in 1912 became wreck commissioner, being the same year president of the commission which investigated the loss of the “Titanic.” He presided in 1913 over the conference on the safety of life at sea, and in 1914 over the commission of inquiry into the loss of the “Empress of Ireland.” On the outbreak of the World War Lord Mersey's wide experience and knowledge were recognized by his appointment as head of the Admiralty transport arbitration board, and in 1915 he investigated the circumstances ​attending the losses of the " Falaba " and the " Lusitania." In 1916 he was created a viscount.
# 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Michigan, University of

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MICHIGAN, UNIVERSITY OF (see 18.378), was the first university established by an American state to become conspicuously successful. The promise of its earlier period continued in recent years. The total roll of the faculty increased from 350 in 1907-8 to 616 in 1919-20, while the number of students grew from 5,013 to 9,401 in the same period (5,007 in the college of Literature, Science and the Arts, 2,038 in the college of Engineering and Architecture, 394 in the Medical School, 382 in the Law School, 99 in the college of Pharmacy, 42 in the Homoeopathic Medical School, 350 in the college of Dental Surgery, 340 in the Graduate School, 1,961 in the Summer Session and 222 in the two training schools for nurses). On Jan. 1 1921 there were over 30,000 living graduates. The Medical School, Law School and Homoeopathic Medical School demand two years of college work before admitting students.
Among the buildings erected between 1910 and 1920 were the Hill Auditorium (1913) seating 5,000 persons, with remarkably good acoustic properties; the Natural Science Building (1916); the new University Library (1919) containing approximately 400,000 volumes, with room for over 1,000,000 volumes; the Michigan Union (1919), a student clubhouse costing $1,250,000, the gift of
some 14,000 alumni. A new university hospital was to be completed in 1922 with accommodation for 600 patients, affording proper facilities for the teaching of medicine, and the first hospital controlled exclusively for the benefit of the people of the state. Four dormitories for women students were also erected during this period.
The income of the university in 1919-20 was $3,802,164. Of this amount $1,687,500 was derived from the state through the tax of three-eighths of a mill on every dollar of taxable property, $38,428 from the state lands originally granted by the Government for the support of the university, $682,445 from tuition, student fees, etc., and $659,250 from special appropriations and savings for the erection of buildings.
Over 12,000 graduates and students of the university were enlisted in the U.S. forces during the World War, of whom 231 lost their lives. This number included 2,747 students who were enrolled in the collegiate section of the Students' Army Training Corps during the fall of 1918. Pres. James Burrill Angell, upon his resignation in 1909, was succeeded by Harry Burns Hutchins, dean of the Law School, as acting president (1909-10) and president (1910-20). Pres. Hutchins resigned in 1920 and was succeeded by Marion Leroy Burton, who had been president of Smith College (1910-7) and of the university of Minnesota (1917-20).
See A Memorial of the Seventy-fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, 1915); also Wilfred Shaw, The University of Michigan (New York, 1920) and A. L. Cross, “The University of Michigan and the Training of her Students for the War,” Michigan History Magazine (Lansing, Jan. 1920).
    (W. B. S.)
# 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Midleton, William St. John Fremantle Brodrick, 1st Earl of

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​MIDLETON, WILLIAM ST. JOHN FREMANTLE BRODRICK, 1st Earl of (1856- ), English politician (see 18.419), did not remain long out of Parliament after his defeat in the general election of 1906, as in the following year his father died, and he entered the House of Lords as pth viscount. He took a considerable share in the work of that House, and played an active part behind the scenes in Unionist politics, without returning to ministerial office. He was indeed perhaps the most conspicuous figure among the Unionist leaders who did not find a place in Mr. Asquith's Coalition Cabinet. He had meanwhile become specially prominent as leader of the southern Unionists of Ireland, in virtue of his position as a landowner in county Cork. In his opposition to the Home Rule bills, he was never willing to base himself mainly on the difficulties of Ulster, but constantly called attention to the necessity of protecting loyalists in the South and securing them from discriminating taxation. He was disquieted by the negotiations carried on in the summer of 1916 with the Irish leaders by Mr. Lloyd George on behalf of Mr. Asquith's Coalition Ministry, on the basis of excluding the six Ulster counties but bringing the Home Rule Act at once into effect in the rest of Ireland. In the Irish Convention, which was set up in the middle of 1917 and sat into the following year, he and a band of southern Unionists separated themselves from the Ulster standpoint, and showed themselves ready to concede a unitary Home Rule Government for Ireland, subject to provisions for safeguarding the minority of loyalists. At the beginning of 1920 he was created an earl.
# 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Merry, William Walter

