Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/656

630 two methods are applicable to two widely different classes of move- ments. It is at least possible that between these classes there may be other modes of motion, displacements which are too slow for the inertia method, and which give rise to too little change of slope for the equilibrium method. How to measure them is, and must appar- ently remain, an unsolved problem in seismometry. 1em  SEISTAN. See.  SEJANUS, (executed 31 A.D.), the famous minister of (''q.v.).  SELBY, a market town of the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, is situated on the navigable river Ouse and on the main line of the Great Northern Railway, 15 miles south of York and 20 east of Leeds. Of the ancient abbey for Benedictines, founded by William the Conqueror in 1069 and raised to the dignity of a mitred abbey by Pope Alexander II., there still remains the church of St Mary and St German, although it has been much changed by alterations and additions, the more ancient and notable features being the nave, transept, and west front. The church was made parochial in 1618. In the market-place there is a modern Gothic market cross. Among the public buildings are the drill hall and the mechanics' institute and public rooms. Flax- scutching, seed-crushing, brick and tile making, boat-building, tanning, and brewing are the principal industries. There is a large trade in potatoes, flax, and mustard, and a considerable cattle-market. The town receives its water-supply from artesian wells. A local board of health was established in 1851, consisting of nine members. The population of the urban sanitary district (6193 in 1871), extended in 1881 from 514 to 3760 acres, was in that year 6057. 1em  SELDEN, (1584-1654), jurist, legal antiquary, and Oriental scholar, was born on 16th December 1584 at Salvington, in the parish of West Tarring, near Worthing, Sussex. His father, also named John Selden, held a small farm, and seems to have occasionally added to his liveli- hood by his labour as a wheelwright and his skill as a musician. It is said that his accomplishments as a violin- player gained him his wife, whose social position was somewhat superior to his own. She was Margaret, the only child of Thomas Baker of Rustington, a village in the vicinity of West Tarring, and was more or less re- motely descended from a knightly family of the same name in Kent. John Selden commenced his education at the free grammar-school at Chichester, whence he pro- ceeded in his sixteenth year with an exhibition to Hart Hall at Oxford. In 1603 he was admitted a member of Clifford's Inn, London, and in 1604 migrated to the Inner Temple, and in due course he was called to the bar. While still a student he appears to have been on terms of friendship with Ben Jonson, Drayton, and Camden ; and among his more intimate companions were Edward Little- ton, afterwards lord keeper ; Henry Rolle, afterwards lord chief - j ustice ; Edward Herbert, afterwards solicitor- general ; and Thomas Gardener, afterwards recorder of London. His earliest patron was Sir Robert Cotton, the antiquary, by whom he seems to have been employed in copying and abridging certain of the parliamentary records then preserved in the Tower. For some reason which has not been explained, Selden never went into court as an advocate, save on rare and exceptional occasions. But his practice in chambers as a conveyancer and consulting counsel is stated to have been large, and, if we may judge from the considerable fortune he accumulated, it must also have been lucrative. It was, however, as a scholar and writer that Selden won his reputation both amongst his contemporaries and with posterity. His first work, an account of the civil adminis- tration of England before the Norman Conquest, is said to have been completed when he was only two- or three-and- twenty years of age. But if this was the Analecton Anglo- Britannicon, as is generally supposed, he withheld it from the world until 1615. In 1610 appeared his England's Epinomisecddi Janus Anglorwm, Fades Altera, which dealt with the progress of English law down to Henry II., and The Duello, or Single Combat, in which he traced the his- tory of trial by battle in England from the Norman Con- quest. In 1613 he supplied a series of notes, enriched by an immense number of quotations and references, to the first eighteen cantos of Drayton's Polyolbion. In 1614 he published Titles of Honour, which, in spite of some obvious defects and omissions, has remained to the present day the most comprehensive and trustworthy work of its kind that we possess; and in 1616 his notes on Fortescue's De Laudibus Legum' Anglix and Hengham's Siimmx Mugna et Parva. In 1617 his De Diis Syriis was issued from the press, and immediately established his fame as an Oriental scholar among the learned in all parts of Europe. After two centuries and a half, indeed, it is still not only the fundamental but also in many respects the best book which has been written on Semitic mythology. In 1618 his History of Tithes, although only published after it had been submitted to the censorship and duly licensed, never- theless aroused the apprehension of the bishops and pro- voked the intervention of the king. The author was sum- moned before the privy council and compelled to retract his opinions, or at any rate what were held to be his opin- ions. Moreover, his work was suppressed and himself forbidden to reply to any of the controversialists who had come or might come forward to answer it. This seems to have introduced Selden to the practical side of political affairs. The discontents which a few years later broke out into civil war were already forcing them- selves on public attention, and it is pretty certain that, although he was not in parliament, he was the instigator and perhaps the draftsman of the memorable protestation on the rights and privileges of the House affirmed by the Commons on the 18th of December 1621. He was with several of the members committed to prison, at first in the Tower and subsequently under the charge of Sir Robert Ducie, sheriff of London. During his detention, which only lasted a short time, he occupied himself in preparing an edition of Eadmer's History from a manuscript lent to him by his host or jailor, which he published two years afterwards. In 1623 he was returned to the House of Commons for the borough of Lancaster, and sat with Coke, Noy, and Pym on Sergeant Glanville's election committee. He was also nominated reader of Lyon's Inn, an office which he declined to undertake. For this the benchers of the Inner Temple, by whom he had been appointed, fined him 20 and disqualified him from being chosen one of their number. But he was relieved from this in- capacity after a few years, and became a master of the bench. In the first parliament of Charles I. (1625), it appears from the "returns of members" printed in 1878 that, contrary to the assertion of all his biographers, he had no seat. In Charles's second parliament (1626) he was elected for Great Bedwin in Wiltshire, and took a prominent part in the impeachment of George Villiers, duke of Buckingham. In the following year, in the "benevolence" case, he was counsel for Sir Edmund Hampden in the Court of King's Bench. In 1628 he was returned to the third parliament of Charles for Ludgers-