returned to Spain, and by the favour of Charles V. was enabled to sail (1538) in command of a brilliant expedition for the conquest of the vast territory then known by the name of Florida. After a short stay at Cuba, of which island he was appointed governor, he left his wife in command, and sailed for the mainland (May, 1539). The expedition landed in the bay of Spiritu Santo, and the first season's wanderings in search of the precious metals led them to the head of the bay of Appalachee. Though sustained by religious zeal and the hope of gold, they were nearly exhausted in the fruitless search, and were only too happy to rest near the harbour of Pensacola till supplies could reach them from Cuba. Next spring the expedition pushed its way along the coast to the mouth of the river Mobile, where a sanguinary engagement with the Indians took place. The adventurers wintered at Chickasaw, in the upper part of the state of Mississippi, and in the spring of 1541 Solis attempted to renew the expedition; but the Indians set fire to the village in which the Spaniards had taken up their quarters. Solis, refitting with such means as were at hand, pushed on, and in April was rewarded with the sight of the Mississippi, which he crossed (so far as can be conjectured) at the lowest Chickasaw bluff. Still pushing on, they reached the highlands of White River, and spent the winter at Autiamque, a town on the river Washita, but no gold was to be found. Solis decided to regain the Mississippi and descend the stream to the sea-coast. On the journey he was seized with a malignant fever, of which he died, May 21, 1542, and his remains were thrown into the great river which he was the first European to visit.—F. M. W.
SOLIS, Juan Diaz de, a Spanish navigator, who sailed in 1506 in company with Vicente Yñez Pinzon in search of the strait supposed to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In 1508 they made a second voyage, in which they visited the northern coast of South America. In a third voyage they explored the coast as far as 40° S., but the pecuniary results being unsatisfactory. Solis was thrown into prison on his return to Spain. In 1512 he undertook a further voyage of discovery, projected by King Ferdinand, with a view to reach the southern ocean by circumnavigating the continent, and took possession of the bay of Rio Janeiro in the name of the king of Castile. Proceeding further, he received such accounts of the riches of the district watered by the river Paraguay (Rio de la Plata), that he returned to Spain to seek the requisite permission and means for exploring it. He sailed in 1515, but on reaching a spot near a small river (still called Rio de Solis) between Montevideo and Maldonado, he was surrounded and killed by the Indians, with the greater part of his crew.—F. M. W.
* SOLLOGOOB, Vladimir Alexandrovitch, Count, a Russian novelist and miscellaneous writer, is descended from an ancient family of Lithuania, and was educated at St. Petersburg. He began his career in the diplomatic service as an attaché of the Russian embassy at Vienna. He was subsequently appointed a member of the administrative council of the Transcaucasian provinces. In 1841 he published two volumes of tales under the title of "Na Sonn" (in dreaming). He contributed largely to the monthly reviews of St. Petersburg and Moscow, more especially to the Rooskiya Beceda. His dramatic pieces have met with considerable success, and a humorous account of his travels through Russia, published in 1846 under the title of "The Tarantasse," was the favourite book of the season in the fashionable world of St. Petersburg. An English translation of this work was published in London in 1850.—R. H.
SOLON, the greatest legislator of the ancient world, and one of the best and greatest men of all times. He was born at Salamis from the most ancient royal stock of the Athenians, and thus suited by his position to perform that function of mediation between the nobility and the commons which has made his name so famous. The exact date of his birth is not known; but as his archonship is a fixed date, 594 b.c., and as he cannot be supposed to have attained to that responsible situation till he was fifty years of age, we cannot be far wrong in placing his birth about the year 640. The exact date of his death is likewise unknown; but it is certain that he lived to a good old age, and survived the usurpation of Pisistratus in 560. Of his early life, the most notable facts are his activity as a merchant, showing his sympathy with the rising middle classes of Athens, and his enterprise as a patriot and a soldier, displayed in the recovery of Salamis from the people of Megara. After his legislation he is said to have left his native country for several years to allow his new statutes quietly to root themselves in the habits of his countrymen; and during this period he visited Egypt, Cyprus, and various parts of Asia Minor, though the beautiful and philosophical conversation on happiness, which Herodotus reports him to have held with Croesus, king of Lydia, is, on very strong chronological grounds, rejected by Niebuhr, Grote, and other scholars of the highest authority. On his return home, he opposed the democratico-despotic movements of Pisistratus, but found himself too isolated in the retirement of old age to prevent the success of that reputable usurper. The fame of Solon stands exclusively on his legislative enactments; his poems, of which considerable fragments still remain, were the mere vehicle of his political wisdom in an age when prose writing was scarcely known, and when everything that was meant extensively to impress the popular mind was written in verse. As evidence of his political views and position, however, and not less of his rational piety and faith in divine providence, these verses are of the utmost value, and justly ranked among the most precious remains of antiquity. To understand the great political reform known as the Solonian legislation, we must take into account the condition of Attica as it had been from the times of Theseus and Codrus downwards. Here, as in all other parts of Greece, except Sparta, the original mixed constitution had given way to an oligarchy—an oligarchy which, being without check either from above or from below, naturally exercised its power in a manner the most oppressive to the mass of the people, including both the smaller proprietors, occupants of the hill country, and the rising traders and merchants of the coast. Solon found the Athenian people divided into two factions—that of the great landed proprietors who occupied the rich land on the plains, with overwhelming influence and exclusive privileges; and that of the great mass of the nation. As usual in ancient times, when the law of debtor and creditor was harsh and severe, the poorer classes had got indebted to the rich—were, indeed, by the iniquity of the law, sold into slavery by the very fact of not being able to pay their debts. First their property, and then their persons, were swallowed up by the portentous predominance of the aristocracy. This state of things, utterly inconsistent with the existence of a free and prosperous people, had to be mended in the only possible way by a general enactment doing what our bankruptcy laws do in detail, either cancelling certain debts altogether, or at least accepting a certain composition for the full legal obligation. His ordinance to this effect was called σεισαχθεια—that is, a disburdening or disencumbering ordinance, of which the details are not clear, but the effect of which certainly was to set the land free from mortgage, and the debtors from bondage and punishment. On one of his measures all are agreed, viz., that he debased the currency to an extent that relieved every debtor of twenty-seven per cent, of his legal obligations. This, of course, and the other specialities of the great disencumbering ordinance, were severe measures, but absolutely necessary at the time to prevent a revolution, and to found the future prosperity of Athens on a broad popular basis. Connected with these retrospective measures was the enactment, that in future no Athenian citizen be allowed to lend money "on his body;" in other words, that slavery for debt should be abolished. The claims of debtor and creditor having been thus put on an equitable footing, the next and more delicate problem proposed to Solon was to balance the power of the different classes of the people in such a way, in respect of political influence, that the oppressive oligarchy that had hitherto reigned should be changed into a natural and healthy aristocracy, limited by democratic institutions. And in effecting this change, so far as at this distance of time we can judge, it is impossible to admire too much either the justice and moderation of his measures, or the patriotic self-denial with which he resisted all temptations to keep the supreme power in his own hands: for that he might have made himself absolute master of Athens, and exercised a sway as sovereign as Periander, or any of the Corinthian tyrants, is perfectly certain; but being a philosopher—that is, a man of practical wisdom and goodness—he scorned the vulgar ambition of making himself great by enthralling his fellow-citizens. His reform, accordingly, was the most complete example that history presents of a great man kindly mediating between the different classes of society, and adjusting their contending claims with perfect impartiality. His measures were such that no reasonable aristocrat could complain that he had sapped the foundations of authority, and no reasonable democrat that he had choked the rising liberties of the
