The Nuttall Encyclopaedia Part 385

RYMER, THOMAS, the learned editor of the "Foedera," an invaluable collection of historical doc.u.ments dealing with England's relations with foreign powers, born at Northallerton; was a Cambridge man and a barrister; turned to literature and wrote much both in prose and poetry, but to no great purpose; was Historiographer-royal; Macaulay in characteristic fas.h.i.+on calls him "the worst critic that ever lived"; but his "Foedera" is an enduring monument to his unwearied industry (1639-1714).

RYSBRACH, MICHAEL, a well-known sculptor in the 18th century, born at Antwerp; established himself in London and executed busts and statues of the most prominent men of his day, including the monument to Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey, statue of Marlborough, busts of Walpole, Bolingbroke, Pope, &c. (1694-1770).

RYSWICK, PEACE OF, signed on October 30, 1697, at the village of Ryswick, 2 m. S. of The Hague, by England, Holland, Germany, and Spain on the one hand and France on the other, terminating the sanguinary struggle which had begun In 1688; it lasted till 1702.

S

SAADI. See SaDI.

SAALE, the name of several German rivers, the most important of which rises in the Fichtelgebirge, near Zell, in Upper Bavaria; flows northward, a course of 226 m., till it joins the Elbe at Barby; has numerous towns on its banks, including Jena, Halle, and Naumburg, to which last it is navigable.

SAARBRuCK (10), a manufacturing town in Rhenish Prussia, on the French frontier, where the French under Napoleon III. repulsed the Germans, August 2, 1870.

SABADELL (18), a prosperous Spanish town, 14 m. NW. of Barcelona; manufactures cotton and woollen textiles.

SABaeANS, a trading people who before the days of Solomon and for long after inhabited South Arabia, on the sh.o.r.es of the Bed Sea, and who wors.h.i.+pped the sun and moon with other kindred deities; also a religious sect on the Lower Euphrates, with Jewish, Moslem, and Christian rites as well as pagan, called Christians of St. John; the term Sabaeanism designates the wors.h.i.+p of the former.

SABAOTH, name given in the Bible, and particularly in the Epistle of James, to the Divine Being as the Lord of all hosts or kinds of creatures.

SABATHAI, LEVI, a Jewish impostor, who gave himself out to be the Messiah and persuaded a number of Jews to forsake all and follow him; the sultan of Turkey forced him to confess the imposture, and he turned Mussulman to save his life (1625-1676).

SABBATH, the seventh day of the week, observed by the Jews as a day of "rest" from all work and "holy to the Lord," as His day, specially in commemoration of His rest from the work of creation, the observance of which by the Christian Church has been transferred to the first of the week in commemoration of Christ's resurrection.

SABELLIANISM, the doctrine of one Sabellius, who, in the third century, denied that there were three persons in the G.o.dhead, and maintained that there was only one person in three functions, aspects, or manifestations, at least this was the form his doctrine a.s.sumed in course of time, which is now called by his name, and is accepted by many in the present day.

SABIANISM. See SABaeANS.

SABINE, a river of Texas which, rising in the extreme N. of the State, flows SE. and S., forming for 250 m. the boundary between Louisiana and Texas, pa.s.ses through Sabine Lake into the Gulf of Mexico after a navigable course of 500 in.

SABINE, SIR EDWARD, a noted physicist, born in Dublin; served in artillery in 1803, maintained his connection with it till his retirement in 1874 as general, but owes his celebrity to his important investigations into the nature of terrestrial magnetism; accompanied as a scientist Boss and Parry in their search for the North-West Pa.s.sage (1819-20); was President both of the Royal Society from 1861 to 1879 and of the British a.s.sociation in 1853 (1788-1883).

SABINES, an ancient Italian people of the Aryan stock, near neighbours of ancient Borne, a colony of whom is said to have settled on the Quirinal, and contributed to form the moral part of the Roman people.

Numa, the second king of the city, was a Sabine. See ROMULUS.

