OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Jacobsen, Jens Peter

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​JACOBSEN, JENS PETER (1847–1885), Danish imaginative writer, was born at Thisted in Jutland, on the 7th of April 1847; he was the eldest of the five children of a prosperous merchant. He became a student at the university of Copenhagen in 1868. As a boy he showed a remarkable turn for science, particularly for botany. In 1870, although he was secretly writing verses already, Jacobsen definitely adopted botany as a profession. He was sent by a scientific body in Copenhagen to report on the flora of the islands of Anholt and Læsö. About this time the discoveries of Darwin began to exercise a fascination over him, and finding them little understood in Denmark, he translated into Danish The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. In ​the autumn of 1872, while collecting plants in a morass near Ordrup, he contracted pulmonary disease. His illness, which cut him off from scientific investigation, drove him to literature. He met the famous critic, Dr Georg Brandes, who was struck by his powers of expression, and under his influence, in the spring of 1873, Jacobsen began his great historical romance of Marie Grubbe. His method of composition was painful and elaborate, and his work was not ready for publication until the close of 1876. In 1879 he was too ill to write at all; but in 1880 an improvement came, and he finished his second novel, Niels Lyhne. In 1882 he published a volume of six short stories, most of them written a few years earlier, called, from the first of them, Mogens. After this he wrote no more, but lingered on in his mother’s house at Thisted until the 30th of April 1885. In 1886 his posthumous fragments were collected. It was early recognized that Jacobsen was the greatest artist in prose that Denmark has produced. He has been compared with Flaubert, with De Quincey, with Pater; but these parallelisms merely express a sense of the intense individuality of his style, and of his untiring pursuit of beauty in colour, form and melody. Although he wrote so little, and crossed the living stage so hurriedly, his influence in the North has been far-reaching. It may be said that no one in Denmark or Norway has tried to write prose carefully since 1880 whose efforts have not been in some degree modified by the example of Jacobsen’s laborious art.
His Samlede Skrifter appeared in two volumes in 1888; in 1899 his letters (Breve) were edited by Edvard Brandes. In 1896 an English translation of part of the former was published under the title of Siren Voices: Niels Lyhne, by Miss E. F. L. Robertson.  (E. G.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Jacotot, Joseph

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​JACOTOT, JOSEPH (1770–1840), French educationist, author of the method of “emancipation intellectuelle,” was born ​at Dijon on the 4th of March 1770. He was educated at the university of Dijon, where in his nineteenth year he was chosen professor of Latin, after which he studied law, became advocate, and at the same time devoted a large amount of his attention to mathematics. In 1788 he organized a federation of the youth of Dijon for the defence of the principles of the Revolution; and in 1792, with the rank of captain, he set out to take part in the campaign of Belgium, where he conducted himself with bravery and distinction. After for some time filling the office of secretary of the “commission d’organisation du mouvement des armées,” he in 1794 became deputy of the director of the Polytechnic school, and on the institution of the central schools at Dijon he was appointed to the chair of the “method of sciences,” where he made his first experiments in that mode of tuition which he afterwards developed more fully. On the central schools being replaced by other educational institutions, Jacotot occupied successively the chairs of mathematics and of Roman law until the overthrow of the empire. In 1815 he was elected a representative to the chamber of deputies; but after the second restoration he found it necessary to quit his native land, and, having taken up his residence at Brussels, he was in 1818 nominated by the Government teacher of the French language at the university of Louvain, where he perfected into a system the educational principles which he had already practised with success in France. His method was not only adopted in several institutions in Belgium, but also met with some approval in France, England, Germany and Russia. It was based on three principles: (1) all men have equal intelligence; (2) every man has received from God the faculty of being able to instruct himself; (3) everything is in everything. As regards (1) he maintained that it is only in the will to use their intelligence that men differ; and his own process, depending on (3), was to give any one learning a language for the first time a short passage of a few lines, and to encourage the pupil to study, first the words, then the letters, then the grammar, then the meaning, until a single paragraph became the occasion for learning an entire literature. After the revolution of 1830 Jacotot returned to France, and he died at Paris on the 30th of July 1840.
His system was described by him in Enseignement universel, langue maternelle, Louvain and Dijon, 1823—which passed through several editions—and in various other works; and he also advocated his views in the Journal de l’émancipation intellectuelle. For a complete list of his works and fuller details regarding his career, see Biographie de J. Jacotot, by Achille Guillard (Paris, 1860).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Jacobi, Karl Gustav Jacob

