OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Grodno (government)

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​GRODNO, one of the Lithuanian governments of western Russia, lying between 51° 40′ and 52° N. and between 22° 12′ and 26° E., and bounded N. by the government of Vilna, E. by Minsk, S. by Volhynia, and W. by the Polish governments of Lomza and Siedlce. Area, 14,926 sq. m. Except for some hills (not exceeding 925 ft.) in the N., it is a uniform plain, and is drained chiefly by the Bug, Niemen, Narev and Bobr, all navigable. There are also several canals, the most important being the Augustowo and Oginsky. Granites and gneisses crop out along the Bug, Cretaceous, and especially Tertiary, deposits elsewhere. The soil is mostly sandy, and in the district of Grodno and along the rivers is often drift-sand. Forests, principally of Coniferae, cover more than one-fourth of the area. Amongst them are some of vast extent, e.g. those of Grodno (410 sq. m.) and Byelovitsa (Bialowice) (376 sq. m.), embracing wide areas of marshy ground. In the last mentioned forest the wild ox survives, having been jealously preserved since 1803. Peat bogs, sometimes as much as 4 to 7 ft. thick, cover extensive districts. The climate is wet and cold; the annual mean temperature being 44.5° F., the January mean 22.5° and the July mean 64.5°. The rainfall amounts to 211/2 in.; hail is frequent. Agriculture is the predominant industry. The peasants own 421/2% of the land, that is, about 4,000,000 acres, and of these over 21/4 million acres are arable. The crops principally grown are potatoes, rye, oats, wheat, flax, hemp and some tobacco. Horses, cattle and sheep are bred in fairly large numbers. There is, however, a certain amount of manufacturing industry, especially in woollens, distilling and tobacco. In woollens this government ranks second (after Moscow) in the empire, the centre of the industry being Byelostok. Other factories produce silk, shoddy and leather. The government is crossed by the main lines of railway from Warsaw to St Petersburg and from Warsaw to Moscow. The population numbered 1,008,521 in 1870 and 1,616,630 in 1897; of these last 789,801 were women and 255,946 were urban. In 1906 it was estimated at 1,826,600. White Russians predominate (54%), then follow Jews (17.4%), Poles (10%), Lithuanians and Germans. The government is divided into nine districts, the chief towns, with their populations in 1897, being Grodno (q.v.), Brest-Litovsk (pop. 42,812 in 1901), Byelsk (7461), Byelostok or Bialystok (65,781 in 1901), Kobrin (10,365), Pruzhany (7634), Slonim (15,893), Sokolsk (7595) and Volkovysk (10,584). In 1795 Grodno, which had been Polish for ages, was annexed by Russia.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Grodno (town)

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​GRODNO, a town of Russia, capital of the government of the same name in 53° 40′ N. and 23° 50′ E., on the right bank of the Niemen, 160 m. by rail N.E. of Warsaw and 98 m. S.W. of Vilna on the main line to St Petersburg. Pop. (1901) 41,736, nearly two-thirds Jews. It is an episcopal see of the Orthodox Greek church and the headquarters of the II. Army Corps. It has two old castles, now converted to other uses, and two churches (16th and 17th centuries). Tobacco factories and distilleries are important; machinery, soap, candles, vehicles and firearms are also made. Built in the 12th century, Grodno was almost entirely destroyed by the Mongols (1241) and Teutonic knights (1284 and 1391). Stephen Bathory, king of Poland, made it his capital, and died there in 1586. The Polish Estates frequently met at Grodno after 1673, and there in 1793 they signed the second partition of Poland. It was at Grodno that Stanislaus Poniatowski resigned the Polish crown in 1795.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Groen van Prinsterer, Guillaume

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​GROEN VAN PRINSTERER, GUILLAUME (1801–1876), Dutch politician and historian, was born at Voorburg, near the Hague, on the 21st of August 1801. He studied at Leiden university, and graduated in 1823 both as doctor of literature and LL.D. From 1829 to 1833 he acted as secretary to King William I. of Holland, afterwards took a prominent part in Dutch home politics, and gradually became the leader of the so-called anti-revolutionary party, both in the Second Chamber, of which he was for many years a member, and outside. In Groen the doctrines of Guizot and Stahl found an eloquent exponent. They permeate his controversial and political writings and historical studies, of which his Handbook of Dutch History (in Dutch) and Maurice et Barnevelt (in French, 1875, a criticism of Motley’s Life of Van Olden-Barnevelt) are the principal. Groen was violently opposed to Thorbecke, whose principles he denounced as ungodly and revolutionary. Although he lived to see these principles triumph, he never ceased to oppose them until his death, which occurred at the Hague on the 19th of May 1876. He is best known as the editor of the Archives et correspondance de la maison d’Orange (12 vols., 1835–1845), a great work of patient erudition, which procured for him the title of the “Dutch Gachard.” J. L. Motley acknowledges his indebtedness to Groen’s Archives in the preface to his Rise of the Dutch Republic, at a time when the American historian had not yet made the acquaintance of King William’s archivist, and also bore emphatic testimony to Groen’s worth as a writer of history in the correspondence published after his death. At the first reception, in 1858, of Motley at the royal palace at the Hague, the king presented him with a copy of Groen’s Archives as a token of appreciation and admiration of the work done by the “worthy vindicator of William I., prince of Orange.” This copy, bearing the king’s autograph inscription, afterwards came into the possession of Sir William Vernon Harcourt, Motley’s son-in-law.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gray, Sir Thomas

