Saumarez received the order of the Bath and the freedom of the city of London. In 1803 he received a pension of £1200 a year. On the outbreak of the war with Russia in 1809 he was given command of the Baltic fleet. He held it during the wars preceding the fall of Napoleon, and his tact was conspicuously shown towards the government of Sweden at the crisis of the invasion of Russia. Charles XIII. (Bernadotte) bestowed on him the grand cross of the military order of the Sword. At the peace of 1814 he attained the rank of admiral; and in 1819 he was made rear-admiral, in 1821 vice-admiral of Great Britain. He was raised to the peerage as Baron de Saumarez in 1831, and died at Guernsey on the 9th of October 1836.
See Memoirs of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, by Sir John Ross (2 vols., 1838).
SAUMUR, a town of western France, capital of an arrondissement
in the department of Maine-et-Loire, 28 m. S.E. of Angers
on the railway to Tours. Pop. (1906) 14,747. Saumur is well
situated on the left bank of the Loire, which here receives the
Thouet, and on an island in the river. A large metal bridge
connects the Tours-Angers railway with that of Montreuil-Bellay,
by which Saumur communicates with Poitiers and Niort.
Two stone bridges (764 and 905 ft. long) unite the town on the
island with the two banks of the river. Several of the Saumur
churches are interesting. St Pierre, of the 12th century, has a
17th-century façade and a Renaissance nave; and Notre-Dame
of Nantilly, often visited by Louis XI., who rebuilt portions of it,
has a remarkable though greatly damaged façade, a doorway and
choir of the 12th century, and a nave of the 11th. Both these
churches contain curious tapestries, and in the latter, fixed in the
wall, is the copper cross of Gilles de Tyr, keeper of the seals to
St Louis. St Jean is a small building in the purest Gothic style
of Anjou. St Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, in the Gothic style of the
12th century, has a fine modern spire. Notre-Dame of Ardilliers,
of the 16th century, was enlarged in the following century by
Richelieu and Madame de Montespan. The hotel de ville,
containing a museum and library, is an elegant 16th century
edifice; and the whole town is rich in examples of the domestic
architecture of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. The house
knoum as the Maison de la Reine Cécile (1 5th century) was built
by René, duke of Anjou. The castle, built between the 11th
century and the 13th, and remodelled in the 16th, is used as an
arsenal and powder magazine. There is also an interesting almshouse,
with its chambers in part dug out in the rock. The famous
cavalry school of Saumur was founded in 1768 and is used for the
special training of young officers appointed to cavalry regiments
on leaving the cadet school of St Cyr. Other public institutions
are the sub-prefecture, tribunals of first instance and of commerce,
a chamber of commerce, a branch of the Bank of France, colleges
for both sexes and a horticultural garden, with a school of vines.
Saumur prepares and carries on a large trade in the sparkling
white wines grown in the neighbourhood, as well as in brandy,
grain, flax and hemp; and it manufactures enamels and rosaries
and carries on liqueur-distilling.
The Saumur caves along the Loire and on both sides of the valley of the Thouet must have been occupied at a very remote period. The Tour du Tronc (9th century), the old stronghold of Saumur, served as a place of refuge for the inhabitants of the surrounding district during foreign invasions (whence perhaps the name Saumur, from Salons Murus) and became the nucleus of a monastery built by monks from St Florent le Vieil. On the same site rose the castle of Saumur two hundred years later. The town fell into the hands of Foulques Nerra, duke of Anjou, in 1025, and passed in the 13th century into the possession of the kings of France. The English failed to capture it during the Hundred Years' War. After the Reformation the town became the metropolis of Protestantism in France and the seat of a theological seminary. The school of Saumur, as opposed to that of Sedan, represented the more liberal side of lfrench Protestantism (Cameron, Amyraut, &c.). In 1623 the fortifications were dismantled; and the revocation of the edict of Nantes reduced the population by more than one half. In June 1793, the town was occupied by the Vendeans, against whom it soon afterwards became a base of operations for the republican army.