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​MERRY, WILLIAM WALTER (1835–1918), English classical scholar, was born at Evesham Sept. 6 1835. Educated at Cheltenham and Balliol College, Oxford, he became fellow and lecturer of Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1859 and rector of the college in 1884. A witty and fluent speaker both in Latin and in English, he acquired a great reputation as public orator to the university, a post he held from 1880 down to the time of his death. He published editions of many of the plays of Aristophanes (1879–1900), as well as an edition of Homer's Odyssey (1870–8) and Selected Fragments of Roman Poetry (1891). He died at Oxford March 5 1918.
# 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Meyer, George von Lengerke

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MEYER, GEORGE VON LENGERKE (1858-1918), American diplomatist, was born in Boston, Mass., June 24 1858. After graduating from Harvard in 1879 he was engaged in business for 20 years. He entered public life in 1889 as a member of the Boston Common Council and two years later became a member of the Board of Aldermen. From 1892 to 1897 he was a member of the Mass. House of Representatives, being speaker for the last three years. In 1898 he was appointed by Governor Wolcott as chairman of the Mass. Paris Exposition Managers. From 1900 to 1904 he was a member of the Republican National Committee. In 1900 he was appointed ambassador to Italy by President McKinley, and five years later was transferred by President Roosevelt to Russia. In 1907 he was recalled by Roosevelt and made Postmaster-General in his Cabinet. From 1909 to 1913 he was Secretary of the Navy in President Taft's Cabinet. On the outbreak of the World War he urged preparedness and criticised America's naval administration. He was actively associated with the National Security League and the Navy League. He was a director in many organizations, including the Amoskeag Manufacturing Co., Old Colony Trust Co., Puget Sound Light & Power Co., Walter Baker Co., and Ames Plow Co. He died in Boston March 9 1918.
See M. A. De Wolfe Howe, George von Lengerke Meyer: His Life and Services (1920).
# 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Michelson, Albert Abraham

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MICHELSON, ALBERT ABRAHAM (1852-), American physicist, was born in Strelno, Germany, Dec. 19 1852. His parents moved to San Francisco, Cal., where he studied in the public schools. He graduated from U.S. Naval Academy in 1873 and was instructor in physics and chemistry there during 1875-9. He was then for a short time in the Nautical Almanac office. From 1880 to 1882 he studied in Berlin, Heidelberg and Paris. He resigned from the navy in 1881. In 1883 he was appointed professor of physics at the Case School of Applied Science, Cleveland, O., and six years later accepted a similar position at Clark University. In 1892 he was appointed professor and head of the department of physics at the university of Chicago. He early directed his researches to the velocity of light and while in Cleveland invented his interferometer (see 14.693), which enabled him to measure distances by means of the length of light-waves. In 1892 he was a member of the Bureau Internationale des Poids et Mesures and in 1897 of the International Committee of Weights and Measures. He was made president of the American Physical Society in 1901 and of the American Society for the Advancement of Science in 1910. He received medals and prizes from many learned societies and in 1907 was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics. In 1920 he was able to demonstrate by means of light-interference that the diameter of Alpha Orionis was 260,000,000 miles. This was the first computation ever made of the size of a star. He was the author of numerous papers on light and in 1903 published Light Waves and Their Uses, being Lowell lectures for 1899. In 1921 he was awarded the gold medal of the Society of Arts, London. (For the “Michelson-Morley experiment,” in interference of light, with its bearing on the Einstein theory, see Relativity.)
# 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Michaelis, Georg

