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

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​MIRZAPUR, a city and district of British India, in the Benares division of the United Provinces. The city is on the right bank of the Ganges; a station on the East Indian railway, about halfway between Allahabad and Benares, 509 m. N.W. from Calcutta. Pop. (1901), 79,862. The river front, lined with stone ghats or flights of stairs, mosques, Hindu temples and dwelling-houses of the wealthier merchants, is handsome; but the interior of the town is mainly composed of mud huts. Formerly it was the emporium of trade between central India and Bengal, which has now been diverted to the railways. It has European and native lace factories, and manufactures brass vessels and woollen carpets. The London Mission manages a high school and an orphanage. The municipal limits include the town of Bindhachal, an important centre of pilgrimage, with the shrine of Vindhyeshwari.
The District of Mirzapur extends into the Sone valley. Area, 5238 sq. m. It is crossed from east to west by the Vindhya and Kaimur ranges. A central jungly plateau connects these and separates the valley of the Ganges from that of the Sone. The part north of the Vindhyas is highly cultivated and thickly peopled, but the rest of the district consists largely of ravines and forests with a sparse population. The population in 1901 was 1,082,430, showing a decrease of 6·8% in the decade. The district comprises a large part of the hereditary domains of the raja of Benares, which are revenue-free. It is traversed, near the Ganges, by the main line of the East Indian railway. The Great Southern road used to start from the city.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pont-l'Abbé

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​PONT-L’ABBÉ, a town of western France in the department of Finistère, 13 m. S.W. of Quimper by rail. Pop. (1906), of the town 4485, of the commune 6432. The town is situated on the right bank of the estuary or river of Pont-l'Abbé, 2 m. from the sea. Its port carries on fishing, imports timber, coal, &c., and exports mine-props and the cereals and vegetables of the neighbourhood. Of the old buildings of the town the chief is a church of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, once attached to a Carmelite convent; an old castle is occupied by the hôtel de ville. The local costumes, trimmed with the bright-coloured embroideries for which the town is noted, are among the most striking in Brittany; the bigouden or head-dress of the women has given its name to the inhabitants. Pont-l'Abbé carries on flour-milling and the extraction of chemicals from seaweed.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pont Audemer

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​PONT AUDEMER, a town of north-western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Eure, 39 m. N.W. of Evreux, on the Risle, a left-bank affluent of the Seine, and on the railway from Evreux to Honfleur. Pop. (1906), 5700. The church of St Ouen, which has fine stained glass of the 16th century, combines the late Gothic and Renaissance styles; its choir is Romanesque. Local institutions are the sub-prefecture, a tribunal of first instance, a board of trade-arbitration, a chamber and tribunal of commerce. Manufacturing industry is active, and includes the founding of malleable metal, a spur factory, the manufacture of glue and paper, cotton-spinning and various branches of leather manufacture. There is trade in iiax, wool, grain, cattle, cider, paper, iron, wood and coal. The port has a length of over half a mile on the Risle, which is navigable for small vessels from this point to its mouth (10 m.). The town owes its name to Audomar, a Frank lord, who in the 7th or 8th century built a bridge over the Risle at this point. It was the scene of several provincial ecclesiastical councils in the 12th and 13th centuries and of meetings of the estates of Normandy in the 13th century.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ponson du Terrail

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​PONSON DU TERRAIL [[Pierre Alexis de Ponson], Vicomte de (1829–1871), French romance writer, was born at Montmaur (Isère) on the 8th of July 1829. He was a prolific novelist, producing in the space of two years some seventy-three volumes. Among his most successful productions were Les Coulisses du monde (1853), Exploits de Rocambole (1859), Les Drames de Paris (1865) and Le Forgeron de la Cour-Dieu (1869). He died at Bordeaux on the 20th of January 1871.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pont-à-Mousson

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​PONT-À-MOUSSON, a town of northern France in the department of Meurthe-et-Moselle, 17 m. N.N.W. of Nancy by rail. Pop. (1906), 12,282. The Moselle, which is canalized, divides the town into two quarters, united by a bridge of the late 16th century. The church of St Martin, dating from the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, has a handsome façade with two towers, and in the interior a choir screen and Holy Sepulchre of the 15th century. The lower ecclesiastical seminary occupies the building of an old Premonstratensian convent. There are several interesting old houses. The town has a communal college and engineering workshops, blast furnaces, and manufactures of lacquered ware, paper, cardboard, cables and iron-ware. Dating from the 9th or 10th century, Pont-à-Mousson constituted a lordship, which was made a marquis ate in 1354. It was from 1572 to 1763 the seat of a well-known university.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pont, Robert