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​JACOBI, KARL GUSTAV JACOB (1804–1851), German mathematician, was born at Potsdam, of Jewish parentage, on the 10th of December 1804. He studied at Berlin University, where he obtained the degree of doctor of philosophy in 1825, his thesis being an analytical discussion of the theory of fractions. In 1827 he became extraordinary and in 1829 ordinary professor of mathematics at Königsberg, and this chair he filled till 1842, when he visited Italy for a few months to recruit his health. On his return he removed to Berlin, where he lived as a royal pensioner till his death, which occurred on the 18th of February 1851.
His investigations in elliptic functions, the theory of which he established upon quite a new basis, and more particularly his development of the theta-function, as given in his great treatise Fundamenta nova theoriae functionum ellipticarum (Königsberg, 1829), and in later papers in Crelle’s Journal, constitute his grandest analytical discoveries. Second in importance only to these are his researches in differential equations, notably the theory of the last multiplier, which is fully treated in his Vorlesungen über Dynamik, edited by R. F. A. Clebsch (Berlin, 1866). It was in analytical development that Jacobi’s peculiar power mainly lay, and he made many important contributions of this kind to other departments of mathematics, as a glance at the long list of papers that were published by him in Crelle’s Journal and elsewhere from 1826 onwards will sufficiently indicate. He was one of the early founders of the theory of determinants; in particular, he invented the functional determinant formed of the n$^2$ differential coefficients of n given functions of n independent variables, which now bears his name (Jacobian), and which has played an important part in many analytical investigations (see Algebraic Forms). Valuable also are his papers on Abelian transcendents, and his investigations in the theory of numbers, in which latter department he mainly supplements the labours of K. F. Gauss. The planetary theory and other particular dynamical problems likewise occupied his attention from time to time. He left a vast store of manuscript, portions of which have been published at intervals in Crelle’s Journal. His other works include Commentatio de transformatione integralis duplicis indefiniti in formam simpliciorem (1832), Canon arithmeticus (1839), and Opuscula mathematica (1846–1857). His Gesammelte Werke (1881–1891) were published by the Berlin Academy.
See Lejeune-Dirichlet, “Gedächtnisrede auf Jacobi” in the Abhandlungen der Berliner Akademie (1852).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Jacobi, Johann Georg

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​JACOBI, JOHANN GEORG (1740–1814), German poet, elder brother of the philosopher, F. H. Jacobi (1743–1819), was born at Düsseldorf on the 2nd of September 1740. He studied theology at Göttingen and jurisprudence at Helmstedt, and was appointed, in 1766, professor of philosophy in Halle. In this year he made the acquaintance of J. W. L. (“Vater”) Gleim, who, attracted by the young poet’s Poetische Versuche (1764), became his warm friend, and a lively literary correspondence ensued between Gleim in Halberstadt and Jacobi in Halle. In order to have Jacobi near him, Gleim succeeded in procuring for him a prebendal stall at the cathedral of Halberstadt in 1769, and here Jacobi issued a number of anacreontic lyrics and sonnets. He ​tired, however, of the lighter muse, and in 1774, to Gleim’s grief, left Halberstadt, and for two years (1774–1776) edited at Düsseldorf the Iris, a quarterly for women readers. Meanwhile, he wrote many charming lyrics, distinguished by exquisite taste and true poetical feeling. In 1784 he became professor of literature at the university of Freiburg im Breisgau, a post which he held until his death there on the 4th of January 1814. In addition to the earlier Iris, to which Goethe, his brother F. H. Jacobi, Gleim and other poets contributed, he published, from 1803–1813, another periodical, also called Iris, in which Klopstock, Herder, Jean Paul, Voss and the brothers Stollberg also collaborated.
Jacobi’s Sämmtliche Werke were published in 1774 (Halberstadt, 3 vols.). Other editions appeared at Zürich in 1807–1813 and 1825. See Ungedruckte Briefe von und an Johann Georg Jacobi (Strassburg, 1874); biographical notice by Daniel Jacoby in Allg. Deutsche Biographie; Longo, Laurence Sterne und Johann Georg Jacobi (Vienna, 1898); and Leben J. G. Jacobis, von einem seiner Freunde (1822).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Jacobs, Christian Friedrich Wilhelm

