The Nuttall Encyclopaedia Part 396

SCHWERIN (34), capital of the grand-duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin; has a pretty site on Lake of Schwerin (14 m. by 3), 47 m. SE. of Lubeck; has a 14th-century cathedral, Renaissance castle, a.r.s.enal, &c., and manufactures of lacquered ware, machinery, &c.

SCHWYZ (50), one of the three original cantons of Switzerland, German speaking and Catholic; Lake Zurich forms part of the N. border, and Lake Lucerne part of the S.; Zug with its lake is on the W.; is mountainous, but good pasturage favours cattle-breeding, sheep and goat rearing, &c.; important industries in cotton and silk are carried on; Einsiedeln, with its famous monastery, attracts thousands of pilgrims, and the Rigi is a favourite resort of summer visitors. The capital (7), same name, is prettily situated 26 m. E. of Lucerne.

SCIENCE, as it has been said, "has for its province the world of phenomena, and deals exclusively with their relations, consequences, or sequences. It can never tell us what a thing really and intrinsically is, but only why it has become so; it can only, in other words, refer us to one inscrutable as the ground and explanation of another inscrutable." "A science," says Schopenhauer, "anybody can learn, one perhaps with more, another with less trouble; but from art each receives only so much as he brings, yet latent within him.... Art has not, like science, to do merely with the reasoning powers, but with the inmost nature of man, where each must count only for what he really is."

SCILLY ISLANDS, a rugged group of islands belonging to Cornwall, 27 m. SW. of Land's End; consists of six larger islands--St. Mary's (1528 acres, pop. 1200), the largest--and some 30 smaller, besides numerous rock cl.u.s.ters, the name Scilly being strictly applicable to a rocky islet in the NW. of the group; climate is damp and mild; the cultivation and export of large quant.i.ties of lilies is the princ.i.p.al industry, but generally industries have decayed, lighthouses have reduced greatly the hereditary occupation of pilotage, and emigration goes on; the only town is Hugh Town (with two hotels, banks, pier, &c.), on St. Mary's; there are some interesting ecclesiastical ruins, &c.; since 1834 much has been done to improve the condition of the islanders by the then proprietor Mr.

A. J. Smith, and his nephew, T. A. Darien Smith, who succeeded in 1872.

SCIOPPIUS, CASPAR, a Protestant renegade, born in the Palatinate; turned Catholic on a visit to Rome, and devoted his life to vilify his former co-religionists, and to invoke the Catholic powers to combine to their extermination; he was a man of learning, but of most infirm temper (1576-1649).

SCIPIO, P. CORNELIUS, THE ELDER, surnamed Africa.n.u.s Major, a celebrated Roman general; was present at the engagement near the Tacinus and at Cannae; was appointed proconsul of Spain at the age of 24, and made himself master of nearly the whole of it against the Carthaginians; on his return to Rome was made consul; transferred the seat of war against Carthage to Africa, and landed at Utica; met Hannibal on the field of Zama, and totally defeated him, and ended the Second Punic War in 202 B.C. (234-183 B.C.).

SCIPIO, P. CORNELIUS, THE YOUNGER, surnamed Africa.n.u.s Minor, adopted by the preceding, the proper name being L. Paullus aemelius; after distinguishing himself in Spain proceeded to Africa to take part in the Third Punic War; laid siege to Carthage, took it by storm, and levelled it with the ground in 146 B.C.; he was afterwards sent to Spain, where he captured Numantia after a stubborn resistance, to the extension of the sway of Rome; he was an upright and magnanimous man, but his character was not proof against a.s.sault; he died by the hand of an a.s.sa.s.sin.

SCONE (p.r.o.nounced Sc.o.o.n), a, village in Perthshire, on the left bank of the Tay, 2 m. N. of Perth; once the capital of the Pictish kingdom, and the place of the coronation of the Scottish kings; near it is the seat of the Earl of Mansfield.

SCOPAS, Greek sculptor, born at Paros, who flourished in 4th century B.C.

SCORESBY, WILLIAM, scientist, born at Whitby; began life as a sailor; visited the Arctic regions twice over, and wrote an account of his explorations; took to the Church, and held several clerical charges, but retired in 1849, and gave himself to scientific researches, both at home and abroad (1787-1857).

SCORY, JOHN, a Cambridge Dominican friar in 1530, who became bishop of Rochester in 1551, and later of Chichester; was deprived of his living on Queen Mary's accession; recanted, but fled abroad, whence he issued his "Epistle to the Faytheful in Pryson in England"; returned in Elizabeth's reign, and became bishop of Hereford; _d_. 1585.

