its eggs along the ribs on the under surface of the leaves; the larva is green and shagreened' with minute black tubercles. Many remedies have been proposed and tried to prevent the ravages of these larvæ, of which, perhaps, the best are picking off the leaves observed to be covered with the eggs of the saw-fly, and dusting with powder of white hellebore, which, if carefully and sufficiently applied, is most efficacious, killing any kind of larva.

GOPHER WOOD. The probable identity of the gopher wood of Scripture with the Cypress (q. v.), is maintained partly on account of the qualities of the wood, and partly on account of the agreement of the radical consonants of the names. GÖPPINGEN, a small town of the kingdom of Würtemberg, is situated on the right bank of the Fils, 27 miles north-west from Ulm, and is a station on the railway from Ulm to Stuttgart. It is an industrious, cleanly, and flourishing town, possessing a town-hall, a large castle, and mineral baths, and carrying on manufactures of woollen cloth, earthenwares, and some trade in wool. Pop. (1871) 8649. GORAL (Antilope Goral, or Nemorhedus Goral), an animal of the antelope family, inhabiting in large herds the elevated plains of Nepaul. It is of a grayish-brown colour, dotted with black, the cheeks white; the hair is short; the horns are short, inclined, recurved, and pointed. It is a wild and fleet animal, and when pursued, takes refuge in rocky heights. Its flesh is highly esteemed.

GORAMY, or GOURAMI (Osphromenus olfax), a fish of the family Anabasida or Labyrinthibranchida, a native of China and the Eastern Archipelago, highly esteemed for the table, and which has on that account been introduced into Mauritius, Cayenne, and the French West India Islands. Its form is deep in proportion to its length, the head small, and terminating in a rather sharp short

snout, the mouth small, the tail rounded, the dorsal and anal fins having numerous rather short spines, the first ray of the ventral fins extending into a very long filament. It is sometimes kept in large jars by the Dutch residents in Java, and fed on water-plants. It was introduced into Mauritius about the middle of the 18th c., and soon spread from the tanks in which it was at first kept into the streams, multiplying abundantly. The success which has attended the introduction of this fish into countries remote from those in which it is indigenous, holds out great encouragement to other attempts of the same kind. The G. is interesting also on other accounts. It is one of the nestbuilding fishes, and at the breeding season forms its nest by entangling the stems and leaves of aquatic grasses. Both the male and female watch the nest for a month or more with careful vigilance, and violently drive away every other fish which approaches, till the spawn is hatched,

afterwards affording a similar parental protection to the young fry.

over.

GORDIAN-KNOT. The traditional origin of this famous knot was as follows: Gordius, a Phrygian peasant, was once ploughing in his fields, when an eagle settled on his yoke of oxen, and remained till the labour of the day was Surprised at so wonderful a phenomenon, by a prophetess of Telmissus that he should offer he sought an explanation of it, and was informed sacrifice to Zeus. tude for the kindness shewn him, married the He did so, and out of gratiprophetess, by whom he had a son, the famous Midas. When Midas grew up, disturbances broke out in Phrygia, and the people sent messengers to the oracle at Delphi, to ask about choosing a new king. The messengers were informed that a king would come to them riding on a car, and that he would, restore peace. Returning to Phrygia, they announced these things, and while the people were talking about them, Gordius, with his father, very opportunely arrived in the requisite manner. was immediately elected king, whereupon he dedicated his car and yoke to Zeus, in the acropolis of Gordium (a city named after himself), the knot of the yoke being tied in so skilful a manner, that an oracle declared whoever should unloose it would be ruler of all Asia. When Alexander the Great came to Gordium, he cut the knot in two with his sword, and applied the prophecy to himself.

He

GORDIA'NUS, the name of three Roman emperors, father, son, and grandson.-The first, MARCUS ANTONIUS G., was grandson of Annius Severus, and was descended by the father's side from the famous family of the Gracchi. He was remarkable for his attachment to literary pursuits. After being sedile, in which capacity he celebrated the gladiatorial sports with great magnificence, he twice filled the office of consul, first as the colleague of Caracalla, in 213 A. D.; and second, as the colleague of Alexander Severus. Soon afterwards, he was appointed proconsul of Africa, where he gained the affections and esteem of the people by his modest and gentle manners, his splendid liberality, and his refined literary taste; his old age was spent in the study of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Virgil. The tyranny and injustice of the Emperor Maximinus having at length excited a rebellion against his authority in Africa, the imperial procurator there was murdered by a band of nobles who had formed a conspiracy against him on account of his cruelty. G., now in his 80th year, was proclaimed emperor, after having vainly refused the dangerous honour. He received the title of Africanus, and his son was conjoined with him in the exercise of imperial authority. The Roman senate acknowledged both, and proclaimed Maximinus, then absent in Pannonia, an enemy to his country. The younger G., however, was defeated in battle by Capellianus, viceroy of Mauritania, before Carthage, and his father, in an agony of grief, put a period to his own existence, having been emperor for little more than a month. In his personal appearance, G. is said to have greatly resembled Augustus.-MARCUS ANTONIUS G., grandson of the preceding, was raised to the dignity of Cæsar along with Pupienus Maximus and Balbinus, who were also elected emperors in opposition to Maximinus; and, in the same year, after all three had fallen by the hands of their own soldiers, Marcus Antonius was elevated by the Prætorian bands to the rank of Augustus. Assisted by his father-in-law, Misitheus, a man distinguished for his wisdom, virtue, and courage, whom he made prefect of the

