Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 03.djvu/487

LEFT DBEYSE 425 DRILL entered the Polytechnic School in Paris in 1878 and four years later was made a lieutenant of artillery. In 1889 he be- came a captain. He was arrested in 1894 charged with selling military secrets to Germany and Italy. He was convicted and on Jan. 5, 1895, publicly degraded from his rank in the presence of 5,000 troops. His sentence included life im- prisonment on the Isle du Diable, off the coast of French Guiana, where he was rigidly confined till 1899 when the French Senate voted for revision of the Dreyfus ALFRED DREYFUS case. He was accordingly brought back to France, retried by court-martial and again convicted. The French Govern- ment granted him a pardon almost imme- diately. He published "Five Years of My Life" (1901). Dreyfus was restored to the army, and served during the World War. DREYSE, JOHANN NIKOLAUS VON(dri'ze), a German inventor; born in Sommerda, near Erfurt, in Prussia, in 1787. He worked as a locksmith in Ger- many, and in a musket factory in Paris from 1809 to 1814. He then founded an ironware factory in Sommerda, and be- gan the manufacture of percussion-caps under a patent in 1824. In 1827 he in- vented a muzzle-loading, and in 1836 a breech-loading needle-gun, which was adopted in the Prussian army in 1840. In 1864 Dreyse was ennobled. He died Dec. 9, 1867. DRIFT, a word of several applications. 1. Architecture: The push, shoot, or horizontal thrust of an arch or vault on the abutments. 2. Geology: A loose aggregation or ac- cumulation of transported matter, con- sisting of sand and clay, with a mixture of angular and rounded fragments of rock, some of large size having occasion- ally one or more of their sides flattened or smoothed, or even highly polished. The smoothed surfaces usually exhibit many scratches parallel to each other, one set often crossing an older one. The drift is generally unstratified, in which case it is called till. This may be in places 50 or even 100 feet thick. 3. Ordnance: A priming-iron to clean the vent of a piece of ordnance from burning particles after each discharge. 4. Machinery: A round piece of steel, made slightly tapering and used for en- larging a hole in a metallic plate by be- ing driven through it. The drift may have a cutting edge merely on its advance face, or it may have spirally cut grooves which give the sides of the drift a ca- pacity for cutting. DRIFT PERIOD, the period during which the drift described above was de- posited. Though there is no reason why it should not have recurred time after time during bygone geological ages, yet the term "drift-period" as a measure of duration is limited to the time commenc- ing during the Newer Pliocene or Pleisto- cene, and terminating with the Post Plio- cene or Post Pleistocene, during which drift was deposited in the latitudes in which we find it now. That it is essen- tially a glacial phenomenon is apparent from the fact that while becoming more marked in its character on this side the equator, the farther N. one goes, it dies out about lat. 50° N. in Europe and 40° in North America. Hence it is often called Northern Drift. A corresponding development of it, however, exists in the S. hemisphere. This becomes more marked as one approaches the S. pole, and disappears, between 40° and 50° S. lat. Where it exists nearer the equator it is deposited ai'ound some giant mountain, the scratches and striations on the boul- ders and pebbles radiating from the mountain on every side. The drift is now universally attributed, as Agassiz long ago suggested, to the action of ice, the only controversy remaining being whether land ice or floating icebergs took the chief part in its distribution. Hence it is often called, as by Sir Charles Lyell, Glacial Drift. DRILL, a metallic tool for boring a hole in metal or hard material such as stone. Its form varies with the material in which it works. The action in metal is usually rotative, and the tool has two or