CIS 



DASHKOV, EKATERINA KOMANOVA. 



DAUBENTON, LOUIS JEAN MARIE. 



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man of a highly original turn of mind ; he was unusually well read iu 

 the physics of his day ; he had a singular aptitude for seizing and 

 illustrating natural analogies, and above all be was fully impressed 

 with a sense of the important truths of a universal simplicity and 

 harmony of design throughout the whole creation. It is true that 

 his analogies are often imaginary, his theories untenable, and his 

 illustrations overstrained, but many of these errors were inevitable 

 in the state of natural history in his day, and the others are by no 

 means sufficient to overbalance his claims to fame as a clear-sighted, 

 ingenious, and often profound physiologist. Darwin's 'Botanic 

 Garden' is divided into two books, very unequal in size and in merit. 

 The first, which explains the principal phenomena of vegetation, is 

 superior in every respect to the second, which is devoted to what he 

 calls ' The Loves of the Plants,' which, forming a poetical commentary 

 upon some of the more curious phenomena of vegetable fertilisation, 

 is filled with the most ludicrous analogies and imagery. That the 

 character of the ' Botanic Garden ' as a poem is by no means of a 

 high order must, we think, be on all hands allowed, for its language 

 is often tawdry and tinselly, its similes extravagant, and its machinery 

 in the highest degree fantastical as well as incomprehensible ; but on 

 the other hand it abounds with passages which have seldom been 

 excelled for their elegant and forcible description of natural objects 

 in poetical language, and it can by no means be admitted that where 

 an author's powers are expended upon au illustration of the laws of 

 any part of the creation, they are applied to mean and insignificant 

 subjects. It is only where he calls to his aid the fancies of the 

 Uoiicrvicians that he wastes hia talent and fatigues his reader. His 

 ' Phytologia' is remarkable for the number of novel and ingenious 

 ideas which it contains : many of these were too far in advance of 

 thoae of bin contemporaries to be much esteemed when they appeared, 

 but they are singularly in accordance with opinions which now are 

 either altogether recognised, or are under discussion, with a strong 

 probability of being finally adopted. For instance, he particularly 

 insisted upon the clone analogy between plants and animals in their 

 functions, showing that the difference between the two kingdoms is 

 the necessary consequence of the difference between their wants, 

 necessities, and habit* of life. He urged with great force that every 

 bud of a plant U the seat of a separate and in some measure inde- 

 pendent system, that plants are therefore iu one sense congeries of 

 individuala living in couctrt but growing independently; finally, he 

 pointed out the analogy between buds and seeds, showing that the 

 woody part of plants is really analogous to the roots of seeds, and 

 produced by the adhesion of the descending matter of organisation 

 which passes downwards from the buds. While however we thus 

 give Darwin credit for a rank in science that has hardly been accorded 

 to him before, we are bound to add that his errors were neither few 

 nor unimportant. He was too fond of tracing analogies between 

 dissimilar objects ; he readily adopted the ingenious views of others 

 without sufficient inquiry ; he had the great fault of being often a 

 credulous collector aud a fanciful reasoner, and finally his prose writings 

 are often inexcusably inelegant, ill-arranged am) uugrammatical. 



DASHKOV, EKATE1UNA KOMANOVA, a Russian princess, 

 remarkable for her singular character and career, was the daughter ol 

 Count lioman Lariouovich Vorontsov, and was born according to her 

 own statement in 1744. If this be correct, at the age of fifteen she 

 was married to Prince Dashkov, and at the age of eighteen she was 

 the principal agent iu a revolution which changed the face of Russia. 

 The Untud Duke Peter, averse to his wife the Princess Catharine 

 [CATHAHIN A A I.KXIKW.VA], had formed the plan of repudiating her am 

 of raising hi* mistress, Elizabeth Vorontsov, to her place. It was 

 Elizabeth's sister, the Princess Dashkov, who, according to her own 

 statement, first suggested to the grand duchess the idea aud the means 

 of thwarting the plan ; she was according to all accounts the soul o 

 the conipiracy that was entered into, aud she, a woman, took the 

 principal part in the insurrection of 1762, which dethroned Catharine's 

 husband, now become the Emperor Peter the Third, aud rained 

 Catharine to the imperial throne. She waa not long however in losing 

 the favour of the empress, whom she displeased by the independence 

 of her character and the bluntness of her manners, and it was even 

 with some difficulty that after she had lost her husband she obtained 

 permission in 1768 to travel abroad. In a somewhat lengthened tour, 

 which carried her over Germany, England, France, aud Italy, she 

 became acquainted with many of the leading literary men of the 

 various countries, aud we find among her correspondence letters from 

 Garrick, Dr. Blair, and Dr. Robertson, with the last of whom she was 

 desirous of placing her son for the purpose of education. She was 

 partial to England, and her brother, Count Simon Vorontsov (or, as 

 the name U often written, Worouzow), who was for gome time 

 ambassador here, was so much so that, after giving up the embassy in 

 1806, he resided in London till his death in 1832. His son, at present 

 (1856) uigh in the Russian service, aud lately governor of the Cau- 

 casian province*, was educated in England, and his daughter, the 

 princess's niece, is the present Countess Dowager of Pembroke. On 

 the Princess Dashkor's return to Russia in 1782, she found herself 

 again iu favour with the Empress Catharine, who had probably 

 discovered in her absence, that a little freedom of character relieves 

 the tedium of a court. One of their bonds of union was a strong 

 partiality to literary occupation iu both. 



