Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/820

784 tax-payers, the towns, and the communes. To the imperia diet Dalmatia furnishes five delegates. Zara is the capita of the country ; and Benkovacz, Cattaro, Curzola, Imoski Knin, Lesina, Macarsca, Ragusa, Sebenico, Sign, and Spalat give names to the administrative districts. With the excep tion of Zara, Spalato, and Sebenico, most of the towns ar very small, and the great proportion of the population is distributed in petty hamlets.

1em 1em  DALRYMPLE. See and.  DALTON, (1766-1844), the celebrated physicist, and founder of the atomic theory of chemistry, was born September 5, 1766, at Eaglesfield, 2f miles south-west of Cockeraiouth, in Cumberland. His grandfather, Jonathan Daltou, was a member of the Society of Friends, and Dalton as well as his parents belonged to that body. His father, Joseph Dalton, who in 1755 married Deborah Greenup, had three children, Jonathan, John, the subject of this sketch, and Mary. The occupation in which he was engaged, namely, that of weaving woollens, was not a lucrative one, and Mrs Dalton assisted in the support of the family by the sale of stationery. John received his early education from his father and from a Mr Fletcher, the teacher of the Quakers school at Eaglesfield. At the age of twelve he himself began the work of school-teaching, in which he continued for two years ; then, for a year or more, he worked occasionally on his father s farm. His principal study was mathematics, in which he received aid from a distant relative, a gentleman of the name of Robinson, living in the vicinity of Eaglesfield. In 1781 Dalton left his native village to become assistant to his cousin George Bewley, the master of a school for boys and girls at Kendal ; and there he spent the next twelve years of his life in teaching, and in studying Latin, Greek, mathematics, and natural philosophy. During that period he became acquainted with the blind philosopher, Mr Gough, to whose influence and help his progress in scientific knowledge was in no small measure due. In 1785 Dalton became, through the retirement of his cousin, joint-manager with his brother of the school at Kendal, and in addition to his ordinary teaching he, in 1787 and 1791, gave courses of lectures in natural philosophy. The school was not generally popular, for its young masters were uncouth in manners, and kept aloof from society. Discipline was strict, and the elder brother Jonathan is said to have been stern and severe ; John being milder and gentler, and continually preoccupied with mathematics, allowed faults to escape his notice, and was consequently preferred by the scholars. About the year 1790 Dalton appears to have been desirous to secure a larger sphere for his abilities by entering on the profession of law or of physic ; but his projects meeting with no encouragement from his relations, he continued to live at Kendal, till in the spring of 1793 he obtained, mainly through Mr Gough, the appointment of teacher of mathematics and natural philosophy in the New College, Moseley Street, Manchester. That position he retained up to the time of the removal of the College to York in 1799, when he became a private tutor. In 1794 the number of his pupils at the College, in mathematics, mechanics, algebra, geometry, book-keeping, natural philosophy, and chemistry, was 24. It was in 1792 that he first visited London, which he described as &quot; a surprising place, and well worth one s while to see once; but the most disagreeable place on earth for one of a contemplative turn to reside in constantly.&quot; During his residence at Kendal Dalton had con tributed solutions of problems and questions on various topics to the Gentleman s and Ladies Diaries ; but his first eparate publication was his Meteorological Observations and Essays, published September 1793, a result of the tudy of natural phenomena during upwards of seven years previously. The book contained much original matter, but met nevertheless with only a limited sale, for, having been printed exclusively for the author, it never found its way in any large numbers into the hands of publishers. Another work by Dalton, entitled Elements of English rammar, was published in 1801. On October 3, 1794, Dalton became a member of the Manchester Literary and philosophical Society, before which, on the 31st, he read a ommunication entitled " Extraordinary Facts relating to ,he Vision of Colours." In this paper he gives the arliest account of that ocular peculiarity known as lyschromatopsis, chromato-pseudopsis (false vision of colours), Daltonism, parachromatism, or colour-blindness, ind sums up its characteristics as observed in himself and thers. When a boy, being present at a review of troops, and hearing those around him expatiating on the gorgeous fleet of the military costume, he asked in what the colour )f a soldier s coat differed from that of the grass on which ie trod ; and it was the derisive laugh and the exclamations f his companions which this question called forth that first nade him aware of the defectiveness of his eye-sight, besides the blue and purple of the spectrum he was able o recognize but one colour, yellow ; or, as he states in his iaper, " That part of the image which others call red ppears to me little more than a shade or defect of light ; fter that the orange, yellow, and green seem one colour, vhich descends pretty uniformly from, an intense to a rare 