SCOT, REGINALD, author of a famous work, "The Discoverie of Witchcraft" (1584), remarkable as one of the earliest exposures of the absurdities of witchcraft and kindred superst.i.tions, which provoked King James's foolish defence "Daemonology"; son of a Kentish baronet; educated at Oxford, and spent a peaceful life gardening and studying; wrote also "The Hoppe Garden" (1538-1599).

SCOTLAND (4,026), the northern portion of the island of Great Britain, separated from England by the Solway, Cheviots, and Tweed, and bounded N. and W. by the Atlantic and E. by the German Ocean; inclusive of 788 islands (600 uninhabited), its area, divided into 33 counties, is slightly more than one-half of England's, but has a coast-line longer by 700 m.; greatest length from Dunnet Head (most northerly point) to Mull of Galloway (most southerly) is 288 m., while the breadth varies from 32 to 175, Buchan Ness being the eastmost point and Ardnamurchan Point the westmost; from rich pastoral uplands in the S.--Cheviots, Moffat Hills, Lowthers, Moorfoots, and Lammermoors--the country slopes down to the wide, fertile lowland plain--growing fine crops of oats barley, wheat, &c.--which stretches, with a varying breadth of from 30 to 60 m., up to the Grampians (highest peak Ben Nevis, 4406 ft.), whence the country sweeps northwards, a wild and beautiful tract of mountain, valley, and moorland, diversified by some of the finest loch and river scenery in the world; the east and west coasts present remarkable contrasts, the latter rugged, irregular, and often precipitous, penetrated by long sea-lochs and fringed with numerous islands, and mild and humid in climate; the former low and regular, with few islands or inlets, and cold, dry, and bracing; of rivers the Tweed, Forth, Tay, Dee, and Clyde are the princ.i.p.al, and the Orkneys, Shetlands, and Hebrides the chief island groups; coal and iron abound in the lowlands, more especially in the plain of the Forth and Clyde, and granite in the Grampians; staple industries are the manufacture of cottons, woollens, linen, jute, machinery, hardware, paper, and shipbuilding, of which Glasgow is the centre and commercial metropolis, while Edinburgh (capital) is the chief seat of law, education, &c.; of cultivated land the percentage varies from 74.8 in Fife to 2.4 in Sutherland, and over all is only 24.2; good roads, ca.n.a.ls, extensive railway and telegraph systems knit all parts of the country together; Presbyterianism is the established form of religion, and in 1872 the old parish schools were supplanted by a national system under school-boards similar to England; the lowlanders and highlanders still retain distinctive characteristics of their Teutonic and Celtic progenitors, the latter speaking in many parts of the Highlands their native Gaelic; originally the home of the PICTS (q. v.), and by them called Alban or Albyn, the country, already occupied as far as the Forth and Clyde by the Romans, was in the 5th century successfully invaded by the Scots, a Celtic tribe from Ireland; in 843 their king Kenneth was crowned king of Picts and Scots, and by the 10th century the country (known to the Romans as Caledonia) began to be called Scotia or Scotland; government and power gradually centred in the richer lowlands, which, through contact with England, and from the number of English immigrants, became distinctively Anglo-Saxon; since the Union with ENGLAND (q. v.) the prosperity of Scotland has been of steady and rapid growth, manufactures, commerce, and literature (in all branches) having flourished wonderfully.

SCOTS, THE, a tribe of Celts from Ireland who settled in the W. of North Britain, and who, having gained the ascendency of the Picts in the E., gave to the whole country the name of Scotland.

SCOTT, DAVID, Scotch painter, born in Edinburgh; he was an artist of great imaginative power, and excelled in the weird; his best picture, exhibited in 1828, was "The Hopes of Early Genius Dispelled by Death,"

though his first achievements in art were his ill.u.s.trations of the "Ancient Mariner"; but his masterpiece is "Vasco da Gama encountering the Spirit of the Cape"; he was a sensitive man, and disappointment hastened his death (1806-1849).

SCOTT, SIR GEORGE GILBERT, English architect, born in Buckinghamshire, son of Scott the commentator; was the builder or restorer of buildings both in England and on the Continent after the Gothic, and wrote several works on architecture.

SCOTT, MICHAEL, a sage with the reputation of a wizard, who lived about the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th centuries, of whose art as a magician many legends are related.

