Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/176

 160 S L I S L O principal modern buildings are the new Catholic cathedral, in the Norman style with a finely sculptured doorway, the town-hall (1865-66), the county court-house, the cus- tom-house, the lunatic asylum, and the barracks. The quays are commodious, and steamers ply to and fro be- tween Sligo and Glasgow, Liverpool, and Londonderry, the principal exports being cattle, fowls, eggs, and butter, and the imports coal, iron, timber, and provisions. The port is under the control of harbour commissioners. There is an important butter-market, and maize, flour, and corn mills. The population in 1861 was 10,693, and in 1881 it was 10,808. A castle was built at Sligo by Maurice Fitzgerald in 1242, which in 1270 was taken and destroyed by O'Donnell ; in 1310 it was rebuilt by Richard, earl of Ulster, and was again partly destroyed in 1369 and 1394. Early in the reign of James I. the town received a market and two annual fairs; in 1613 it was incorporated and received the privileges of a borough ; and in 1621 it received a charter of the staple. In 1641 it was besieged by the Parliament- ary forces under Sir Charles Coote, but was afterwards evacuated, and occupied by the Royalists till the termination of the war. In 1688 it declared in favour of James II., and, after being captured by the Enniskilleners, was retaken by General Sarsfield, but ulti- mately surrendered to the earl of Granard. The borough was dis- franchised in 1870. SLIVEN, SLIVNO, SELIMMA, ISLEMNIYE, or ISLIMYE, an important town of East Roumelia, situated at the southern base of the Balkans, 750 feet above the sea, where several mountain streams flow south to the Tunja, a tributary of the Maritza. The luxuriant foliage of its trees and the general picturesqueness of its appearance gain in effect by the contrast which they present with the bare gneiss and porphyry summits that rise immediately to the north. On the south it is surrounded by orchards, gardens, and extensive mulberry plantations. Besides a large number of mosques, the public buildings comprise a synagogue and four Christian churches ; but there is nothing of much architectural interest in the town. A Government factory for the manufacture of military cloth- ing was established in 1834 ; there is a good silk industry; and Sliven red wine is famous. The population (Turks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and Gipsies) was 22,000 in 1872. Sliven, the Stlifanos of the Byzantine writers, owes a good deal of its importance to its strategical position on one of the trans-Balkan highways to Adrianople and the south. In early times, when it was a subject of dispute between Byzantium and Bulgaria, it generally followed the fate of Aidos and Mesembria (Misivri). After its capture by the Turks (1388) it was one of the " voinik " towns which remained exempt from taxes and were allowed to elect their own voivode ; but those privileges were lost in the 16th cen- tury. On 12th August 1829 Sliven was occupied by the Russian army under Riidiger and Gortchakoff. SLOANE, SIR HANS (1660-1753), a celebrated collector and successful physician, was born on 16th April 1660 at Killileagh in county Down, Ireland, where his father had settled at the head of a Scotch colony sent over by James I. He had as a youth a strong turn for collecting objects of natural history and other curiosities. This led him to the study of medicine, which he went to London to pursue, directing his attention assiduously to botany, materia medica, and pharmacy. His collecting propensities made him useful to the more philosophically minded Ray and Boyle, and procured him their patronage. After four years in London he travelled through France, spending some time at Paris and Montpellier, and taking his M.D. degree at the university of Orange. He returned to London with a considerable collection of plants and other curiosities, of which the former were sent to Ray and uti- lized by him for his History of Plants. Sloane was quickly elected into the Royal Society, and at the same time he had the good fortune to attract the notice of Sydenham, who took a fancy to him and gave him valuable introduc- tions to practice. In 1687 he became fellow of the College of Physicians, and took the opportunity of proceeding to Jamaica the same year as physician in the suite of the duke of Albemarle. The duke died soon after landing, and Sloane's visit lasted only fifteen months ; but during that time he got together about 800 new species of plants, the island being at the time virgin ground to the botanist. Of these he published an elaborate catalogue in Latin ; and at a later date (1707-25) he made the experiences of his visit the subject of two sumptuous folio volumes. His merits as a collector were sufficient to give him a high place in the scientific circles of the time. He became secre- tary to the Royal Society in 1693, and edited its Trans- actions for twenty years. His practice as a physician among the upper classes was large and lucrative ; he is said to have inspired the members of the court and aristo- cracy with the " greatest confidence in his prescriptions." In the pamphlets written concerning Dr Cockburn's sale of a secret remedy for dysentery and other fluxes, it was stated for the defence that Sloane himself did not disdain the same kind of professional conduct ; and there is some colour given to that charge by the fact that his only medi- cal piece, an Account of a Medicine for Soreness, Weakness, and other Distempers of the Eyes (London, 1745) was not given to the world until its author was in his eighty-fifth year, and had retired from practice. On the accession of George I. Sloane was made physician- general to the army, and in 1716 was created a baronet, being the first medical practitioner to receive an hereditary title. In 1719 he became president of the College of Phy- sicians, and held the office sixteen years. In 1727 he suc- ceeded Sir Isaac Newton in the presidential chair of the Royal Society ; he retired from it at the age of eighty, "much against the inclination of that respectable body, who chose Martin Folkes to succeed him, and in a public assembly thanked him for the great and eminent services which he had rendered them." Sloane's memory survives more by his judicious investments than by anything that he contributed to the subject-matter of natural science or even of his own profession ; his name is absolutely unknown in the history of medicine, and his services to botany were such as, in the nature of things, would be soon forgotten. But his purchase of the manor of Chelsea has perpetuated his memory in the name of a "place," a street, and a square. His great stroke as a collector was to acquire (by bequest, conditional on paying off certain debts) in 1701 the cabinet of William Courten, who had made collecting the business of his life. When Sloane retired from active work in 1741 his library and cabinet of curiosities, which he took with him from Bloomsbury to his house in Chelsea, had grown to be very extensive and of unique value. On his death on llth January 1753 he bequeathed his books, manu- scripts, prints, drawings, pictures, medals, coins, seals, cameos, and other curiosities to the nation, on condition that parliament should pay to his executors 20,000, which was a good deal less than the value of the collection. The bequest was accepted on those terms by an Act passed the same year, and the collection, together with George II. 's royal library, &c., was opened to the public at Bloomsbury as the British Museum in 1759. Among his other acts of benevolence or munificence may be mentioned his gift to the Apothecaries' Company of the freehold of the botanical or physic garden, which they had rented from the Chelsea estate since 1673, also his help in starting the foundling hospital. Sloane is described as having been a man of con- siderable presence and of courtly address. See Weld, History of the Royal Society, i. 450 (London, 1848) ; and Munk, Roll of the College of Physicians, 2d ed., i. 466 (Lou- don, 1878). SLODTZ, RENE MICHEL or MICHEL ANGE (1715-1764), French sculptor, was born at Paris on 29th September