SABLE ISLAND, a low, sandy, barren island in the Atlantic, 110 m.

off the E. coast of Nova Scotia; is extremely dangerous to navigation, and is marked by three lighthouses; is gradually being washed away.

SABOTS, a species of wooden shoes extensively worn by the peasants of France, Belgium, &c.; each shoe is hollowed out of a single block of wood (fir, willow, beech, and ash); well adapted for marshy districts.

SACERDOTALISM, a tendency to attach undue importance to the order and the ministry of priests, to the limitation of the operation of Divine grace.

SACHEVEREL, HENRY, an English Church clergyman, born at Maryborough, who became notorious in the reign of Queen Anne for his embittered attack (contained in two sermons in 1700) on the Revolution Settlement and the Act of Toleration; public feeling was turning in favour of the Tories, and the impolitic impeachment of Sacheverel by the Whig Government fanned popular feeling to a great height in his favour; was suspended from preaching for three years, at the expiry of which time the Tories, then in power, received him with ostentatious marks of favour; was soon forgotten; was an Oxford graduate, and a friend of Addison; a man of no real ability (1672-1724).

SACHS, HANS, a noted early German poet, born at Nurnberg; the son of a tailor, by trade a shoemaker; learned "the mystery of song" from a weaver; was a contemporary of Luther, who acknowledged his services in the cause of the Reformation; in his seventy-fourth year (1568), on examining his stock for publication, found that he had written 6048 poetical pieces, among them 208 tragedies and comedies, and this besides having all along kept house, like an honest Nurnberg burgher, by a.s.siduous and sufficient shoemaking; a man standing on his own basis; wrote "Narrenschneiden," a piece in which the doctor cures a bloated and lethargic patient by "cutting out half-a-dozen fools from his interior"; he sunk into oblivion during the 17th century, but his memory was revived by Goethe in the 18th (1494-1576).

SACHS, JULIUS, a German botanist and professor, born at Breslau; has written several works on botany, and experimented on the physiology of plants; _b_. 1832.

SACKVILLE, THOMAS, EARL OF DORSET, poet and statesman, born at Buckhurst; bred for the bar; entered Parliament in 1558; wrote with Thomas Norton a tragedy called "Gorboduc," contributed to a collection of British legends called the "Mirror of Magistrates" two pieces in n.o.ble verse (1536-1608).

SACRAMENT, a ceremonial observance in the Christian Church divinely inst.i.tuted as either really or symbolically a means, and in any case a pledge, of grace.

SACRAMENTARIAN, a High Churchman who attaches a special sacred virtue to the sacraments of the Church.

SACRAMENTO, largest river of California, rises in the NE. in the Sierra Nevada; follows a south-westerly course, draining the central valley of California; falls into Suisund Bay, on the Pacific coast, after a course of 500 miles, of which 250 are navigable.

SACRAMENTO (29), capital of California, situated at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers, 90 m. NE. of San Francisco; industries embrace flour and planing mills, foundries, potteries, &c.; has an art gallery, court-house, &c.; the tropical climate is tempered at night by cool sea breezes.

SACRED WARS. See AMPHICTYONIC COUNCIL.

SACRIFICE, anything of value given away to secure the possession of something of still higher value, and which is the greater and more meritorious the costlier the gift.

SACRING-BELL, or SANCTUS-BELL, the bell which rings when the Host is elevated at the celebration of High Ma.s.s.

SACY, ANTOINE ISAAC, BARON SILVESTRE DE, the greatest of modern Orientalists, born at Paris; by twenty-three was a master of cla.s.sic, Oriental, and modern European languages; was appointed in 1795 professor of Arabic in the School of Oriental Languages, and in 1806 of Persian in the College de France, besides which he held various other appointments; founded the Asiatic Society in 1822; was created a baron by Napoleon Bonaparte, and entered the Chamber of Peers in 1832; published "Biographies of Persian Poets," a standard Arabic grammar, &c.; his writings gave a stimulus to Oriental research throughout Europe (1758-1838).