which abandoned the coast at Ortona 10 m. to the N. and returned to it at Histonium (Vasto). Remains of a Roman theatre exist under the bishop’s palace.
See V. Bindi, Monumenti degli Abruzzi (Naples, 1889, 690 sqq.), and for discoveries in the neighbourhood see A. de Nino in Notizie degli scavi (1884), 431. (T. As.)
LANCRET, NICOLAS (1660–1743), French painter, was born in Paris on the 22nd of January 1660, and became a brilliant
depicter of light comedy which reflected the tastes and manners
of French society under the regent Orleans. His first master
was Pierre d’Ulin, but his acquaintance with and admiration
for Watteau induced him to leave d’Ulin for Gillot, whose pupil
Watteau had been. Two pictures painted by Lancret and
exhibited on the Place Dauphine had a great success, which
laid the foundation of his fortune, and, it is said, estranged
Watteau, who had been complimented as their author. Lancret’s
work cannot now, however, be taken for that of Watteau, for
both in drawing and in painting his touch, although intelligent,
is dry, hard and wanting in that quality which distinguished his
great model; these characteristics are due possibly in part to
the fact that he had been for some time in training under an
engraver. The number of his paintings (of which over eighty
have been engraved) is immense; he executed a few portraits
and attempted historical composition, but his favourite subjects
were balls, fairs, village weddings, &c. The British Museum
possesses an admirable series of studies by Lancret in red chalk,
and the National Gallery, London, shows four paintings—the
“Four Ages of Man” (engraved by Desplaces and l’Armessin),
cited by d’Argenville amongst the principal works of Lancret.
In 1719 he was received as Academician, and became councillor
in 1735; in 1741 he married a grandchild of Boursault, author
of Aesop at Court. He died on the 14th of September 1743.
See d’Argenville, Vies des peintres; and Ballot de Sovot, Éloge de M. Lancret (1743, new ed. 1874).
LAND, the general term for that part of the earth’s surface
which is solid and dry as opposed to sea or water. The word
is common to Teutonic languages, mainly in the same form and
with essentially the same meaning. The Celtic cognate forms
are Irish lann, Welsh llan, an enclosure, also in the sense of
“church,” and so of constant occurrence in Welsh place-names,
Cornish lan and Breton lann, health, which has given the French
lande, an expanse or tract of sandy waste ground. The ultimate
root is unknown. From its primary meaning have developed
naturally the various uses of the word, for a tract of ground or
country viewed either as a political, geographical or ethnographical
division of the earth, as property owned by the public
or state or by a private individual, or as the rural as opposed to
the urban or the cultivated as opposed to the built on part of
the country; of particular meanings may be mentioned that of
a building divided into tenements or flats, the divisions being
known as “houses,” a Scottish usage, and also that of a division
of a ploughed field marked by the irrigating channels, hence
transferred to the smooth parts of the bore of a rifle between the
grooves of the rifling.
For the physical geography of the land, as the solid portion of the earth’s surface, see Geography. For land as the subject of cultivation see Agriculture and Soil, also Reclamation of Land. For the history of the holding or tenure of land see Village Communities and Feudalism; a particular form of land tenure is dealt with under Métayage. The article Agrarian Laws deals with the disposal of the public land (Ager publicus) in Ancient Rome, and further information with regard to the part played by the land question in Roman history will be found under Rome: § History. The legal side of the private ownership of land is treated under Real Property and Conveyancing (see also Landlord and Tenant, and Land Registration).
LANDAU, a town in the Bavarian Palatinate, on the Queich,
lying under the eastern slope of the Hardt Mountains, 32 m.
by rail S.W. from Mannheim, at the junction of lines to Neustadt
an der Hardt, Weissenburg and Saarbrücken. Pop. (1905)
17,165. Among its buildings are the Gothic Evangelical church,
dating from 1285; the chapel of St Catherine built in 1344;
the church of the former Augustinian monastery, dating from
1405; and the Augustinian monastery itself, founded in 1276
and now converted into a brewery. There are manufactures of
cigars, beer, hats, watches, furniture and machines, and a trade
in wine, fruit and cereals. Large cattle-markets are held here.