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​GRAY, SIR THOMAS (d. c. 1369), English chronicler, was a son of Sir Thomas Gray, who was taken prisoner by the Scots at Bannockburn and who died about 1344. The younger Thomas was present at the battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346; in 1355, whilst acting as warden of Norham Castle, he was made a prisoner, and during his captivity in Edinburgh Castle he devoted his time to studying the English chroniclers, Gildas, Bede, Ranulf Higdon and others. Released in 1357 he was appointed warden of the east marches towards Scotland in 1367, and he died about 1369. Gray’s work, the Scalacronica (so called, perhaps, from the scaling-ladder in the crest of the Grays), is a chronicle of English history from the earliest times to about the year 1362. It is, however, only valuable for the reigns of Edward I. and Edward II. and part of that of Edward III., being especially so for the account of the wars between England and Scotland, in which the author’s father and the author himself took part. Writing in Norman-French, Gray tells of Wallace and Bruce, of the fights at Bannockburn, Byland and Dupplin, and makes some mention of the troubles in England during the reign of Edward II. He also narrates the course of the war in France between 1355 and 1361; possibly he was present during some of these campaigns.
The Scalacronica was summarized by John Leland in the 16th century; the part dealing with the period from 1066 to the end, together with the prologue, was edited for the Maitland Club by J. Stevenson (1836); and the part from 1274 to 1362 was translated into English by Sir Herbert Maxwell (Glasgow, 1907). In the extant manuscript, which is in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, there is a gap extending from about 1340 to 1355, and Gray’s account of this period is only known from Leland’s summary.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gray, Elisha

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​GRAY, ELISHA (1835–1901), American electrician, was born in Barnesville, Belmont county, Ohio, on the 2nd of August 1835. He worked as a carpenter and in a machine shop, reading ​in physical science at the same time, and for five years studied at Oberlin College, where he taught for a time. He then investigated the subject of telegraphy, and in 1867 patented a telegraphic switch and annunciator. Experimenting in the transmittal of electro-tones and of musical tones by wire, he utilized in 1874 animal tissues in his receivers, and filed, on the 14th of February 1876, a caveat for the invention of a telephone, only a few hours after the filing of an application for a patent by Alexander Graham Bell. (See Telephone.) The caveat was disregarded; letters patent No. 174,465 were granted to Bell, whose priority of invention was upheld in 1888 by the United States Supreme Court (see Molecular Telephone Co. v. American Bell Telephone Co., 126 U.S. 1). Gray’s experiments won for him high praise and the decoration of the Legion of Honour at the Paris Exposition of 1878. He was for a time a manufacturer of electrical apparatus, particularly of his own inventions; and was chief electrical expert of the Western Electric Company of Chicago. At the Columbian Exposition of 1893 Gray was chairman of the International Congress of Electricians. He died at Newtonville, Massachusetts, on the 21st of January 1901. Among his later inventions were appliances for multiplex telegraphy and the telautograph, a machine for the electric transmission of handwriting. He experimented in the submarine use of electric bells for signalling.
Gray wrote, besides scientific addresses and many monographs, Telegraphy and Telephony (1878) and Electricity and Magnetism (1900).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gray, Robert

