stay in Sweden furnished him with valuable documents for a political and social history of Sweden and France at the end of the 18th century. In 1864 and 1865 he published in the Revue des deux mondes a series of articles on Gustavus III. and the French court, which were republished in book form in 1867. To the second volume he appended a critical study on Marie Antoinette et Louis XVI apocryphes, in which he proved, by evidence drawn from documents in the private archives of the emperor of Austria, that the letters published by Feuillet de Conches (Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette et Madame Elisabeth, 1864–1873) and Hunolstein (Corresp. inédite de Marie Antoinette, 1864) are forgeries. With the collaboration of Alfred von Arneth, director of the imperial archives at Vienna, he edited the Correspondance secrète entre Marie-Thérèse et le comte de Mercy-Argenteau (3 vols., 1874), the first account based on trustworthy documents of Marie Antoinette’s character, private conduct and policy. The Franco-German War drew Geffroy’s attention to the origins of Germany, and his Rome et les Barbares: étude sur la Germanie de Tacite (1874) set forth some of the results of German scholarship. He was then appointed to superintend the opening of the French school of archaeology at Rome, and drew up two useful reports (1877 and 1884) on its origin and early work. But his personal tastes always led him back to the study of modern history. When the Paris archives of foreign affairs were thrown open to students, it was decided to publish a collection of the instructions given to French ambassadors since 1648 (Recueil des instructions données aux ambassadeurs et ministres de France depuis le traité de Westphalie), and Geffroy was commissioned to edit the volumes dealing with Sweden (vol. ii., 1885) and Denmark (vol. xiii., 1895). In the interval he wrote Madame de Maintenon d’après sa correspondance authentique (2 vols., 1887), in which he displayed his penetrating critical faculty in discriminating between authentic documents and the additions and corrections of arrangers like La Beaumelle and Lavallée. His last works were an Essai sur la formation des collections d’antiques de la Suède and Des institutions et des mœurs du paganisme scandinave: l’Islande avant le Christianisme, both published posthumously. He died at Bièvre on the 16th of August 1895.
GEFLE, a seaport of Sweden on an inlet of the Gulf of Bothnia,
chief town of the district (län) of Gefleborg, 112 m. N.N.W. of
Stockholm by rail. Pop. (1900) 29,522. It is the chief port of
the district of Kopparberg, with its iron and other mines and
forests. The exports consist principally of timber and wood-pulp,
iron and steel. The harbour, which has two entrances
about 20 ft. deep, is usually ice-bound in mid-winter. Large
vessels generally load in the roads at Gråberg, 6 m. distant.
There are slips and shipbuilding yards, and a manufacture of
sail-cloth. The town is an important industrial centre, having
tobacco and leather factories, electrical and other mechanical
works, and breweries. At Skutskär at the mouth of the Dal
river are wood-pulp and saw mills, dealing with the large
quantities of timber floated down the river; and there are large
wood-yards in the suburb of Bomhus. Gefle was almost destroyed
by fire in 1869, but was rebuilt in good style, and has the advantage of a beautiful situation. The principal buildings are a castle, founded by King John III. (1568–1592), but rebuilt later,
a council-house erected by Gustavus III., who held a diet here in
1792, an exchange, and schools of commerce and navigation.
GEGENBAUR, CARL (1826–1903), German anatomist, was
born on the 21st of August 1826 at Würzburg, the university of
which he entered as a student in 1845. After taking his degree
in 1851 he spent some time in travelling in Italy and Sicily,
before returning to Würzburg as Privatdocent in 1854. In 1855
he was appointed extraordinary professor of anatomy at Jena,
where after 1865 his fellow-worker, Ernst Haeckel, was professor
of zoology, and in 1858 he became the ordinary professor. In 1873 he was appointed to Heidelberg, where he was professor
of anatomy and director of the Anatomical Institute until his
retirement in 1901. He died at Heidelberg on the 14th of June
1903. The work by which perhaps he is best known is his
Grundriss der vergleichenden Anatomie (Leipzig, 1874; 2nd edition, 1878). This was translated into English by W. F.
