Staunton (1737–1801), first baronet, diplomatist and Orientalist, and in 1792 accompanied his father, who had been appointed secretary to Lord Macartney's mission to China, to the Far East. He acquired a good knowledge of Chinese, and in 1798 was appointed a writer in the East India Company's factory at Canton, and subsequently its chief. In 1805 he translated a work of Dr George Pearson into Chinese, thereby introducing vaccination into China. In 1816 he proceeded as second commissioner on a special mission to Pekin with Lord Amherst and Sir Henry Ellis. Between 1818 and 1852 he was M.P. for several English constituencies, finally for Portsmouth. He was a member of the East India Committee, and in 1823, in conjunction with Henry Thomas Colebroke founded the Royal Asiatic Society. He died on the 10th of August 1859.
His publications include translations of Ta Tsing leu lee, being the Fundamental Laws of China (1810), the first Chinese book translated into English, and of the Narrative of the Chinese Embassy to the Khan of the Tourgouth Tartars (1821); Miscellaneous Notices Relating to China and our Commercial Intercourse with that Country (1822); Notes of Proceedings and Occurrences during the British Embassy to Peking (1824); Observations on our Chinese Commerce (1850). For the Hakluyt Society he edited Gonzalez de Mendoza's History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China.
STAUNTON, HOWARD (1810–1874), English Shakespearian scholar and writer on chess, supposed to have been a natural son of Frederic Howard, fifth earl of Carlisle, was born in 1810. He is said to have studied at Oxford, but if so, he never matriculated. Settling in London he soon spent the small fortune left him under his father's will and began to make his living by journalism. He gave much of his attention to the study of the English dramatists of the Elizabethan age. As a Shakespearian commentator he showed the qualities of acuteness and caution which made him excel in chess. He possessed, moreover, a thorough mastery of the literature of the period, shown in his papers in the Athenaeum on " Unsuspected Corruptions of Shakespeare's text," begun in October 1872.' These formed part of the materials which he intended to utilize in a proposed edition of Shakespeare which never became an accomplished fact. In 1864 he published a facsimile of the Shakespeare folio of 1623, and a facsimile edition of Much Ado about Nothing, photolithographed from the quarto of 1600. He died in London on the 22nd of June 1874. Staunton's services to chess literature were very great, and the game in England owes much of its later popularity to him, while for thirty years he was the best player in England, perhaps in the world. For his important works on the subject see Chess.
STAUNTON, an independent city and the county-seat of Augusta county, Virginia, U.S.A., about 135 m. N.W. of Richmond. Pop. Cr89o) 6975; (1900) 7289, including 1828 negroes and 149 foreign-born; (1910) 10,604. Staunton is served by the Chesapeake & Ohio and the Baltimore & Ohio railways. It lies between the Alleghany Mountains and the Blue Ridge, on a plateau about 1380 ft. above sea-level, in a fertile farming country with good pasture on the hillsides. In Staunton are a county court-house, the Western State hospital for the insane (1828), the Virginia school for the deaf and the blind (1839), the King's Daughters' hospital (1895), Dunsmore business college, Staunton military academy, the Mary Baldwin seminary, formerly Augusta female seminary (founded in 1842) and Stuart Hall (for girls), which was founded in 1843, was incorporated in 1845, an d w &s reincorporated in 1907 under its present name in honour of Mrs J. E. B. Stuart, wife of the Confederate cavalry leader, who was its principal in 1879–1898. One mile east of Staunton is a U.S. national military cemetery with graves of 753 Union soldiers killed at Port Republic, Cross Keys and Piedmont; and west of the city is a Confederate cemetery with a memorial monument. The municipality owns the waterworks, the electric-lighting plant and the opera house An interesting feature of the city government is the employment of a business manager (elected annually by the city council), whose duties are in general similar to those of the business manager of a large corporation—e.g. he buys the city's supplies and has general supervision over the city improvements. The first settlement in this vicinity was on Lewis Creek, about 2 m. east of the city, in 1731. A county court-house was built here in 1745, and the name Staunton, in honour of the wife of Sir William Gooch (then lieutenant-governor), whose maiden name was Staunton, was used in 1748–1749, but Staunton was not incorporated as a town until 1761. It was chartered as a city in 1870, and then became a municipality independent of the county. The corporate limits of the city were extended in 1965 and, as its population thus became more than 10,000, Staunton was made a city of the first class.
STAUROLITE, a mineral consisting of basic aluminium and ferrous iron silicate with the formula HFeAl5Si2O13. The material is, however, usually very impure, the crystals enclosing sometimes as much as 30 or 40% of quartz and other minerals as well as carbonaceous matter. Crystals are orthorhombic and have the form of six-sided prisms. Interpenetrating cruciform twinned crystals are very common and characteristic; they were early known as pierres de croix or lapis crucifer, and the name staurolite, given by J. C. Delametherie in 1792, has the same meaning (Greek, aravpos, a cross, and X10os, a stone). In fig. 1 the twin-plane is (032) and the two prisms intercross
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| Fig. 1. | Fig. 2. |
| Twinned Crystals of Staurolite. | |
at an angle of 91 22'; in fig. 2 the twin-plane is (232) and the prisms intercross at nearly 6o°. The mineral is translucent to opaque and dark reddish-brown in colour; it thus has a certain resemblance to garnet, and on this account has been called grenatite. Waterworn pebbles of material sufficiently transparent for cutting as gem-stones are occasionally found in the diamantiferous sands of Brazil. The hardness is 712 and the specific gravity 3·75. Staurolite is a characteristic mineral of crystalline schists, and it is also a product of contact-metamorphism. Large twinned crystals with rough surfaces a.re found in mica-schist in Brittany and at several places in the United States, e.g. in Fannin county, Georgia. Untwinned crystals, translucent and of a rich brown colour (grenatite), are abundant in the silvery white paragonite-schist of Monte Campione, St Gothard. (L. J. S.)
STAVANGER, a seaport of Norway, capital of Stavanger amt (county), on the west coast in 59° N. (that of the Orkney Islands and northern Labrador). Pop. (1900), 30,541. It lies on the south side of the Bukken Fjord, and has a picturesque harbour well sheltered by islands. The town is one of the oldest in Norway, founded in the 8th or 9th century, but the present town is modern, though narrow, winding streets and wooden houses give it an antique appearance. It became the seat of a bishopric in the 13th century. Though the bishop's see was removed to Christiansand in 1685, the Romanesque cathedral church of St Swithun, founded by the English bishop Reinald in the end of the 11th century, and rebuilt after being burned down in 1272, remains, and, next to the cathedral of Trondhjem, is the most interesting stone church in Norway. There is an ornate painted pulpit of carved wood (1658). The old episcopal palace of Kongsgaard is now a Latin school. There are a theatre, an interesting museum of antiquities, natural history and art; and a picturesque park (Bjergsted). The industries of the town and its environs (Sandnaes, &c.) are prosperous, including factories for preserved foods, woollens and linens, lime, iodine from seaweed, and domestic commodities. The