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​GRAY, ROBERT (1809–1872), first bishop of Cape Town and metropolitan of South Africa, was born at Bishop Wearmouth, Durham, and was the son of Robert Gray, bishop of Bristol. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, and took orders in 1833. After holding the livings of Whitworth, Durham, 1834–1845, and Stockton-on-Tees, 1845–1847, he was consecrated bishop of Cape Town in 1847; the bishopric having been endowed through the liberality of Miss (afterwards Baroness) Burdett-Coutts. Until 1853 he was a suffragan of Canterbury, but in that year he formally resigned his see and was reappointed by letters patent metropolitan of South Africa in view of the contemplated establishment of the suffragan dioceses of Graham’s Town and Natal. In that capacity his coercive jurisdiction was twice called in question, and in each case the judicial committee of the privy council decided against him. The best-known case is that of Bishop Colenso, whom Gray deposed and excommunicated in 1863. The spiritual validity of the sentence was upheld by the convocation of Canterbury and the Pan-Anglican synod of 1867, but legally Colenso remained bishop of Natal. The privy council decisions declared, in effect, that the Anglican body in South Africa was on the footing of a voluntary religious society. Gray, accepting this position, obtained its recognition by the mother church as the Church of the Province of South Africa, in full communion with the Church of England. The first provincial synod was held in 1870. During his episcopate Bishop Gray effected a much-needed organization of the South African church, to which he added five new bishoprics, all carved out of the original diocese of Cape Town. It was also chiefly owing to his suggestions that the universities’ mission to Central Africa was founded.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gray, Henry Peters

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​GRAY, HENRY PETERS (1819–1877). American portrait and genre painter, was born in New York on the 23rd of June 1819. He was a pupil of Daniel Huntington there, and subsequently studied in Rome and Florence. Elected a member of the National Academy of Design in 1842, he succeeded Huntington as president in 1870, holding the position until 1871. The later years of his life were devoted to portrait work. He was strongly influenced by the old Italian masters, painting in mellow colour with a classical tendency. One of his notable canvases was an allegorical composition called “The Birth of our Flag” (1875). He died in New York City on the 12th of November 1877.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gray, John de

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​GRAY, JOHN DE (d. 1214), bishop of Norwich, entered Prince John’s service, and at his accession (1199) was rapidly promoted in the church till he became bishop of Norwich in September 1200. King John’s attempt to force him into the primacy in 1205 started the king’s long and fatal quarrel with Pope Innocent III. De Gray was a hard-working royal official, in finance, in justice, in action, using his position to enrich himself and his family. In 1209 he went to Ireland to govern it as justiciar. He adopted a forward policy, attempting to extend the English frontier northward and westward, and fought a number of campaigns on the Shannon and in Fermanagh. But in 1212 he suffered a great defeat. He assimilated the coinage of Ireland to that of England, and tried to effect a similar reform in Irish law. De Gray was a good financier, and could always raise money: this probably explains the favour he enjoyed from King John. In 1213 he is found with 500 knights at the great muster at Barham Downs, when Philip Augustus was threatening to invade England. After John’s reconciliation with Innocent he was one of those exempted from the general pardon, and was forced to go in person to Rome to obtain it. At Rome he so completely gained over Innocent that the pope sent him back with papal letters recommending his election to the bishopric of Durham (1213); but he died at St Jean d’Audely in Poitou on his homeward journey (October 1214).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gray, Horace

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​GRAY, HORACE (1828–1902), American jurist, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 24th of March 1828. He graduated at Harvard in 1845; was admitted to the bar in 1851, and in 1854–1861 was reporter to the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. He practised law, first in partnership with Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, and later with Wilder Dwight (1823–1862) and Charles F. Blake; was appointed associate justice of the state Supreme Court on the 23rd of August 1864, becoming chief-justice on the 5th of September 1873; and was associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from December 1881 to August 1902, resigning only a few weeks before his death at Nahant, Mass., on the 15th of September 1902. Gray had a fine sense of the dignity of the bench, and a taste for historical study. His judgments were unmistakably clear and contained the essence of earlier opinions. A great case lawyer, he was a much greater judge, the variety of his knowledge and his contributions to admiralty and prize law and to testamentary law being particularly striking; in constitutional law he was a “loose” rather than a “strict” constructionist.
See Francis C. Lowell, “Horace Gray,” in Proceedings of the American Academy, vol. 39, pp. 627-637 (Boston, 1904).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gray, Walter de

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​GRAY (or Grey), WALTER DE (d. 1255), English prelate and statesman, was a nephew of John de Gray, bishop of Norwich, and was educated at Oxford. He owed his early and rapid preferment in church and state to the favour of King John, becoming the king’s chancellor in 1205, and being chosen bishop of Lichfield in 1210. He was, however, not allowed to keep this bishopric, but he became bishop of Worcester in 1214, resigning his office as chancellor in the same year. Gray was with John when the king signed Magna Carta in June 1215; soon after this event he left England on the king’s business, and it was during his absence that he was forced into the archbishopric of York, owing his election to the good offices of John and of Pope Innocent III. He took a leading part in public affairs during the minority of Henry III., and was regarded with much favour by this king, who employed him on important errands to foreign potentates, and left him as guardian of England when he went to France in 1242. Afterwards the archbishop seems to have been less favourably disposed towards Henry, and for a time he absented himself from public business; however, in 1255, he visited London to attend a meeting of parliament, and died at Fulham on the 1st of May 1255. Gray was always anxious to assert his archiepiscopal authority over Scotland, and to maintain it against the archbishop of Canterbury, but in neither case was he very successful. He built the south transept of the minster at York and bought for his see the village, afterwards called Bishopthorpe, which is still the residence of the archbishop of York. He was also generous to the church at Ripon. Gray was regarded by his contemporaries as an avaricious, but patriotic man.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Illustres

