eration in which he showed consummate skill. In the expedition to Egypt he received the command of a division, and after the storming of Alexandria, marched to Cairo with the vanguard. He took part in the battle of the pyramids, and being ordered to pursue Murad Bey, defeated him in several encounters, and driving him into Nubia, conquered the whole of upper Egypt. Here he established a regular government, and inspired the Egyptians with such esteem that they called him the "just sultan." When Bonaparte embarked from Egypt, he placed Kleber in command of the French troops, and ordered Desaix to follow him. The latter sailed on board a Ragusan bark, but on nearing his destination was intercepted by an English frigate, and was detained a prisoner for 30 days. Being at last released, he arrived, May 3, 1800, at Toulon, and hastened to join Bonaparte in Italy, where he arrived June 11, and was put in command of a division, with orders to prevent the army which had just taken Genoa from joining that under Melas at Alessandria. He was consequently at some distance from the main army on the morning of June 14, but on hearing the artillery, he hastily returned, and arrived in time to change the nearly lost battle of Marengo to a complete victory. But he did not witness the result of his movement; he was shot through the heart as he was entering the action. Bonaparte wept for him, had a medal struck in his honor, and decreed that a statue should be erect ed to his memory in the place des victoires at Paris, and that his grave should be placed on the summit of the Alps, under the care of the monks of St. Bernard.

DESAUGIERS, MARO ANTOINE MADELEINE, a French song-writer and dramatist, born at Fréjus, Nov. 17, 1772, died in Paris, Aug. 9, 1827. At the age of 17 he produced a successful oneact comedy. He was in St. Domingo, whither he had accompanied his sister, who was married to a planter, when the insurrection of the blacks broke out, from which he barely escaped with his life to the United States, where he earned a living by teaching pianoforte playing. He returned to France in 1797, and wrote songs and light comedies. Some of his plays, such as Les petites Danaides, La chatte merveilleuse, and M. Vautour, had an unprecedented run; while his songs were more popular than those of any other writer except Béranger.

DESAULT, PIERRE JOSEPH, & French surgeon, born of humble parentage at Magny-Vernais, a village of Franche Comté, in 1744, died in Paris, June 1, 1795. He commenced his education for the church in a Jesuit school, but exhibiting a strong inclination toward the study of surgery, was permitted to acquire the rudiments of the art from the barber-surgeon of his native village, after which he was sent to the military hospital at Befort, where he remained 3 years, giving special attention to gunshot and sword wounds. While here he translated Borelli's treatise De Motu Animalium. In 1764 he went to Paris, and there availed

himself of the facilities for dissection with such success that he was soon competent to open a course of demonstrations in anatomy. In 1776 he became a member of the college of surgery. Thereafter his progress was rapid, having successively become chief surgeon to the hospital of the college, consulting surgeon to St. Sulpice, in 1782 surgeon-major to La Charité, and finally chief surgeon to the Hôtel Dieu, with the reputation of being the most skilful operator in France. In connection with the Hôtel Dieu he instituted a clinical class which attracted many students. The chief cases that came before the class were reported in a serial, entitled Journal de chirurgie, edited by the pupils. In the revolution he was arrested while lecturing, May 28, 1793, and carried to the Luxembourg, from which, however, he was liberated at the end of 3 days, more from need of his professional skill than from any leniency in his accusers. Having been employed to attend the dauphin, during the imprisonment of that unfortunate youth in the temple, he bestowed on him unremitting care. Suddenly he himself was seized with illness, which almost immediately terminated in delirium and death. The rumor of the time asserted that he was poisoned, because he refused to lend himself to the murder of his patient. This supposition was favored by the coincidence that Dr. Chopart, who succeeded Desault in his attendance, died with equal suddenness, and that soon afterward the young prince was reported dead. An autopsy in the case of Desault showing no trace of poison, his death was set down to ataxic fever. The republic pensioned his widow. Desault in manner was abrupt, even to rudeness, but under this rough husk lay many kindly qualities. His pupils gave him the name of le bourrou bienfaisant. He introduced numerous improvements into his art, both in instruments and their use, especially in the treatment of fractures and ligature of arteries. In conjunction with his friend Chopart, he wrote the Traité des maladies chirurgicales (2 vols. 8vo., 1780), which has been translated into English by Trumbull.

