POINCARÉ, RAYMOND (1860–), French statesman, was born at Bar-le-duc on the 20th of August 1860, the son of Nicolas Antoinin Hélène Poincaré, a distinguished civil servant and meteorologist. Educated at the university of Paris, Raymond was called to the Paris bar, and was for some time law editor of the Voltaire. He had served for over a year in the department of agriculture when in 1887 he was elected deputy for the Meuse. He made a great reputation in the Chamber as an economist, and sat on the budget commissions of 1890–1891 and 1892. He was minister of education, fine arts and religion in the first cabinet (April–Nov. 1893) of Charles Dupuy, and minister of finance in the second and third (May 1894–Jan. 1895). In the succeeding Ribot cabinet Poincaré became minister of public instruction. Although he was excluded from the Radical cabinet which followed, the revised scheme of death duties proposed by the new ministry was based upon his proposals of the previous year. He became vice-president of the chamber in the autumn of 1895, and in spite of the bitter hostility of the Radicals retained his position in 1896 and 1897. In 1906 he returned to the ministry of finance in the short-lived Sarrien ministry. Poincaré had retained his practice at the bar during his political career, and he published several volumes of essays on literary and political subjects.
His brother, Lucien Poincaré (b. 1862), famous as a physicist, became inspector-general of public instruction in 1902. He is the author of La Physique moderne (1906) and L'Électricité (1907). Jules Henri Poincaré (b. 1854), also a distinguished physicist, belongs to another branch of the same family.
POINSETTIA. The Poinsettia pulcherrima of gardens (Euphorbia pulcherrima of botanists), a native of Mexico and Central America, with its brilliant scarlet bracts, stands unrivalled amongst decorative plants. The white-bracted sort, var. alba, is not so effective, but the double-flowered, var. plenissima, in which the brilliant inflorescence is branched, is as brilliant as the type, and keeps long in flower. They are increased by cuttings in spring, which when taken off with a heel strike freely in brisk heat. They require good turfy loam, with an addition of one-sixth of leaf-mould and a little sand, and should be kept in a heat from 65° to 70° at night, with a rise of 10° by day. To prevent their growing lanky, they should be kept with their heads almost touching the glass; and as the pots get filled with roots they must be shifted into others, 7 or 8 in. in diameter. About August they may be inured to a heat of 50º at night, and should be brought to bear air night and day whilst the weather is warm, or they may be placed out of doors for a month under a south wall in the full sun. This treatment matures and prepares them for flowering. In autumn they must be removed to a house where the temperature is 50° at night, and by the end of September some of them may be put in the stove, where they will come into flower, the remainder being placed under heat later for succession. When in bloom they may be kept at about 55° night, and so placed will last longer than if kept in a higher temperature.
POINSOT, LOUIS (1777–1859), French mathematician, was born at Paris on the 3rd of January 1777. In 1794 he became a scholar at the École Polytechnique, which he left in 1796 to act as a civil engineer. In 1804 he was appointed professor of mathematics at the Lycée, in 1809 professor of analysis and mechanics, and in 1816 examiner at the École Polytechnique. On the death of J. L. Lagrange, in 1813, Poinsot was elected to his place in the Académie des Sciences; and in 1840 he became a member of the superior council of public instruction. In 1846 he was made an officer of the Legion of Honour; and on the formation of the senate in 1852 he was chosen a member of that body. He died at Paris on the 5th of December 1859.