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​ILLUSTRES, the Latin name given to the highest magistrates of the later Roman Empire. The designation was at first informal, and not strictly differentiated from other marks of honour. From the time of Valentinian I. it became an official title of the consuls, the chief praefecti or ministers, and of the commanders-in-chief of the army. Its usage was eventually extended to lower grades of the imperial service, and to pensionaries from the order of the spectabiles. The Illustres were privileged to be tried in criminal cases by none but the emperor or his deputy, and to delegate procuratores to represent them in the courts.
See O. Hirschfeld in Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie (1901), p. 594 sqq.; and T. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders (Oxford, 1892), i. 603-617.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Iller

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​ILLER, a river of Bavaria, rising in the south-west extremity of the kingdom, among the Algäuer Alps. Taking a northerly course, it quits the mountains at Immenstadt, and, flowing by Kempten, from which point it is navigable for rafts, forms for some distance the boundary between Bavaria and Württemberg, and eventually strikes the Danube (right bank) just above Ulm. Its total length is 103 m.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ephorus

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​EPHORUS (c. 400–330 B.C.), of Cyme in Aeolis, in Asia Minor, Greek historian. Together with the historian Theopompus he was a pupil of Isocrates, in whose school he attended two courses of rhetoric. But he does not seem to have made much progress in the art, and it is said to have been at the suggestion of Isocrates himself that he took up literary composition and the study of history. The fruit of his labours was his Ἱστορίαι in 29 books, the first universal history, beginning with the return of the Heraclidae to Peloponnesus, as the first well-attested historical event. The whole work was edited by his son Demophilus, who added a 30th book, containing a summary description of the Social War and ending with the taking of Perinthus (340) by Philip of Macedon (cf. Diod. Sic. xvi. 14 with xvi. 76). Each book was complete in itself, and had a separate title and preface. It is clear that Ephorus made critical use of the best authorities, and his work, highly praised and much read, was freely drawn upon by Diodorus Siculus and other compilers. Strabo (viii. p. 332) attaches much importance to his geographical investigations, and praises him for being the first to separate the historical from the merely geographical element. Polybius (xii. 25 g) while crediting him with a knowledge of the conditions of naval warfare, ridicules his description of the battles of Leuctra and Mantineia as showing ignorance of the nature of land operations. He was further to be commended for drawing (though not always) a sharp line of demarcation between the mythical and historical (Strabo ix. p. 423); he even recognized that a profusion of detail, though lending corroborative force to accounts of recent events, is ground for suspicion in reports of far-distant history. His style was high-flown and artificial, as was natural considering his early training, and he frequently sacrificed truth to rhetoric effect; but, according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, he and Theopompus were the only historical writers whose language was accurate and finished. Other works attributed to him were:—A Treatise on Discoveries; Respecting Good and Evil Things; On Remarkable Things in Various Countries (it is doubtful whether these were separate works, or merely extracts from the Histories); A Treatise on my Country, on the history and antiquities of Cyme, and an essay On Style, his only rhetorical work, which is occasionally mentioned by the rhetorician Theon. Nothing is known of his life, except the statement in Plutarch that he declined to visit the court of Alexander the Great.
Fragments in C. W. Müller, Fragmenta historicorum Graecorum, i., with critical introduction on the life and writings of Ephorus; see J. A. Klügmann, De Ephoro historico (1860); C. A. Volquardsen, Untersuchungen über die Quellen der griechischen und sicilischen Geschichten bei Diodor. xi.-xvi. (1868); and specially J. B. Bury, Ancient Greek Historians (1909); E. Schwartz, in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyc. s.v.; and article Greece: History: Ancient Authorities.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ephebeum

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​EPHEBEUM (from Gr. ἔφηβος, a young man), in architecture, a large hall in the ancient Palaestra furnished with seats (Vitruvius v. 11), the length of which should be a third larger than the width. It served for the exercises of youths of from sixteen to eighteen years of age.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ephemeris

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​EPHEMERIS (Greek for a “diary”), a table giving for stated times the apparent position and other numerical particulars relating to a heavenly body. The Astronomical Ephemeris, familiarly known as the “Nautical Almanac,” is a national annual publication containing ephemerides of the principal or more conspicuous heavenly bodies, elements and other data of eclipses, and other matter useful to the astronomer and navigator. The governments of the United Kingdom, United States, France, Germany and Spain publish such annals.