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 stay in Sweden furnished him with valuable documents for a political and social history of Sweden and France at the end of the 18th century. In 1864 and 1865 he published in the Revue des deux mondes a series of articles on Gustavus III. and the French court, which were republished in book form in 1867. To the second volume he appended a critical study on Marie Antoinette et Louis XVI apocryphes, in which he proved, by evidence drawn from documents in the private archives of the emperor of Austria, that the letters published by Feuillet de Conches (Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette et Madame Elisabeth, 1864–1873) and Hunolstein (Corresp. inédite de Marie Antoinette, 1864) are forgeries. With the collaboration of Alfred von Arneth, director of the imperial archives at Vienna, he edited the Correspondance secrète entre Marie-Thérèse et le comte de Mercy-Argenteau (3 vols., 1874), the first account based on trustworthy documents of Marie Antoinette’s character, private conduct and policy. The Franco-German War drew Geffroy’s attention to the origins of Germany, and his Rome et les Barbares: étude sur la Germanie de Tacite (1874) set forth some of the results of German scholarship. He was then appointed to superintend the opening of the French school of archaeology at Rome, and drew up two useful reports (1877 and 1884) on its origin and early work. But his personal tastes always led him back to the study of modern history. When the Paris archives of foreign affairs were thrown open to students, it was decided to publish a collection of the instructions given to French ambassadors since 1648 (Recueil des instructions données aux ambassadeurs et ministres de France depuis le traité de Westphalie), and Geffroy was commissioned to edit the volumes dealing with Sweden (vol. ii., 1885) and Denmark (vol. xiii., 1895). In the interval he wrote Madame de Maintenon d’après sa correspondance authentique (2 vols., 1887), in which he displayed his penetrating critical faculty in discriminating between authentic documents and the additions and corrections of arrangers like La Beaumelle and Lavallée. His last works were an Essai sur la formation des collections d’antiques de la Suède and Des institutions et des m&oelig;urs du paganisme scandinave: l’Islande avant le Christianisme, both published posthumously. He died at Bièvre on the 16th of August 1895.

GEFLE, a seaport of Sweden on an inlet of the Gulf of Bothnia, chief town of the district (län) of Gefleborg, 112 m. N.N.W. of Stockholm by rail. Pop. (1900) 29,522. It is the chief port of the district of Kopparberg, with its iron and other mines and forests. The exports consist principally of timber and wood-pulp, iron and steel. The harbour, which has two entrances about 20 ft. deep, is usually ice-bound in mid-winter. Large vessels generally load in the roads at Gråberg, 6 m. distant. There are slips and shipbuilding yards, and a manufacture of sail-cloth. The town is an important industrial centre, having tobacco and leather factories, electrical and other mechanical works, and breweries. At Skutskär at the mouth of the Dal river are wood-pulp and saw mills, dealing with the large quantities of timber floated down the river; and there are large wood-yards in the suburb of Bomhus. Gefle was almost destroyed by fire in 1869, but was rebuilt in good style, and has the advantage of a beautiful situation. The principal buildings are a castle, founded by King John III. (1568–1592), but rebuilt later, a council-house erected by Gustavus III., who held a diet here in 1792, an exchange, and schools of commerce and navigation.

