This page needs to be proofread.
ST JUST—ST LAWRENCE
21

arrest (see Robespierre). On the following day, the 28th of July 1794, twenty-two men, nearly all young, were guillotined. Saint-Just maintained his proud self-possession to the last.

See Œuvres de Saint-Just, précédées d’une notice historique sur sa vie (Paris, 1833–1834); E. Fleury, Etudes révolutionnaires (2 vols., 1851), with which cf. articles by Sainte Beuve (Causeries du lundi, vol. v.), Cuvillier-Fleury (Portraits politiques et révolutionnaires); E. Hamel, Histoire de Saint-Just (1859), which brought a fine to the publishers for outrage on public decency; F. A. Aulard, Les Orateurs de la Législative et de la Convention (2nd ed., Paris, 1905). The Œuvres complètes de Saint-Just have been edited with notes by C. Vellay (Paris, 1908).

ST JUST (St Just in Penwith), a market town in the St Ives parliamentary division of Cornwall, England, 71/2 m. by road W. of Penzance. Pop. of urban district (1901) 5646. This is the most westerly town in England, lying in a wild district 1 m. inland from Cape Cornwall, which is 4 m. N. of Land’s End. The urban district has an area of 7633 acres, and includes the small industrial colonies near some of the most important mines in Cornwall. The Levant mine is the chief, the workings extending beneath the sea. Traces of ancient workings and several exhausted mines are seen. The church of St Just is Perpendicular, with portions of the fabric of earlier date. There are ruins of an oratory dedicated to St Helen on Cape Cornwall.


ST KILDA, a city of Bourke county, Victoria, Australia, 31/2 m. by rail S. of, and suburban to, Melbourne. Pop. (1901) 20,544. It is a fashionable watering-place on Hobson’s Bay, and possesses the longest pier in Australia. The esplanade and the public park are finely laid out; and portions of the sea are fenced in to protect bathers. The town hall, the public library, the assembly hall, and the great Anglican church of All Saints are the chief buildings.


ST KILDA (Gaelic Hirta, “the Western land”), the largest of a small group of about sixteen islets of the Outer Hebrides, Inverness-shire, Scotland. It is included in the civil parish of Harris, and is situated 40 m. W. of North Uist. It measures 3 m. from E. to W. and 2 m. from N. to S., has an area of about 3500 acres, and is 7 m. in circumference. Except at the landing place on the south-east, the cliffs rise sheer out of deep water, and on the north-east side the highest eminence in the island, Conagher, forms a precipice 1220 ft. high. St Kilda is probably the core of a Tertiary volcano, but, besides volcanic rocks, contains hills of sandstone in which the stratification is distinct. The boldness of its scenery is softened by the richness of its verdure. The inhabitants, an industrious Gaelic-speaking community (110 in 1851 and 77 in 1901), cultivate about 40 acres of land (potatoes, oats, barley), keep about 1000 sheep and a few head of cattle. They catch puffins, fulmar petrels, guillemots, razor-birds, Manx shearwaters and solan geese both for their oil and for food. Fishing is generally neglected. Coarse tweeds and blanketing are manufactured for home use from the sheep’s wool which is plucked from the animal, not shorn. The houses are collected in a little village at the head of the East Bay. The island is practically inaccessible for eight months of the year, but the inhabitants communicate with the outer world by means of “sea messages,” which are dispatched in boxes when a strong west wind is blowing, and generally make the western islands or mainland of Scotland in a week.

The island has been in the possession of the Macleods for hundreds of years. In 1779 the chief of that day sold it, but in 1871 Macleod of Macleod bought it back, it is stated, for £3000. In 1724 the population was reduced by smallpox to thirty souls. They appear to catch what is called the “boat-cold” caused by the arrival of strange boats, and at one time the children suffered severely from a form of lockjaw known as the “eight days’ sickness.”

See works by Donald Munro, high dean of the Isles (1585), M. Martin (1698), Rev. K. Macaulay (1764), R. Connell (1887); Miss Goodrich-Freer, The Outer Isles; Richard and Cherry Kearton, With Nature and a Camera (1896).

