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of whisky is made into alcohol, gin and French brandy. Whisky is nearly colorless when made, but grows red from the wood of the barrels in which it is kept, which are usually charred to help to darken it. It is improved by age. Over 50,000,000 gallons a year are made and consumed in Great Britain, besides beer and wine. In the United States the tax on whisky is one of the greatest sources of revenue to the government. The total production of whisky, distilled spirits and fermented liquors in the United States in 1906 was 180,860,926 gallons. About 45,000,000 gallons of whisky are made annually in this country. JAMES WHISTLER Whistler (hwĭs′lẽr), James Abbott McNeill, a brilliant Anglo-American painter, etcher and author, was born at Lowell, Mass., on July 10, 1834, and educated at West Point Military Academy. He studied art at Paris and settled at London, England, where he became president of the British Society of Artists and held exhibitions of his pictures. There was a strain of the erratic in his mental composition, which more than once brought him into antagonism with critics of art — notably with Ruskin; but he had genius and gifts of a high order in the impressionist school and attained eminence as an etcher and colorist. Some of his more important paintings include what he termed A Nocturne in Blue and Gold, arrangements in black, gray and green; his Portrait of My Mother is excellent, as are The White Girl and The Last of Old Westminster. He also did good work in painting portraits of celebrities, and wrote The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. His other published works include Ten O'Clock, Four Masters of Etching and The Baronet and the Butterfly. He died on July 17, 1903. Whit'by, a seaport in Yorkshire, England, on the North Sea, at the mouth of the Esk. The old town has narrow, steep, irregular streets, while the new part has all the features of the fashionable watering-place. The old abbey is in ruins, but Whitby Hall has been restored. The parish church stands on a cliff 350 feet high, with a flight of nearly 200 steps. The piers run out about 1,000 feet in the ocean. The chief exports are jet ornaments and iron, the jet being obtained from a petrified wood peculiar to the region. The herring-fishery is increasing, but the shipping-trade, which was large when the vessels for Captain

Cook's voyages were built here, has declined, and the town is gradually becoming merely a watering-place. Population 11,750. Whitby (Whitetown) originally was the seat of a monastery, built by Oswy, king of Northumbria, in 658. The convent connected with it was in charge of Abbess Hilda and became famous. Caedmon (q. v.) was a servitor of this abbey. Destroyed by the Danes in 867, it was restored in 1074. ANDREW D. WHITE White, Andrew Dickson, American educator and diplomat, was born at Homer, N.Y., on Nov. 7, 1832, and after graduating at Yale traveled and studied in France, and became an attaché to the United States legation at St. Petersburg. In 1857 he was appointed professor of history and English literature at the University of Michigan, and ten years later became president of Cornell University, a post which he held until 1885, contributing $100,000 from his own means, part of which was applied to the equipment of the library of the school of history and political science at Cornell. In 1871 he was appointed one of the United States commissioners to Santo Domingo; in 1878 was commissioner to the Paris Exposition from the state of New York; and from 1879 to 1881 was United States minister to Russia (serving again during 1892-4). In 1897 he was named by President McKinley ambassador of the United States to Berlin, a post he held till 1902. Dr. White is a regent of Smithsonian Institute at Washington, and has been president of the American Historical Society and the American Social Science Association. He is the author of Lectures on History, The New Germany, The Warfare of Science, History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, European Schools of History, Studies in History and Autobiography. White, Edward Douglass, associate-justice of the United States supreme court, was born in the parish of Lafourche, La. on Nov. 3, 1845, and was educated at the Jesuit College of New Orleans and at Georgetown (D.C.) College. He served in the Confederate army during the Civil War, was admitted to the Louisiana bar, and in 1874 was a state senator. From 1878 to 1891 he sat as associate-justice of the supreme court of Louisiana, and from 1891 to 1894 was a member of the United States