OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gravina

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​GRAVINA, a town and episcopal see of Apulia, Italy, in the province of Bari, from which it is 63 m. S.W. by rail (29 m. direct), 1148 ft. above sea-level. Pop. (1901) 18,197. The town is probably of medieval origin, though some conjecture that it occupies the site of the ancient Blera, a post station on the Via Appia. The cathedral is a basilica of the 15th century. The town is surrounded with walls and towers, and a castle of the emperor Frederick II. rises above the town, which later belonged to the Orsini, dukes of Gravina; just outside it are dwellings and a church (S. Michele) all hewn in the rock, and now abandoned.
Prehistoric remains in the district (remains of ancient settlements, tumuli, &c.) are described by V. di Cicco in Notizie degli scavi (1901), p. 217.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gravina, Giovanni Vincenzo

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​GRAVINA, GIOVANNI VINCENZO (1664–1718), Italian littérateur and jurisconsult, was born at Roggiano, a small town near Cosenza, in Calabria, on the 20th of January 1664. He was descended from a distinguished family, and under the direction of his maternal uncle, Gregorio Caloprese, who possessed some reputation as a poet and philosopher, received a learned education, after which he studied at Naples civil and canon law. In 1689 he came to Rome, where in 1695 he united with several others of literary tastes in forming the Academy of Arcadians. A schism occurred in the academy in 1711, and Gravina and his followers founded in opposition to it the Academy of Quirina. From Innocent XII. Gravina received the offer of various ​ecclesiastical honours, but declined them from a disinclination to enter the clerical profession. In 1699 he was appointed to the chair of civil law in the college of La Sapienza, and in 1703 he was transferred to the chair of canon law. He died at Rome on the 6th of January 1718. He was the adoptive father of Metastasio.
Gravina is the author of a number of works of great erudition, the principal being his Origines juris civilis, completed in 3 vols. (1713) and his De Romano imperio (1712). A French translation of the former appeared in 1775, of which a second edition was published in 1822. His collected works were published at Leipzig in 1737, and at Naples, with notes by Mascovius, in 1756.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gray, David

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​GRAY, DAVID (1838–1861), Scottish poet, the son of a hand-loom weaver, was born at Merkland, near Glasgow, on the 29th of January 1838. His parents resolved to educate him for the church, and through their self-denial and his own exertions as a pupil teacher and private tutor he was able to complete a course of four sessions at the university of Glasgow. He began to write poetry for The Glasgow Citizen and began his idyll on the Luggie, the little stream that ran through Merkland. His most intimate companion at this time was Robert Buchanan, the poet; and in May 1860 the two agreed to proceed to London, with the idea of finding literary employment. Shortly after his arrival in London Gray introduced himself to Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, with whom he had previously corresponded. Lord Houghton tried to persuade him to return to Scotland, but Gray insisted on staying in London. He was unsuccessful in his efforts to place Gray’s poem, “The Luggie,” in The Cornhill Magazine, but gave him some light literary work. He also showed him great kindness when a cold which had seized him assumed the serious form of consumption, and sent him to Torquay; but as the disease made rapid progress, an irresistible longing seized Gray to return to Merkland, where he arrived in January 1861, and died on the 3rd of December following, having the day before had the gratification of seeing a printed specimen copy of his poem “The Luggie,” published eventually by the exertions of Sydney Dobell. He was buried in the Auld Aisle Churchyard, Kirkintilloch, where in 1865 a monument was erected by “friends far and near” to his memory.
“The Luggie,” the principal poem of Gray, is a kind of reverie in which the scenes and events of his childhood and his early aspirations are mingled with the music of the stream which he celebrates. The series of sonnets, “In the Shadows,” was composed during the latter part of his illness. Most of his poems necessarily bear traces of immaturity, and lines may frequently be found in them which are mere echoes from Thomson, Wordsworth or Tennyson, but they possess, nevertheless, distinct individuality, and show a real appreciation of natural beauty.
The Luggie and other Poems, with an introduction by R. Monckton Milnes, and a brief memoir by James Hedderwick, was published in 1862; and a new and enlarged edition of Gray’s Poetical Works, edited by Henry Glassford Bell, appeared in 1874. See also David Gray and other Essays, by Robert Buchanan (1868), and the same writer’s poem on David Gray, in Idyls and Legends of Inverburn.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gravelotte