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​MICHAELIS, GEORG (1857- ), Prussian official, was born on Sept. 7 1857 at Haynau. He studied law and was for some years after 1885 a lecturer at the university of Tokyo. On his return to Germany he continued his official career and rose to the position of Under-Secretary of State in the Prussian Ministry of Finance. On the outbreak of the World War he was appointed director of the Imperial department for the control of the grain trade, and in Feb. 1917 State commissioner for the national food supply. On the retirement of Bethmann Hollweg in July 1917 the influence of the higher military authorities, including Hindenburg (in the leading strings of Ludendorff), was exercised in favour of the appointment of a chancellor who would accommodate his policy to theirs in home as well as in foreign affairs. In the hope of avoiding conflicts between the highest military and the highest civil authorities of the empire, the immediate entourage of the Emperor, in particular the chief of his Civil Cabinet, Valentini, seems to have suggested the appointment of a colourless Prussian official. Michaelis was accordingly appointed, but even in the first weeks of his chancellorship his weakness became manifest. The so-called Peace Resolution in favour of a peace "without annexation or indemnities" had been passed by the Reichstag on July 19. Michaelis was confronted with the demand of the parliamentary majority that in his public utterances he should identify himself with the spirit and the letter of this resolution. Under the influence of the military authorities he attempted to evade this obligation by declaring himself, in a phrase that became celebrated, the supporter of the resolution "as he understood it." There was a storm of indignation throughout the country, but Michaelis had still further to compromise himself, together with Adml. von Kapelle, over the naval mutiny before it was recognized that his position was altogether untenable. He was with some difficulty induced to resign, and was succeeded by Count Hertling on Nov. 1 1917. He was then appointed chief president in the province of Pomerania, an office which he held till 1919.
# 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Micheler, Joseph Alfred

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​MICHELER, JOSEPH ALFRED (1861- ), French general, was born at Phalsbourg (Meurthe) on Sept. 23 1861. He entered St. Cyr in Oct. 1880 and was appointed a sub-lieutenant on the completion of his course in 1882. He was promoted lieutenant in 1886, captain in 1891, major in 1901 and lieutenant-colonel in 1909. Three years later he was made a colonel. At the outbreak of the World War he was employed as chief-of-staff to the VI. Corps. In Oct. 1914 he was promoted general of brigade, and in Jan. 1915 was transferred as chief-of-staff to the I. Army. On Aug. 3 1915 he took over command of the 53rd Inf. Div., being later (March 25 1916) promoted a temporary general of division and appointed to the XXXVIII. Army Corps. Ten days later he was placed at the head of the X. Army. On June 22 1916 he was confirmed in his rank as general of division. He commanded the X. Army during the battle of the Somme, and was then called to the head of a new group of armies formed behind the centre for the exploitation of the victory counted upon in Gen. Nivelle's Aisne scheme. He was thus involved very deeply in the controversies which centred upon that scheme both before and after April 16 1917. It was principally his criticisms that initiated the internal crisis, and led to the council of war, in which, however, he seems not to have followed up his objections. His relations were strained with his subordinate Mangin as well as with Nivelle, and the latter sought afterwards to saddle him with part of the responsibility for the relative failure of the offensive. His group of armies being broken up he returned to the duties of an army commander. In May 1918 he vacated the command of the V. Army which he had held for a year. He was made a commander of the Legion of Honour (Sept. 30 1916).
# 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Michelham, Herbert Stern, 1st Baron

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​MICHELHAM, HERBERT STERN, 1st Baron (1851-1919), British financier, was born Sept. 28 1851, the son of Hermann de Stern, Portuguese baron and banker, and Julia Goldsmid. He entered his father's banking house, Stern Bros., of London, Paris and Belgium, and inherited from his father the Portuguese barony and a fortune of 2,000,000, which was much increased by his own financial ability. In July 1905 he was created a baronet and in Dec. was raised to the peerage of the United Kingdom as Baron Michelham. He presented to the nation the quadriga surmounting the arch on Constitution Hill, and subscribed liberally for the purchase of pictures for the National Gallery, besides forming a valuable private collection. He was also well known as an owner of race-horses. During the World War he bought the Hotel Astoria in Paris for use as a British hospital, and established and maintained a convalescent home for officers at Cimiez. He died in Paris Jan. 7 1919 and was succeeded by his son Herman Alfred Stern, 2nd Baron (b. 1900).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Scylla and Charybdis

