118 



GAYA 



GAY-LUSSAC 



an anonymous pamphlet, called the Present State 

 of Wit. By this time he had made the acquaint- 

 ance of Pope, to whom in 1713 he dedicated a 

 georgic, Rural Sports. Late in the previous year 

 he had been appointed secretary to the Duchess of 

 Monmouth. In 1714 he brought out The Fan, and 

 following this, The Shepherd's Week, a contribution 

 to Pope's crusade against Ambrose Philips. Sub- 

 sequently, resigning his post with the Duchess 

 of Monmouth, he accompanied Lord Clarendon, 

 then envoy to Hanover, as secretary. At Anne's 

 death he was again in London, endeavouring to 

 conciliate fortune by an epistle to the newly- 

 arrived Princess of Wales. His next effort was the 

 What d'ye Call It? 'a tragi-comi-pastoral farce' 

 (1715). Trivia, a clever picture of town life from 

 a pedestrian's point of view, for which Swift 

 supplied hints, came next ; and later he bore the 

 blame of Three Hours after Marriage (1717), a 

 play in which Pope and Arbuthnot had the larger 

 part. In 1720 he published his poems by sub- 

 scription, clearing 1000. With this his friends 

 hoped he would have made some provision for the 

 future, but it apparently vanished, as did also some 

 South Sea stock which had been presented to him, 

 in the crash of 1720. In 1724 he produced The 

 Captives, a tragedy, and three years afterwards the 

 first series of his popular Fables. But his greatest 

 success was The Beggar's Opera, the outcome of a 

 suggestion for a ' Newgate pastoral ' made by 

 Swift as far back as 1716. Its popularity was 

 extraordinary ; it ran sixty-two nights, gave 

 celebrity to its actors, and, in the popular phrase, 

 made Rich (the manager) gay, and Gay (the 

 author) rich. By the thirty-sixth night he had 

 netted between 700 and 800 ; and he forthwith 

 set about a sequel, Polly, which was prohibited. 

 This step only served to give the play a greater 

 sale in book form, and the subscriptions brought 

 Gay 1200. After this he lived chiefly with the 

 Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, who since 1720 

 had been the kindest of his many patrons. In 

 1732 he came from their house to London, probably 

 in connection with his opera of Achilles (produced 

 in 1733), was seized witli an inflammatory fever, 

 and died in three days (4th December 1732). He 

 was buried in Westminster Abbey ' as if he had 

 been a peer of the realm.' 



As a man Gay was amiable, indolent, and 

 luxurious. His health was bad, and he wasted his 

 life in vain hopes of preferment. But no man 

 made kinder friends ; and that he retained them is 

 proof of his personal charm. His Fables have still 

 a faint vitality ; folklorists and antiquaries still 

 study Trivia and The Shepherd's Week, and 

 18th-century specialists delight in the chronicle of 

 his two ballad operas. On the whole, however, his 

 poetical reputation has not been maintained. But 

 he was a charming song- writer, and will perhaps 

 last longest by his ballad of 'Black-eyed Susan.' 

 The best portrait of him is by Kneller's pupil, 

 William Aikman. 



See the edition of the Poetical Works by Underbill 

 (2 vols. 1893) and his edition of the Letters and Prose 

 Writings (Muses Library). 



<ayl, chief town of a district in Bengal, 57 

 miles S. of Patna by rail. It is a place of the 

 greatest sanctity, from its associations with the 

 founder of Buddhism, and is annually visited by 

 about 100,000 Hindu pilgrims, who pray for the souls 

 of their ancestors at the forty-five sacred shrines 

 within and without the walls. In Gaya proper 

 the Brahmans reside ; adjoining is Sahibganj, the 

 trading and official quarter. Six miles south is 

 the village of Buddha-Gaya, the home of Buddha, 

 with a famous temple and pipal tree (see BUDDHISM, 

 p. 517). Joint pop. (1891) 80,383. Gaya is also 

 the name of the wine suburb of Oporto (q.v.). 



Gayal (Bibos frontalis), a species of ox, which 

 is found wild in the mountains of Aracan, Chit- 

 tagong, Tipura, and Sylhet, and which has long 

 been domesticated in these countries and in the 

 eastern parts of Bengal. It is about the size of 

 the Indian buffalo, is dark brown, and has short 

 curved horns. 



Gay-Lnssac, Louis JOSEPH, chemist and 

 physicist, was born 6th December 1778, at St 

 Leonard (Haute Vienne). Entering the Poly- 

 technic School in 1797, he was in 1801 promoted to 

 the department of Ponts et Chaussees ; and shortly 

 afterwards Berthollet selected him as his assistant 

 in the government chemical works at Arcueil. He 

 now began a series of original researches on the 

 dilatation of gases, the tension of vapours, the 

 improvement of thermometers and barometers, the 

 density of vapours, hygrometry, evaporation, and 

 capillary action. Next, first with Biot, and a 

 month later alone, he made two balloon ascents for 

 the purpose of investigating the temperature and 

 moisture of the air and the laws of terrestrial mag- 

 netism. Along with Alexander von Humboldt he 

 analysed the properties of air brought down from 

 a height of nearly 23,000 feet, and their joint 

 memoir to the Academy of Sciences (read 1st 

 October 1804) contained he first announcement 

 of the fact that oxygen and hydrogen unite to form 

 Avater in the proportion of one volume of the former 

 to two volumes of the latter (see ATOMIC THEORY). 

 This result induced him to study the combining 

 volumes of other gases, and thus led him to the 

 important discovery of the law of volumes, which 

 was announced in 1808. A year later he was 

 appointed professor of Chemistry at the Polytechnic 

 School, and from 1832 also tilled the corresponding 

 chair in the Jardin des Plantes. Davy's discoveries 

 of potassium and sodium, by the decomposing 

 action of the voltaic pile, stimulated Gay-Lnssac 

 and Thenard to pursue this class of researches. 

 The results appeared in their Recherches Physico- 

 chimiques (2 vols. 1811). Amongst the most im- 

 portant of the discoveries announced in these 

 volumes were a purely chemical process for obtain- 

 ing potassium directly, the separation of boron 

 from boracic acid, and new and improved methods 

 of analysing organic compounds. (Boron was, 

 however, simultaneously discovered in England 

 by Davy.) Although the discovery of iodine 

 (in 1811) is due to Courtois, Gay-Lussac shares 

 with Davy the merit of having (in 1813) first 

 described its distinctive properties, and proved 

 that it is an elementary body ; he was also the 

 first to form synthetically the compounds of iodine 

 with hydrogen and oxygen, known as hydriodic 

 and iodic acids. In 1815 he succeeded in isolating 

 the compound radicle Cyanogen (q.v.), the first 

 known example of a compound body which will 

 unite with elementary bodies in the same way 

 as these unite with one another. Later in life he 

 experimented upon fermentation, and in conjunc- 

 tion with Liebig made an examination of fulminic 

 acid, and further improved the methods of organic 

 analysis. From this time a good deal of his atten- 

 tion was given to the practical applications of 

 chemistry. In this department his investigations 

 regarding the manufacture of sulphuric acid ( which 

 led to the introduction of the Gay-Lussac tower, 

 first erected by him for the recovery of waste oxides 

 of nitrogen ), his essays on the bleaching chlorides, 

 his method of using the centesimal alcoholometer, 

 and his improvements in assaying silver by the 

 wet method by means of a standard solution of 

 common salt, are the most important. In 1805 he 

 was appointed a member of the Committee of Arts 

 and Manufactures, established by the minister of 

 Commerce, in 1818 superintendent of the govern- 

 ment manufactory of gunpowder and saltpetre, and 



