Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/416

Rh 394 S C H S CH travelled on the Continent he settled in Oxford, and taught for six years as a drawing-master. In 1808 he obtained a post in the military college, Great Marlow, and three years later he received a congenial appointment as professor of drawing in the naval college, Portsmouth, where he had ample opportunities for the study of his favourite marine subjects. From 1836 to 1855 he held a similar professorship in the military college, Addiscombe. To the Royal Academy exhibitions he contributed at intervals from 1805 to 1872, and he was represented at the Westminster Hall competition of 1847 by a large oil- painting of the Battle of La Hogue. He was marine painter to George IV., William IV., and Queen Victoria. Among his published works are the illustrations to Lord John Manners's Cruise in Scotch Waters, and a volume of photographs from his pictures and drawings issued in 1867 under the title of Veterans of the Sea. He died in London, on the 28th of January 1874. One of his best works, the Loss of the Royal George, painted in 1840, is in the National Gallery, London, and the United Service Club possesses another important marine subject from his brush. His memoir by his daughter was published iu 1877. SCHEVENINGEN, a fishing village and watering-place in Holland, on the North Sea, about two miles from The Hague, with which it is connected by a shaded avenue with a tramway. There is a fine sandy beach below the line of dunes that separate the village from the sea. The terrace crowning the dunes serves as a promenade. Popu- lation in 1879, 7713. Scheveningen has a considerable herring fleet. In a naval engagement off the coast in 1673 De Ruyter defeated the combined forces of the French and English. SCHIAVONETTI, LUIGI (1765-1810), engraver, was born at Bassano in Venetia, on April 1, 1765. After having studied art for several years he was employed by Testolini, an engraver of very indifferent abilities, to execute imitations of Bartolozzi's works, which he passed off as his own. In 1790 Testolini was invited by Bartolozzi to join him in England, and, it having been discovered that Schiavonetti, who accompanied him, had executed the plates in question, he was taken by Bartolozzi into his employment, and, having greatly improved under his instruction, he became an eminent engraver in both the line and the dot manner, " developing an individual style which united grandeur with grace, boldness, draughtsman- like power, and intelligence with executive delicacy and finish." Among his early works are four plates of subjects from the French Revolution, after Benazech. He also produced a Mater Dolorosa after Vandyck, and Michel- angelo's cartoon of the Surprise of the Soldiers on the Banks of the Arno. From 1805 to 1808 he was engaged in etching Blake's designs to Blair's Grave, which, with a portrait of the artist engraved by Schiavonetti after T. Phillips, R. A., were published in the last-named year. The etching of Stothard's Canterbury Pilgrims was one of his latest works, and on his death on the 7th of June 1810 the plate was taken up by his brother Niccolo, and finally completed by James Heath. SCHIEDAM, a town of the Netherlands, in the pro- vince of South Holland, not far from the confluence of the Schie with the Maas, 3 miles by rail from Rotterdam. It is best known as the seat of a great gin manufacture, which, carried on in more than two hundred distilleries, gives employment besides to malt-factories, cooperages, and cork- cutting establishments, and supplies grain refuse enough to feed about 30,000 pigs. Other industries are ship- building, glass-blowing, and candle-moulding. Schiedam, which has recently been growing rapidly towards the south- west in the Nieuw-Frankenland, is not behind the larger of the Netherlands cities in the magnificence of its private residences, but none of its public buildings are of much note. It is enough to mention the Groote or Jans-Kerk, with the tomb of Cornelis Haga, ambassador to Turkey, the old Roman Catholic church, the synagogue, the town- house, the exchange, the Musis Sacrum, the post office (Blaauwhuis), and a ruined castle (Huis te Riviere). The population of the commune increased from 9157 in 1811 to 12,360 in 1840, 21,103 in 1875, 23,035 in 1880, and 24,321 in 1884 ; the population of the town was 18,854 in 1870. Schiedam, which first appears in a document of 1264, obtained privileges from Floris V. in 1275, and gradually acquired im- portance as a commercial town. In the 16th century it had a con- siderable share in the herring fishery and carried on salt-making, brick-making, and weaving, and began to turn its attention to dis- tilling. The town was flooded in 1775. SCHIEFNER, FRANZ ANTON (1817-1879), linguist, was born at Reval, in Russia, on the 18th July 1817. His father was a merchant who had emigrated from Bohemia at the end of last century. He received his education at the grammar school of his native place, where also his subsequent colleague, the celebrated naturalist Karl Ernst von Baer, had been brought up. He matricu- lated at St Petersburg as a law student in 1836, but while qualifying for this profession he pursued with keen in- terest the study of the classics, and subsequently devoted himself at Berlin, from 1840 to 1842, exclusively to Eastern languages. On his return to St Petersburg in 1843 he was employed in teaching the classics in the First Grammar School, and soon afterwards received a post in the Imperial Academy, where in 1852 the cultivation of the Tibetan language and literature was assigned to him as his special function. Simultaneously he held from 1860 to 1873 the professorship of classical languages in the Roman Catholic theological seminary. From 1854 till his death he was an extraordinary member of the Imperial Academy. He died after a fortnight's illness on the 16th November 1879. Schiefner made his mark in literary research in three directions. First, he contributed to the Memoirs and Bulletin of the St Petersburg Academy, and brought out independently, a number of valuable articles and larger publications on the language and literature of Tibet. He possessed also a remarkable acquaintance with Mongolian, and when death overtook him had just finished a revision of the New Testament in that language with which the British and Foreign Bible Society had entrusted him. Further, he was one of the greatest authorities on the philology and ethnology of the Finnic tribes. He edited and translated the great Finnic epic Kalcvala ; he arranged, completed, and brought out in twelve volumes the literary remains of Alexander Castren, bearing on the languages of the Sainoyedic tribes, the Koibal, Karagass, Tungusian, Buryat, Ostiak, and Kottic tongues, and prepared several valuable papers on Finnic mythology for the Imperial Academy. In the third place, he made himself the exponent of recent investigations into the languages of the Caucasus, which, thanks to his lucid analyses, have now been placed within reach of European philologists. Thus he gave a full analysis of the Tush language, and in quick succes- sion, from Baron P. Uslar's investigations, comprehensive papers on the Awar, Ude, Abkhasian, Tchetchenz, Kasi-Kumiik, Iliirkanian and Kurinian languages. He had also completely mastered the Ossetic, and brought out a number of translations from that language, several of them accompanied by the original text. For many of his linguistical investigations he had, with as much tact as patience, availed himself of the presence in St Petersburg of natives (soldiers chiefly) of the districts on the languages of which he happened to be engaged. The importance, however, of the vast mass of linguistical material thus opened up by him, and of the results to which his investigations leu, has not yet been fully realized, except so far, perhaps, as his numerous con- tributions to our knowledge of Eastern fables are concerned, for which branch of literature he evinced throughout his works a keen appreciation. With a rare philological acumen, which with equal facility grasped the morphological and idiomatic parts of a language, Scliiefner combined an indefatigable industry and a love of research which never flagged. He visited England three times for purposes of research, in 1863, 1867, and 1878, when he endeared himself to all who were brought in contact with him by his modesty and single- heartedness, his animated and spirited conversation, and his un- swerving devotion to his various literary pursuits.