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​ SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS. In Homer (Od. xii. 73, 235, 430) Scylla is a dreadful sea-monster, daughter of Crataeis, with six heads, twelve feet and a voice like the yelp of a puppy. She dwelt in a sea-cave looking to the west, far up the face of a huge cliff. Out of her cave she stuck her heads, fishing for marine creatures and snatching the seamen out of passing ships. Within a bowshot of this cliff was another lower cliff with a great fig-tree growing on it. Under this second rock dwelt Charybdis, who thrice a day sucked in and thrice spouted out the sea water. Between these rocks Odysseus sailed, and Scylla snatched six men out of his ship. In later classical times Scylla and Charybdis, whose position is not defined by Homer, were localized in the Straits of Messina—Scylla on the Italian, Charybdis on the Sicilian side (Strabo i. p. 24; vi. p. 268). The well-known line, Incidis in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim, occurs in the Alexandreis of Gautier de Lille, a poet of the 12th century. In Ovid (Metam. xiv. 1–74) Scylla appears as a beautiful maiden beloved by the sea-god Glaucus and other deities, and changed by the jealous Circe (or other rival) into a sea-monster; afterwards she was transformed into a rock shunned by fishermen. According to a late legend (Servius on Aeneid, iii. 420), Charybdis was a voracious woman who robbed Heracles of his cattle and was therefore cast into the sea by Zeus, where she retained her old voracious nature. In later poetry and art Scylla was conceived of as a maiden above, with dogs' or wolves' heads growing out of her body, and the tail of a fish.
Another Scylla, confounded by Virgil (Ecl. vi. 74) with the sea-monster, was a daughter of Nisus (q.v.), king of Megara.
See O. Waser, Skylla und Charybdis in der Literatur und Kunst der Griechen und Römer (1894); and D. Jobst, Skylla und Charybdis (Würzburg, 1902), who endeavours to show that the Homeric description really referred, as the ancients assumed, to the Sicilian straits.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Scymnus

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​ SCYMNUS of Chios, the name assigned to a Greek geographer of uncertain date, commonly taken to be the author of a fragmentary anonymous Paraphrasis in verse describing the northern coasts of the Mediterranean and the shores of the Black Sea, a work which in the first edition (Augsburg, 1600) was ascribed to Marcianus of Heraclea. Meineke showed that this piece cannot be by Scymnus. It is dedicated to a King Nicomedes, probably Nicomedes III. of Bithynia (91–76 B.C.), and so would date from the beginning of the 1st century B.C. Its most valuable portions relate to the Euxine regions and to the Hellenic colonies of those shores as well as of the coasts of Spain, Gaul and Italy.
See Meineke's edition (Berlin, 1846); C. Müller, Geographi Graeci minores, vol. i., where the poem is edited with sufficient prolegomena, (pp. lxxiv.–lxxvii.); E. H. Bunbury, Ancient Geography, i. 99, 100, 102, 128, 183; ii. 26, 69–74.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Scyros

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​SCYROS, a small rocky barren island in the Aegean Sea. Off the coast of Thessaly, containing a town of the same name. In 469 B.C. it was conquered by the Athenians under Cimon, and it was probably about this time that the legends arose which connect it with the Attic hero Theseus, who was said to have been treacherously slain and buried there. A mythic claim was thus formed to justify the Athenian attack, and Cimon brought back the bones of Theseus to Athens in triumph. The inhabitants of Scyros before the Athenian conquest were Dolopes (Thuc. 1. 98); but other accounts speak of Pelasgians or Carians as the earliest inhabitants. There was a sanctuary of Achilles on the island, and numerous traditions connect Scyros with that hero. He was concealed, disguised as a woman, in the palace of Lycomedes, king of the island, when his mother wished to keep him back from the Trojan War; he was discovered there by Odysseus, and gladly accompanied him to Troy. An entirely different cycle of legends relate the conquest of Scyros by Achilles. The actual worship on the island of a hero or god named Achilles, and the probable kinship of its inhabitants with a Thessalian people, whose hero Achilles also was, form the historical foundation of the legends. Scyros was left, along with Lemnos and Imbros, to the Athenians by the peace of Antalcides (387 B.C.). It was taken by Philip, and continued under Macedonian rule till 196, when the Romans restored it to Athens, in whose possession it remained throughout the Roman period. It was sacked by an army of Goths, Heruli and Peucini, in A.D. 269. The ancient city was situated on a lofty rocky peak, on the north-eastern coast, where the modern town of St George now stands. A temple of Athena, the chief goddess of Scyros, was on the shore near the town. The island has a small stream, called in ancient times Cephissus.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Scythae

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​SCYTHAE (Gr. Σκύθαι), in Herodotus (iv. 1–142) and Hippocrates (De aere, 24 sqq.), a definite nation giving its name to Scythia (q.v.); in later writers a general term for the inhabitants of that country without distinction of race.
# A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Smith, Elizabeth

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SMITH, ELIZABETH,
Was born, in 1766, at the family seat of Burnhall, in the county of Durham. She understood mathematics, drawing, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, and French. Her "Fragments," "Translation of Job," and "Translation of the Life of Klopstock," have been published. She also wrote poetry. She died in 1806, aged thirty years.