SAUNDERSON, EDWARD JAMES (1837–1906), Irish politician, was born at Castle Saunderson, Co. Cavan, on the 1st of October 1837. He was the son of Alexander Saunderson, M.P. for Cavan (d. 1857), his mother being a daughter of the 6th Baron Farnham. The Irish Saundersons were a 17th century branch of an old family, originally of Durham; a Lincolnshire branch, the Saundersons of Saxby, held the titles of Viscount Castleton (Irish: cr. 1628) and Baron Saunderson (British: cr. 1714) up to 1723. Edward Saunderson was educated abroad, and, having
succeeded to the Cavan estates, married in 1865 a daughter of the 3rd Baron Ventry, and in the same year was elected M.P. for the county as a Palmerstonian Liberal. He lost his seat in 1874, and by 1885, when he again entered parliament for North Armagh, he had become a prominent Orangeman and a Conservative; the question of Irish home rule had now come to the front, and Saunderson's political career as a representative
Irish Unionist had begun. He had entered the Cavan militia (4th battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers) in 1862, and was now major (1875), becoming colonel in 1886 and in command of the battalion
from 1891 to 1893. Almost from the first he became leader of the
Irish Unionist party in the House of Commons, his uncompromising
speeches being full of force and humour. In 1898
his services were recognized by his being made a privy councillor.
He died on the 21st of October 1906. In private life Colonel
Saunderson was well known as a keen yachtsman; his character
was deeply marked by stern religious feeling, and his fine sincerity,
while endearing him to his friends, never lost him the respect of
his opponents.
See the Memoir by Reginald Lucas (1908).
SAUNDERSON, or Sanderson, NICHOLAS (1682–1739),
English mathematician, was born at Thurlstone, Yorkshire, in
January 1682. When about a year old he lost his sight through
smallpox; but this did not prevent him from acquiring a knowledge
of Latin and Greek, and studying mathematics. In 1707
he began lecturing at Cambridge on the principles of the Newtonian
philosophy, and in November 1711 he succeeded William
Whiston, the Lucasian professor of mathematics in Cambridge.
He was created doctor of laws in 1728 by command of George II.,
and in 1736 was admitted a member of the Royal Society. He
died of scurvy, on the 19th of April 1739.
Saunderson possessed the friendship of many of the eminent mathematicians of the time, such as Sir Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, Abraham De Moivre and Roger Cotes. His senses of hearing and touch were extraordinarily acute, and he could carry on mentally long and intricate mathematical calculations. He devised a calculating machine or abacus, by which he could perform arithmetical and algebraical operations by the sense of touch; this method is sometimes termed his palpable arithmetic, an account of which is given in his elaborate Elements of Algebra (2 vols., Cambridge, 1740). Of his other writings, prepared for the use of his pupils, the only one which has been published is The Method of Fluxions (1 vol., London, 1756). At the end of this treatise there is given, in Latin, an explanation of the principal propositions of Sir Isaac Newton's philosophy.
SAUNTER, to loiter, lounge, walk idly or lazily. The derivation
of the word has given rise to some curiously far-fetched
guesses; thus it has been referred to the Holy Land, La Sainte
Terre, where pilgrims lingered and loitered, or to the supposed
tendency to idle propensities of those who possess no landed
property, sans terre. The most probable suggestions are (1)
that of Wedgwood, who connects it with a word in exactly the
English sense which appears in various forms in Scandinavian
languages, Icel. slentr, Dan. slentre, Swed. slentra, cf. slen, sloth,
slunt, lout; this derivation assumes the disappearance of the l.
(2) That supported by Skeat, and first propounded by Blackley
(Word Gossip, 1869), which connects it with the Middle Eng.
aunter, adventure; it may represent the Fr. s'aventurer, to go out
on an adventure, and the sense-development would be from
the idle and apparently objectless expeditions of knights-errant
in search of adventure.
SAUROPSIDA. This name was introduced by T. H. Huxley in his Introduction to the Classifcalion of Animals (1869), to designate a province of the Vertebrata formed by the union of the Aves with the Reptilia. In his Elements of Comparative Anatomy (1864) he had used the term “ Sauroids ” for the same province. The five divisions of the Vertebrate—Pisces, Amphibia, Reptilia, Aves, and Mammalia—are all distinctly definable, but their relations to one another differ considerably in degree. Whilst it