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​JACOBS, CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH WILHELM (1764–1847), German classical scholar, was born at Gotha on the 6th of October 1764. After studying philology and theology at Jena and Göttingen, in 1785 he became teacher in the gymnasium of his native town, and in 1802 was appointed to an office in the public library. In 1807 he became classical tutor in the lyceum of Munich, but, disgusted at the attacks made upon him by the old Bavarian Catholic party, who resented the introduction of “north German” teachers, he returned to Gotha in 1810 to take charge of the library and the numismatic cabinet. He remained in Gotha till his death on the 30th of March 1847. Jacobs was an extremely successful teacher; he took great interest in the affairs of his country, and was a publicist of no mean order. But his great work was an edition of the Greek Anthology, with copious notes, in 13 volumes (1798–1814), supplemented by a revised text from the Codex Palatinus (1814–1817). He published also notes on Horace, Stobaeus, Euripides, Athenaeus and the Iliaca of Tzetzes; translations of Aelian (History of Animals); many of the Greek romances; Philostratus; poetical versions of much of the Greek Anthology; miscellaneous essays on classical subjects; and some very successful school books. His translation of the political speeches of Demosthenes was undertaken with the express purpose of rousing his country against Napoleon, whom he regarded as a second Philip of Macedon.
See E. F. Wüstemann, Friderici Jacobsii laudatio (Gotha, 1848); C. Bursian, Geschichte der classischen Philologie in Deutschland; and the appreciative article by C. Regel in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Leno, Dan

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​LENO, DAN, the stage-name of George Galvin (1861–1904), English comedian, who was born at Somers Town, London, in February 1861. His parents were actors, known as Mr and Mrs Johnny Wilde. Dan Leno was trained to be an acrobat, but soon became a dancer, travelling with his brother as “the brothers Leno,” and winning the world’s championship in clog-dancing at Leeds in 1880. Shortly afterwards he appeared in London at the Oxford, and in 1886–1887 at the Surrey Theatre. In 1888–1889 he was engaged by Sir Augustus Harris to play the Baroness in the Babes in the Wood, and from that time he was a principal figure in the Drury Lane pantomimes. He was the wittiest and most popular comedian of his day, and delighted London music-hall audiences by his shop-walker, stores-proprietor, waiter, doctor, beef-eater, bathing attendant, “Mrs Kelly,” and other impersonations. In 1900 he engaged to give his entire services to the Pavilion Music Hall, where he received £100 per week. In November 1901 he was summoned to Sandringham to do a “turn” before the king, and was proud from that time to call himself the “king’s jester.” Dan Leno’s generosity endeared him to his profession, and he was the object of much sympathy during the brain failure which recurred during the last eighteen months of his life. He died on the 31st of October 1904.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lenormant, François