Prætorians, he marched, in the year 242, into Asia, against the Persians, who, under Shahpûr (Sapor), had taken possession of Mesopotamia, and had advanced into Syria. Antioch, which was threatened by them, was relieved by G., the Persians were obliged to withdraw from Syria beyond the Euphrates, and G. was just about to march into their country, when Misitheus died. Philip the Arabian, who succeeded Misitheus, stirred up dissatisfaction in the army against G. by the falsest treachery, and finally goaded on the ignorant and passionate soldiery to assassinate the emperor, 244 A.D. But knowing the great affection which the Roman people had for the gallant and amiable G., he declared in his dispatch to the senate that the latter had died a natural death, and that he himself had been unanimously chosen to succeed him.

GO'RDIUS, a genus of Annelida, of the very simplest structure; very much elongated and threadlike, with no greater marks of articulation than slight transverse folds, no feet, no gills, no tentacles, although there is a knotted nervous chord. The mouth is a mere pore at one end of the animal; the other end or tail is slightly bifid, and has been often mistaken for the head. The species inhabit moist situations, are sometimes found on the leaves of plants, but more frequently in stagnant pools, and in mud or soft clay, through which they work their way with great ease. They often twist themselves into complex knots, whence their name G., from the celebrated Gordian-knot-and many of them are sometimes found thus twisted together; but they are also often to be found extended in the water. The most common species in Britain is G. aquaticus, of which the popular name is HAIR FEL; and a notion still prevails in many parts of the country, that it is nothing else than a horse-hair, which has somehow acquired life by long immersion in water, and which is destined in due course of time to become an eel of the ordinary kind and dimensions; in proof of all which many an honest observer is ready to present himself as an eye-witness who has often seen these very slender eels in his walks. A popular notion prevails in Sweden, that the bite of the G. causes whitlow. When the pools in which the G. lives are dried up, it becomes shrivelled, and apparently lifeless, but revives on the application of moisture. The Abbé Fontana kept one in a drawer for three years, and although perfectly dry and hard, it soon recovered vigour on being put into water. Gordii are extremely common in the Thames.

GORDON, THE FAMILY OF. The origin of this great Scottish historical house is still wrapped in some measure of obscurity. Uncritical genealogists of the 17th c. affected to trace its descent from a mythical High Constable of Charlemagne, a Duke of Gordon, who, it was said, flourished about the year 800, and drew his lineage from the Gordoni, a tribe which, taking its name from the town of Gordunia, in Macedonia, had settled in Gaul before the days of Julius Cæsar. These fables and fancies have long ceased to be believed. Nor is more credit given to the conjecture that the family, having carried its name from Normandy to England in the train of the Conqueror, soon afterwards passed on from England to Scotland. No proof has been found of any connection between the Gordons of France and the Gordons of Scotland. There is little or no doubt now that the Scottish Gordons took their name from the lands of Gordon in Berwickshire. Their earliest historian, writing in the 16th c., says that these lands, together with the arms of three boars' heads,

were given by King Malcolm Ceanmohr (10571093 A. D.) to the progenitor of the house, as a reward for slaying, in the forest of Huntly, a wild boar, the terror of all the Merse. But in the 11th c., there were neither heraldic bearings in Scotland nor Gordons in Berwickshire. The first trace of the family is about the end of the 12th c., or the beginning of the 13th c., when it appears in record as witnessing charters by the great Earls of March or Dunbar, and as granting patches of land and rights of pasturage to the monks of Kelso. About a century afterwards, it enters the page of history in the person of Sir Adam of Gordon. He is found, in 1305, high in the confidence of King Edward I. of England, holding under that prince the office of joint justiciar of Lothian, and sitting in the English council at Westminster as one of the representatives of Scotland. banner of Bruce, who rewarded his adherence, tardy He seems to have been among the last to join the Strathbogie. The grant failed of effect at the time; as it was, by a grant of the northern lordship of but it was renewed by King David II. in 1357, and by King Robert II. in 1376. Under this last renewal, Sir John of Gordon, the great-grandson of Sir Adam, entered into possession, and so transferred the chief seat and power of the family from the Merse and Teviotdale to the banks of the Dee, the Deveron, and the Spey. Its direct male line came to an end in his son Sir Adam, who fell at Homildon in 1402, leaving an only child, a daughter, to inherit his lands, but transmitting his name of Scurdargue, and Thomas of Gordon of Ruthven through two illegitimate brothers-John of Gordon