DES BARRES, JOSEPH FREDERIO WALLET, an English soldier and hydrographer, born in 1722, died in Halifax, N. S., Oct. 24, 1824, while on his way to England. He was descended from the Protestant branch of a noble French family, which emigrated after the revocation of the edict of Nantes. He received his education under the Bernouillis, entered the royal military college at Woolwich, and was offered the choice of a commission either in the royal artillery or corps of engineers. Preferring immediate active service, he embarked in March, 1756, as lieutenant in the 60th regiment of foot, for America; where, having raised above 300 recruits in Pennsylvania and Maryland, he was ordered to form and discipline them as a corps of field artillery, which he commanded until the arrival of one of the battalions of the royal train from England. In 1757 he commanded a detachment of volunteers

DES BARRES

against the Indians, who had committed depredations in the neighborhood of Schenectady and other frontier towns; surprised the chiefs, whom he made prisoners, and soon after gained their confidence so completely, that they not only were restrained from further acts of hostility, but became useful to the army, in which a corps of them continued to be employed to the end of the war. In 1758 he was engaged in the expedition against Louisburg, where he had the good fortune to effect a landing in a violent surf, and to take from the enemy an intrenchment by which the debarkation of the army was greatly facilitated. At this siege he was on a critical occasion ordered to the duty of an engineer, and after the capitulation he employed himself in drawing a chart on a large scale, from papers and plans obtained there, which was found very useful in the next spring, as the navigation of the river St. Lawrence was then known only to a few Canadian pilots. At the siege of Quebec he served under Wolfe as an aide-de-camp, and was making his report when that hero received his mortal wound, and fell dying in his arms. By the expenditure of lives in the campaign of 1759 and the ensuing winter, and in the unsuccessful battle fought by Gen. Murray, April 28, 1760, the army in Canada was reduced to less than 2,000 men fit for duty. The fortifications of Quebec being in a dismantled state, the preservation of what had been acquired, as well as the expectation of future conquests, seemed to rest on the operations for its actual defence. The conducting of these operations fell to Des Barres as directing engineer, and here, and subsequently in the reduction of Fort Jacques Cartier and other strong places, which completed the conquest of Canada, his endeavors proved successful. He was afterward ordered to Nova Scotia to assist Gen. Bastide in tracing designs and making estimates of the expense for fortifying the harbor of Halifax, and securing its dock yard. In 1762 he served as directing engineer and quartermaster-general in the expedition for retaking Newfoundland, and was honored with public thanks, as having essentially contributed to the recovery of that island. After making surveys of some of its principal harbors, he was ordered to repair to New York, to proceed on reconnoitring excursions and report observations on the expediency of establishing a chain of military posts through out the British colonies. In 1763 Lord Colville received instructions to employ him on the survey of the coast of Nova Scotia, which was projected by Admiral Spry, who proposed the undertaking to senior officers prior to recommending Des Barres to the admiralty for that duty. In this work he was engaged until 1773, and on his return to England, 1774, the king express ed his commendation of the manner in which this duty had been performed. Previous to this, many of the fine harbors of Nova Scotia were known only to fishermen, and the isle of Sable was a terror to all navigators. The want of correct charts of the coast of North America

for the use of the fleet engaged in carrying on the American revolutionary war, began at this time to be felt; and on Earl Howe representing the immediate necessity of their being prepared, Des Barres was selected to adapt the surveys of Holland, De Brahm, and others to nautical purposes. These he published in 1777 under the title of the "Atlantic Neptune," in 2 large folio volumes. In 1784 the government of the island of Cape Breton was conferred on him, with the military command of that and of Prince Edward's island; and soon after he commenced building the town of Sydney, and opened and worked the valuable coal fields at the entrance of the river. From his official position he was engaged in aiding and removing the royalists from the United States after the war of the revolution. In 1804 he was appointed lieutenant-governor and commander-in-chief of Prince Edward's island, in the gulf of St. Lawrence, being then in his 82d year. In person he was short, and at the age of 95 lithe and active; about which time he talked of making the tour of the United Kingdom, to which he allotted 2 years; this performed, he was to commence that of Europe, which he calculated would take 3 years more; after which it was his intention to return to his native place, and there spend the remainder of his days. He was Capt. Cook's teacher in navigation.