ST KITTS, or St Christopher, an island in the British West Indies, forming, with Nevis and Anguilla, one of the presidencies in the colony of the Leeward Islands. It is a long oval with a narrow neck of land projecting from the south-eastern end; total length 23 m., area 63 sq. m. Mountains traverse the central part from N.W. to S.E., the greatest height being Mount Misery (3771 ft.). The island is well watered, fertile and healthy, and its climate is cool and dry (temperature between 78° and 85° F.; average annual rainfall 38 in.). The circle of land formed by the skirts of the mountains, and the valley of-Basseterre constitute nearly the whole of the cultivated portion. The higher slopes of the hills afford excellent pasturage, while the summits are crowned with dense woods. Sugar, molasses, rum, salt, coffee and tobacco are the chief products; horses and cattle are bred. Primary education is compulsory. The principal towns are Old Road, Sandy Point and the capital Basseterre, which lies on the S.W. coast (pop. about 10,000). One good main road, macadamized throughout, encircles the island. The local legislature consists of 6 official and 6 unofficial members nominated by the Crown. St Kitts was discovered by Columbus in 1493 and first settled by Sir Thomas Warner in 1623. Five years later it was divided between the British and the French, but at the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 it was entirely ceded to the British Crown. Population, mostly negroes, 29,782.


SAINT-LAMBERT, JEAN FRANÇOIS DE (1716–1803), French poet, was born at Nancy on the 26th of December 1716. He entered the army and, when Stanislaus Leszczynski was established in 1737 as duke of Lorraine, he became an official at his court at Lunéville. He left the army after the Hanoverian campaign of 1756–57, and devoted himself to literature, producing a volume of descriptive verse, Les Saisons (1769), now never read, many articles for the Encyclopédie, and some miscellaneous works. He was admitted to the Academy in 1770. His fame, however, comes chiefly from his amours. He was already high in the favour of the marquise de Boufflers, Stanislaus’s mistress, Whom he addressed in his verses as Doris and Thémire, when Voltaire in 1748 came to Lunéville with the marquise de Châtelet. Her infatuation for him and its fatal termination are known to all readers of the life of Voltaire. His subsequent liaison with Madame d’Houdetot, Rousseau’s Sophie, though hardly less disastrous to his rival, continued for the whole lives of himself and his mistress. Saint-Lambert’s later years were given to philosophy. He published in 1798 the Principe des mœurs chez toutes les nations on catéchisme universel, and published his Œuvres philosophiques (1803), two years before his death on the 9th of February 1803. Madame d’Houdetot survived until the 28th of January 1813.

See G. Maugras, La Cour de Lunéville (1904) and La Marquise de Boufflers (1907); also the literature dealing with Rousseau and Voltaire.

ST LAWRENCE. The river St Lawrence, in North America, with the five fresh-water inland seas (see Great Lakes), Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario, forms one of the great river systems of the world, having a length, from the source of the river St Louis (which rises near the source of the river Mississippi and falls into the head of Lake Superior) to Cape Gaspé, where it empties into the Gulf of St Lawrence, of 2100 m. The river is here considered as rising at the foot of Lake Ontario, in 44° 10′ N., 76° 30′ W., where the name St Lawrence is first applied to it.

The river, to the point where it crosses 45° N. in its northwesterly course, forms the boundary line between the state of New York and the province of Ontario; thence to the sea it is wholly within Canadian territory, running through the province of Quebec. At Point des Monts, 260 m. below Quebec, it is 26 m. wide, and where it finally merges into the Gulf of St Lawrence, 150 m. farther on, it is 90 m. wide, this stretch being broken by the large island of Anticosti, lying fairly in the mouth. The character of the river banks varies with the geological formations through which it runs. Passing over the Archaean rocks of the Laurentian from Kingston to Brockville the shores are very irregular, and the river is broken up by protrusions of glaciated summits of the granites and gneisses into a large number of picturesque islands, “The Thousand Islands,” greatly frequented as a summer resort. From Brockville to Montreal the river runs through flat-bedded Cambro-silurian limestones, with rapids at several points, which are all run by light-draught passenger boats. For the up trip the rapids are avoided by canalization. From Montreal to Three Rivers the course is through an alluvial plain over-lying the limestones,