Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/228

216 LAING, (–), an n, was at  27th. At first it seemed that he would follow his father’s, that of a of the ; but, his fancy being fired with the  ardour of the time, he set out for , where his maternal uncle Colonel Gordon was then stationed. Here he met with, who procured him a in the. His career as a traveller began in, when he was sent on a mission to the of the  and advanced as far as the  of the. By ascertaining that the of the  or  was not more than 1600  above the, he dispelled the idea that it was connected with the. The further elucidation of the other questions that were then connected with formed the principal object of his next journey, undertaken in  under the auspices of. From a sent  10,, from  to  at  we know that he had barely escaped with his life from an attack in which he had received twenty-four wounds. He managed to reach by  18th, but shortly afterwards fell a victim to the treachery of his servant. The history of the vain attempt to recover the traveller’s journals will be found in the Quarterly Review, vol. xlii. . The narrative of his first journey was in.  LAING, (–), a distinguished, especially eminent for his knowledge, was the son of William Laing, a eller in , and was  in  in. He was brought up to his father’s, and continued for many s in with him. Shortly after the death of the latter, however, a vacancy having occurred in the of the, Laing was  to that office in , and continued to hold it till the time of his death. In addition to, it is believed, an almost unexampled knowledge of the titles and value of, Laing possessed on intimate acquaintance with the of. His knowledge of  was also very extensive; and the  of his, particularly during the  and , had long been the subject of his profound investigation. It is perhaps to be regretted that with all this knowledge he never produced any large independent work, but confined himself to the editing of the works of others. Of these, the chief are—Dunbar’s Works, 2 vols.,, with a supplement added in ; Robert Baillie’s Letters and Journals, 3 vols., –; John Knox’s Works, 6 vols., –; Poems and Fables of Robert Henryson, ; Andrew of Wyntoun’s Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, 3 vols., –; Sir David Lyndsay’s Poetical Works, 3 vols.,. Laing was for more than fifty s an active member of the Society of Antiquaries of, and during that period he contributed upwards of a hundred separate papers to their Proceedings. He was also for more than forty s secretary to the, many of the publications of which were carefully edited by him, and few of them we believe failed to benefit by his assistance. A complete list of his productions would occupy many pages. His activity ended only with his life. He was struck with when attending to his duties in the, and it is touchingly recorded of him that, on awakening out of the fit, he looked about him and asked if a proof of Wyntoun had been sent up from the. He died a few s afterwards, on 18,, at the age of eighty-six s. Perhaps few men who ever lived possessed so much recondite knowledge on subjects connected with  and , and no one could be more ready to communicate whatever he knew to those who were engaged in investigations similar to his own. In the  of  conferred on him the  of LL.D. In the course of his long life Laing had collected an immense, a large portion of the s being illustrative of the  or  of , and many of them being of extraordinary rarity. It was dispersed by in  soon after his death, and the enormous prices obtained for many of the s were such as had hardly ever been known even in the most celebrated of previous  s. A valuable collection of, chiefly relating to , was ed by him to the  of.  LAING, (–), a, was at his paternal estate on the Mainland of  in. Having studied at the of  and the  of, he was called to the bar in , but never obtained an extensive practice as. In he completed the last volume of Henry’s History of Great Britain, the portion which he wrote being, in its strongly liberal tone, at signal variance with the preceding tenor of the work. In he  a History of Scotland from the Accession of James VI. to the Reign of Queen Anne, a work of considerable research. In a dissertation prefixed to an edition of his History in  he endeavoured to prove the participation of  in the  of. In the he  an edition of the Historie and Life of King James the Sext. His only other is an edition of the Poems of Ossian. For a short period in Laing represented his  in. He died in.  LAI-YANG, a in the  of, situated in 37° N.  and 120° 55′ E., about the middle of the eastern , on the  running south from  to  or. It is surrounded by well-kept of great antiquity, and its main  are spanned by large  or al es, some of which date from the time of the   of the. There are extensive both in the north and south, and the total  is estimated at 50,000. The so-called  produced by  is  at Lai-yang into a strong ; and the  of the peculiar kind of  obtained from the la-shoo or  is largely carried on in the vicinity.  LAKE. When a in its course meets with a depression in the  it flows into it and tends to fill it up to the lip of its lowest exit. Whether it succeeds in doing this or not depends on the. In the, and in most and , the  would fill the depression and run over, and the surplus  would flow on towards the. Such a depression, with its contents of practically stagnant, constitutes a lake, and its would be. In warm dry regions, however, such as are frequently met with in s, it might easily happen that the  from the surface of the depression, supposed filled with, might be greater than the supply from the feeding  and from  falling on its surface. The level of the s in the depression would then stand at such a height that the from its surface would exactly balance the supply from  and. We should have as the result a lake whose s would be. Lakes of the first kind may be considered as enlargements of, those of the second kind as isolated portions of the ; indeed, lakes are very frequently called s, as the  and the. The occurrence of lakes and  lakes in the same  system is not uncommon. In this case the lake forms the termination. Well known examples of this 