to a wide circle of the gentry of Mar, Buchan, and Strathbogie, who, calling themselves 'Gordons,' styled the descendants of their niece Seton

Gordons.'

HUNTLY, MARQUISES OF HUNTLY, AND DUKES OF LORDS OF GORDON AND BADENOCH, EARLS OF GORDON.-Elizabeth of Gordon, the heiress of Sir Adam, married before 1408 Alexander of Seton (the son of Sir William of Seton), who, before 1437, who took the name of Gordon, was made Earl of was created Lord of Gordon. Their son Alexander, Huntly in 1445, and Lord of Badenoch a few years afterwards. He acquired by marriage the baronies of Cluny, Aboyne, and Glenmuick in Aberdeenshire; and had grants from the crown of the Highland lordship of Badenoch, and of other lands in the counties of Inverness and Moray. He died in 1470, and was succeeded by his second son George, the second earl, who married Annabella, daughter of King James I., and added to the territories of his house the lands of Schivas in Aberdeenshire, and the Boyne, the Enzie, and Netherdale in Banffshire. He was chancellor of Scotland from 1498 to 1502, and dying soon afterwards, was succeeded by his son Alexander, the third earl, who enlarged the family domains by the acquisition of Strathaven (or Strathdoun) in Banffshire, and of the Brae of Lochaber in Inverness-shire. He commanded the left wing of the Scottish army at Flodden; and, escaping the carnage of that disastrous field, survived till the year 1524. He was succeeded by his grandson George, the fourth earl, under whom the family reached, perhaps, its highest pitch of power. He added the earldom of Moray to its already vast possessions, and long held the great offices of lieutenant of the north and chancellor of the realm. He had the repute of being the wisest, the wealthiest, and the most powerful subject in Scotland. The crown, it is said, was counselled to clip his wings, lest he should attempt, like the Douglases in the previous age, to awe or overshadow the throne. He was stripped of the earldom of

in 1644, bequeathing the name of 'Haddo's Hole' to one of the aisles of St Giles's Church, which had been his prison. His son, Sir George Gordon of Haddo, after distinguishing himself at the university and the bar, was made a Lord of Session in 1680, Lord President of the court in 1681, and Lord Chancellor in the following year. He was raised to the peerage in 1682, by the titles of Earl of Aberdeen, Viscount of Formartine, Lord Haddo, Methlic, Tarves, and Kellie. He died in 1720, with the character of being a solid statesman, a fine orator, speaking slow but strong.' Some of these lineaments, it has been thought, reappeared, with his love of letters, in his great-great-grandson, George, fourth Earl of Aberdeen, who died in 1860, after holding the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from December 1852 to February

1855.

The history of the Gordons was written in the middle of the 16th c., at the request of the fourth Earl of Huntly, by an Italian monk, who found his way to the Cistercian monastery of Kinloss, in Moray. His work, which has not yet been printed, is entitled, Historia Compendium de Origine et Incremento Gordonia Familiæ, Johanne Ferrerio, Pedemontano, authore, apud Kinlos A.D. 1545, fideliter collectum. A century later, the Gordons found another and abler historian in a country gentleman of their own race, the excellent and accomplished Robert Gordon of Straloch, who died in 1661, before he had completed his Origo et Progressus Familia Illustrissima Gordoniorum in Scotia. It is still in manuscript. A History of the Ancient, Noble, and Illustrious Family of Gordon, by William Gordon, of Old Aberdeen, was published at Edinburgh in 1726 -1727, in 2 vols. 8vo. A Concise History of the Antient and Illustrious House of Gordon, by C. A. Gordon, appeared at Aberdeen, in 1 vol. 12mo, in 1754. The chief value of both books is now in their rarity. A work of much greater merit is the Genealogical History of the Earldom of Sutherland, or, as its author called it, 'The Genealogie and Pedigree of the most Ancient and Noble Familie of the Earles of Southerland, wherein also many Particulars are related touching the Surname of Gordoun and the Family of Huntley.' This was published at Edinburgh in 1813, in 1 vol. fol. It was written in 1639, by Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonstoun, the fourth son of the twelfth Earl of Sutherland by his marriage with that Lady Jane Gordon (daughter of the fourth Earl of Huntly), who was divorced from the infamous Earl Bothwell, in order that he might marry Mary Queen of Scots. Along with Sir Robert Gordon's work, there is printed a continuation of it to the year 1651, by Gilbert Gordon of Sallach. We learn from this sequel that the House of Gordon of Gight (claiming descent from a younger son of the second Earl of Huntly), which gave birth, at the end of the 18th c., to the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, gave birth, at the end of the 16th c., to one of the assassins of Wallenstein, Colonel John Gordon, governor of Egra, in Bohemia.

