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 gymnasium, and, as a result of its influence, was at the age of nineteen baptized into the Lutheran Church. To this faith he clung with earnest devotion and persistence until his death. Having studied law at Wiirzburg, Heidelberg and Erlangen, Stahl, on taking the degree of doctor juris, established himself as privatdozent in Munich, was appointed (1832) ordinary pro- fessor of law at Wiirzburg, and in 1840 received the chair of ecclesiastical law and polity at Berlin. Here he immediately made his mark as an ecclesiastical lawyer, and was appointed a member of the first chamber of the synod. Elected in 1850 a member of the short-lived Erfurt parliament, he bitterly opposed the idea of German federation. Stahl early fell under the influence of Schelling, and at the latter's insistence, began in 1827 his great work: Die Philosophic des Rechls nach geschichtlicher Ansicht (an historical view of the philosophy of law), in which he bases all law and political science upon Christian revelation, denies rationalistic doctrines, and, as a deduction from this principle, maintains that a state church must be strictly confessional. This position he further eluci- dated in his Der christliche Staat und sein Verhdltniss zum Deismus und Judenthum (The Christian State and its relation to Deism and Judaism; 1874). As Oberkirchenrath (synodal councillor) Stahl used all his influence to weaken the Evan- gelical Union {i.e. that compromise between the Calvinist and Lutheran doctrines which is the essence of the Prussian Evan- gelical Church) and to strengthen the influence of the Lutheran Church (cf. Die Lutherische Kirche und die Union, 1859). The Prussian* minister von Bunsen attacked, while King Frederick William IV. supported, Stahl in his ecclesiastical policy, and the Prussian Evangelical Church would probably have been dissolved had not the regency of Prince William (afterwards the emperor William I.) supervened in 1858. Stahl's influence fell under the new regime, and, resigning his seat on the synod, he retired into private life and died at Briickenau on the 10th of August 1 86 1.

See " Biographie von Stahl," in Unsere Zeit, vi. 419-447 (anony- mous, but probably by Gneist) ; Pernice, Savigny, Stahl (anonymous; Berlin, 1862).

STAHL, GEORG ERNST (1660-1734), German chemist and physician, was born on the 21st of October 1660 at Anspach. Having graduated in medicine at Jena in 1683, he became court physician to the duke of Weimar in 1687. From 1694 to 1 7 16 he held the chair of medicine at Halle, and was then ap- pointed physician to the king of Prussia in Berlin, where he died on the 14th of May 1734. In chemistry he is chiefly known in connexion with his doctrine of phlogiston, the essentials of which, however, he owed to J. J. Becher; and he also propounded a view of fermentation which in some respects resembles that supported by Liebig a century and half later. In medicine he professed an animistic system, in opposition to the material- ism of Hermann Boerhaave and Friedrich Hoffmann.

The most important of his numerous writings are Zymotechnia fundamentals sive fermentationis theoria generalis (1697), which contains the phlogistic hypothesis; Specimen Becherianum (1702); Experimenta, observationes, animadver stones. . . chymicae et physicae (1731); Theoria medica vera (1707); Ars sanandi cum expectatione (173Â°)-

STAINER, SIR JOHN (1840-1901), English composer and organist, was born at Southwark on the 6th of June 1840. He was the second son of the schoolmaster of the parish school of St Thomas's, Southwark, who was enough of a musician to teach his son the organ and the art of reading music, in which he was already proficient when, in 1847, he entered the choir of St Paul's Cathedral. He remained there till 1856, and often took the organ in emergencies; he held the post of organist of St Benet's and St Paul's, Upper Thames Street, during the last year of his choristership; and in 1856 was given the ap- pointment of organist to St Michael's College, Tenbury, where his musical and general education benefited greatly from the intercourse with Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley. He was appointed to Magdalen College, Oxford, in i860, and became university organist in the following year. While at Oxford he did much to bring the choir of Magdalen to a remarkable state of excellence; he took a keen interest in the foundation of various musical societies; and as a sign of his appreciation of the value of general culture, it is worth recording that he took the degree of B.A. in 1864, that of Mus. D. in 1865, and procured M.A. in 1867, being appointed a university examiner in music in the same year. In 1868 he was engaged frequently as solo organist at the Crystal Palace; and in 1872 was appointed organist of St Paul's, where he raised the standard of choral music to something very like perfection. He was professor of the organ in the National Training School of Music from 1876, and in 1881 succeeded his lifelong friend Sullivan as principal. In 1878 he was a juror at the Paris Exhibition, and was created Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur. In 1882 he became inspector of music in training colleges. In 1888 he retired from the organistship of St Paul's owing to failing eyesight, and was knighted. In 1889 he succeeded Ouseley as professor of music in the university of Oxford, holding the post till 1899. Besides these official distinctions he received a great number of honorary degrees: he was vice-president of the Royal College of Organists, and president of the Plain-song and Medieval Music Society, the London Gregorian Association, and the Musical Association. His compositions include four oratorios: Gideon (1865), The Daughter of Jairus (Worcester, 1878), St Mary Magdalen (Gloucester, 1887), Crucifixion (London, 1887); forty-two anthems, some of them very elaborate; many hymn-tunes, organ pieces, madrigals, &c. His professorial lectures were of great value, and he made many contributions to the literature of music. He was a man of wide influence, with a remarkable faculty of organization, and his work in regard to the conditions of the musical profession was of considerable importance. His own music has many of the defects of his qualities, for his breadth of artistic views led him to admire and adopt many styles that are not always compatible with each other. He died while on a holiday at Verona on the 31st of March 1901.

STAINES, a market town in the Uxbridge parliamentary division of Middlesex, England, on the river Thames at the junction of the Colne, 19 m. W.S.W. of London on the London & South Western and Great Western railways. Pop. of urban district (1901), 6688. Breweries and mustard mills employ many hands. A rifle range for the Metropolitan Volunteers and others was opened in 1892. A British village was situated here at the crossing of the Thames on the main road from London to south-western Britain, and the crossing was certainly one of the earliest bridged. A grant of oaks from Windsor forest for the repair of the bridge is recorded in 1262. The existing bridge, from the designs of George Rennie, was opened in 1831, after three bridges had failed in the previous forty years. The name of Staines appears in the Domesday Survey, and it has been supposed that the town is so called from a stone which marks the limit of the former jurisdiction of the City of London over the lower Thames. This is still considered to be the boundary between the upper and lower Thames. In the immediate neighbourhood, though included in the parish of Egham, Surrey, is Runnimede Island, where King John signed the Magna Carta.

 STAIR, JAMES DALRYMPLE, (1619-1695), Scottish lawyer and statesman, was born in May 1619, at Drummurchie in Ayrshire. He was descended from a family for several generations inclined to the principles of the Reformation, and had ancestors both on the father's and the mother's side amongst the Lollards of Kyle. His father, James Dalrymple, laird of the small estate of Stair in Kyle, died when he was an infant; his mother, Janet Kennedy of Knockdaw, is described as "a woman of excellent spirit," who took care to have him well educated. From the grammar school at Mauchline he went, in 1633, to the university of Glasgow, where he graduated in arts on the 26th of July, 1637. Next year he went to Edinburgh, probably with the intention of studying law, but the troubles of the times, then approaching a crisis, led him to change his course, and we next find him serving in the earl of Glencairn's regiment in the War of the Covenant. What part he took in it is not certainly known, but he was in command of