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FRE of Missouri and the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains, the survey which first made him famous. He entered upon his duties in the May of 1842, returning to Washington in the following October. During this arduous journey he explored and scientifically determined the two points of greatest interest in the range of the Rocky Mountains. One was the South Pass, the lowest depression of the mountains, and afterwards the thoroughfare to Oregon and California. The other called, after its first explorer, Fremont's Peak, was the highest elevation of the range, and from its base four great rivers take their rise and flow in opposite directions towards the east and the west. The brief and unpretending, but graphic and interesting report in which the young and adventurous explorer detailed the results of his journey, was printed by order of congress, and excited great attention. Its author was raised to the rank of brevet-captain of the topographical engineers, and was soon afterwards appointed to conduct another expedition, the object of which was to connect the reconnaissance of 1842 with the surveys then being made by Commander Wilkes on the coast of the Pacific. The South Pass was to be reached by a different route, and the second expedition was to find the great theatre of its labours west of the Rocky Mountains, and between the Oregon river and South California. Starting in the May of 1843, Fremont and his party crossed the great South Pass, and traversed the valley of the Bear River, until on the 6th of September he could see with pride and exultation, as recorded in his narrative, the Great Salt Lake, till then only vaguely known by the reports of trappers, "stretching in still and solitary grandeur far beyond the limit of our vision." Making an immense circuit which consumed eight months of time, and which led the explorers through Oregon and North California to the verge of the Pacific, they reached (returning eastward by another route) in the May of 1844 the now famous Utah, the southern limb of the Great Salt Lake, and recrossing the South Pass, arrived again at Kansas towards the end of July. Of Fremont's official report of this second expedition, with its geographical and scientific elucidations of vast and interesting regions never before explored, ten thousand copies were printed by order of congress, with a reprint of his former report prefixed. It was not published before its indefatigable author had planned a third expedition, the aim of which was to explore the section of the Rocky Mountains which gives rise to the Arkansas, the Rio Grande del Norte, and the Rio Colorado of California, and thence westward and south-west ward, to examine the country in the direction of the Pacific. Starting in the spring of 1845, he explored in the depth of the ensuing winter the ranges of the Sierra Nevada, and descended to the country watered by the Sacramento. In the spring of the following year he reached Monterey, then the capital of Upper California—a region then in insurrectionary transition from the position of a Mexican province to that of a state of the American Union. In the war between the United States and Mexico Fremont aided actively in making California American, and it was during this military section of his career that he received his commission of lieutenant-colonel, and began to be styled "Colonel Fremont," the designation by which he has since been known. The part which he took, however, in a dispute between two American officers of superior rank, each of whom claimed the chief command, led to his appearance before a court-martial, and he was deprived of his commission. President Polk confirmed the sentence of the court, but offered to confer upon him again military rank similar to that which he had held, an offer which Fremont peremptorily rejected. Once more, towards the close of 1848, he planned another and a final expedition. He had resolved to settle in California, and in carrying out the resolution, to discover or determine a new route to the Pacific. With a party rather strong numerically, and a considerable number of mules, he set forth in the winter of 1848-49; and crossing the South Pass by a route still more southerly than any which he had yet followed, he met the greatest disasters which he had yet experienced. On the Sierra San Juan he lost one-third of his companions and followers, who were frozen to death; and when he reached Santa Fe, he was on foot and destitute of everything. There the expedition was refitted and reinforced, and, in a hundred days, penetrating through and sustaining conflicts with wild Indian tribes, he reached the Sacramento. The ordinary fate of great discoverers and explorers seemed destined to be his. Claims were urged upon him for advances made to the state, on the authority of his private credit, during the Mexican war. The quiet possession of his Californian estate of Maripoza was contested. In time, however, the claims made upon him were rejected, and those made by him were confirmed. California, admitted into the Union in the December of 1849, sent him as one of its first senators to congress. He did not long enjoy this honour, and was subsequently displaced by a pro-slavery competitor; but his antislavery zeal procured him a distinguished compensation. In 1856 he was nominated by the republican party as their candidate, in opposition to the actual president of the States, Mr. Buchanan; and although his democratic competitor carried the election. Colonel Fremont had an unusually large vote in his favour. Europe has recognized Colonel Fremont's exploratory merits. He received for his second expedition the medal of the Royal Geographical Society of England, and at the instance of the late illustrious Alexander von Humboldt himself, the King of Prussia bestowed on him the great gold medal of the monarchy of Frederick the Great for his efforts in the advancement of science in the largest sense of the word.—F. E.  FREMONT D'ABLANCOURT,, born at Paris in 1625; died in 1694; nephew of Perrot D'Ablancourt, by whom he was educated. At the revocation of the edict of Nantes, he went to Holland, where he was appointed historiographer to the prince of Orange. He wrote memoirs of the history of Portugal, and one or two humorous tracts in imitation of Lucian, which are printed at the end of his uncle's translations of Lucian.—J. A., D.  * FRÉMY,, professor of chemistry in the école polytechnique and in the muséum d'histoire naturelle, born on the 28th February, 1814, in Versailles. He is the author of several manuals on chemistry, and of numerous original papers. Among other subjects he has investigated the brain, the composition of muscle, and the chemical changes attendant on the ripening of fruits. To mineral chemistry he has contributed researches on ferric acid, on metallic acids in general, on gold, on certain cobalt compounds, on the fluorides, and on a number of other bodies.—J. A. W.  FRENCH,, Roman catholic bishop of Ferns, and ambassador to four courts, was born in the town of Wexford in 1604. He was a distinguished alumnus of the Irish college of Louvain, received ordination there, and returned to Wexford, of which he was appointed the Roman catholic pastor. His reputation for learning and eloquence was, as Peter Walsh informs us, great. Before attaining his twenty-sixth year, he had completed his "System of Philosophy," the manuscript of which still exists in Marsh's library, Dublin. The work is divided under the respective heads of Physics, Logic, and Metaphysics. In 1643 Mr. French was nominated to the see of Ferns. Full of true christian philosophy and zeal, with a well-knit form and an indomitable soul, few seemed better suited to its duties than Nicholas French. In 1645 we find him elected to the supreme council of Kilkenny as burgess for his native town. Here, as he had previously been in the synod. Bishop French was the animating, the ruling, and the guiding spirit, the nuncio Rinnuncini acting quite a secondary part. No period of Irish history is more thickly studded with interesting and complicated events than that immediately subsequent. Throughout this stirring epoch, French was a constant and a prominent actor. For details we must refer the reader to Clanricarde's Memoirs, Clarendon's Civil Wars, and an able biographical sketch of the bishop from the pen of Mr. Darcy M'Gee. We shall therefore turn from his political to his literary career. Having unsuccessfully resisted the encroachments of Cromwell and his puritan commanders, French proceeded, an exile, to Brussels, where in 1652 he published his celebrated book, "The unkind Deserter of Loyal Men and True Friends." This work was particularly levelled against the conduct of Ormond, to whom he justly attributed the defeat of his plans and mission. He upbraids the duke with proposing treaties to distract the confederates, with fomenting divisions among them, and all from a fear of losing "his ill-gotten wealth and lands." Harris tells us that to Bishop French's book we are indebted for Clarendon's History of the Civil Wars in Ireland, which was undertaken with a view to vindicate Ormond's conduct. French shortly afterwards commenced a second work on the same theme, which appeared under the title of "The Bleeding Iphigenia," and was published at Louvain. "After many wanderings," says 