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​GRAVELOTTE, a village of Lorraine between Metz and the French frontier, famous as the scene of the battle of the 18th of August 1870 between the Germans under King William of Prussia and the French under Marshal Bazaine (see Metz and Franco-German War). The battlefield extends from the woods which border the Moselle above Metz to Roncourt, near the river Orne. Other villages which played an important part in the battle of Gravelotte were Saint Privat, Amanweiler or Amanvillers and Sainte-Marie-aux-Chênes, all lying to the N. of Gravelotte.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gravy

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GRAVY, a word usually confined to the parent juices which come from meat during cooking. In early uses (in the New English Dictionary the quotations date from the end of the 14th to the beginning of the 16th centuries) it meant a sauce of broth flavoured with spices and almonds. The more modern usage seems to date from the end of the 16th century. The word is obscure in origin. It has been connected with "graves" or "greaves," the refuse of tallow in the manufacturing of soap or candles. The more probable derivation is from the French. In Old French the word is almost certainly grané, and is derived from grain, "something used in cooking." The word was early read and spelled with a u or v instead of n, and the corruption was adopted in English.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Geddes, James Lorraine

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​GEDDES, JAMES LORRAINE (1827–1887), American soldier and writer, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on the 19th of March 1827. In his boyhood he was taken to Canada, but in 1843 he returned to Scotland; then studied at Calcutta in the military academy, entered the army, and after distinguishing himself in the Punjab campaign, returned to Canada, whence in 1857 he removed to Vinton, Iowa. In the American Civil War he served in the Federal army first as lieutenant-colonel and after February 1862 as colonel of volunteers, taking part in the fighting at Shiloh, Vicksburg and Corinth. He was captured at Shiloh and was imprisoned for a time at Madison, Ga., and in Libby prison, Richmond, Va., and in 1865 was brevetted brigadier-general of volunteers. He was principal of the College for the Blind at Vinton after the war, and until his death was connected with the Iowa College of Agriculture at Ames, being military instructor and cashier in 1870–1882, acting president in 1876–1877, librarian in 1877–1875, vice-president and professor of military tactics in 1880–1882, and treasurer in 1884–1887. He died at Ames on the 21st of February 1887. He wrote a number of war songs, including “The Soldiers’ Battle Prayer” and “The Stars and Stripes.”
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Geddes, Sir William Duguid

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​GEDDES, SIR WILLIAM DUGUID (1828–1900), Scottish scholar and educationist, was born in Aberdeenshire. He was educated at Elgin academy and university and King’s College, Aberdeen, and after having held various scholastic posts he was appointed in 1860 professor of Greek and in 1885 principal of the (united) university of Aberdeen. He was knighted in 1892. He died in Aberdeen on the 9th of February 1900. It is chiefly as a teacher that Geddes will be remembered, and in his enthusiastic and successful efforts to raise the standard of Greek at the Scottish universities he has been compared with the humanists of the Renaissance. Amongst other works he was the author of A Greek Grammar (1855; 17th edition, 1883; new and revised edition, 1893); a meritorious edition of the Phaedo of Plato (2nd ed., 1885); and The Problem of the Homeric Poems (1878), in which, while supporting Grote’s view that the Iliad consisted of an original Achilleïs with insertions or additions by later hands, he maintains that these insertions are due to the author of the Odyssey.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ged, William