DESCANT, in music, an old term, now understood to be synonymous with counterpoint. It signifies strictly an unpremeditated enlargement upon a given subject, which, sung by another voice or by voices, formed the accompaniment of the descant. Musicians distinguished between plain, figurative, and double descant.

DESCARTES, RENÉ (Lat. RENATUS CARTESIUS), a French philosopher, born in La Haye, between Tours and Poitiers, in Touraine, March 31, 1596, died in Stockholm, Feb. 11, 1650. He was the youngest son of a councillor of the parliament of Rennes, of an ancient and noble family, and early in life, when as yet a mere boy, evinced such a disposition to inquire into the nature and causes of things, that he passed under the sobriquet of the young philosopher. His education was conducted in the Jesuit college of La Flèche, where, in spite of the extreme delicacy of his physical constitution, he made rapid progress in the Greek and Latin classics, and the other ordinary studies of such an institution. He contracted also while there a friendship with Mersenne, which lasted until the end of his life; and though Mersenne became a monk, it was chiefly through him that Descartes communicated from the profound scholastic retirement which he sedulously sought with the outside learned world. After leaving college, in his 16th year, he occupied himself in acquiring the manly accomplishments of riding and fencing, with a view to the military life, to which he was destined by the wishes of his family and the spirit of the times. But his health did not allow him to enter the service immediately, and he was sent to Paris with a tutor, in order to pass two years in the further prose

cution of his studies. In 1616 he joined the army of the prince of Orange, and while in garrison at Breda composed his Compendium Musica, which seemed a prelude to the research for harmony which he was soon about to carry into all the realms of knowledge. He was driven to it, doubtless, by the painful uncertainty and chaotic confusion which reigned in nearly all the departments of human inquiry. As a reaction against the prevailing tone, which was the despotism of authorities, many of the finest intellects had taken refuge in scepticism, so that Mersenne could write in 1623: "There are 50,000 atheists in Paris;" and the most popular, verses of the Agrippine of Cyrano were those which sang:

Une heure après la mort, notre âme évanouie Sera ce qu'elle était une heure avant la vie ; which may be translated:

An hour after death, our soul, released from earth, Will be just what it was an hour before its birth. At the same time there was a bitter reaction against the past in the scientific aspirations of those students of Italy, France, Germany, and England, who began to cast off the fetters of the scholastic logic, and to open new methods of investigation into nature, by means of observation and experiment. Descartes was torn by the doubts of his epoch, but he shared also in its grand hopes; and if he doubted, it was only to cleanse his mind of the errors of the past, and to enable it to move more freely toward the grand constructions of the future. In 1619 he left the Dutch army, and entered as a volunteer into the service of the duke of Bavaria; he was present at the battle of Prague in 1620, and made the campaign of Hungary in 1621. The atrocities which he witnessed in this war are said to have been the occasion of his resigning his commission; but the probability is that his active mind had exhausted the uses of that mode of life, and he was eager to enlarge his knowledge of men and society by more extensive travel. Quitting the profession of arms altogether, therefore, he visited the greater part of the north of Europe, then returned to France, where he sold his estates, and speedily resumed his journeys. He spent considerable time in Switzerland and Italy, being present at Rome during the jubilee of 1625, and wherever he went observing the grand phenomena of nature, and peffecting himself in the acquisition of all existing knowledge. It was at the town of Neuburg, on the Danube, where he passed the winter, that the plan of devoting the remainder of his days to the reconstruction of the principles of human knowledge, which had long been maturing in his mind, took a definite shape. While he wandered from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, he was digesting the outlines of the great discoveries in geometry and method, destined soon to change the intellectual currents of the world. He was but just 33, and in the height and vigor of his powers. Repairing first to Paris, where he moved about from one obscure house to another to escape the intrusions of

