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Rh clear sanguine complexion, with a long beard as white as milk—a very handsome man—tall and slender. He wore a goune like an artist’s goune with hanging sleeves.” Dee’s Speculum or mirror, a piece of solid pink-tinted glass about the size of an orange, is preserved in the British Museum.

His principal works are—Propaedeumata aphoristica (London, 1558); Monas hieroglyphica (Antwerp, 1564); Epistola ad Fredericum Commandinum (Pesaro, 1570); Preface Mathematical to the English Euclid (1570); Divers Annotations and Inventions added after the tenth book of English Euclid (1570); Epistola praefixa Ephemeridibus Joannis Feldi, a. 1557; Parallaticae commentationis praxeosque nucleus quidam (London, 1573). The catalogue of his printed and published works is to be found in his Compendious Rehearsal, as well as in his letter to Archbishop Whitgift. A manuscript of Dee’s, relating what passed for many years between him and some spirits, was edited by Meric Casaubon and published in 1659. The Private Diary of Dr John Dee, and the Catalogue of his Library of Manuscripts, edited by J. O. Halliwell, was published by the Camden Society in 1842. There is a life of Dee in Thomas Smith’s Vitae illustrium virorum (1707); English translation by W. A. Ayton, the Life of John Dee (1909).

 DEE (Welsh, Dyfrdwy; Lat., and in Milton, Deva), a river of Wales and England. It rises in Bala Lake, Merionethshire, which is fed by a number of small streams. Leaving the lake near the town of Bala it follows a north-easterly course to Corwen, turns thence E. by S. past Llangollen to a point near Overton, and then bends nearly north to Chester, and thereafter north-west through a great estuary opening into the Irish Sea. In the Llangollen district the Dee crosses Denbighshire, and thereafter forms the boundary of that county with Shropshire, a detached part of Flint, and Cheshire. From Bala nearly down to Overton, a distance of 35 m., during which the river falls about 330 ft., its course lies through a narrow and beautiful valley, enclosed on the south by the steep lower slopes of the Berwyn Mountains and on the north by a succession of lesser ranges. The portion known as the Vale of Llangollen is especially famous. Here an aqueduct carrying the Pontcysyllte branch of the Shropshire Union canal bestrides the valley; it is a remarkable engineering work completed by Thomas Telford in 1805. The Dee has a total length of about 70 m. and a fall of 530 ft. Below Overton it debouches upon its plain track. Below Chester it follows a straight artificial channel to the estuary, and this is the only navigable portion. The estuary, which is 14 m. long, and 5 m. wide at its mouth, between Hilbre Point on the English and Point of Air on the Welsh side, is not a commercial highway like the neighbouring mouth of the Mersey, for though in appearance a fine natural harbour at high tide, it becomes at low tide a vast expanse of sand, through which the river meanders in a narrow channel. The navigation, however, is capable of improvement, and schemes have been set on foot to this end. The tide rushes in with great speed over the sands, and their danger is illustrated in the well-known ballad “The Sands of Dee” by Charles Kingsley. The Dee drains an area of 813 sq. m.

DEE, a river in the south of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, pursuing a generally easterly direction from its source in the extreme west of the county till it reaches the North Sea at the city of Aberdeen. It rises in the Wells of Dee, a spring on Ben Braeriach, one of the Cairngorms, at a height of 4061 ft. above the sea. It descends rapidly from this altitude, and by the time that it receives the Geusachan, on its right bank, about 6 m. from its source, it has fallen 2421 ft. From the mountains flanking its upper reaches it is fed by numerous burns named and unnamed. With its tributaries the river drains an area of 1000 sq. m. Rapid and turbulent during the first half of its course of 90 m., it broadens appreciably below Aboyne and the rate of flow is diminished. The channel towards its mouth was artificially altered in order to provide increased dock accommodation at Aberdeen, but, above, the stream is navigable for only barges and small craft for a few miles. It runs through scenery of transcendent beauty, especially in Braemar. About two miles above Inverey it enters a narrow rocky gorge, 300 yds. long and only a few feet wide at one part, and forms the rapids and cascades of the famous Linn of Dee. One of the finest of Scottish salmon streams, it retains its purity almost to the very end of its run. The principal places on the Dee, apart from private residences, are Castleton of Braemar, Ballater, Aboyne, Kincardine O’Neil, Banchory, Culter and Cults.

DEED (in O. Eng. deâd, from the stem of the verb “to do”), that which is done, an act, doing; particularly, in law, a contract in writing, sealed and delivered by the party bound to the party intended to benefit. Contracts or obligations under seal are called in English law specialties, and down to 1869 they took precedence in payment over simple contracts, whether written or not. Writing, sealing and delivery are all essential to a deed. The signature of the party charged is not material, and the deed is not void for want of a date. Delivery, it is held, may be complete without the actual handing over of the deed; it is sufficient if the act of sealing were accompanied by words or acts signifying that the deed was intended to be presently binding; and delivery to a third person for the use of the party benefited will be sufficient. On the other hand, the deed may be handed over to a third person as an escrow, in which case it will not take effect as a deed until certain conditions are performed. Such conditional delivery may be inferred from the circumstances attending the transaction, although the conditions be not expressed in words. A deed indented, or indenture (so called because written in counterparts on the same sheet of parchment, separated by cutting a wavy line between them so as to be identified by fitting the parts together), is between two or more parties who contract mutually. The actual indentation is not now necessary to an indenture. The deed-poll (with a polled or smooth-cut edge, not indented) is a deed in which one party binds himself without reference to any corresponding obligations undertaken by another party. See.

 DEEMS, CHARLES (ALEXANDER) FORCE (1820–1893), American clergyman, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on the 4th of December 1820. He was a precocious child and delivered lectures on temperance and on Sunday schools before he was fourteen years old. He graduated at Dickinson College in 1839, taught and preached in New York city for a few months, in 1840 took charge of the Methodist Episcopal church at Asbury, New Jersey, and removed in the next year to North Carolina, where he was general agent for the American Bible Society. He was professor of logic and rhetoric at the University of North Carolina in 1842–1847, and professor of natural sciences at Randolph-Macon College (then at Boydton, Virginia) in 1847–1848, and after two years of preaching at Newbern, N.C., he held for four years (1850–1854) the presidency of Greensboro (N.C.) Female College. He continued as a Methodist Episcopal clergyman at various pastorates in North Carolina from 1854 to 1865, for the last seven years being a presiding elder and in 1859 to 1863 being the proprietor of St Austin’s Institute, Wilson. In 1865 he settled in New York City, where in 1866 he began preaching in the chapel of New York University, and in 1868 he established and became the pastor of the undenominational Church of the Strangers, which in 1870 occupied the former Mercer Street Presbyterian church, purchased and given to Dr Deems by Cornelius Vanderbilt; there he remained until his death in New York city on the 18th of November 1893. He was one of the founders (1881) and president of the American Institute of Christian Philosophy and for ten years was editor of its organ, Christian Thought. Dr Deems was an earnest temperance advocate, as early as 1852 worked (unsuccessfully) for a general prohibition law in North Carolina, and in his later years allied himself with the Prohibition party. He was influential in securing from Cornelius Vanderbilt the endowment of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a man of rare personal and literary charm; he edited The Southern Methodist Episcopal Pulpit (1846–1852) and The Annals of Southern Methodism (1855–1857); he compiled Devotional Melodies (1842), and, with the assistance of Phoebe Cary, one of his parishioners, Hymns for all Christians (1869; revised, 1881); and he published many books, among which were: The Life of Dr Adam Clarke (1840); 