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​GED, WILLIAM (1690–1749), the inventor of stereotyping, was born at Edinburgh in 1690. In 1725 he patented his invention, developed from the simple process of soldering together loose types of Van der Mey. Ged, although he succeeded in obtaining a cast in similar metal, of a type page, could not persuade Edinburgh printers to take up his invention, and finally entered into partnership with a London stationer named Jenner and Thomas James, a typefounder. The partnership, however, turned out very ill; and Ged, broken-hearted at his want of success due to trade jealousy and the compositors’ dislike of the innovation, died in poverty on the 19th of October 1749. Two prayer-books for the university of Cambridge and an edition of Sallust were printed from his stereotype plates. In his time the best type was imported from Holland, and Ged’s daughter reports that he had repeated offers from the Dutch which, from patriotic motives, he refused. His sons tried to carry out his patent, and it was eventually perfected by Andrew Wilson.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Geddes, Andrew

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​GEDDES, ANDREW (1783–1844), British painter, was born at Edinburgh. After receiving a good education in the high school and in the university of that city, he was for five years in the excise office, in which his father held the post of deputy auditor. After the death of his father, who had opposed his desire to become an artist, he came to London and entered the Royal Academy schools. His first contribution to the exhibitions of the Royal Academy, a “St John in the Wilderness,” appeared at Somerset House in 1806, and from that year onwards Geddes was a fairly constant exhibitor of figure-subjects and portraits. His well-known portrait of Wilkie, with whom he was on terms of intimacy, was at the Royal Academy in 1816. He alternated for some years between London and Edinburgh, with some excursions on the Continent, but in 1831 settled in London, and was elected associate of the Royal Academy in 1832; and he ​died in London of consumption in 1844. A very able executant, a good colourist, and a close student of character, he made his chief success as a portrait-painter, but he produced occasional figure subjects and landscapes, and executed some admirable copies of the old masters as well. He was also a good etcher. His portrait of his mother, and a portrait study, called “Summer,” are in the National Gallery of Scotland, and his portrait of Sir Walter Scott is in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
See Art in Scotland: its Origin and Progress, by Robert Brydall (1889); The Scottish School of Painting, by William D. McKay, R.S.A. (1906).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gee, Thomas

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​GEE, THOMAS (1815–1898), Welsh Nonconformist preacher and journalist, was born at Denbigh on the 24th of January 1815. At the age of fourteen he went into his father’s printing office, but continued to attend the grammar school in the afternoons. In 1837 he went to London to improve his knowledge of printing, and on his return to Wales in the following year ardently threw himself into literary, educational and religious work. Among his publications were the well-known quarterly magazine Y Traethodydd (“The Essayist”), Gwyddoniadur Cymreig (“Encyclopaedia Cambrensis”), and Dr Silvan Evans’s English-Welsh Dictionary (1868), but his greatest achievement in this field was the newspaper Baner Cymru (“The Banner of Wales”), founded in 1857 and amalgamated with Yr Amserau (“The Times”) two years later. This paper soon became an oracle in Wales, and played a great part in stirring up the nationalist movement in the principality. In educational matters he waged a long and successful struggle on behalf of undenominational schools and for the establishment of the intermediate school system. He was an enthusiastic advocate of church disestablishment, and had a historic newspaper duel with Dr John Owen (afterwards bishop of St David’s) on this question. The Eisteddfod found in him a thorough friend and a wise counsellor. His commanding presence, mastery of diction, and resonant voice made him an effective platform speaker. He was ordained to the Calvinistic Methodist ministry at Bala in 1847, and gave his time and talents ungrudgingly to Sunday school and temperance work. Throughout his life he believed in the itinerant unpaid ministry rather than in the settled pastorate. He died on the 28th of September 1898, and his funeral was the most imposing ever seen in North Wales.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gebweiler

