Perjury or prevarication committed before a committee of either House of Parliament may be dealt with as a contempt or breach of privilege as well as by prosecution. As to false oaths not perjury, it is a misdemeanor at common law, punishable by fine and imprisonment, to swear falsely before any person authorized to administer an oath upon a matter of common concern, under such circumstances that the false swearing, if committed in judicial proceedings, would have amounted to perjury. There are some cases of making false declarations which are punishable on summary conviction, e g certain declarations under the Registration of Births and Deaths Act 1874, and the Customs Consolidation Act 1876.
In Scotland the law, as a general rule, agrees with that of England. Perjury may be committed by a party on reference to oath as well as by a witness. A witness making a false affirmatlon is guilty of perjury (The Affirmatlon [Scotland] Act, 1865). The acts of 1851 and 1859 do not extend to Scotland. The trial, though usually by the court of Justiciary, may be by the court of session If the perjury Is committed In the course of an action before that court The punishment is penal servitude or imprisonment at the discretion of the court. Formerly a person convicted of perjury was disabled from giving evidence In future; this disability was abolished by the Evidence (Scotland) Act 1852.
In the United States the common law has been extended by most states to embrace false affirmations and false evidence in proceedings not judicial. Perjury in a United States court is dealt with by an act of Congress of the 3rd of March 1825, by which the maximum punishment for perjury or subornation of perjury is a fine of $2000 or imprisonment for not more than five years jurisdiction to punish perjury committed In the state courts belongs to the states, as the Federal Constitution did not give it to the Federal government Statutory provisions founded upon the English act of 1749, have been adopted in some states. In the states which have not adopted such provisions, the indictment must set out the offence with the particularity necessary at common law.
On the continent of Europe perjury is also regarded as an offence of gravity punishable by imprisonment for varying periods In Germany, as In England, it was at one time a matter for the spiritual courts In Austria it is treated as a form of fraud, and the punishment is proportioned to the estimated amount of damage done to the party aggrieved In France the term perjury (parjure) is specifically applied only to the making of false oaths by parties in a civil suit.
PERKIN, SIR WILLIAM HENRY (1838–1907), English
chemist, was born in London on the 12th of March 1838. From
an early age he determined to adopt chemistry as his profession,
although his father, who was a builder, would have preferred
him to be an architect. Attending the City of London School
he devoted all his spare time to chemistry, and on leaving,
In 1853, entered the Royal College of Chemistry, then under the
direction of A. W. Hofmann, in whose own research laboratory
he was in the course of a year or two promoted to be an assistant.
Devoting his evenings to private investigations in a rough
laboratory fitted up at his home, Perkin was fired by some remarks
of Hofmann's to undertake the artificial production of quinine.
In this attempt he was unsuccessful, but the observations he
made in the course of his experiments induced him, early in
1856, to try the effect of treating aniline sulphate with bichromate
of potash. The result was a precipitate, aniline black,
from which he obtained the colouring matter subsequently known
as aniline blue or mauve. He lost no time in bringing this
substance before the managers of Pullar's dye-works, Perth,
and they expressed a favourable opinion of it, if only it should
not prove too expensive in use. Thus encouraged, he took out
a patent for his process, and leaving the College of Chemistry,
a boy of eighteen, he proceeded, with the aid of his father and
brother, to erect works at Greenford Green, near Harrow, for
the manufacture of the newly discovered colouring matter, and
by the end of 1857 the works were in operation. That date
may therefore be reckoned as that of the foundation of the coal-tar
colour Industry, which has since attained such important
dimensions-in Germany, however, rather than in England,
the country where it originated. Perkin also had a large share
In the introduction of artificial alizarin (q.v.), the red dye of the
madder root. C. Graebe and C. T. Liebermann in 1868 prepared
that substance synthetically from anthracene, but their
process was not practicable on a large scale, and it was left to
him to patent a method that was commercially valuable. This
he did in 1869, thus securing for the Greenford Green works a
monopoly of alizarin manufacture for several years. About
the same time he also carried out a series of investigations into
kindred substances, such as anthrapurpurin. About 1874 he
abandoned the manufacture of coal-tar colours and devoted
himself exclusively to research in pure chemistry, and among
the discoveries he made in this field was that of the reaction
known by his name, depending on the condensation of aldehydes
with fatty acids (see Cinnamic Acid). Later still he engaged
in the study of the relations between chemical constitution and
rotation of the plane of polarization in a magnetic field, and
enunciated a law expressing the variation of such rotation
in bodies belonging to homologous series. For this work he
was in 1889 awarded a Davy medal by the Royal Society,
which ten years previously had bestowed upon him a Royal
medal in recognition of his investigations in the coal-tar colours.
The Chemical Society, of which he became secretary in 1869
and president in 1883, presented him with its Longstaff medal
in 1889, and in 1899 he received the Albert medal of the Society
of Arts. In 1906 an international celebration of the fiftieth
anniversary of his invention of mauve was held in London,
and in the same year he was made a knight. He died near
Harrow on the 14th of July 1907.
His eldest son, William Henry Perkin, who was born at Sudbury, near Harrow, on the 17th of June 1860, and was educated at the City of London School, the Royal College of Science, and the universities of Wurzburg and Munich, became professor of chemistry at the Heriot-Watt College, Edinburgh, in 1887, and professor of organic chemistry at Owens College, Manchester, in 1892. His chief researches deal with the polymethylene compounds, the alkaloids, in particular hydrastine and berberine, and the camphors and terpenes (q.v.). He received the Davy medal from the Royal Society in 1904.
PERKINS, CHARLES CALLAHAN (1823–1886), American artist and author, was born in Boston and educated at Harvard, subsequently studying art in Rome and Paris. Returning to Boston, he helped to found the Museum of Fine Arts, of which he was honorary director, and for many years he played a leading part in artistic circles as a cultured critic and writer. His chief publications were Tuscan Sculptors (1864) and Italian Sculptors (1868)-replaced in 1883 by The Historical Handbook of Italian Sculptors-Art in Education (1870), and Sepulchral Monuments in Italy (1885).
PERKINS, JACOB (1766–1849), American inventor and physicist, was born at Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1766, and was apprenticed to a goldsmith. He soon made himself known by a variety of useful mechanical inventions, and in 1818 came over to England with a plan for engraving bank-notes on steel, which ultimately proved a signal success, and was carried out by Perkins in partnership with the English engraver Heath. His chief contribution to physics lay in the experiments by which he proved the compressibility of water and measured it by a piezometer of his own invention (see Phil. Trans., 1820, 1826). He retired in 1834, and died in London on the 30th of July 1849.
His second son, Angier March Perkins (1799?–1881), also born at Newburyport, went to England in 1827, and was the author of a system of warming buildings by means of high pressure steam. His grandson, Loftus Perkins (1834–1891), most of whose life was spent in England, experimented with the application to steam engines of steam at very high pressures, constructing in 1880 a yacht, the “Anthracite,” whose engines worked with a pressure of 500 ℔ to the sq. in.
PERLEBERG, a town of Germany, in the Prussian province of Brandenburg, on the Stepenitz, 6 m. N .E. from Wittenberge by the railway to Neustrelitz. Pop. (1905), 9502. It contains a fine Gothic Evangelical church, a Roman Catholic church, a synagogue and several schools, and has a town-hall, dating from the 15th century, and a Roland column. Its chief manufactures are machinery, soap, blacking and clogs.
See Höpfner, Perleberger Reimchronik. Perleberg von 1200 bis 1700 (Perleberg, 1876).