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​PONT (or Kylpont), ROBERT (1524–1606), Scottish reformer, was educated at St Andrews. In 1562 he was appointed minister at Dunblane and then at Dunkeld; in 1563, commissioner for Moray, Inverness and Banff. Then in succession he became minister of Birnie (1567), provost of Trinity College near Edinburgh (1571), a lord of session (1572), minister of St Cuthbert’s, Edinburgh (1573) and at St Andrews (1581). Pont was a strenuous champion of ecclesiastical independence, and for protesting against parliamentary interference in church government he was obliged to leave his country. From 1584 to 1586 he was in England, but returning north he resumed his prominence in church matters and kept it until his death in 1606. His elder son Timothy Pont (1560?–1614?) was a good mathematician, surveyor, and “the first projector of a Scottish atlas.”
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Pontarlier

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​PONTARLIER, a frontier town of eastern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Doubs, 36 m. S.E. of Besançon by road. Pop. (1906), 7896. It is situated 2750 ft. above sea-level on the Doubs, about four miles from the Swiss frontier, and forms an important strategic point at the mouth of the defile of La Cluse, one of the principal passes across the ]ura. The pass is defended by the modern fort of Larmont, and by the Fort de Joux, which was originally built in the 10th century by the family of Joux and played a conspicuous part in the history of Franche-Comté. Pontarlier is the junction of railway lines to Neuchâtel, Lausanne, Lons-le-Saunier, Dole and Besançon. A triumphal arch of the 18th century commemorates the reconstruction of the town after the destructive fire of 1736. It was at Pontarlier that the French army of the East made its last stand against the Prussians in 1871 before crossing the Swiss frontier. The distillation of herbs, extensively cultivated for the manufacture of absinthe, kirsch and other liqueurs, is the chief industry. The town is the seat of a sub-prefect and has a tribunal of first instance and a communal college.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ponsard, François

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​PONSARD, FRANÇOIS (1814–1867), French dramatist, was born at Vienne, department of Isére, on the 1st of June 1814. He was bred a lawyer, and his first performance in literature was a translation of Manfred (1837). His play Lucrèce was represented at the Théâtre Français on the 1st of April 1843. This date is a kind of epoch in literature and dramatic history, because it marked a reaction against the romantic style of Dumas and Hugo. He received in 1845 the prize awarded by the Academy for a tragedy “ to oppose a dike to the waves of romanticism.” Ponsard adopted the liberty of the romantics with regard to the unities of time and place, but he reverted to the more sober style of earlier French drama. The tastes and capacities of the greatest tragic actress of the day, Rachel, suited his methods, and this contributed greatly to his own popularity. He followed up Lucrèce with Agnès de Méramie (1846), Charlotte Corday (1850), and others. Ponsard accepted the empire, though with no very great enthusiasm, and received the post of librarian to the senate, which, however, he soon resigned, fighting a bloodless duel with a journalist on the subject. L’Honneur et l’argent, one of his most successful plays, was acted in 1853, and he became an Academician in 1855. For some years he did little, but in 1866 he obtained great success with Le Lion amoureux, another play dealing with the revolutionary epoch. His Galilée, which excited great opposition in the clerical camp, was produced early in 1867. He died in Paris on the 7th of July of the same year, soon after his nomination to the commandership of the Legion of Honour. Most of Ponsard’s plays hold a certain steady level of literary and dramatic ability, but his popularity is in the main due to the fact that his appearance coincided with a certain public weariness of the extravagant and unequal style of 1830.
His Œuvres completes were published in Paris (3 vols., 1865–1876). See La Fin du théâtre romantique et François Ponsard d’après des documents inédits (1899), by C. Latreille.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ponta Delgada

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​PONTA DELGADA, the capital of an administrative district, comprising the islands of St Michael’s and St Mary in the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores. Pop. (1900), 17,620. Ponta Delgada is built on the south coast of St Michael’s, in 37° 40′ N. and 25° 36′ W. Its mild climate, and the fine scenery of its mountain background, render it very attractive to visitors; it is the commercial centre, and the most populous city of the archipelago. Besides the cathedral, it contains several interesting churches and monasteries, and an observatory. Formerly its natural inner harbour only admitted vessels of light draught, while larger ships were compelled to anchor in an open roadstead, which was inaccessible during the prevalence of southerly gales. But great improvements were effected after 1860 by the construction of a breakwater 2800 ft. long.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Siebold, Carl Theodor Ernst von

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​SIEBOLD, CARL THEODOR ERNST VON (1804-1883), German physiologist and zoologist, the son of a physician and a descendant of what Lorenz Oken called the “Asclepiad family of Siebolds,” was born at Würzburg on the 16th of February 1804. Educated in medicine and science chiefly at the university of Berlin, he became successively professor of zoology, physiology and comparative anatomy in Königsberg, Erlangen, Freiburg, Breslau and Munich. In conjunction with F. H. Stannius he published (1845-1848) a Manual of Comparative Anatomy, and along with R. A. Kölliker he founded in 1848 a journal which soon took a leading place in biological literature, Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Zoologie. He was also a laborious and successful helminthologist and entomologist, in both capacities contributing many valuable papers to his journal, which he continued to edit until his death at Munich on the 7th of April 1885. In these ways, without being a man of marked genius, but rather an industrious and critical observer, he came to fill a peculiarly distinguished position in science, and was long reckoned, what his biographer justly calls him, the Nestor of German zoology.
See Ehlers, Zeitschr. f. wiss. Zool. (1885).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Siedlce (town)

