Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/812

 776 F R E F R E FRESCOBALDI, GIROLAMO, a celebrated musical com poser, was born at Ferrara in 1587. Little is known of his life except that he studied music at his birthplace under Alessandro Milleville, and owed his first reputation to his beautiful voice. According to one account he went to Belgium, at that time still a centre of the art, where he is said to have lived till 1608, after which period he appears to have settled in Italy, at first in Milan, and from 1G27 in Rome, where three years later he obtained the office of organist of St Peter s Cathedral. At this period lie had acquired great fame as a virtuoso on the organ, and according to Baini no less than 30,000 people flocked to St Peter s on his first appearance there. He also excelled as a teacher, Frohberger, the celebrated German organist and precursor of Bach, being the most distinguished of his pupils. Frescobaldi s compositions show the consummate art of the early Italian school, and his works for the organ more especially are full of the finest devices of fugal treat ment. He also wrote numerous vocal compositions, such as canzone, motets, hymns, &c., a collection of madrigals for five voices (Antwerp, 1608) being among the earliest of his published works. The year of his death is not suffi ciently established. Fetis conjectures 1654. FRESNEL, AUGUSTIN JEAN (1788-1827), an illustrious French physicist, the son of an architect, was born at Broglie, in the department of Eure, in France, May 10, 1788. His early progress in learning was slow, and when eight years old he was still t unable to read. At the age of thirteen he entered the Ecole CentraleinCaon,and at sixteen and a half the T^cole Poly technique, where he acquitted him self with distinction. Thence he went to the Ecole des Pouts et Chausse es. He served as an engineer successively in the departments of Vendde, Drome, and Ille-et-Villaine ; but his espousal of the cause of the Bourbons in 1814 occasioned, on Napoleon s reaccession to power, the loss of his appointment. On the second restoration he obtained a post as engineer in Paris, where much of his life from that time was spent. His researches in optics, continued until his death, appear to have been begun about the year 1814, when he prepared a paper on the aberration of light, which, however, was not published. In 1818 he read his celebrated memoir on diffraction, for which in the ensu ing year he received the prize of the Academy of Sciences at Paris. He was in 1823 unanimously elected a member of the Academy, and in 1825 he became a member of the Royal Society of London, which in 1827, at the time of his last illness, awarded him the Rumford medal. In 1819 lie was nominated a commissioner of lighthouses, for which he was the first to construct compound lenses as substitutes for mirrors (see LIGHTHOUSES). Fresnel died of consumption at Ville-d Avray, near Paris, July 14, 1827. The undu- latory theory of light enunciated by Hooke, and upheld by Huygeus and Euler, but first founded upon experimental demonstration by Thomas Young, was extended to a large class of optical phenomena, and permanently established, by the brilliant discoveries and the mathematical deductions of Fresnel. By the use of two plane mirrors of nietal, forming with each other an angle of nearly 180, he avoided the diffraction caused in Grimaldi s experiment on inter ference by the employment of apertures for the transmission of the light, and was thus enabled in the most conclusive manner to account for the phenomena of interference in ac cordance with the undulatory theory. With Arago he studied the laws of the interference of polarized rays, and discovered that though when similarly polarized they affect each other as do ordinary rays, yet when rectangularly polarized they have no power of interference. Circularly polarized light Fresnel obtained by means of a rhomb of glass, known as &quot; Fresnel s rhomb,&quot; having obtuse angles of 126, and acute angles of 54. His labours in the cause of optical science received during his lifetime only scant public recognition, and some of his papers were not printed by the Academy of Sciences till many years after his de cease. But, as he wrote to Young in 1824, in him &quot;that sensibility, or that vanity, which people call love of glory &quot; had been blunted. &quot; All the compliments,&quot; he says, &quot; that I have received from Arago, Laplace, and Biot never gave me so much pleasure as the discovery of a theoretic truth, or the confirmation of a calculation by experiment.&quot; For further details as to the scientific achievements of Fresnel see ARAGO and OPTICS. His papers were published chiefly in the memoirs of the Academy of Sciences, the bulletins of the Soci6t6 Philomatique, and the Annales de Chimie. See Duleau, &quot;Notice sur Fresnel,&quot; Revue Ency., t. xxxix. ; Arago, (Euvrts complttts, t. i. ; and Dr G. Peacock, Miscellaneous Works of Tho iiias Young, vol. i. FRESNILLO, a town of Mexico, in the state of Zacate- cas, is situated 30 miles N.W. of Zacatecas, on a branch of the Santiago river, in the plain which divides the moun tains of Santa Cruz and Deganos from the Zacatecas range. It is well built, and its streets are clean and regular. The country in the immediate neighbourhood is pretty and fer tile, and maize and wheat are cultivated. Fresnillo is noted chiefly for its silver mines situated at the adjacent knoll of Proano. They were discovered in 1569, and for a long period have been the most productive in the country, the annual yield averaging more than &quot;500,000. A school of mines was founded in 1853. Population about 15,000. FRESNOY, CHARLES ALPHONSE DU (1611-1665), a painter and writer on his art, was born in Paris, son of an apothecary. He was destined for the medical profession, and well educated in Latin and Greek ; but, having a nat ural propensity for the fine arts, he would not apply to his intended vocation, and was allowed to learn the rudiments of design under Perrier and Vouet. At the age of twenty- one he went off to Rome, with no resources ; he drew ruins and architectural subjects. After two years thus spent, he re- encountered his old fellow-student Pierre Mignard, and by his aid obtained some amelioration of his professional pros pects. He studied Raphael and the antique, went in 1633 to Venice, and in 1656 returned to France. During two years he was now employed in painting altar-pieces in the chateau of Raincy, landscapes, (tc. His death was caused by an attack of apoplexy followed by palsy ; he ex pired at Villiers le Bel, near Paris. He never married. His pictorial works are few ; they are correct in drawing, with something of the Caracci in design, and of Titian in colouring, but wanting fire and expression, and insufficient to keep his name in any eminent repute. He is remembered now almost entirely as a writer rather than painter. His Latin poem, De Arte Graphica, was written during his Italian sojourn, and embodied his observations on the art of painting ; it may be termed a critical treatise on the practice of the art, with general advice to students. The precepts are sound according to the standard of his time ; the poetical merits slender enough. The Latin style is formed chiefly on Lucretius and Horace. This poem was first published by Mignard, and has been translated into several languages. la 1684 it was turned into French by Roger de Piles ; Dryden translated the work into English prose ; and a rendering into verse by Mason followed, to which Sir Joshua Reynolds added some annotations. FREUDENSTADT, a town of Wiirtemberg, circle of the Black Forest, on the right bank of the Murg, 42 miles W.S.W. of Stuttgart. It has a large square, a town- house, acd a Protestant church of later Gothic architecture, with two naves at right angles to each other, in one of which the male and in the other the female members of the congregation worship separately. The manufactures include woollen cloth, nails, white lead, potash, and Prussian