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 Continental Congress. In 1776, as president of the provincial convention, which adopted a state constitution for Virginia, he drew up the instructions to the Virginia members of Congress directing them to advocate the independence of the American colonies In the same year he became president of the Virginia committee of safety, and in October was chosen the first speaker of the House of Delegates. With Jefferson and Chancellor George Wythe he drew up a new law code for Virginia. He was president of the court of chancery in 1777–1788, and from 1779 until his death was president of the Virginia court of appeals. He was an enthusiastic advocate of the Federal constitution, and in 1788 exerted strong influence to secure its ratification by his native state. He was a leader of the Federalist party in Virginia until his death at Richmond, Va., on the 23rd of October 1805.

PENDLETON, GEORGE HUNT (1825–1889), American lawyer and legislator, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on the 25th of July 1825. He was educated at the university of Heidelberg, studied law, was admitted to the bar, and began to practise at Cincinnati. He was a member of the Ohio Senate in 1854 and 1855, and from 1857 to 1865 was a Democratic member of the national House of Representatives, in which he opposed the war policy of Lincoln. In 1864 he was the Democratic candidate for vice-president. After leaving Congress he became one of the earliest champions of the “Ohio idea” (which he is said to have originated), demanding that the government should pay the principal of its 5–20-year 6% bonds in the “greenback” currency instead of in coin. The agricultural classes of the West regarded this as a means of relief, and Pendleton became their recognized leader and a candidate for the Democratic nomination to the presidency in 1868, but he failed to receive the requisite two-thirds majority. In 1869 he was the Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio, but was defeated by Rutherford B. Hayes. For the next ten years he devoted himself to the practice of law and to the supervision of the Kentucky Railroad Company, of which he had become president in 1869. From 1879 to 1885 he was a Democratic member of the United States Senate, and introduced the so-called Pendleton Act of 1885 for reforming the civil service, hostility to which lost him his seat in 1885 He was minister to Germany from 1885 to the summer of 1889, and died at Brussels on the 24th of November 1889

PENELOPE, in Greek legend, wife of Odysseus, daughter of Icarius and the nymph Periboea. During the long absence of her husband after the fall of Troy many chieftains of Ithaca and the islands round about became her suitors, and, to rid herself of the import unities of the wooers, she bade them wait till she had woven a winding-sheet for old Laërtes, the father of Odysseus But every night she undid the piece which she had woven by day. This she did for three years, till her maids revealed the secret. She was relieved by the arrival of Odysseus, who returned after an absence of twenty years, and slew the wooers. The character of Penelope is less favourable in late writers than in the Homeric story. During her husband's absence she is said to have become the mother of Pan by Hermes, and Odysseus, on his return, repudiated her as unfaithful (Herodotus ii. 145 and schol.) She thereupon withdrew to Sparta and thence to Mantineia, where she died and where her tomb was shown. According to another account she married Telegonus the son of Odysseus and Circe, after he had killed his father, and dwelt with him in the island of Aeala or in the Islands of the Blest (Hyginus Feb. 127).

PENGELLY, WILLIAM (1812–1894), English geologist and anthropologist, was born at East Looe in Cornwall on the 12th of January 1812, the son of the captain of a small coasting vessel. He began life as a sailor, after an elementary education in his native village, but in 1828 he abandoned a seafaring life. He had developed a passion for learning, and about 1856 he removed to Torquay and started a school, in 1846 he became a private tutor in mathematics and natural science. Geology hail in early years attracted his attention, but it was not until he was about 50 years of age that he began seriously to cultivate the study. In 1857 he was instrumental in the reorganization of the Torquay Mechanics’ Institute, in 1844 mainly owing to his energy the Torquay Natural History Society was founded, and in 1862 he assisted in founding the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art. Meanwhile he had been occupied in collecting fossils from many parts of Devon and Cornwall, and in 1860 the Baroness Burdett-Coutts acquired and presented them to the Oxford Museum, where they form “The Pengelly Collection.” Through the generosity of the same lady he was called upon to examine the lignites and clays of Bovey Tracey, in conjunction with Dr Oswald Heer, who undertook the determination of the plant-remains. Their report was published by the Royal Society (1862), and Pengelly was elected F.R.S. in 1865. He aided in the investigations of the Brixham bone-cavern from the date of its discovery in 1858, the full report being issued in 1875; and he was the main explorer of Kent’s Hole, Torquay, and from 1864 for more than fifteen years he laboured with unflagging energy in examining and recording the exact position of the numerous organic remains that were disinterred during a systematic investigation of this cave, carried on with the aid of grants from the British Association. He first attended the British Association at the Cheltenham meeting in 1856, and was present at subsequent meetings (except that at Montreal in 1884) until 1889. His observations assisted in establishing the important fact of the contemporaneity of Palaeolithic man with various Pleistocene mammalia, such as the mammoth, cave-bear, cave-lion, &c. He was awarded the Lyell medal by the Geological Society of London in 1886. He died at Torquay on the 16th of March 1894.

See Memoir of William Pengelly, edited by his daughter Hester Pengelly, with a summary of his scientific work by the Rev. Professor T. G. Bonney (1897).

PENGUIN, the name of a flightless sea-bird, but, so far as is known, first given to one inhabiting the seas of Newfoundland as in Hore’s “Voyage to Cape Breton,” 1556 (Hakluyt, Researches, iii. 168-170), which subsequently became known as the great auk or (q.v.); though the French equivalent Pingouin preserves its old application, the word penguin is by English ornithologists always used for certain birds inhabiting the Southern Ocean, called by the French Manchots, the Spheniscidae of ornithologists. For a long while their position was very much misunderstood, some systematists having placed them with the Alcidae or Auks, to which they bear only a relationship of analogy, as indeed had been perceived by a few ornithologists, who recognized in the penguins a very distinct order, Impennes. L. Stejneger (Standard Nat. Hist. vol. iv, Boston, 1885) gave the Impennes independent rank equivalent to the rest of Carinate birds; M. A. Menzbier (Vergl. Osteol. d. Penguine, Moscow, 1887) took a similar view; M. Fürbringer was first to show their relation to Procellariformes, and this view is now generally accepted.