Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/869

Rh the geology of North America, read in 1838 before the Ashmoleau Society and the British Association. In 1856 lie became president of the latter body at its meeting at Cheltenham. In 1841 Daubeny published his Lectures on Agriculture ; in 1857 his Lectures on Roman Husbandry ; and in 1865 an Essay on the Trees and Shrubs of the Ancients, and a Catalogue of the Trees and Shrubs indigenous to Greece and Italy. His last literary work was the collec tion of his miscellaneous essays, published in two volumes, in 1867. In all his undertakings Daubeny was actuated by a practical spirit and a desire for the advancement of knowledge ; and his personal influence on his contemporaries was in keeping with the high character of his various lite rary productions.  D’AUBIGNÉ, (1794-1872), was born 16th August 1794 at Eaux Vives, near Geneva. The ancestors of his father, Francois Merle, were French Protestant refugees ; his paternal grandmother s name, D Aubigne, which Jean-Henri Merle subsequently added to his own, was a name well known in the service of Henry IV. Jean-Henri was destined by his parents to a com mercial life ; but the new interests awakened by his course at college led him to fix his choice on the office of the Christian ministry. The influence of Robert Haldane, a Scottish evangelist sojourning in Geneva, told powerfully and permanently on the divinity student, and kindled in him a hitherto unknown zeal for the distinctively evangeli cal truths of the Christian faith. When in 1817 Merle went abroad to further his education, Germany was about to celebrate the tercentenary of the Reformation ; and thus early he conceived the ambition to write the history of that great epoch. At Berlin he received stimulus from teachers so unlike as were Neander and De Wette. After presiding for five years over the French Protestant church in Ham burg, he was in 1823 called to become pastor of a congre gation in Brussels, and preacher to the court. At the Belgian revolution, he preferred pastoral work at home to an educational post in the family of the Dutch king ; and, shortly after his return to Switzerland, events rendered it impossible far those like-minded with him in religious matters to remain in the national Genevese church. The separation took place finally in 1833, and Merle D Aubigne became one of the founders of the new evangelical church ; and, whether as pastor or as professor of church history in its theological seminary, he continued to be till the last days of his life an unwearied and influential labourer in the cause of his church and of evangelical Protestantism. In Lira the Evangelical Alliance found a hearty promoter. He made many friends in other lands, and repeatedly visited England ; he was made a D.C.L. by Oxford University, and received civic honours from the city of Edinburgh. His many labours never impaired his healthy frame. In his seventy-ninth year he still enjoyed perfect vigour of mind and body ; sudden death during the night of the 20th October 1872 removed him from the midst of academic and literary work. It was as their historian that Merle D Aubigne&quot; was most powerfully to serve the cause of the Protestant churches. The first section of his History of the. Reformation, having for its central subject the earlier period of the work in Germany, gave its author at once a foremost rank amongst modern French ecclesiastical historians, was translated into most European tongues, and was much more widely read and admired in English-speaking lands than at home. It is said that 200,000 copies of the English translation were sold in Great Britain alone, and about twice as many in the United States. The second series of volumes, dealing with reform in the time of Calvin, was not less thorough than the former series, and had a subject hitherto less exhaus tively treated ; but it did not meet with a success so marked. This part of the subject, with which the Genevese professor was most competent effectively to deal, was all but com pleted at the time of his death. Along with the great work of his life, he had written many minor treatises on the themes he had most closely at heart. Of these the most important are a vindication of the character and aims of Oliver Cromwell, and a sketch of the contendings of the Kirk of Scotland. Dr Merle D Aubigue was in many ways well fitted to be a powerful and popular expositor of history, and especially ofthat history to which he devoted the studies of a life time. Indefatigable in exploring and sifting original documents, he had amassed a vast wealth of authentic information ; but a desire to give everywhere a full and graphic picture, assisted by a gift of warm and genial imaginative power, betrayed him into aiming at fulness of picturesque detail concerning events and processes necessarily hidden from the eye of a strict historiographer. In a few cases he seems by inference from his knowledge of a later period to have filled up a narrative not sustained by docu mentary evidence. He was able in a marvellous manner to identify himself with the Reformers ; but while his sym pathies enabled him to do justice to great aims of good men, he too frequently becomes their apologist. His expressed desire everywhere to trace the working of God s Spirit in the work of the Reformers leads him to pass too lightly over secondary but weighty influences, and in his heroes opponents continually to discover the foes of God ; and the devout purpose with which he confessedly wrote inspires his pages with much that is rather religious admonition than history, and causes a style otherwise simple and dignified to pass into fervid rhetoric. But his work remains a noble monument of painstaking sincerity and reverential love for a great subject. In the main it unquestionably brings us into direct contact with the genuine spirit of the most momentous period in the modern history of the Christian church.

1em  D’AUBIGNÉ, (1550-1630), French historian and poet, was born at St Maury, in Saintonge, on the 8th February 1550. In his childhood he showed a great aptitude for languages ; according to his own account he knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew at six years of age ; and he had translated the Crito of Plato before he was eleven. His father, a Huguenot who had been one of the conspirators of Amboise, strengthened his Protestant sym pathies by showing him, while they were passing through that town on their way to Paris, the heads of the conspira tors exposed upon the scaffold, and adjuring him not to spare his own head in order to avenge their death. After a brief residence he was obliged to flee from Paris to avoid persecution, but was captured and condemned to death. Escaping through the intervention of a friend, he went to Montargis. In his fourteenth year he was present at the siege of Orleans, at which his father was killed. His guardian sent him to Geneva, where he studied for a con siderable time under the direction of Beza. In 1567 he made his escape from tutelage, and attached himself to the Huguenot army under the prince of Conde&quot;. Subsequently he joined Henry of Navarre, to whom he rendered valuable service, both as a soldier and as a counsellor, in the wars that issued in his elevation to the throne as Henry IV. His career at camp and court, however, was a somewhat 