- Branche: Library & information science
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Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. It was founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The ...
A celebrated French ducal family deriving its title from the town of Guise in Aisne.
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A celebrated French historian and statesman, born at Nimes; his boyhood was spent at Geneva, and in 1805 he came to Paris to study law, but he soon took to writing, and in his twenty-fourth year had published several works and translated Gibbon's great history; in 1812 he was appointed to the chair of History in the Sorbonne; on the second restoration (1814) became Secretary-General of the Ministry of the Interior; the return of Napoleon drove him from office, but on the downfall of the Corsican he received the post of Secretary to the Ministry of Justice; in 1830 he threw in his lot with Louis Philippe, became Minister of Public Instruction, Foreign Minister, and Prime Minister; his political career practically closed with the downfall of Louis Philippe; his voluminous historical works, executed between his terms of office and in his closing years, display wide learning and a great faculty of generalisation; the best known are "The History of the English Revolution" and "The History of Civilisation"; as a statesman he was honest, patriotic, but short-sighted (1787-1874).
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A celebrated French sculptor and architect, born at Paris; he did the reliefs on the Fountain of the Innocents and the facade of the old Louvre; was a Huguenot, but died before the massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572.
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A celebrated German chemist, the father of chemistry, born at Brussels; his early years were divided between the study of medicine and the practice of a religious mysticism; the works of Paracelsus stimulated his interest in chemistry and physics, and having married a noble Brabant lady, he settled down on the family estate near Vilvorde, where he devoted himself to scientific research; mixed up a good deal of mysticism and alchemy with his scientific discoveries, and made a special study of gases; he was the first to prove the indestructibility of matter in chemical changes by utilising the balance in analysis; he invented the word gas, first used the melting-point of ice and the boiling-point of water as limits of a thermometric scale, and his physiological speculations led him to regard the stomach as the seat of the soul! (1577-1644).
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A celebrated German city, in Baden, situated amid beautiful surroundings, on the Neckar, 13 m. SE. of Mannheim; has many interesting buildings, including ruins of a splendid 13th-century castle, but is chiefly celebrated for its flourishing university (student roll, 800; professors, 100; library, 500,000), whose professoriate has included many of the most distinguished German scholars; it was long the centre of Calvinism; its chief trade is in books, tobacco, wine, and beer.
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A celebrated German jurist, born at Eisenberg; was successively professor of Philosophy and subsequently of Law at several universities of Germany; he wrote several learned works in law treated from a philosophical standpoint; mention may be made of his "Historia Juris Civilis Romani" and "Elementa Juris Naturae Gentium" (1681-1741).
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A celebrated German writer, whose versatility displayed itself in numerous tales, sketches, art-criticisms, etc., all bearing the impress of a strong, if wayward, intellect; born at Konigsberg, was trained to the law, and entered the State service; his position at Warsaw was lost to him on the entry of the French troops in 1806, and for some years he supported himself by musical criticism in Leipzig, and as Director of a Dresden Opera Company; in 1816 he was again in government service at Berlin, where he continued till his death; his writings are strongly characteristic of the romanticism of his time, while he himself was a witty, restless leader of Bohemian life (1776-1822).
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A celebrated Greek physician who lived into the 3rd century B.C., born at Chalcedon, and settled at Alexandria, where he devoted himself specially to anatomy and helped to found the medical school in that city; his zeal is said to have led him to dissect criminals alive; some of his writings are yet extant.
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A celebrated Greek sophist, born at Syracuse, in Sicily; settled in Athens, a swashbuckler of a man, who attached himself to the Eleatics, and especially Zeno, in order that by their dialectic "he might demonstrate that nothing exists, or if something exists, that it cannot be known, or if it can be known, that it cannot be communicated"; his work bore characteristically enough the title "Of the Non-Existent, or of Nature"!
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A celebrated mechanician, born at Foulby, Yorkshire; was the first to invent a chronometer which, by its ingenious apparatus for compensating the disturbing effects caused by variations of climate, enabled mariners to determine longitude to within a distance of 18 m.; by this invention he won a prize of £20,000 offered by Government; amongst other things he invented the compensating gridiron pendulum, still in use (1693-1776).
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