Page:EB1911 - Volume 01.djvu/84

 ABERGAVENNY, a market town and municipal borough in the northern parliamentary division of Monmouthshire, England, 14 m. W. of Monmouth on the Great Western and the London and North-Western railways. Pop. (1901) 7795. It is situated at the junction of a small stream called the Gavenny with the river Usk; and the site, almost surrounded by lofty hills, is very beautiful. The town was formerly walled, and has the remains of a castle built soon after the conquest, frequently the scene of border strife. The church of St Mary belonged originally to a Benedictine monastery founded early in the 12th century. The existing building, however, is Decorated and Perpendicular, and contains a fine series of memorials of dates from the 13th to the 17th century. There is a free grammar school, which till 1857 had a fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford. Breweries, ironworks, quarries, brick fields and collieries in the neighbourhood are among the principal industrial establishments. Abergavenny was incorporated in 1899, and is governed by a mayor, 4 aldermen and 12 councillors. Area, 825 acres.

ABERIGH-MACKAY, GEORGE ROBERT (1848–1881), Anglo-Indian writer, son of a Bengal chaplain, was born on the 25th of July 1848, and was educated at Magdalen College School and Cambridge University. Entering the Indian education department in 1870, he became professor of English literature in Delhi College in 1873, tutor to the raja of Rutlam 1876, and principal of the Rajkumar College at Indore in 1877. He is best known for his book Twenty-one Days in India (1878–1879), a satire upon Anglo-Indian society and modes of thought. This book gave promise of a successful literary career; but the author died at the age of thirty-three. ABERNETHY, JOHN (1680–1740), Irish Presbyterian divine, was born at Coleraine, county Londonderry, where his father was Nonconformist minister, on the 19th of October 1680. In his thirteenth year he entered the university of Glasgow, and on concluding his course there went on to Edinburgh, where his intellectual and social attainments gained him a ready entrance into the most cultured circles. Returning home he received licence to preach from his Presbytery before he was twenty-one. In 1701 he was urgently invited to accept charge of an important congregation in Antrim; and after an interval of two years, mostly spent in further study in Dublin, he was ordained there on the 8th of August 1703. Here he did notable work, both as a debater in the synods and assemblies of his church and as an evangelist. In 1712 he lost his wife (Susannah Jordan), and the loss desolated his life for many years. In 1717 he was invited to the congregation of Usher’s Quay, Dublin, and contemporaneously to what was called the Old Congregation of Belfast. The synod assigned him to Dublin. After careful consideration he declined to accede, and remained at Antrim. This refusal was regarded then as ecclesiastical high-treason; and a controversy of the most intense and disproportionate character followed, Abernethy standing firm for religious freedom and repudiating the sacerdotal assumptions of all ecclesiastical courts. The controversy and quarrel bears the name of the two camps in the conflict, the “Subscribers” and the “Non-subscribers.” Out-and-out evangelical as John Abernethy was, there can be no question that he and his associates sowed the seeds of that after-struggle (1821–1840) in which, under the leadership of Dr Henry Cooke, the Arian and Socinian elements of the Irish Presbyterian Church were thrown out. Much of what he contended for, and which the “Subscribers” opposed bitterly, has been silently granted in the lapse of time. In 1726 the “Non-subscribers,” spite of an almost wofully pathetic pleading against separation by Abernethy, were cut off, with due ban and solemnity, from the Irish Presbyterian Church. In 1730, although a “Non-subscriber,” he was invited to Wood Street, Dublin, whither he removed. In 1731 came on the greatest controversy in which Abernethy engaged, viz. in relation to the Test Act nominally, but practically on the entire question of tests and disabilities. His stand was “against all laws that, upon account of mere differences of religious opinions and forms of worship, excluded men of integrity and ability from serving their country.” He was nearly a century in advance of his age. He had to reason with those who denied that a Roman Catholic or Dissenter could be a “man of integrity and ability.” His Tracts—afterwards collected—did fresh service, generations later, and his name is honoured by all who love freedom of conscience and opinion. He died in December 1740.

ABERNETHY, JOHN (1764–1831), English surgeon, grandson of (see above), was born in London on the 3rd of April 1764. His father was a London merchant. Educated at Wolverhampton grammar school, he was apprenticed in 1779 to Sir Charles Blicke (1745–1815), surgeon to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. He attended the anatomical lectures of Sir William Blizard (1743–1835) at the London Hospital, and was early employed to assist as “demonstrator”; he also attended Percival Pott’s surgical lectures at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, as well as the lectures of John Hunter. On Pott’s resignation of the office of surgeon of St Bartholomew’s, Sir Charles Blicke, who was assistant-surgeon, succeeded him, and Abernethy was elected assistant-surgeon in 1787. In this capacity he began to give lectures at his house in Bartholomew Close, which were so well attended that the governors of the hospital built a regular theatre (1790–1791), and Abernethy thus became the founder of the distinguished school of St Bartholomew’s. He held the office of assistant-surgeon of the hospital for the long period of twenty-eight years, till, in 1815, he was elected principal surgeon. He had before that time been appointed lecturer in anatomy to the Royal College of Surgeons (1814). Abernethy was not a great operator, though his name is associated with the treatment of aneurism by ligature of the external iliac artery. His Surgical Observations on the Constitutional Origin and Treatment of Local Diseases (1809)—known as “My Book,” from the great frequency with which he referred his patients to it, and to page 72 of it in particular, under that name—was one of the earliest popular works on medical science.