friends, he next settled in the neighboring conntry, and being disturbed there, finally fixed his retreat in Holland, "the busy hive of labor and liberty," where he found it more easy to create the solitude necessary to his profound medita tions. His life became that of an ascetic, emancipated from all social ties and relations, in order that he might devote himself the more exclusively to what was now his only wedded wife, the truth. He did not refuse, however, all participation in the affairs of the world; in 1633 he made a brief visit to England, the following year to Amsterdam; and, indeed, he constantly. through the mediation of Mersenne, maintained an active correspondence with the learned men who sought his instruction or his friendship. In 1637 he began a more open career by the publication of a volume from the press of Leyden, entitled Discours de la méthode, which contained treatises on method, on dioptries, on meteors, and on geometry. The first of these, beside an admirable picture of his life and of the progress of his studies, furnished a clear outline of a new science of metaphysics only expanded in his later and larger works. In 1641 he published in Latin, from the press of Paris, his Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, which carried his speculations into abstruse ques tions as to the existence of God and the immor tality of the soul. He invited criticisms of these, which, in later editions, are arranged and replied to under 7 heads, wherein he consid ers all the objections raised to his original sys tem. These works filled Europe with his name, and at the close of the year 1641 he was invited to France by King Louis XIII., but he refused to quit his retirement. In 1644 his Principia Philosophia appeared, which 3 years later was translated into French by one of his friends, Claude Picot. He then went to France, where a pension of 3,000 livres a year was conferred upon him; but as Queen Christina of Swe den invited him to Stockholm, at the same time appointing him director of an academy which she proposed to establish, at a salary of 3,000 crowns a year, he was induced once more to abandon his native country. It was a fatal choice for him, for the rigors of the climate, combined with the unusually early hours exact ed from him by the queen, in an eccentric wish to take lessons from him, led to his death in less than two years. He was buried at Stockholm, but 16 years afterward Louis XIV. caused his remains to be disinterred and carried to France, where he was entombed in the church of Ste. Geneviève du Mont, in the midst of magnificent ceremonies, and of the almost universal homage of his enlightened countrymen.-Descartes was an encyclopaedic genius, and it would be impossible, in an article like this, to describe the entire scope and influence of his activity, He created an epoch in the history of the hu man mind, and can only be classed with men of the first order, like Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Newton, and Kant. With Bacon, he was one of the founders of modern philosophy, but

he pushed his inquiries further than Bacon in many respects, and in a somewhat different sphere. What the latter accomplished for natural science, Descartes accomplished for moral and metaphysical; and it is no exaggeration which considers him as the father of that stupendous movement of intellectual investigation which has given to the world Malebranche and Spinoza, and after them the entire school of the great German idealists, beginning with Leibnitz and Wolf, and culminating in Kant and Hegel. As a metaphysician, he was the fountain head of the speculation of a whole subsequent century, while he added to his glory in that sphere the scarcely inferior distinction of a great discoverer in the mathematics, and of an earnest and sedulous laborer in nearly all the broad domains of physical science then known. Not wholly exempt from the errors of his day, he was yet immeasurably in advance of his day; while he enjoys this singular eminence among the greater number of philosophers, too much given to the jargon of learned words and abstruse phrases, that his style, his manner of expression, is as clear and beautiful as his thought is great. French style appears nowhere more simple, limpid, and direct than in the varied dissertations of Descartes, even when he treats of subjects the most recondite and difficult. Sir James Stephen com pares the language of Descartes to the "atmosphere, by the intervention of which we see, though it is itself invisible. It is the nearest possible approach to that inarticulate speech in which disembodied spirits may be supposed to interchange their thoughts. It has no technical terms, no appeals to the memory, no coloring of imagination or of art, no trope or epigram or antithesis, no rhetoric and no passion; and yet it wants neither elegance nor warmth. The warmth is the warmth of a devout solicitude to attain truth and to impart it. The elegance consists in the felicity with which every word, sentence, paragraph, and discussion falls into its proper place, and exactly fulfils its appropriate office." It was owing to this admirable clear ness, perhaps, as much as to the more essential merits of his system, that it was said, at the time of Descartes' death, that everybody, great or small, in England and France, who thought at all, thought Cartesianism. The fundamental principles of the philosophy of Descartes relate to his method, which takes its point of departure in universal doubt, and places the criterion of all certitude in evidence, or in other words, in reason, as the sovereign judge of the true and the false; to the erection of the individual consciousness into the fundamental ground and source of all correct philosophy-cogito, ergo sum; to the radical distinction which is drawn between the soul and the body, the essential attribute of the former being thought, and that of the latter, extension; to the demonstration of the existence of God from the very idea of the infinite; to the division of ideas into those which are innate, or born within us as necessary or inspired, those which are fac