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​GEBWEILER (Fr. Guebwiller), a town of Germany in the imperial province of Alsace-Lorraine, at the foot of the Vosges, on the Lauch, 13 m. S. of Colmar, on the railway Bollweiler-Lautenbach. Pop. (1905) 13,259. Among the principal buildings are the Roman Catholic church of St Leodgar, dating from the 12th century, the Evangelical church, the synagogue, the town-house, and the old Dominican convent now used as a market and concert hall. The chief industries are spinning and dyeing, and the manufacture of cloth and of machinery; quarrying is carried on and the town is celebrated for its white wines.
Gebweiler is mentioned as early as 774. It belonged to the religious foundation of Murbach, and in 1759 the abbots chose it for their residence. In 1789, at the outbreak of the Revolution, the monastic buildings were laid in ruins, and, though the archives were rescued and removed to Colmar, the library perished.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pisek

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​PISEK, a town of Bohemia, 55 m. S. of Prague by rail. Pop. (1900), 13,608, mostly Czech. It lies on the right bank of the Wottawa, which is here crossed by an interesting stone bridge of great antiquity. The most prominent buildings are the church of the Nativity, the town-hall, and a castle dating from the 15th century. The industries are iron and brass founding, brewing, and the manufacture of shoes, paper, cement and Turkish fezes. Feldspar, quartz and granite are quarried in the environs The name of Pisek, which is the Czech for sand, is said to be derived from the gold-washing formerly carried on in the bed of the Wottawa (1571–1621).
In 1619 it was captured by the imperialist general, Karl Bonaventura de Longueval, Graf von Buquoy, and suffered so severely that the citizens opened their gates to his opponent, Ernst von Mansfeld. This was punished in October of the following year, when Duke Maximilian of Bavaria sacked the town and put nearly all the inhabitants to the sword. Pisek was one of the chief centres of the Hussites. It was occupied by the French in 1741.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pissarro, Camille

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​PISSARRO, CAMILLE (1831–1903), French painter, was born at St Thomas in the Danish Antilles, of Jewish parents of Spanish extraction. He went to Paris at the age of twenty, and, as a pupil of Corot, came into close touch with the Barbizon masters. Though at first he devoted himself to subjects of the kind which will be ever associated with the name of Millet, his interest was entirely absorbed by the landscape, and not by the figures. He subsequently fell under the spell of the rising impressionist movement and threw in his lot with Monet and his friends, who were at that time the butt of public ridicule. Like Monet, he made sunlight, and the effect of sunlight on the objects of nature, the chief subjects of his paintings, whether in the country or on the Paris boulevards. About 1885 he took up the laboriously scientific method of the pointillists, but after a few years of these experiments he returned to a broader and more attractive manner. Indeed, in the closing years of his life he produced some of his finest paintings, in which he set down with admiral truth the peculiar atmosphere and colour and teeming life of the boulevards, streets and bridges of Paris and Rouen. He died in Paris in 1903.
​Pissarro is represented in the Caillebotte room at Luxembourg, and in almost every collection of impressionistic paintings. A number of his finest works are in the collection of M. Durand-Ruel in Paris.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pistachio Nut

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​PISTACHIO NUT, the fruit of Pistacia vera (natural order Anacardiaceae), a small tree which is a native of Syria and generally cultivated in the Mediterranean region. Although a delicious nut and much prized by the Greeks and other Eastern nations, it is not well known in Britain. It is not so large as a hazel nut, but is rather longer and much thinner, and the shell is covered with a somewhat wrinkled skin. The pistachio nut is the species named in Gen. xliii. 11 (Heb. פטן, Ar. boṭm ) as forming part of the present which Joseph’s brethren took with them from Canaan, and in Egypt it is still often placed along with sweetmeats and the like in presents of courtesy. The small nut of Pistacia Lentiscus, not larger than a cherry stone, also comes from Smyrna, Constantinople and Greece. P. Lentiscus is the mastic tree, a native of the Mediterranean region, forming a shrub or small tree with evergreen pinnately-compound leaves with a winged stalk. “Mastic” (from masticare, to chew) is an aromatic resinous exudation obtained by making incisions in the bark. It is chiefly produced in Asia Minor and is used by Turks as a chewing gum. It is also used as a varnish for pictures. P. Terebinthus, the Cyprus turpentine tree, a native of southern Europe, Asia Minor and North Africa, yields turpentine from incisions in the trunk. A gall is produced on this tree, which is used in dyeing and tanning.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pistil

