of his age,” and Southey said that “he had all the elements of a poet; he only wanted the art.” In spite of his ungainly exterior and peculiar manner, his happy gifts of exposition and illustration won him extraordinary popularity as a lecturer, his experiments were ingenious and rapidly performed, and Coleridge went to hear him “to increase his stock of metaphors.” The dominating ambition of his life was to achieve fame, but though that sometimes betrayed him into petty jealousy, it did not leave him insensible to the claims on his knowledge of the “cause of humanity,” to use a phrase often employed by him in connexion with his invention of the miners’ lamp. Of the smaller observances of etiquette he was careless, and his frankness of disposition sometimes exposed him to annoyances which he might have avoided by the exercise of ordinary tact.
See Dr J. A. Paris, The Life of Sir Humphry Davy (1831), vol. ii. of which on pp. 450-456 gives a list of his publications. Dr John Davy, Memoirs of Sir Humphry Davy (1836); Collected Works (with shorter memoir, 1839); Fragmentary Remains, Literary and Scientific (1858). T. E. Thorpe, Humphry Davy, Poet and Philosopher (1896).
DAWARI, or Dauri, a Pathan tribe on the Waziri border of the North-West Frontier Province of India. The Dawaris inhabit the Tochi Valley (q.v.), otherwise known as Dawar or Daur, and are a homogeneous tribe of considerable size, numbering 5200 fighting men. Though surrounded on all four sides by a Waziri population they bear little resemblance to Waziris. They are an agricultural and the Waziris a pastoral race, and they are much richer than their neighbours. They thrive on a rich sedimentary soil copiously irrigated in the midst of a country where cultivable land of any kind is scarce and water in general hardly to be obtained. But they pay a heavy tax in health and well-being for the possession of their fertile acres. Fevers and other ravaging diseases are bred in the wet sodden lands of the Tochi Valley, lying at the bottom of a deep depression exposed to the burning rays of the sun; and the effects of these ailments may be clearly traced in the drawn or bloated features and the shrunken or swollen limbs of nearly every Dawari that has passed middle life. They have an evil name for indolence, drug-eating and unnatural vices, and are morally the lowest of the Afghan races; but in spite of these defects, and of the contempt with which they are regarded by the other Afghan tribes, they have held their own for centuries against the warlike and hardy Waziris. The secret of this is that the Dawaris stand together, and the Waziris do not, while the weaker race is gifted with infinite patience and tenacity of purpose. With the advent of British government, however, the Dawaris are now secured in the possession of their ancestral lands.
See J. G. Lorimer, Grammar and Vocabulary of Waziri Pushtu (1902).
DAWES, HENRY LAURENS (1816–1903), American lawyer, was born at Cummington, Massachusetts, on the 30th of October 1816. After graduating at Yale in 1839, he taught for a time at Greenfield, Mass., and also edited The Greenfield Gazette. In 1842 he was admitted to the bar and began the practice of law at North Adams, where for a time he conducted The Transcript. He served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1848–1849 and in 1852, in the state Senate in 1850, and in the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1853. From 1853 to 1857 he was United States district attorney for the western district of Massachusetts; and from 1857–1875 he was a Republican member of the national House of Representatives. In 1875 he succeeded Charles Sumner as senator from Massachusetts, serving until 1893. During this long period of legislative activity he served in the House on the committees on elections, ways and means, and appropriations, took a prominent part in the anti-slavery and reconstruction measures during and after the Civil War, in tariff legislation, and in the establishment of a fish commission and the inauguration of daily weather reports. In the Senate he was chairman of the committee on Indian affairs, and gave much attention to the enactment of laws for the benefit of the Indians. On leaving the Senate, in 1893, he became chairman of the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes (sometimes called the Dawes Indian Commission), and served in this capacity for ten years, negotiating with the tribes for the extinction of the communal title to their land and for the dissolution of the tribal governments, with the object of making the tribes a constituent part of the United States.[1] Dawes died at Pittsfield, Mass., on the 5th of February 1903.
DAWES, RICHARD (1708–1766), English classical scholar, was born in or near Market Bosworth. He was educated at the town grammar school under Anthony Blackwall, and at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, of which society he was elected fellow in 1731. His peculiar habits and outspoken language made him unpopular. His health broke down in consequence of his sedentary life, and it is said that he took to bell-ringing at Great St Mary’s as a restorative. He was a bitter enemy of Bentley, who he declared knew nothing of Greek except from indexes. In 1738 Dawes was appointed to the mastership of the grammar school, Newcastle-on-Tyne, combined with that of St Mary’s hospital. From all accounts his mind appears to have become unhinged; his eccentricities of conduct and continual disputes with his governing body ruined the school, and finally, in 1749, he resigned his post and retired to Heworth, where he chiefly amused himself with boating. He died on the 21st of March 1766. Dawes was not a prolific writer. The book on which his fame rests is his Miscellanea critica (1745), which gained the commendation of such distinguished continental scholars as L. C. Valckenaer and J. J. Reiske. The Miscellanea, which was re-edited by T. Burgess (1781), G. C. Harles (1800) and T. Kidd (1817), for many years enjoyed a high reputation, and although some of the “canons” have been proved untenable and few can be accepted universally, it will always remain an honourable and enduring monument of English scholarship.
See J. Hodgson, An Account of the Life and Writings of Richard Dawes (1828); H. R. Luard in Dict. of Nat. Biog.; J. E. Sandys, Hist. of Classical Scholarship, ii. 415.
DAWISON, BOGUMIL (1818–1872), German actor, was born at Warsaw, of Jewish parents, and at the age of nineteen went on the stage. In 1839 he received an appointment to the theatre at Lemberg in Galicia. In 1847 he played at Hamburg with marked success, was from 1849 to 1854 a member of the Burg theatre in Vienna, and then became connected with the Dresden court theatre. In 1864 he was given a life engagement, but resigned his appointment, and after starring through Germany visited the United States in 1866. He died in Dresden on the 1st of February 1872. Dawison was considered in Germany an actor of a new type; a leading critic wrote that he and Marie Seebach “swept like fresh gales over dusty tradition, and brushing aside the monotony of declamation gave to their rôles more character and vivacity than had hitherto been known on the German stage.” His chief parts were Mephistopheles, Franz Moor, Mark Antony, Hamlet, Charles V., Richard III. and King Lear.
DAWKINS, WILLIAM BOYD (1838– ), English geologist and archaeologist, was born at Buttington vicarage near Welshpool, Montgomeryshire, on the 26th of December 1838. Educated at Rossall School and Oxford, he joined the Geological Survey in 1862, and in 1869 became curator of the Manchester museum, a post which he retained till 1890. He was appointed professor of geology and palaeontology in Owens College, Manchester, in 1874. He paid special attention to the question of the existence of coal in Kent, and in 1882 was selected by the Channel tunnel committee to make a special survey of the French and English coasts. He was also employed in the scheme of a tunnel beneath the Humber. His chief distinctions, however, were won in the realms of anthropology by his researches into the lives of the cave-dwellers of prehistoric times, labours which have borne fruit in his books Cave-hunting (1874); Early Man in Britain (1880); British Pleistocene Mammalia (1866–1887). He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1867, and acted as president of the anthropological section of the British Association in 1882 and of the geological section in 1888.
- ↑ The commission completed its labours on the 1st of July 1905, after having allotted 20,000,000 acres of land among 90,000 Indians and absorbed the five Indian governments into the national system. The “five tribes” were the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole Indians.
