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 church of St Vincent, to the south-west of the town, derives its name from the first bishop, whose tomb it contains. The church of St Paul-lès-Dax, a suburb on the right bank of the Adour, belongs mainly to the 15th century, and has a Romanesque apse adorned with curious bas-reliefs. On a hill to the west of Dax stands a tower built in memory of the sailor and scientist Jean Charles Borda, born there in 1733; a statue was erected to him in the town in 1891. Dax, which is well known as a winter resort, owes much of its importance to its thermal waters and mud-baths (the deposit of the Adour), which are efficacious in cases of rheumatism, neuralgia and other disorders. The best-known spring is the Fontaine Chaude, which issues into a basin 160 ft. wide in the centre of the town. The principal of numerous bathing establishments are the Grands Thermes, the Bains Salés, adjoining a casino, and the Baignots, which fringe the Adour and are surrounded by gardens. Dax has a sub-prefecture, tribunals of first instance and of commerce, a communal college, a training college and a library. It has salt workings, tanneries, saw-mills, manufactures of soap and corks; commerce is chiefly in the pine wood, resin and cork of the Landes, in mules, cattle, horses and poultry.

Dax (Aquae Tarbellicae, Aquae Augustae, later D’Acqs) was the capital of the Tarbelli under the Roman domination, when its waters were already famous. Later it was the seat of a viscounty, which in the 11th century passed to the viscounts of Béarn, and in 1177 was annexed by Richard Cœur de Lion to Gascony. The bishopric, founded in the 3rd century, was in 1801 attached to that of Aire.

 DAY, JOHN (1574–1640?), English dramatist, was born at Cawston, Norfolk, in 1574, and educated at Ely. He became a sizar of Caius College, Cambridge, in 1592, but was expelled in the next year for stealing a book. He became one of Henslowe’s playwrights, collaborating with Henry Chettle, William Haughton, Thomas Dekker, Richard Hathway and Wentworth Smith, but his almost incessant activity seems to have left him poor enough, to judge by the small loans, of five shillings and even two shillings, that he obtained from Henslowe. The first play in which Day appears as part-author is The Conquest of Brute, with the finding of the Bath (1598), which, with most of his journeyman’s work, is lost. A drama dealing with the early years of the reign of Henry VI., The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green (acted 1600, printed 1659), written in collaboration with Chettle, is his earliest extant work. It bore the sub-title of The Merry Humor of Tom Strowd, the Norfolk Yeoman, and was so popular that second and third parts, by Day and Haughton, were produced in the next year. The Ile of Guls (printed 1606), a prose comedy founded upon Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, contains in its light dialogue much satire to which the key is now lost, but Mr Swinburne notes in Manasses’s burlesque of a Puritan sermon a curious anticipation of the eloquence of Mr Chadband in Bleak House. In 1607 Day produced, in conjunction with William Rowley and George Wilkins, The Travailes of the Three English Brothers, which detailed the adventures of Sir Thomas, Sir Anthony and Robert Shirley.

The Parliament of Bees is the work on which Day’s reputation chiefly rests. This exquisite and unique drama, or rather masque, is entirely occupied with “the doings, the births, the wars, the wooings” of bees, expressed in a style at once most singular and most charming. The bees hold a parliament under Prorex, the Master Bee, and various complaints are preferred against the humble-bee, the wasp, the drone and other offenders. This satirical allegory of affairs ends with a royal progress of Oberon, who distributes justice to all. The piece contains much for which parallel passages are found in Dekker’s Wonder of a Kingdom (1636) and Samuel Rowley’s (or Dekker’s) Noble Soldier (printed 1634). There is no earlier known edition of The Parliament of Bees than that in 1641, but a persistent tradition has assigned the piece to 1607. In 1608 Day published two comedies, Law Trickes, or Who Would have Thought it? and Humour out of Breath. The date of his death is unknown, but an elegy on him by John Tatham, the city poet, was published in 1640. The six dramas by John Day which we possess show a delicate fancy and dainty inventiveness all his own. He preserved, in a great measure, the dramatic tradition of John Lyly, and affected a kind of subdued euphuism. The Maydes Metamorphosis (1600), once supposed to be a posthumous work of Lyly’s, may be an early work of Day’s. It possesses, at all events, many of his marked characteristics. His prose Peregrinatic Scholastica or Learninges Pilgrimage, dating from his later years, was printed by Mr A. H. Bullen from a MS. of Day’s. Considerations partly based on this work have suggested that he had a share in the anonymous Pilgrimage to Parnassus and the Return from Parnassus. The beauty and ingenuity of The Parliament of Bees were noted and warmly extolled by Charles Lamb; and Day’s work has since found many admirers.

 DAY, THOMAS (1748–1789), British author, was born in London on the 22nd of June 1748. He is famous as the writer of Sandford and Merton (1783–1789), a book for the young, which, though quaintly didactic and often ridiculous, has had considerable educational value as inculcating manliness and independence. Day was educated at the Charterhouse and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and became a great admirer of J. J. Rousseau and his doctrine of the ideal state of nature. Having independent means he devoted himself to a life of study and philanthropy. His views on marriage were typical of the man. He brought up two foundlings, one of whom he hoped eventually to marry. They were educated on the severest principles, but neither acquired the high quality of stoicism which he had looked for. After several proposals of marriage to other ladies had been rejected, he married an heiress who agreed with his ascetic programme of life. He finally settled at Ottershaw in Surrey and took to farming on philanthropic principles. He had many curious and impracticable theories, among them one that all animals could be managed by kindness, and while riding an unbroken colt he was thrown near Wargrave and killed on the 28th of September 1789. His poem The Dying Negro, published in 1773, struck the keynote of the anti-slavery movement. It is also obvious from his other works, such as The Devoted Legions (1776) and The Desolation of America (1777), that he strongly sympathized with the Americans during their War of Independence.

 DAY (O. Eng. dæg, Ger. Tag; according to the New English Dictionary, “in no way related to the Lat. dies”), in astronomy, the interval of time in which a revolution of the earth on its axis is performed. Days are distinguished as solar, sidereal or lunar, according as the revolution is taken relatively to the sun, the stars or the moon. The solar day is the fundamental unit of time, not only in daily life but in astronomical practice. In the latter case, being determined by observations of the sun, it is taken to begin with the passage of the mean sun over the meridian of the place, or at mean noon, while the civil day begins at midnight. A vigorous effort was made during the last fifteen years of the 19th century to bring the two uses into harmony by beginning the astronomical day at midnight. In some isolated cases this has been done; but the general consensus of astronomers has been against it, the day as used in astronomy being only a measure of time, and having no relation to the period of daily repose. The time when the day shall begin is purely a matter of convenience. The present practice being the dominant one from the time of Ptolemy until the present, it was felt that the confusion in the combination of past and present astronomical observations, and the doubts and difficulties in using the astronomical ephemerides, formed a decisive argument against any change.

The question of a possible variability in the length of the day is one of fundamental importance. One necessary effect of the tidal retardation of the earth’s rotation is gradually to increase this length. It is remarkable that the discussion of