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​PISTIL, a term in botany for the female or seed-bearing organ of a flower (q.v.). The Lat. pistillum (diminutive from pinsere, pistum, to pound), a pestle, a club-headed instrument used for crushing or braying substances in a mortar (q.v.), was taken as the name for this organ from its similarity in shape, and thence adapted in Fr. pistil about the middle of the 18th century. In its complete form a pistil consists of three parts ovary, at the base, containing the bodies which become seeds, style (Gr. στῦλος, pillar), and stigma (Gr. στίγμα, mark, στίζειν, to brand), the part which in impregnation receives the pollen.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pistole

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​PISTOLE, the French name given to a Spanish gold coin in use from 1537; it was a double escudo, the gold unit, and was worth 16s. 11¼d. sterling. The name was also given to the louis d'or of Louis XIII. of France, and to other European gold coins of about the value of the Spanish coin.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Procès-verbal

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​PROCÈS-VERBAL (Fr. procès, process, Late Lat. verbalis, from verbum, word), in French law, a detailed authenticated account drawn up by a magistrate, police officer, or other person having authority of acts or proceedings done in the exercise of his duty. In a criminal charge, a procès-verbal is a statement of the facts of the case. The term is also sometimes applied to the written minutes of a meeting or assembly.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Prognosis

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​PROGNOSIS (Gr. πρόγνωσις, knowledge of recognition beforehand, from πρόγιγνώσκειν, to know beforehand, cf. “prognostication,” prediction), a term used in modern medicine, as it was in Greek, for an opinion, forecast or decision as to the probable course, duration and termination of a case of disease. It is to be distinguished from “diagnosis” (Gr. διάγνωσις, διαγιγνώσκειν to distinguish), the determination or identification of a disease in a particular case from an investigation of its history and symptoms.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Prodicus of Ceos

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​PRODICUS OF CEOS (b. c. 465 or 450 B.C.), a Greek humanist of the first period of the Sophistical movement, known as the “precursor of Socrates.” He was still living in 399 B.C. He came to Athens as ambassador from Ceos, and became known as a speaker and a teacher. Like Protagoras, he professed to train his pupils for domestic and civic affairs; but it would appear that, while Protagoras's chief instruments of education were rhetoric and style, Prodicus made ethics prominent in his curriculum. In ethics he was a pessimist. Though he discharged his civic duties in spite of a frail physique, he emphasized the sorrows of life; and yet he advocated no hopeless resignation, but rather the remedy of work, and took as his model Heracles, the embodiment of virile activity. The influence of his views may be recognized as late as the Shepherd of Hermas. His views on the origin of the belief in the gods is strikingly modern. First came those great powers which benefit mankind (comparing the worship of the Nile), and after these the deified men who have rendered services to humanity. But he was no atheist, for the pantheist Zeno spoke highly of him. Of his natural philosophy We know only the titles of his treatises On Nature and On the Nature of Man. His chief interest is that he sought to give precision to the use of words. Two of his discourses were specially famous; one, “On Propriety of Language,” is repeatedly alluded 'to by Plato; the other, entitled Ὦραι, contained the celebrated apologue of the Choice of Heracles, of which the Xenophontean Socrates (Mem. ii. 1, 21 seq.) gives a summary. Theramenes, Euripides and Isocrates are said to have been pupils or hearers of Prodicus. By his immediate successors he was variously estimated: Plato satirizes him in the early dialogues; Aristophanes in the Ταγηνισταί calls him “a babbling brook”; Aeschines the Socratic condemns him as a sophist.
See Spengel, Artium scriptures, pp. 45 sqq.; Welcker, “Prodikos der Vorganger des Sokrates,” in Rheinisches Museum (1833), and in Kleine Schriften, ii. 393; Hummel, De Prodico Sophista (Leiden. 1846); Cougny, De Prodico Ceio (Paris, 1858).