Poinsot's earliest work was his Elémens de statique (1803; 9th edition, 1848), in which he introduces the idea of statical couples and investigates their properties. In the Théorie nouvelle de la rotation des corps (1834) he treats the motion of a rigid body geometrically, and shows that the most general motion of such a body can be represented at any instant by a rotation about an axis combined with a translation parallel to this axis, and that any motion of a body of which one point is fixed may be produced by the rolling of a cone fixed in the body on a cone fixed in space. The previous treatment of the motion of a rigid body had in every case been purely analytical, and so gave no aid to the formation of a mental picture of the body's motion; and the great value of this work lies in the fact that, as Poinsot himself says in the introduction, it enables us to represent to ourselves the motion of a rigid body as clearly as that of a moving point. In addition to publishing a number of works on geometrical and mechanical subjects, Poinsot also contributed a number of papers on pure and applied mathematics to Liouville's Journal and other scientific periodicals
See J. L. F. Bertrand, Discours aux funérailles de Poinsot (Paris, 1860.
POINT PLEASANT, a town and the county-seat of Mason county, West Virginia, U.S.A., on the Ohio river, at the mouth of the Kanawha river, and about midway between Pittsburg and Cincinnati. Pop. (1900) 1934; (1910) 2045. It is served directly by the Baltimore & Ohio and the Kanawha & Michigan (controlled by the Hocking Valley) railways, and by the Hocking Valley railway on the opposite side of the Ohio river. The Kanawha river is navigable (by the use of locks and dams) for 90 m. above the town, and Point Pleasant is a re-shipping point for Kanawha coal. Coal and salt are mined in the vicinity, but the surrounding country is principally agricultural. The battle of Point Pleasant, the only important engagement in “Lord Dunmore's War,” was fought here on the 10th of October 1774 between about 1100 Virginia militiamen, under General Andrew Lewis (c. 1720–1781),[1] and about 1000 Shawnees and their allies, under their chief, Cornstalk (c. 1720–1777).[2] Lewis had been ordered to meet Lord Dunmore here with a body of militiamen (recruited from Botetourt, West Augusta and Fincastle counties), but when he reached the mouth of the Kanawha, after marching 160 m. from Fort Union (now Lewisburg, W. Va.), Dunmore's force, which was to have gone over the Braddock trail to Fort Pitt, and thence down the Ohio river, had not arrived. Early on the morning of the 10th the Indians suddenly attacked, and the battle continued fiercely throughout the day. At night the Indians crossed the Ohio river, leaving behind many of their dead. The whites lost about 144 in killed and wounded, Colonel Charles Lewis (1733–1774), a brother of the commanding officer, being among the former. In December Lord Dunmore concluded a treaty with the Indians, by which they surrendered their claim to lands south of the Ohio and agreed not to molest whites travelling to the western country. The battle, which overawed the Indians, and the treaty, which was not seriously broken for three years, made possible the rapid settlement of the western country, especially of Kentucky, during the early years of the War of Independence.[3] Four years before the battle the Virginia House of Burgesses had awarded to General Lewis, for his earlier services in the French and Indian War, 9876 acres of land, including the
- ↑ General Lewis was born in Donegal, Ireland; served with Washington at Fort Necessity and at Braddock's defeat; was commissioner from Virginia to conclude the treaty with the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix (1768); was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses for several years; served as a brigadier-general in the War of Independence; and in 1776 forced Lord Dunmore to retire from Gwynn's Island, in Chesapeake Bay, where he had taken refuge.
- ↑ Cornstalk and his son were killed within the fort at Point Pleasant in November 1777 by Virginian soldiers (contrary to the protests of their commanding officers), who thus avenged the death of a comrade. He was at the time warning the garrison of his inability to hold the Shawnees to the terms of the treaty of 1774. There is a granite monument (erected in 1899) over his grave in the yard of the court-house.
- ↑ Various American writers have asserted that Lord Dunmore incited the Indians to attack the frontier in order to divert the colonists from their opposition to Great Britain, and that he purposely refrained from effecting a junction with Lewis, so that Lewis might be defeated and Virginia thus be greatly crippled on the eve of the threatened war with the mother country; and the battle itself has accordingly frequently been referred to as the first battle of the War of Independence. The assertions with regard to Lord Dunmore, however, rest on circumstantial evidence alone, and have never been conclusively proved.