GORDON, GENERAL PATRICK, one of the most distinguished of the many soldiers of fortune whom Scotland sent to the wars of Europe, was born at Easter Auchleuchries, a bleak homestead on the eastern coast of Aberdeenshire, on the 31st of March 1635. His father, a 'goodman' or yeoman, was a grandson of the family of Gordon of Haddo, afterwards raised to the earldom of Aberdeen. His mother, an Ogilvie, who could count kindred with the noble houses of Deskford and Findlater, was the heiress of Auchleuchries, an estate of five or six petty farms, worth in those days about £360 Scots, or £30 sterling a year, and hopelessly burdened by mortgages. In his fifth year, G. was sent to the

neighbouring parish school, where he seems to have got a fair knowledge of Latin. The gates of the university were closed against him by his devotion to the Roman Catholic faith of his mother; and so, at the age of sixteen, he resolved-to use his own wordsto go to some foreign country, not caring much on what pretence, or to what country I should go, seeing I had no known friend in any foreign place.' A ship from Aberdeen landed him at Danzig in the summer of 1651, and some Scottish acquaintances or kinsfolks placed him at the Jesuit college of Braunsberg. His restless temper could not long endure the stillness and austerity of that retreat, and making his escape from it in 1653, he led for some time an unsettled life, until, in 1655, he enlisted under the flag of Sweden, then at war with Poland. During the six years that he took part in the struggle between these two powers, he was repeatedly made prisoner, and as often took service with his captors, until again retaken. He had risen to the rank of captain-lieutenant, when he resolved to try his fortune next with the czar, and, in 1661, joined the Muscovite standard.

Here his services in disciplining the Russian soldiers were duly appreciated, and his rise was rapid. He was made lieutenant-colonel in 1662, and colonel in 1665. Hearing that the death of his elder brother had made him 'goodman of Auchleuchries,' he wished once more to return to Scotland; but he found that there was no escape from the Russian service. The czar, however, sent him on a mission to England in 1666. On his return, he fell into disgrace, for what reason, does not very clearly appear. In 1670, he was sent to serve in the Ukraine against the Cossacks; and when these were subdued, he was sent back, in 1677, to defend Tschigirin against the Turks and the Tartars. His gallant performance of that duty gained him high military reputation and the rank of major-general. In 1683, he was made lieutenant-general; and two years afterwards he obtained leave to visit England and Scotland. King James II. wished him to enter the English service; but it was in vain that he petitioned for leave to quit Russia. In 1688, he was made general, and now began his intimacy with the Czar Peter, who, in the following year, owed to G.'s zeal and courage his signal triumph over the conspirators against his throne and life. Nor was this G.'s only great service to his imperial master. In 1698, he crushed the revolt of the Strelitzes, during the czar's absence from Russia. Peter was not ungrateful, and G.'s last years were passed in opulence and honour. He died at Moscow, in the morning of the 29th November 1699. The czar,' says his latest biographer, who had visited him five times in his illness, and had been twice with him during the night, stood weeping by his bed as he drew his last breath; and the eyes of him who had left Scotland a poor unfriended wanderer, were closed by the hands of an emperor.'

G. kept a journal for the last forty years of his life. It seems to have filled eight or ten thick quartos, of which only six are now known to exist. An abridgment of them, rendered into German, under the title of Tagebuch des Generals Patrick Gordon, was published at Moscow and St Petersburg, in 3 vols. 8vo, in 1849-1851-1853, very carefully edited by Dr Posselt. In 1859, Passages from the Diary of General Patrick Gordon, in the original English, edited by Mr Joseph Robertson, were printed by the Spalding Club in 1 vol. 4to.

GORDON, LORD GEORGE, celebrated in connection with the London Protestant riots of 1780, the third son of the third Duke of Gordon, was born September 19, 1750. At an early age he entered the navy, and rose to the rank of lieutenant,