own times. His friendships with Richard Fitz Nigel, who succeeded Foliot in the see of London, with William Longchamp, the chancellor of Richard I., and with Walter of Coutances, the archbishop of Rouen, gave him excellent opportunities of collecting information. His two chief works, the Abbreviationes Chronicorum and the Ymagines Historiarum, cover the history of the world from the birth of Christ to the year 1202. The former, which ends in 1147, is a work of learning and industry, but almost entirely based upon extant sources. The latter, beginning as a compilation from Robert de Monte and the letters of Foliot, becomes an original authority about 1172, and a contemporary record about 1181. In precision and fulness of detail the Ymagines are inferior to the chronicles of the so-called Benedict and of Hoveden. Though an annalist, Diceto is careless in his chronology; and the documents which he incorporates, while often important, are selected on no principle. He has little sense of style; but displays considerable insight when he ventures to discuss a political situation. For this reason, and on account of the details with which they supplement the more important chronicles of the period, the Ymagines are a valuable though a secondary source.
See W. Stubbs’ edition of the Historical Works of Diceto (Rolls ed. 1876, 2 vols.), and especially the introduction. The second volume contains minor works which are the barest compendia of facts taken from well-known sources. Diceto’s fragmentary Domesday of the capitular estates has been edited by Archdeacon Hale in The Domesday of St Paul’s, pp. 109 ff. (Camden Society, 1858).
DICEY, EDWARD (1832– ), English writer, son of T. E. Dicey of Claybrook Hall, Leicestershire, was born in 1832. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took mathematical and classical honours, he became an active journalist, contributing largely to the principal reviews. He was called to the bar in 1875, became a bencher of Gray’s Inn in 1896, and was treasurer in 1903–1904. He was connected with the Daily Telegraph as leader writer and then as special correspondent, and after a short spell in 1870 as editor of the Daily News he became editor of the Observer, a position which he held until 1889. Of his many books on foreign affairs perhaps the most important are his England and Egypt (1884), Bulgaria, the Peasant State (1895), The Story of the Khedivate (1902), and The Egypt of the Future (1907). He was created C.B. in 1886.
His brother Albert Venn Dicey (b. 1835), English jurist, was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first class in the classical schools in 1858. He was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1863. He held fellowships successively at Balliol, Trinity and All Souls’, and from 1882 to 1909 was Vinerian professor of law. He became Q.C. in 1890. His chief works are the Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885, 6th ed. 1902), which ranks as a standard work on the subject; England’s Case against Home Rule (1886); A Digest of the Law of England with Reference to the Conflict of Laws (1896), and Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the 19th century (1905).
DICHOTOMY (Gr. δίχα, apart, τέμνειν, to cut), literally a cutting asunder, the technical term for a form of logical division, consisting in the separation of a genus into two species, one of which has and the other has not, a certain quality or attribute. Thus men may be thus divided into white men, and men who are not white; each of these may be subdivided similarly. On the principle of contradiction this division is both exhaustive and exclusive; there can be no overlapping, and no members of the original genus or the lower groups are omitted. This method of classification, though formally accurate, has slight value in the exact sciences, partly because at every step one of the two groups is merely negatively characterized and therefore incapable of real subdivision; it is useful, however, in setting forth clearly the gradual descent from the most inclusive genus (summum genus) through species to the lowest class (infima species), which is divisible only into individual persons or things. (See further Division.) In astronomy the term is used for the aspect of the moon or of a planet when apparently half illuminated, so that its disk has the form of a semicircle.
DICK, ROBERT (1811–1866), Scottish geologist and botanist, was born at Tullibody, in Clackmannanshire, in January 1811. His father was an officer of excise. At the age of thirteen, after receiving a good elementary education at the parish school, Robert Dick was apprenticed to a baker, and served for three years. In these early days he became interested in wild flowers—he made a collection of plants and gradually acquired some knowledge of their names from an old encyclopaedia. When his time was out he left Tullibody and gained employment as a journeyman baker at Leith, Glasgow and Greenock. Meanwhile his father, who in 1826 had been removed to Thurso, as supervisor of excise, advised his son to set up a baker’s shop in that town. Thither Robert Dick went in 1830, he started in business as a baker and worked laboriously until he died on the 24th of December 1866. Throughout this period he zealously devoted himself to studying and collecting the plants, mollusca and insects of a wide area of Caithness, and his attention was directed soon after he settled in Thurso to the rocks and fossils. In 1835 he first found remains of fossil fishes; but it was not till some years later that his interest became greatly stirred. Then he obtained a copy of Hugh Miller’s Old Red Sandstone (published in 1841), and he began systematically to collect with hammer and chisel the fossils from the Caithness flags. In 1845 he found remains of Holoptychius and forwarded specimens to Hugh Miller, and he continued to send the best of his fossil fishes to that geologist, and to others after the death of Miller. In this way he largely contributed to the progress of geological knowledge, although he himself published nothing and was ever averse from publicity. His herbarium, which consisted of about 200 folios of mosses, ferns and flowering plants “almost unique in its completeness,” is now stored, with many of his fossils, in the museum at Thurso. Dick had a hard struggle for existence, especially through competition during his late years, when he was reduced almost to beggary: but of this few, if any, of his friends were aware until it was too late. A monument erected in the new cemetery at Thurso testifies to the respect which his life-work created, when the merits of this enthusiastic naturalist came to be appreciated.
See Robert Dick, Baker of Thurso, Geologist and Botanist, by Samuel Smiles (1878).
DICK, THOMAS (1774–1857), Scottish writer on astronomy, was born at Dundee on the 24th of November 1774. The appearance of a brilliant meteor inspired him, when in his ninth year, with a passion for astronomy; and at the age of sixteen he forsook the loom, and supported himself by teaching. In 1794 he entered the university of Edinburgh, and set up a school on the termination of his course; then, in 1801, took out a licence to preach, and officiated for some years as probationer in the United Presbyterian church. From about 1807 to 1817 he taught in the secession school at Methven in Perthshire, and during the ensuing decade in that of Perth, where he composed his first substantive book, The Christian Philosopher (1823, 8th ed. 1842). Its success determined his vocation as an author; he built himself, in 1827, a cottage at Broughty Ferry, near Dundee, and devoted himself wholly to literary and scientific pursuits. They proved, however, owing to his unpractical turn of mind, but slightly remunerative, and he was in 1847 relieved from actual poverty by a crown pension of £50 a year, eked out by a local subscription. He died on the 29th of July 1857. His best-known works are: Celestial Scenery (1837), The Sidereal Heavens (1840), and The Practical Astronomer (1845), in which is contained (p. 204) a remarkable forecast of the powers and uses of celestial photography. Written with competent knowledge, and in an agreeable style, they obtained deserved and widespread popularity.
See R. Chambers’s Eminent Scotsmen (ed. 1868); Monthly Notices Roy. Astr. Society, xviii. 98; Athenaeum (1857), p. 1008. (A. M. C.)
DICKENS, CHARLES JOHN HUFFAM (1812–1870), English novelist, was born on the 7th of February 1812 at a house in the Mile End Terrace, Commercial Road, Landport (Portsea)—a house which was opened as a Dickens Museum on 22nd July 1904. His father John Dickens (d. 1851), a clerk in the navy-pay office