The empress however somewhat amazed the princess by the proposal 

 a appoint her to the presidency of the St. Petersburg Academy of 

 Arts and Science, and she at first replied that a more appropriate 

 appointment would be that of ' Directress of her Majesty's Washer- 

 women.' The appointment was however pressed and accepted, and 

 the princess appears to have made a very active and respectable 

 iresident. She herself proposed to Catharine the establishment of a 

 luseian Academy, in imitation of the French Academy, to promote 

 the cultivation of the Russian language, of which the empress was so 

 irdent an admirer that she once declared that, " combining as it did 

 the richness and energy of German with the sweetness of Italian, it 

 must one day become the leading language of the world." The Russian 

 Academy was founded ; the princess, who became the first president, 

 set the compilation of a dictionary on foot, assigned the different 

 .etters to different persons, aud herself took three, with the general 

 superiutendenca of the whole. The work was completed in twelve 

 years, it has since gone to a second edition, and it occupies a highly 

 respectable place among the standard dictionaries. It is remarkable 

 that the princess proposed the arrangement of the words under the 

 alphabetical order of their roots, instead of the directly alphabetical 

 order of both roots and compounds, which is the ordinary method of 

 dictionaries ; and that the method proposed by her is that adopted in 

 Rein's excellent dictionary of Russian, which is highly valued by 

 philologists on that as well as other accounts. The empress, who, as 

 is well known, traced the plan of the ' Comparative Dictionary of all 

 Languages,' which was executed by Professor Pallas, was less successful 

 as a lexicographer. The princess did not confine herself merely to 

 the presidency of academies ; she wrote some plays, contributed articles 

 to periodicals, and set on foot and edited a monthly magazine, the 

 ' Sobesyednik Lyubiteley Rossiyskago Slovo.' For some time the two 

 literary ladies went on in harmony, till a quarrel arose on the subject 

 of a tragedy by Kniazhnin, the Russian poet, which the princess had 

 allowed to be printed in one of the publications of the Academy, but 

 which the empress asserted contained revolutionary principles, and 

 which, when the princess defended it, she declared should be " burnt by 

 the hands of the common executioner." This quarrel was made up, or 

 appeared to bo so ; but not long after the princess resigned her office?, 

 and retired to her estates at Serpukh, in the neighbourhood of Moscow. 

 At the death of Catharine iu 1796 she received an intimation from the 

 Emperor Paul that she was dismissed from her offices, and ordered to 

 " retire to her Novgorod estates, aud reflect on the events of 1762." 

 As the village which was assigned her for a residence in her exile was 

 only a collection of cabins, she suffered considerable hardship till her 

 friends procured her pardon and permission to return to Serpukh, 

 where she resided till her death on the 4th of January 1810. 



The fullest and best account of the life of the Princess Dashkov is 

 from her own pen iu the ' Memoirs of the Princess Dasehkaw, Lady 

 of Honour to Catharine II., edited from the Originals by Mrs. W. 

 Bradford,' 2 vols. 8vo, London, 1840. The memoirs had been written 

 by the princess at the request of Mrs. Bradford, then Miss Wilmot, 

 an English lady, who with her sister spent some years at the princess's 

 country-seat in the early part of the present century. They leave an 

 impression that the princess, however eccentric aud abrupt, was l^oth 

 clever and amiable. The memoirs appear to have been originally 

 written in French, though this is not distinctly stated by the editress ; 

 and some letters in English by the princess, which are printed in 

 connection, will even show that she had au excellent knowledge of 

 our language. The volumes, though full of curious matter, seem to 

 have attracted little attention here, and to have been till lately 

 unknown in Russia, though some years ago a rumour was current 

 there that such memoirs existed. 



DAUBENTON, LOD1S JEAN MARIE, a celebrated naturalist 

 and zootomist, was born at Montbard in Burgundy, on the 29th of 

 May 1716. The church was his destination, and ho was sent to 

 Paris to study theology ; but he gave iu secret those hours to medi- 

 cine and anatomy which his father hoped he was devoting to 

 ecclesiastical reading. The death of his father in 1736 left him at 

 liberty to follow the path he loved : and, having taken his degrees at 

 Rheims, he returned to Montbard, for the purpose of exercising his 

 profession. There he found a kindred spirit who, happily for zoology, 

 had been connected from infancy with Daubenton. The Comte de 

 Buffon, born at the same place, knew him well in youth, and when, in 

 after life, Buffou was appointed iutendant of the Jardin du Roi, his 

 thoughts reverted to Daubentou as the person of all others qualified 

 by his zeal and ability to prosecute those anatomical inquiries, the 

 details of which, his own feebleness of sight prevented him from 

 investigating. The count drew Daubeuton to Paris in 1742, and iu 

 1745 the office of Curator and Demonstrator of the Cabinet of Natural 

 History was conferred upon a man eminently fitted by his quick 

 discernment, his untiring diligence, and his inexhaustible patience, to 

 fill the situation with the greatest possible advantage to the public. 

 No one can open the ' Histoire Naturelle des Animaux ' without being 

 struck by the multitude and justness of the facts (for he carefully 

 avoided all theory) with which Daubentou enriched that work, and in 

 some degree corrected the fervid imagination of his brilliant coadj utor. 

 But he did this without presuming in the least to draw general 

 inferences; he confined himself strictly to facts; and such was his 

 modesty, that Camper used to say of him that he himself was not 