411

titious, or created by us, and those which are adventitious, or come from without by means of the senses; to the definition of substance, as that which so exists as to need nothing else for its existence, and which is applicable in the highest sense only to God, who has his ground in himself, but only relatively to the thinking and corporeal substances, which need the cooperation of God to their existence; and to the affirmation that the universe depends upon the productive power, not only for its first existence, but for its continued being and operation, or in other words, that conservation is perpetual creation. Other points in this philosophy are important, and other aspects of it are to be regarded by the student; but for the popular reader these chiefly deserve attention, because these were characteristic and creative, and furnished the themes for the greater part of the agitated discussions of later years. From his theory of doubt, except upon evidence, for instance, the philosophy of the 17th century, and the whole of modern philosophy, in fact, derived that disdain for the authority which formerly fettered the free movements of the mind, and that reliance upon reason, which Arnauld, Malebranche, Pascal, Bossuet, Fénelon, and others appealed to so effectively. This vivid determination of the consciousness, or the ME, as the proper object of metaphysical investigation, was the starting point of those great systems of thought, both Scotch and German, which are such remarkable phenomena in the history of intellectual development. It is easy to trace, also, to his doctrine of substance, the vast pantheistic speculations of Spinoza, and more lately of Fichte and Hegel. In short, the schemes of Geulincx, Leibnitz, Wolf, Kant, and perhaps of Swedenborg, are all more or less directly affiliated to the great leading ideas of the French thinker. As a whole, therefore, we are not surprised to learn that when his system appeared, it produced an instant and vivid sensation. The scholastics were astonished by an assault at once so radical and so vital; the sceptics saw with stupefaction a scepticism more searching than theirs rising into the most solid religious faith; while the independent men of science, who had long been struggling against the methods of the old dialectics, received with joy and gratitude a doctrine which seemed to place their researches on an immovable foundation of truth, and to promise to crown them with the richest fruits of progress. For a while Descartes threatened to succeed to the place of absolute dictation and mastery which had been so long assigned to Aristotle. His influence passed from the oratory and the study to the popular literature; all the great writers of the age of Louis XIV. were tinctured by it; but just as it appeared to have attained a universal acceptation, it began as rapidly to fade and shrink. The reasons of this decline are to be found partly in the growth of Locke's sensational philosophy; partly in the demonstrated impotence of Descartes' principles to resolve many of the higher problems to which ho aspired; but