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​LENORMANT, FRANÇOIS (1837–1883), French Assyriologist and archaeologist, was born in Paris on the 17th of January 1837. His father, Charles Lenormant, distinguished as an archaeologist, numismatist and Egyptologist, was anxious that his son should follow in his steps. He made him begin Greek at the age of six, and the child responded so well to this precocious scheme of instruction, that when he was only fourteen an essay of his, on the Greek tablets found at Memphis, appeared in the Revue archéologique. In 1856 he won the numismatic prize of the Académie des Inscriptions with an essay entitled Classification des monnaies des Lagides. In 1862 he became sub-librarian of the Institute. In 1859 he accompanied his father on a journey of exploration to Greece, during which Charles Lenormant succumbed to fever at Athens (24th November). Lenormant returned to Greece three times during the next six years, and gave up all the time he could spare from his official work to archaeological research. These peaceful labours were rudely interrupted by the war of 1870, when Lenormant served with the army and was wounded in the siege of Paris. In 1874 he was appointed professor of archaeology at the National Library, and in the following year he collaborated with Baron de Witte in founding the Gazette archéologique. As early as 1867 he had turned his attention to Assyrian studies; he was among the first to recognize in the cuneiform inscriptions the existence of a non-Semitic language, now known as Accadian. Lenormant’s knowledge was of encyclopaedic extent, ranging over an immense number of subjects, and at the same time thorough, though somewhat lacking perhaps in the strict accuracy of the modern school. Most of his varied studies were directed towards tracing the origins of the two great civilizations of the ancient world, which were to be sought in Mesopotamia and on the shores of the Mediterranean. He had a perfect passion for exploration. Besides his early expeditions to Greece, he visited the south of Italy three times with this object, and it was while exploring in Calabria that he met with an accident which ended fatally in Paris on the 9th of December 1883, after a long illness. The amount and variety of Lenormant’s work is truly amazing when it is remembered that he died at the early age of forty-six. Probably the best known of his books are Les Origines de l’histoire d’après la Bible, and his ancient history of the East and account of Chaldean magic. For breadth of view, combined with extraordinary subtlety of intuition, he was probably unrivalled.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lens (France)

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​LENS, a town of Northern France, in the department of Pas-de-Calais, 13 m. N.N.E. of Arras by rail on the Déûle and on the Lens canal. Pop. (1906) 27,692. Lens has important iron and steel foundries, and engineering works and manufactories of steel cables, and occupies a central position in the coalfields of the department. Two and a half miles W.S.W. lies Liévin (pop. 22,070), likewise a centre of the coalfield. In 1648 the neighbourhood of Lens was the scene of a celebrated victory gained by Louis II. of Bourbon, prince of Condé, over the Spaniards.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lennox, Charlotte

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​LENNOX, CHARLOTTE (1720–1804), British writer, daughter of Colonel James Ramsay, lieutenant-governor of New York, was born in 1720. She went to London in 1735, and, being left unprovided for at her father’s death, she began to earn her living by writing. She made some unsuccessful appearances on the stage and married in 1748. Samuel Johnson had an exaggerated admiration for her. “Three such women,” he said, speaking of Elizabeth Carter, Hannah More and Fanny Burney, “are not to be found; I know not where to find a fourth, except Mrs Lennox, who is superior to them all.” Her chief works are: The Female Quixote; or the Adventures of Arabella (1752), a novel; Shakespear illustrated; or the novels and histories on which the plays . . . are founded (1753–1754), in which she argued that Shakespeare had spoiled the stories he borrowed for his plots by interpolating unnecessary intrigues and incidents; The Life of Harriot Stuart (1751), a novel; and The Sister, a comedy produced at Covent Garden (18th February 1769). This last was withdrawn after the first night, after a stormy reception, due, said Goldsmith, to the fact that its author had abused Shakespeare.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lenox