Landau was founded in 1224, becoming an imperial city fifty
years later. This dignity was soon lost, as in 1317 it passed to
the bishopric of Spires and in 1331 to the Palatinate, recovering
its former position in 1511. Captured eight times during the
Thirty Years’ War the town was ceded to France by the treaty
of Westphalia in 1648, although with certain ill-defined reservations.
In 1679 Louis XIV. definitely took possession of Landau.
Its fortifications were greatly strengthened; nevertheless it
was twice taken by the Imperialists and twice recovered by the
French during the Spanish Succession War. In 1815 it was
given to Austria and in the following year to Bavaria. The
fortifications were finally dismantled in 1871.
The town is commonly supposed to have given its name to the four-wheeled carriage, with an adjustable divided top for use either open or closed, known as a “landau” (Ger. Landauer). But this derivation is doubtful, the origin of the name being also ascribed to that of an English carriage-builder, Landow, who introduced this form of equipage.
See E. Heuser, Die Belagerungen von Landau in den Jahren 1702 und 1703 (Landau, 1894); Lehmann, Geschichte der ehemaligen freien Reichsstadt Landau (1851); and Jost, Interessante Daten aus der 600 jährigen Geschichte der Stadt Landau (Landau, 1879).
LANDECK, a town and spa in the Prussian province of Silesia,
on the Biele, 73 m. by rail S. of Breslau and close to the Austrian
frontier. Pop. (1905) 3,481. It is situated at an altitude of
1400 ft. It has manufactures of gloves. Landeck is visited by
nearly 10,000 people annually on account of its warm sulphur
baths, which have been known since the 13th century. In the
neighbourhood are the ruins of the castle of Karpenstein.
See Langner, Bad Landeck (Glatz, 1872); Schütze, Die Thermen von Landeck (Berlin, 1895); Wehse, Bad Landeck (Breslau, 1886); Joseph, Die Thermen von Landeck (Berlin, 1887), and Patschovsky, Führer durch Bad Landeck und Umgebung (Schweidnitz, 1902).
LANDEN, JOHN (1719–1790), English mathematician, was born at Peakirk near Peterborough in Northamptonshire on the 23rd of January 1719, and died on the 15th of January 1790 at Milton in the same county. He lived a very retired life, and saw little or nothing of society; when he did mingle in it, his dogmatism and pugnacity caused him to be generally shunned. In 1762 he was appointed agent to the Earl Fitzwilliam, and held that office to within two years of his death. He was first known as a mathematician by his essays in the Ladies’ Diary for 1744. In 1766 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. He was well acquainted with the works of the mathematicians of his own time, and has been called the “English d’Alembert.” In his Discourse on the “Residual Analysis,” he proposes to avoid the metaphysical difficulties of the method of fluxions by a purely algebraical method. The idea may be compared with that of Joseph Louis Lagrange’s Calcul des Fonctions. His memoir (1775) on the rotatory motion of a body contains (as the author was aware) conclusions at variance with those arrived at by Jean le Rond, d’Alembert and Leonhard Euler in their researches on the same subject. He reproduces and further develops and defends his own views in his Mathematical Memoirs, and in his paper in the Philosophical Transactions for 1785. But Landen’s capital discovery is that of the theorem known by his name (obtained in its complete form in the memoir of 1775, and reproduced in the first volume of the Mathematical Memoirs) for the expression of the arc of an hyperbola in terms of two elliptic arcs. His researches on elliptic functions are of considerable elegance, but their great merit lies in the stimulating effect which they had on later mathematicians. He also showed that the roots of a cubic equation can be derived by means of the infinitesimal calculus.
The list of his writings is as follows:—Ladies’ Diary, various communications (1744–1760); papers in the Phil. Trans. (1754, 1760, 1768, 1771, 1775, 1777, 1785); Mathematical Lucubrations (1755); A Discourse concerning the Residual Analysis (1758); The Residual Analysis, book i. (1764); Animadversions on Dr Stewart’s Method of computing the Sun’s Distance from the Earth (1771); Mathematical Memoirs (1780, 1789).