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SIEDLCE, a town of Russia, capital of the government of the same name, 56 m. E.S.E. of the city of Warsaw, on the Brest-Litovsk railway. It is a Roman Catholic episcopal see. The Oginskis, to whom it belonged, have embellished it with a palace and gardens; but it is nothing more than a large village. Pop. 23,714 (1897), two-thirds Jews.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Siebengebirge

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​SIEBENGEBIRGE (“The Seven Hills”), a cluster of hills in Germany, on the Rhine, 6 m. above Bonn. They are of volcanic origin, and form the north-western spurs of the Westerwald. In no part of the Rhine valley is the scenery more attractive; crag and forest, deep dells and gentle vine-clad slopes, ruined castles and extensive views over the broad Rhine and the plain beyond combine to render the Siebengebirge the most favourite tourist resort on the whole Rhine. The hills are as follows: the steep Drachenfels (1067 ft.), abutting on the Rhine and surmounted by the ruins of an old castle; immediately behind it, and connected by a narrow ridge, the Wolkenburg (1076 ft.); lying apart, and to the N. of these, the Petersberg (1096 ft.), with a pilgrimage chapel of St Peter; then, to the S. of these three, a chain of four — viz. the Ölberg (1522 ft.), the highest of the range; the Löwenburg (1506 ft.); the Lohrberg (1444 ft.), and, farthest away, the Nonnenstromberg (1107 ft.). At the foot of the Drachenfels, on the north side, lies the little town of Königswinter, whence a mountain railway ascends to the summit, and a similar railway runs up the Petersberg. The ruins which crown almost every hill are those of strongholds of the archbishops of Cologne and mostly date from the 12th century.
See von Dechen, Geognostischer Führer in das Siebengebirge (Bonn, 1861); von Stürtz, Führer durch das Siebengebirge (Bonn, 1893); Laspeyres, Das Siebengebirge am Rhein (Bonn, 1901).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Siedlce (government)

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SIEDLCE (Russian Syedlets), a government of Russian Poland, between the Vistula and the Bug, having the governments of Warsaw on the W., Lomza on the N., Grodno and Volhynia on the E., Lublin on the S., and Radom on the S.W. Its area is 5533 sq. m. The surface is mostly flat, only a few hilly tracts appearing in the middle, around Biala, and in the east on the banks of the Bug. Extensive marshes occur in the north and in the south-east. Cretaceous, Jurassic and Tertiary strata cover the surface, and are overlain by widely spread Glacial deposits. The valley of the Vistula is mostly wide, with several terraces covered with sand-dunes or peat-bogs. Siedlce is drained by the Vistula, which borders it for 50 m. on the west; by the Bug, which is navigable from Opalin in Volhynia and flows for 170 m. on the east and north-east borders; by the Wieprz, a tributary of the Vistula, which is also navigable, and flows for 25 m. along the southern boundary; and by the Liwiec, a tributary of the Bug, which is navigable for some 30 m. below Wegrow. Of the total area only 5.2% is unproductive; 48.1% is under crops and 17.2 under meadows and pasture land. The estimated
population in 1906 was 907,700. The inhabitants consist of Little Russians (40%), Poles (43%), Jews (15½%) and Germans (1½%). The government is divided into nine districts, the chief towns of which are the capital Siedlce, Biala, Konstantinow, Garwolin, Lukow, Radzyn, Sokolow, Wegrow, Wlodawa. The main occupation is agriculture, the principal crops being rye, wheat, oats, barley and potatoes. The area under forests amounts to 19.6% of the total. Live-stock breeding is second in importance to agriculture. Manufactures and trade are insignificant.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Siegburg

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SIEGBURG, a town of Germany, in the Prussian Rhine Province, on the river Sieg, 16 m. by rail S.E. of Cologne by the railway to Giessen. Pop. (1905) 14,878. It has a royal shell factory, calico-printing mills, lignite mines, stone quarries and pottery and tobacco factories. The parish church, dating from the 13th century, possesses several richly decorated reliquaries of the 12th to 15th centuries. The buildings of the Benedictine abbey, founded in 1066, are now used as a prison. The town, which was founded in the 11th century, attained the height of its prosperity in the 15th and 16th centuries owing to its pottery wares. Siegburg pitchers (Siegburger Krüge) were widely famed. Their shape was often fantastic and they are now eagerly sought by collectors.
See R. Heinekamp, Siegburgs Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Siegburg, 1897); and Renard, Die Kunstdenkmäler des Siegkreises (Düsseldorf, 1907).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Siege