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​LENOX, a township of Berkshire county, Massachusetts, U.S.A. Pop. (1900) 2942, (1905) 3058; (1910) 3060. Area, 19.2 sq. m. The principal village, also named Lenox (or Lenox-on-the-Heights), lies about 2 m. W. of the Housatonic river, at an altitude of about 1000 ft., and about it are high hills—Yokun Seat (2080 ft.), South Mountain (1200 ft.), Bald Head (1583 ft.), and Rattlesnake Hill (1540 ft.). New Lenox and Lenoxdale are other villages in the township. Lenox is a fashionable summer and autumn resort, much frequented by wealthy people from Washington, Newport and New York. There are innumerable lovely walks and drives in the surrounding region, which contains some of the most beautiful country of the Berkshires—hills, lakes, charming intervales and woods. As early as 1835 Lenox began to attract summer residents. In the next decade began the creation of large estates, although the great holdings of the present day, and the villas scattered over the hills, are comparatively recent features. The height of the season is in the autumn, when there are horse-shows, golf, tennis, hunts and other outdoor amusements. The Lenox library (1855) contained about 20,000 volumes in 1908. Lenox was settled about 1750, was included in Richmond township in 1765, and became an independent township in 1767. The names were those of Sir Charles Lennox, third duke of Richmond and of Lennox (1735–1806), one of the staunch friends of the American colonies during the War of Independence. Lenox was the county-seat from 1787 to 1868. It has literary associations with Catherine M. Sedgwick (1789–1867), who passed here the second half of her life; with Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose brief residence here (1850–1851) was marked by the production of the House of the Seven Gables and the Wonder Book; with Fanny Kemble, a summer resident from 1836–1853; and with Henry Ward Beecher (see his Star Papers). Elizabeth (Mrs Charles) Sedgwick, the sister-in-law of Catherine Sedgwick, maintained here from 1828 to 1864 a school for girls, in which Harriet Hosmer, the sculptor, and Maria S. Cummins (1827–1866), the novelist, were educated; and in Lenox academy (1803), a famous classical school (now a public high school) were educated W. L. Yancey, A. H. Stephens, Mark Hopkins and David Davis (1815–1886), a circuit judge of Illinois from 1848 to 1862, a justice (1862–1877) of the United States Supreme Court, a Republican member of the United States Senate from Illinois in 1877–1883, and president of the Senate from the 31st of October 1881, when he succeeded Chester A. Arthur, until the 3rd of March 1883. There is a statue commemorating General John Paterson (1744–1808) a soldier from Lenox in the War of Independence.
See R. de W. Mallary, Lenox and the Berkshire Highlands (1902); J. C. Adams, Nature Studies in Berkshire; C. F. Warner, Picturesque Berkshire (1890); and Katherine M. Abbott, Old Paths and Legends of the New England Border (1907).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lennox, Margaret, Countess of

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​LENNOX, CHARLOTTE (1720–1804), British writer, daughter of Colonel James Ramsay, lieutenant-governor of New York, was born in 1720. She went to London in 1735, and, being left unprovided for at her father’s death, she began to earn her living by writing. She made some unsuccessful appearances on the stage and married in 1748. Samuel Johnson had an exaggerated admiration for her. “Three such women,” he said, speaking of Elizabeth Carter, Hannah More and Fanny Burney, “are not to be found; I know not where to find a fourth, except Mrs Lennox, who is superior to them all.” Her chief works are: The Female Quixote; or the Adventures of Arabella (1752), a novel; Shakespear illustrated; or the novels and histories on which the plays . . . are founded (1753–1754), in which she argued that Shakespeare had spoiled the stories he borrowed for his plots by interpolating unnecessary intrigues and incidents; The Life of Harriot Stuart (1751), a novel; and The Sister, a comedy produced at Covent Garden (18th February 1769). This last was withdrawn after the first night, after a stormy reception, due, said Goldsmith, to the fact that its author had abused Shakespeare.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lituus

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​LITUUS, the cavalry trumpet of the Romans, said by Macrobius (Saturn. lib. vi.) to have resembled the crooked staff borne by the Augurs. The lituus consisted of a cylindrical tube 4 or 5 ft. long, having a narrow bore, and terminating in a conical bell joint turned up in such a manner as to give the instrument the outline of the letter “J.” Unlike the buccina, cornu and tuba, the other military service instruments of the Romans, the lituus has not been traced during the middle ages, the medieval instrument most nearly resembling it being the cromorne or tournebout, which, however, had lateral holes and was played by means of a reed mouthpiece. A lituus found in a Roman warrior’s tomb at Cervetri (Etruria) in 1827 is preserved in the Vatican. Victor Mahillon gives its length as 1 m. 60, and its scale as in unison with that of the trumpet in G (Catalogue descriptif, 1896, pp. 29-30).  (K. S.)