Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 14.djvu/375

Dennis fatal before he got back to the city. He was buried in a bastion used as a graveyard by the garrison, over which the earth was designedly projected when the defences were blown up on leaving the place. Dennie's services had been recognised at home by his appointment as aide-de-camp to the queen, tidings of which (reports to the contrary notwithstanding) reached Jellalabad a week before his fall (, Hist. Rec. 13th Foot). He fell after forty-two years' military service, all passed on full pay and mostly in India, during which he had purchased every step of regimental rank, a soldier as brave as any the British army ever produced, and as good an officer as any that served through the war in Afghanistan. After his death, Dennie's letters from the seat of war in Afghanistan were published in the ‘Dublin University Magazine,’ and afterwards as a separate volume, entitled ‘Narrative of Campaigns in Scinde, Beloochistan, and Afghanistan’ (Dublin, 1843). The volume contains Dennie's correspondence with the military authorities, respecting his treatment at Ghuznee, and his reasons for rejecting the offer of an inferior grade of the Dooranee decoration. The medal to which he was entitled for the defence of Jellalabad was forwarded to his aged mother, and to four unmarried sisters chiefly depending on him small pensions were subsequently awarded.

[Burke's Landed Gentry, 1868, under ‘Steele of Rathbride;’ War Office Records; London Gazettes; Extraordinary Military Career of John Shipp (London, 1843), vol. i.; narratives of First Burmese and First Afghan Wars, various; Sir Thomas Seaton's Cadet to Colonel (London, 1864), vol. i.; Gleig's Sale's Brigade in Afghanistan; Thomas Carter's Hist. Rec. 13th Light Infantry (London, 1867); Dennie's Narrative of Campaigns in Scinde, Beloochistan, and Afghanistan (Dublin, 1843); Gent. Mag. new ser. xviii. 95.]  DENNIS. [See also and .]

DENNIS, JAMES BLATCH PIGGOTT (1816–1861), histologist, son of Philip Piggott Dennis, an officer in the army, took the degree of B.A. at Queen's College, Oxford, and was ordained in 1839. He is best known by his microscopical investigations into the internal structure of bone, of which he gave an account in the papers published in the ‘Journal of Microscopical Science.’ He is credited with having established two important geological facts, namely the existence of mammifers anterior to the lias deposit, and the existence of birds during the deposition of the Stonesfield slate, or further back by many formations than had been previously known (Journ. Microsc. Sci. iv. 261, v. 63, 191). The results of his researches were welcomed by men of high scientific rank, such as Professor Owen and Professor Henslow, and on the proposal of Owen he was elected a member of the Geological Society. The mammal jawbone which Dennis had discovered fourteen years previously in the Stonesfield slate formed the subject of a paper which Owen read before this society (Geol. Soc. Journ. xiii. 1–11). In connection with Dennis's discovery of the Stonesfield slate it is related that the curator of one of the university museums having sent some perfect bones to Professor Owen, and a few minute fragments of the same parcel to Dennis, the two investigators, without communicating with each other, both arrived at the same conclusion and ascribed the bones to the same fossil reptile. In 1860 Dennis read a paper before the British Association ‘On the Mode of Flight of the Sterodactyles of the Coprolite bed near Cambridge’ (Brit. Assoc. Rep. 1860, p. 76). Besides contributing papers to the ‘Journal of Microscopical Science’ and other serials, Dennis was the author of various pamphlets on theological and scientific subjects. He died on 13 Jan. 1861 at Bury St. Edmunds.

[Annual Register; Ipswich Journal, 19 Jan. 1861; Ward's Men of the Reign; Royal Society's Catalogue of Scientific Papers, ii. 239, iv. 727.]  DENNIS, JOHN (1657–1734), critic, was born in London in 1657. His father, Francis Dennis, was a prosperous saddler. Dennis was sent to Harrow under Dr. William Horn, where he remained for about five years. He entered Caius College, Cambridge, 13 Jan. 1675, and took his B.A. degree in 1679. He left the following year for Trinity Hall, where he became M.A. in 1683 (Graduati Cantabrigienses, p. 137). In the ‘European Magazine’ (1794), xxv. 412, Dr. R. Farmer, in a letter to Isaac Reed, quotes for the first time the following entry from the ‘Cambridge Gesta Book:’ ‘March 4, 1680. At a meeting of the masters and fellows, Sir Dennis mulcted 3l., his scholarship taken away, and he sent out of the college, for assaulting and wounding Sir Glenham with a sword.’ Nothing more is known of the affair. After leaving college Dennis started for a tour through France and Italy. On his return he mixed with the leading literary and fashionable men, such as the Earls of Pembroke and Mulgrave, and Dryden, Congreve, Moyle, Wycherley, Southern, Garth, and others. Property inherited from his father and an uncle, who was an alderman of London, maintained him for a considerable time, though he had afterwards to live by his