SCOTT, THOMAS, commentator, born in Lincolnshire; became rector of Aston Sandford, Bucks; was a Calvinist in theology, author of the "Force of Truth" and "Essays on Religion," the work by which he is best known being his "Commentary on the Bible," a scholarly exposition (1747-1821).

SCOTT, SIR WALTER, the great romancer, born in Edinburgh, through both father and mother of Scottish Border blood; his father, a lawyer, a man "who pa.s.sed from the cradle to the grave without making an enemy or losing a friend," his mother a little kindly woman, full of most vivid memories, awakening an interest in him to which he owed much; was a healthy child, but from teething and other causes lost the use of his right limb when 18 months old, which determined, to a marked extent, the course of his life; spent many of the months of his childhood in the country, where he acquired that affection for all natural objects which never left him, and a kindliness of soul which all the lower animals that approached him were quick to recognise; he was from the first home-bred, and to realise the like around his own person was his fondest dream, and if he failed, as it chanced he did, his vexation was due not to the material loss it involved, but to the blight it shed on his home life and the disaster on his domestic relationships; his school training yielded results of the smallest account to his general education, and a writer of books himself, he owed less to book-knowledge than his own shrewd observation; he proceeded from the school (the High School, it was) at 15 to his father's office and cla.s.ses at the University, and at both he continued to develop his own bent more than the study of law or learning; at his sixteenth year the bursting of a blood-vessel prostrated him in bed and enforced a period of perfect stillness, but during this time he was able to prosecute sundry quiet studies, and laid up in his memory great stores of knowledge, for his mind was of that healthy quality which a.s.similated all that was congenial to it and let all that did not concern it slip idly through, achieving thereby his greatest victory, that of becoming an altogether _whole_ man. Professionally he was a lawyer, and a good lawyer, but the duties of his profession were not his chief interest, and though he received at length a sheriffship worth 300 a year, and a clerkship to the court worth 1500, he early turned his mind to seek promotion elsewhere, and chose a literary career. His first literary efforts were translations in verse from the German, but his first great literary success was the publication, in 1802, of "The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," and in this he first gave evidence both of the native force and bent of his genius; it gave the keynote of all that subsequently proceeded from his pen. This was followed the same year by "Cadzow Castle," a poem instinct with military ardour, and this by "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" in 1805; the first poem which gained him popular favour, by "Marmion" in 1808, and by "The Lord of the Isles"

in 1814. Much as the rise of Scott's fame was owing to his poetical works, it is on the ground of his prose writings, as the freest and fullest exhibition of his genius, that it is now mainly founded. The period of his productivity in this line extended over 18 years in all, commencing with the year 1814. This was the year of the publication of "Waverley," which was followed by that of "Guy Mannering," "The Antiquary," "Rob Roy," "Old Mortality," and "The Heart of Midlothian" in the year 1819, when he was smitten down by an illness, the effects of which was seen in his after-work. "The Bride of Lammermoor," "Ivanhoe,"

"The Monastery," "The Abbot," "Kenilworth," and "The Pirate" belong to the years that succeeded that illness, and all more or less witness to its sorrowful effects, of which last "The Abbot" and "The Monastery" are reckoned the best, as still ill.u.s.trating the "essential powers" of Scott, to which may be added "Redgauntlet" and "The Fortunes of Nigel,"

characterised by Ruskin as "quite n.o.ble ones," together with "Quentin Durward" and "Woodstock," as "both of high value." Sir Walter's own life was, in its inner essence, an even-flowing one, for there were in it no crises such as to require a reversal of the poles of it, and a spiritual new birth, with crucifixion of the old nature, and hence it is easily divisible, as it has been divided throughout, into the three natural periods of growth, activity, and death. His active life, which ranges from 1796 to 1826, lay in picturing things and traditions of things as in youth, a 25 years' period of continuous crescent expansiveness, he had learned to view them, and his slow death was the result, not of mere weariness in working, but of the adverse circ.u.mstances that thwarted and finally wrecked the one unworthy ambition that had fatally taken possession of his heart. Of Scott Ruskin says, "What good Scott had in him to do, I find no words full enough to express... Scott is beyond comparison the greatest intellectual force manifested in Europe since Shakespeare... All Scott's great writings were the recreations of a mind confirmed in dutiful labour, and rich with organic gathering of boundless resource" (1771-1832).

SCOTT, WILLIAM BELL, painter and poet, brother of David Scott, born in Edinburgh; did criticism and wrote on artists; is best known by his autobiography (1811-1890).

