Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/70

Rh 58 R U H R U M his bearing towards other scholars Ruhnken was generous and dignified, distributing literary aid with a free hand, and meeting onslaughts for the most part with a smile. It would be difficult to point out in the history of scholarship the name of another man who so thoroughly possessed the snvoir vivre. In the records of learning Ruhnken occupies an im- portant position. He forms a principal link in the chain which connects Bentley with the modern scholarship of the Continent. The spirit and the aims of Hemsterhuis, the great reviver of Continental learning, were committed to his trust, and were faithfully maintained. He greatly widened the circle of those who valued taste and precision in classical scholarship. He powerfully aided the eman- cipation of Greek studies from theology ; nor must it be forgotten that he first in modern times dared to think of rescuing Plato from the hands of the professed philo- sophers men presumptuous enough to interpret the ancient sage with little or no knowledge of the language in which he wrote. Ruhnken's principal works are editions of (1) Timseus's Lexicon of Platonic Words, (2) Thalela>us and other Greek commentators on Roman law, (3) Rutilius Lupus and other grammarians, (4) Velleius Paterculus, (5) the works of Muretus. He also occupied himself much with the history of Greek literature, particularly the oratorical literature, with the Homeric hymns, the scholia on Plato, and the Greek and Roman grammarians and rhetoricians. A dis- covery famous in its time was that in the text of the work of Apsines on rhetoric a large piece of a work by Longinus was embedded. Recent views of the writings attributed to Longinus have lessened the interest of this discovery without lessening its merit. The biography of Ruhnken was written by his great pupil Wy ttenbach, soon after his death. (J. S. R. ) RUHRORT, a busy trading town in Prussia, is situated at the junction of the Ruhr and Rhine, in the midst of a productive coal district, 15 miles north of Diisseldorf. Ruhrort has the largest river harbour in Germany, with very extensive quays ; and most of the 1| million tons of coal which are annually exported from the neighbourhood are despatched in the fleet of steam-tugs and barges which belong to the port. About one half of the coal goes to Holland, and the rest to towns on the upper Rhine. Grain and timber are also exported. In 1881 11,282 craft, carrying 1,791,213 tons, left the harbour. The goods traffic between Ruhrort and Homberg on the opposite bank of the Rhine is carried on by large steam ferry boats, in which the railway waggons are placed with the help of towers, 128 feet high, on each side of the river. The industries of the town include active shipbuilding, iron and tin working, and the making of cordage and machinery. The inhabitants numbered 1443 in 1816, and 9130 in 1880. Ruhrort formerly belonged to Cleves : it received town rights in 1587. RULHIERE, or RULHIJSRES, CLAUDE CARLOMAN DB (1735-1791), poet and historian, was born at Bondy in 1735, and died at Paris in 1791. He was for a time a soldier, and served under Richelieu in Germany. But at twenty-five he accompanied Breteuil to St Petersburg as secretary of legation. Here he actually saw the revolu- tion which seated Catherine II. on the throne, and thus obtained the facts of his best-known and best work, the short sketch called Anecdotes sur la devolution de Russie en 1768. It was not published till after the empress's death. The later years of Rulhiere's life were spent either in Paris, where he held an appointment in the foreign office and went much into society, or else in travelling over Germany and Poland. The distracted affairs of this latter country gave him the subject of his longest work, Histoire de F Anarchic de Pologne (1807), which was never finished, and which the patriotism of its latest editor, M. Ostrowski, has rather unjustifiably rebaptized Revohit',<>,,* de Pologne. Rulhiere was made an Academician in 1787. Besides the historical works mentioned, he wrote one on the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1788). Rulhiere as an historian has much merit of style and arrangement, and the short sketch of the Russian revolution is justly ranked among tho masterpieces of the kind in French. Of the larger Poland Carlyle, as justly, complains that its allowance of fact is too small in proportion to its bulk. The author was also a fertile writer of vers de societt, short satires, epigrams, &c., which show much point and polish, and he had a considerable reputation among tin' witty and ill-natured group also containing Cham fort, Rivarol, Champcenetz, &c. On the other hand he has the credit of being long and disinterestedly assiduous in caring for J. J. Rousseau in his morose old age, until Rousseau as usual quarrelled with him. Hulhiere's works were published by Anguis In 1819 (Paris, 6 vols. 8vo). The Kutiian Revolution may be fonnd In the C/if/s-d'ceurre Historiques of the Collec- tion Didot, and the Poland, with title altered as above, in the same Collection. RUM is a spirituous liquor, prepared from molasses, skimmings of the boiling house, and other saccharine bye- products, and the refuse juice of the cane-sugar manufac- ture. Its distillation, which is a simple process, may be conducted in connexion with any cane-sugar establish- ment, but the rum which comes to the American and European markets is chiefly the produce of the West India Islands and Guiana. The ordinary method of working in the West Indies is the following. A wash is prepared consisting of sugar skimmings 4 parts, lees of still or d under 5 parts, and molasses 1 part, the quantity prepared being equal to the capacity of the still in use. Dunder consists of the residue of the still from previous distillations, and it takes the place of a ferment, besides which the acetic acid it contains, derived from the fer- menting wash of previous operations, has a favourable influence on the progress of attenuation. The wash pre- pared as above is placed in the fermenting vat, where, according to weather and other conditions, the fermenta- tion proceeds more or less briskly; but usually a week or ten days is the period required for attenuation, during whjch time the scum formed is removed from the surface of the vat twice daily. When sufficiently attenuated, the wash is run into the still, which is generally of a simple construction, and distilled off, the first product being " low wines," which on redistillation come over as " high wines" or strong rum. When a Pontefex still is used, which contains two intermediate "retorts" between the still and the worm, a strong spirit is obtained at the first distillation. The charge of wash yields from 10 to 12 per cent, of rum, of an average strength of 25 over proof. Pure distilled rum is an entirely colourless liquid, but as imported and sold it generally has a deep brown colour imparted by caramel or by storage in sherry casks. It has a peculiar aroma, derived principally from the pre- sence of a minute proportion of butyric ether. Rum varies very considerably in quality, the finest being known as Jamaica rum, whether it is the product of that island or not. An inferior quality of rum is known among the French as tafia ; and the lowest quality, into the wash for which debris of sugar cane enters, is called negro rum, and is mostly consumed by the coloured workers in the sugar houses and distilleries. The planters sometimes put rinds and slices of pine-apple into the barrels in which rum is i matured, to improve and add to its flavour, and occasion- ally anise and other flavouring ingredients are also used. j The spirit prepared from molasses of beet-sugar factories cannot be classed with rum. The product has a highly disagreeable odour and taste, and it can only be rendered fit for consumption by repeated distillation and concentra- tion to a high degree of strength, whereby the spirit is rendered "silent," or has only a faint rum flavour. In this condition it is used for mixing with strongly flavoured rum, and for the preparation of a fictitious rum, the flavour of which is due to "rum essence," a mixture of artificial ether, birch bark oil, and other substances. Cane- sugar molasses enters largely into the materials from which