chiefly in the discoveries of Newton and the progress of physics, which discredited his physical theories, and therefore brought his metaphysical conclusions into distrust. The theory of vortices, by which he endeavored to explain the movements of the heavenly bodies, gave place to the simpler theory of Newton as to a law of universal gravitation; but science has not ceased in consequence to confess its obligations to Descartes for his important discoveries as to the application of algebra to geometry, his contributions to dioptrics, to mechanics, and to hydrostatics, and for that fearless spirit of investigation, which, if it led him into mistakes, enabled him also to anticipate many truths as cribed to a later period. After the death of Descartes, in addition to the works we have already mentioned, there were published: Le monde de Descartes, ou le traité de la lumière (12mo., Paris, 1664); Le traité de l'homme et de la formation du fatus (4to., Paris, 1664); Les lettres de René Descartes (3 vols. 4to., 1657-'67). The principal complete editions of his writings are Opera Omnia (8 vols., Amsterdam, 1670'83); Euvres complètes de Descartes (9 vols., Paris, 1724); Euvres complètes de Descartes, by Victor Cousin (11 vols., 1824-26), which is perhaps the most perfect edition; Euvres philosophiques de Descartes (1835), by Garnier, who added a life, and a thorough analysis of all his writings. On the philosophy of this master, the dissertations are almost without number, but the few most useful or curious are comprised in the following list: Recueil de pièces curieuses concernant la philosophie de Descartes (Amsterdam, 1684, published by Bayle); Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du Cartesianisme, by Huet (Paris, 1693); Mémoires sur la persécution du Cartesianisme, by Cousin (Paris, 1838); Histoire et critique de la révolution Cartesienne, by M. Francisque Boullier (2 vols., Paris, 1842); Le Cartesianisme, ou la véritable rénovation des sciences, by M. Bordau Demoulin (2 vols., Paris, 1843). Of late years the study of Descartes has revived among the French philosophers. See Damiron's Essai sur l'histoire de la philosophie en France au XIX siècle, which contains a report in 6 memoirs read to the academy, on the philosophy of Descartes and its effects.

DESCENT, in law, is the transmission of an estate in lands by operation of law, upon the decease of a proprietor, without any disposition thereof having been made by him. The term is derived from a principle existing until very recently in the English law, that an inheritance could never lineally ascend, yet upon failure of lineal descendants, it could ascend collaterally. Thus the father could not be the heir of his son, but the uncle could inherit from the nephew. There was therefore an inaptness in the expression even as used in the common law doctrine of inheritance, and still greater incongruity in American law, which allows a lineal ascent from the son to the father. Succession is the more appropriate phrase in the Roman law,

and from that adopted in the French and other modern systems of law. Gibbon has well remarked that the Roman law of hereditary succession "deviated less from the equality of nature than the Jewish, Athenian, or English institutions." The oldest son of a Hebrew inherited a double portion. By the Athenian law the sons inherited jointly, but the daughters were wholly dependent upon what provision their brothers might choose to give them by way of marriage portion. The English law of primogeniture gives, not a larger proportion, but the whole, to the eldest son; and in various other respects which will be presently referred to, the natural order of equity is singularly disregarded in the law of descent. On the other hand, by the Roman law, when a man died intestate, all his children, both sons and danghters, inherited alike; and in case of the decease of either, the descendants of the decedent would take such share as would have belonged to him or her. The distinction of agnates and cognates was indeed introduced at an early period, whereby the descendants of females, who were called cognates, were excluded; but by imperial constitutions they were restored to the right of succession, with a diminution of a third in favor of the agnates, that is, descendants of males, and even this discrimination was abrogated by Justinian. On failure of lineal descendants, the father and mother or other lineal ascendants were admitted. Such was the rule as to lineal succession. In respect to collateral inheritance, by the law of the 12 tables, agnates, whether male or female, were admitted alike, but by the later law all females of collateral kindred were excluded; the hardship of the rule was in some measure relieved by the prætor, who gave to females thus excluded a share of the personal estate. Justinian restored the right of succession as it had originally existed. Descendants of females of the collateral kindred were still, however, left un-provided for. Thus, though a sister could inherit from her brother, yet her children could not; but the reverse of the rule did not hold, for there was no corresponding disability in the brother to inherit from the children of his sister. The rule of collateral succession was that the nearest agnate (or all the agnates of the same degree) took the whole estate. The mode of estimating the degree of consanguinity was by the Roman law to take the entire nuber of intermediate persons in the ascending and descending scale between the parties whose relationship was in question. Thus, first consins would be related in the fourth degree, being each two removes from the common ancestor; whereas by the canon law, which has been taken as the basis of the English rule of descent, the consanguinity is measured by the number of degrees between the most remote of the two persons and the common ancestor, which in the case of cousins would be two degrees; and it would be the same between uncle and nephew. The rules of descent by the common