SCRANTON (102), capital of Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, on the Lackawanna River, 144 m. NW. of New York; does a large trade in coal, and is the centre of a busy steel, iron, and machinery industry.

SCRIBE, EUGENE, French dramatist, a prolific and a successful, who produced plays for half a century, well adapted for the stage, if otherwise worthless (1791-1861).

SCRIBES, THE (i. e. writers), a non-priestly cla.s.s among the Jews devoted to the study and exposition of the Law, and who rose to a position of importance and influence in the Jewish community, were known in the days of Christ also by the name of Lawyers, and were addressed as Rabbis; their disciples were taught to regard them, and did regard them with a reverence superior to that paid to father or mother, the spiritual parent being reckoned as much above the natural, as the spirit and its interests are above the flesh and its interests.

SCRIBLERUS, MARTINUS, the subject of a fict.i.tious memoir published in Pope's works and ascribed to ARBUTHNOT (q. v.), intended to ridicule the pedantry which affects to know everything, but knows nothing to any purpose.

SCRIVENER, FREDERICK HENRY AMBROSE, New Testament critic, born at Bermondsey, Surrey, educated at Cambridge; head-master of Falmouth School from 1846 to 1856, and after 15 years' rectorship of Gerrans, became vicar of Hendon and prebendary of Exeter; his "Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament" ranks as a standard work; was editor of the Cambridge Paragraph Bible, and one of the New Testament revisers (1813-1891).

SCROGGS, SIR WILLIAM, an infamous Judge of Charles II.'s reign, who became Chief-Justice of the King's Bench in 1678, and whose name is a.s.sociated with all manner of injustice and legal corruption; was impeached in 1680, and pensioned off by the king; _d_. 1683.

SCUDeRY, MADELEINE DE, French novelist, born at Havre, came to Paris in her youth, and there lived to an extreme old age; was a prominent figure in the social and literary life of the city; collaborated at first with her brother Georges, but subsequently was responsible herself for a set of love romances of an inordinate length, but of great popularity in their day, e. g. "Le Grand Cyrus" and "Clelie," &c., in which a real gift for sparkling dialogue is swallowed up in a ma.s.s of improbable adventures and prudish sentimentalism (1607-1701).

SCULPTURED STONES, a name specially applied to certain varieties of commemorative monuments (usually rough-hewn slabs or boulders, and in a few cases well-shaped crosses) of early Christian date found in various parts of the British Isles, bearing lettered and symbolic inscriptions of a rude sort and ornamental designs resembling those found on Celtic MSS.

of the Gospels; lettered inscriptions are in Latin, OGAM (q. v.), and Scandinavian and Anglican runes, while some are uninscribed; usually found near ancient ecclesiastical sites, and their date is approximately fixed according to the character of the ornamentation; some of these stones date as late as the 11th century; the Scottish stones are remarkable for their elaborate decoration and for certain symbolic characters to which as yet no interpretation has been found.

SCUTARI (50), a town of Turkey in Asia, on the Bosporus, opposite Constantinople; has several fine mosques, bazaars, &c.; large barracks on the outskirts were used as hospitals by Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War; has large and impressive cemeteries; chief manufactures are of silks, cottons, &c. Also name of a small town (5) in European Turkey, situated at the S. end of Lake Scutari, 18 by 16 m., in North Albania.

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS, two rocks opposite each other at a narrow pa.s.s of the strait between Italy and Sicily, in the cave of one of which dwelt the former, a fierce monster that barked like a dog, and under the cliff of the other of which dwelt the latter, a monster that sucked up everything that came near it, so that any ship pa.s.sing between in avoiding the one become a prey to the other.

SCYTHIANS, the name of a people of various tribes that occupied the steppes of SE. of Europe and W. of Asia adjoining eastward, were of nomadic habit; kept herds of cattle and horses, and were mostly in a semi-savage state beyond the pale of civilisation; the region they occupied is called Scythia.

SEABURY, SAMUEL, American prelate, born at Groton, Connecticut, graduated at Yale and studied medicine in Edinburgh; entered the Church of England in 1753, and devoted himself at first to missionary work; subsequently held "livings" in Long Island and New York State in 1782; was appointed bishop by the clergy of Connecticut; sought consecration at the hands of the English archbishops who were afraid to grant it, and had to resort to the bishops of the Scotch Episcopal Church for the purpose; did notable work in establishing and consolidating Episcopacy in America (1729-1796).