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​SIEGE (O. Fr. sege, siege, mod. siège, seat, ultimately from sedere, to sit, cf. Class. Lat. obsidium, a siege), the “sitting down” of an army or military force before a fortified place for the purpose of taking it, either by direct military operations or by starving it into submission (see Fortification and Siegecraft). A special form of coin is known as a “siege-piece.” These are coins that were struck during a siege of a town when the ordinary mints were closed or their issues were not available. Such coins were commonly of special shape to distinguish them from the normal coinage, and were naturally of rough workmanship. A common shape for the siege pieces which were issued during the Great Rebellion was the lozenge. A noteworthy example is a shilling siege-piece struck at Newark in 1645 (see Token Money).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Topelius, Zakris

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​TOPELIUS, ZAKRIS [Zacharias] (1818–1898), Finnish author, was born at Kuddnäs, near Nykarleby, on the 14th of January 1818. He was the son of a doctor of the same name, who was distinguished as the earliest collector of Finnish folk-songs. Topelius became a student at Helsingfors in 1833, was made professor in 1863 and received in succession all the academic distinctions open to him. Quite early in his career he began to distinguish himself as a lyric poet, with the three successive volumes of his Heather Blossoms (1845–1854). The earliest of his historical romances was The Duchess of Finland, published in 1850. He was also editor-in-chief of the Helsingfors Gazette from 1841 to 1860. In 1878, Topelius was allowed to withdraw from his professional duties, but this did not sever his connexion with the university; it gave him, however, more leisure for his abundant and various literary enterprises. Of all the multifarious writings of Topelius, in prose and verse, that which has enjoyed the greatest popularity is his Tales of a Barber-Surgeon, episodes of historical fiction from the days of Gustavus II. Adolphus to those of Gustavus III., treated in the manner of Sir Walter Scott; the five volumes of this work appeared at intervals between 1853 and 1867. Topelius attempted the drama also, with most success in his tragedy of Regina von Emmeritz (1854). Topelius aimed, with eminent but perhaps pathetic success, at the cultivation of a strong passion of patriotism in Finland. He died on the 13th of March 1898 at Helsingfors. Topelius was an exceptionally happy writer for children, his best-known work being Läsning för barn. His abundant poetry is graceful and patriotic, but does not offer any features of great originality.
(E. G.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Toole, John Lawrence

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​TOOLE, JOHN LAWRENCE (1832–1906), English actor, son of an employé of the East India Company who for many years acted as toast-master in the City of London, was born in London on the 12th of March 1832. He was educated at the City of London School, and started life in a wine merchant’s office; but his natural propensity for comic acting was not to be denied, and after some practice as an amateur with the City Histrionic Club, he definitely took to the stage in 1852, appearing in Dublin as Simmons in The Spitalfields Weaver. He gained experience in the provinces, and in 1854 made his first professional appearance in London at the St James’s theatre, acting as Samuel Pepys in The King’s Rival and Weazel in My Friend the Major. In 1857, having had a great success in London as Paul Pry, he met Henry Irving in Edinburgh, and recommended him to go to London; and their friendship remained thenceforth of the closest kind. In 1858 Toole joined Webster at the Adelphi, and established his popularity as a comedian, among other parts creating Joe Spriggins in Ici on parle français. In 1868 he was engaged at the Gaiety, appearing among many pieces there in Thespis, the first Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration. His fame was at its height in 1874, when he went on tour to the United States, but he failed to reproduce there the success he had in England. In 1879, he took the “Folly” theatre in London, which he renamed “Toole’s” in 1882. He was constantly away in the provinces, but he produced here a number of plays: H. J. Byron’s Upper Crust and Auntie; Pinero’s Hester’s Mystery and Girls and Boys; burlesques such as Paw Claudian, and, later, J. M. Barrie’s Walker, London. But his appearances gradually became fewer, and after 1893 he was seen no more on the London stage, while his theatre was pulled down shortly afterwards for an extension of Charing Cross Hospital. He published his reminiscences in 1888. Toole married in 1854; and the death of his only son in 1879, and later of his wife and daughter, had distressing effects on his health; attacks of gout, from 1886 onwards, crippled him, and ultimately he retired to Brighton, where after a long illness he died on the 30th of July 1906. In his prime he was immensely popular, and also immensely funny in a way which depended a good deal on his tricks and delivery of words. He excelled in what may be called Dickens parts—combining humour and pathos. He was a good man of business and left a considerable fortune, out of which he made a number of bequests to charity and to his friends. His genial and sympathetic nature was no less conspicuous off the stage than on it.