GEGENBAUR, CARL (1826–1903), German anatomist, was born on the 21st of August 1826 at Würzburg, the university of which he entered as a student in 1845. After taking his degree in 1851 he spent some time in travelling in Italy and Sicily, before returning to Würzburg as Privatdocent in 1854. In 1855 he was appointed extraordinary professor of anatomy at Jena, where after 1865 his fellow-worker, Ernst Haeckel, was professor of zoology, and in 1858 he became the ordinary professor. In 1873 he was appointed to Heidelberg, where he was professor of anatomy and director of the Anatomical Institute until his retirement in 1901. He died at Heidelberg on the 14th of June 1903. The work by which perhaps he is best known is his Grundriss der vergleichenden Anatomie (Leipzig, 1874; 2nd edition, 1878). This was translated into English by W. F. Jeffrey Bell (Elements of Comparative Anatomy, 1878), with additions by E. Ray Lankester. While recognizing the importance of comparative embryology in the study of descent, Gegenbaur laid stress on the higher value of comparative anatomy as the basis of the study of homologies, i.e. of the relations between corresponding parts in different animals, as, for example, the arm of man, the foreleg of the horse and the wing of a fowl. A distinctive piece of work was effected by him in 1871 in supplementing the evidence adduced by Huxley in refutation of the theory of the origin of the skull from expanded vertebrae, which, formulated independently by Goethe and Oken, had been championed by Owen. Huxley demonstrated that the skull is built up of cartilaginous pieces; Gegenbaur showed that “in the lowest (gristly) fishes, where hints of the original vertebrae might be most expected, the skull is an unsegmented gristly brain-box, and that in higher forms the vertebral nature of the skull cannot be maintained, since many of the bones, notably those along the top of the skull, arise in the skin.” Other publications by Gegenbaur include a Text-book of Human Anatomy (Leipzig, 1883, new ed. 1903), the Epiglottis (1892) and Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrates in relation to the Invertebrates (Leipzig, 2 vols., 1898–1901). In 1875 he founded the Morphologisches Jahrbuch, which he edited for many years. In 1901 he published a short autobiography under the title Erlebtes und Erstrebtes.

See Fürbringer in Heidelberger Professoren aus dem 19ten Jahrhundert (Heidelberg, 1903).

GEGENSCHEIN (Ger. gegen, opposite, and schein, shine), an extremely faint luminescence of the sky, seen opposite the direction of the sun. Germany was the country in which it was first discovered and described. The English rendering “counterglow” is also given to it. Its faintness is such that it can be seen only by a practised eye under favourable conditions. It is invisible during the greater part of June, July, December and January, owing to its being then blotted out by the superior light of the Milky Way. It is also invisible during moonlight and near the horizon, and the neighbourhood of a bright star or planet may interfere with its recognition. When none of these unfavourable conditions supervene it may be seen at nearly any time when the air is clear and the depression of the sun below the horizon more than 20°. (See .)

GEIBEL, EMANUEL (1815–1884), German poet, was born at Lübeck on the 17th of October 1815, the son of a pastor in the city. He was originally intended for his father’s profession, and studied at Bonn and Berlin, but his real interests lay not in theology but in classical and romance philology. In 1838 he accepted a tutorship at Athens, where he remained until 1840. In the same year he brought out, in conjunction with his friend Ernst Curtius, a volume of translations from the Greek. His first poems, Zeitstimmen, appeared in 1841; a tragedy, König Roderich, followed in 1843. In the same year he received a pension from the king of Prussia, which he retained until his invitation to Munich by the king of Bavaria in 1851 as honorary professor at the university. In the interim he had produced König Sigurds Brautfahrt (1846), an epic, and Juniuslieder (1848, 33rd ed. 1901), lyrics in a more spirited and manlier style than his early poems. A volume of Neue Gedichte, published at Munich in 1857, and principally consisting of poems on classical subjects, denoted a further considerable advance in objectivity, and the series was worthily closed by the Spätherbstblätter, published in 1877. He had quitted Munich in 1869 and returned to Lübeck, where he died on the 6th of April 1884. His works further include two tragedies, Brunhild (1858, 5th ed. 1890), and Sophonisbe (1869), and translations of French and Spanish popular poetry. Beginning as a member of the group of political poets who heralded the revolution of 1848, Geibel was also the chief poet to welcome the establishment of the Empire in 1871. His strength lay not, however, in his political songs but in his purely lyric poetry, such as the fine cycle Ada and his still popular love-songs. He may be regarded as the leading representative of German lyric poetry between 1848 and 1870.