Jeffrey Bell (Elements of Comparative Anatomy, 1878), with
additions by E. Ray Lankester. While recognizing the importance
of comparative embryology in the study of descent, Gegenbaur
laid stress on the higher value of comparative anatomy
as the basis of the study of homologies, i.e. of the relations
between corresponding parts in different animals, as, for example,
the arm of man, the foreleg of the horse and the wing of a fowl.
A distinctive piece of work was effected by him in 1871 in supplementing
the evidence adduced by Huxley in refutation of the
theory of the origin of the skull from expanded vertebrae, which,
formulated independently by Goethe and Oken, had been
championed by Owen. Huxley demonstrated that the skull
is built up of cartilaginous pieces; Gegenbaur showed that “in
the lowest (gristly) fishes, where hints of the original vertebrae
might be most expected, the skull is an unsegmented gristly
brain-box, and that in higher forms the vertebral nature of the
skull cannot be maintained, since many of the bones, notably
those along the top of the skull, arise in the skin.” Other publications
by Gegenbaur include a Text-book of Human Anatomy
(Leipzig, 1883, new ed. 1903), the Epiglottis (1892) and Comparative
Anatomy of the Vertebrates in relation to the Invertebrates
(Leipzig, 2 vols., 1898–1901). In 1875 he founded the Morphologisches
Jahrbuch, which he edited for many years. In 1901
he published a short autobiography under the title Erlebtes und
Erstrebtes.
See Fürbringer in Heidelberger Professoren aus dem 19ten Jahrhundert (Heidelberg, 1903).
GEGENSCHEIN (Ger. gegen, opposite, and schein, shine), an extremely faint luminescence of the sky, seen opposite the direction of the sun. Germany was the country in which it was first discovered and described. The English rendering “counterglow”
is also given to it. Its faintness is such that it can be
seen only by a practised eye under favourable conditions. It
is invisible during the greater part of June, July, December
and January, owing to its being then blotted out by the superior
light of the Milky Way. It is also invisible during moonlight
and near the horizon, and the neighbourhood of a bright star
or planet may interfere with its recognition. When none of
these unfavourable conditions supervene it may be seen at nearly
any time when the air is clear and the depression of the sun
below the horizon more than 20°. (See Zodiacal Light.)
GEIBEL, EMANUEL (1815–1884), German poet, was born
at Lübeck on the 17th of October 1815, the son of a pastor in
the city. He was originally intended for his father’s profession,
and studied at Bonn and Berlin, but his real interests lay not in
theology but in classical and romance philology. In 1838 he
accepted a tutorship at Athens, where he remained until 1840.
In the same year he brought out, in conjunction with his friend
Ernst Curtius, a volume of translations from the Greek. His
first poems, Zeitstimmen, appeared in 1841; a tragedy, König
Roderich, followed in 1843. In the same year he received a
pension from the king of Prussia, which he retained until his
invitation to Munich by the king of Bavaria in 1851 as honorary
professor at the university. In the interim he had produced
König Sigurds Brautfahrt (1846), an epic, and Juniuslieder
(1848, 33rd ed. 1901), lyrics in a more spirited and manlier style
than his early poems. A volume of Neue Gedichte, published at
Munich in 1857, and principally consisting of poems on classical
subjects, denoted a further considerable advance in objectivity,
and the series was worthily closed by the Spätherbstblätter, published
in 1877. He had quitted Munich in 1869 and returned
to Lübeck, where he died on the 6th of April 1884. His works
further include two tragedies, Brunhild (1858, 5th ed. 1890), and
Sophonisbe (1869), and translations of French and Spanish
popular poetry. Beginning as a member of the group of political
poets who heralded the revolution of 1848, Geibel was also the
chief poet to welcome the establishment of the Empire in 1871.
His strength lay not, however, in his political songs but in his
purely lyric poetry, such as the fine cycle Ada and his still popular
love-songs. He may be regarded as the leading representative
of German lyric poetry between 1848 and 1870.
