Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Kelly, Edward" to "Kite" by Various

1900. (E. He.)

2546 words  |  Chapter 11

KENYON, LLOYD KENYON, 1ST BARON (1732-1802), lord chief-justice of England, was descended by his father's side from an old Lancashire family; his mother was the daughter of a small proprietor in Wales. He was born at Gredington, Flintshire, on the 5th of October 1732. Educated at Ruthin grammar school, he was in his fifteenth year articled to an attorney at Nantwich, Cheshire. In 1750 he entered at Lincoln's Inn, London, and in 1756 was called to the bar. As for several years he was almost unemployed, he utilized his leisure in taking notes of the cases argued in the court of King's Bench, which he afterwards published. Through answering the cases of his friend John Dunning, afterwards Lord Ashburton, he gradually became known to the attorneys, after which his success was so rapid that in 1780 he was made king's counsel. He showed conspicuous ability in the cross-examination of the witnesses at the trial of Lord George Gordon, but his speech was so tactless that the verdict of acquittal was really due to the brilliant effort of Erskine, the junior counsel. This want of tact, indeed, often betrayed Kenyon into striking blunders; as an advocate he was, moreover, deficient in ability of statement; and his position was achieved chiefly by hard work, a good knowledge of law and several lucky friendships. Through the influence of Lord Thurlow, Kenyon in 1780 entered the House of Commons as member for Hindon, and in 1782 he was, through the same friendship, appointed attorney-general in Lord Buckingham's administration, an office which he continued to hold under Pitt. In 1784 he received the mastership of the rolls, and was created a baronet. In 1788 he was appointed lord chief justice as successor to Lord Mansfield, and the same year was raised to the peerage as Baron Kenyon of Gredington. As he had made many enemies, his elevation was by no means popular with the bar; but on the bench, in spite of his capricious and choleric temper, he proved himself not only an able lawyer, but a judge of rare and inflexible impartiality. He died at Bath, on the 4th of April 1802. Kenyon was succeeded as 2nd baron by his son George (1776-1855), whose great-grandson, Lloyd (b. 1864), became the 4th baron in 1869. See _Life_ by Hon. G. T. Kenyon, 1873. KEOKUK, a city of Lee county, Iowa, U.S.A., on the Mississippi river, at the mouth of the Des Moines, in the S.E. corner of the state, about 200 m. above St Louis. Pop. (1900), 14,641; (1905), 14,604, including 1534 foreign-born; (1910), 14,008. It is served by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific, the Wabash, and the Toledo, Peoria & Western railways. There is a bridge (about 2200 ft. long) across the Mississippi, and another (about 1200 ft. long) across the Des Moines. The city has a public library and St Joseph and Graham hospitals, and is the seat of the Keokuk Medical College (1849). There is a national cemetery here. Much of the city is built on bluffs along the Mississippi. Keokuk is at the foot of the Des Moines Rapids, round which the Federal Government has constructed a navigable canal (opened 1877) about 9 m. long, with a draft at extreme low water of 5 ft.; at the foot a great dam, 1½ m. long and 38 ft. high, has been constructed. Keokuk has various manufactures; its factory product in 1905 was valued at $4,225,915, 38.6% more than in 1900. The city was named after Keokuk, a chief of the Sauk and Foxes (1780-1848), whose name meant "the watchful" or "he who moves alertly." In spite of Black Hawk's war policy in 1832 Keokuk was passive and neutral, and with a portion of his nation remained peaceful while Black Hawk and his warriors fought. His grave, surmounted by a monument, is in Rand Park. The first house on the site of the city was built about 1820, but further settlement did not begin until 1836. Keokuk was laid out as a town in 1837, was chartered as a city in 1848, and in 1907 was one of five cities of the state governed by a special charter. KEONJHAR, a tributary state of India, within the Orissa division of Bengal; area, 3096 sq. m.; pop. (1901), 285,758; estimated revenue, £20,000. The state is an offshoot from Mayurbhanj. Part of it consists of rugged hills, rising to more than 3000 ft. above sea-level. The residence of the raja is at Keonjhar (pop. 4532). KEONTHAL, a petty hill state in the Punjab, India, with an area of 116 sq. m.; pop. (1901), 22,499; estimated revenue, £4400. The chief, a Rajput, received the title of raja in 1857. After the Gurkha War in 1815, a portion of Keonthal, which had been occupied by the Gurkhas, was sold to the maharaja of Patiala, the remainder being restored to its hereditary chief. In 1823 the district of Punar was added to the Keonthal state. The raja exercises rights of lordship over the petty states of Kothi, Theog, Madhan and Ratesh. KEPLER, JOHANN (1571-1630), German astronomer, was born on the 27th of December 1571, at Weil, in the duchy of Württemberg, of which town his grandfather was burgomaster. He was the eldest child of an ill-assorted union. His father, Henry Kepler, was a reckless soldier of fortune; his mother, Catherine Guldenmann, the daughter of the burgomaster of Eltingen, was undisciplined and ill-educated. Her husband found campaigning in Flanders under Alva a welcome relief from domestic life; and, after having lost all he possessed by a forfeited security and tried without success the trade of tavern-keeping in the village of Elmendingen, he finally, in 1589, deserted his family. The misfortune and misconduct of his parents were not the only troubles of Kepler's childhood. He recovered from small-pox in his fourth year with crippled hands and eyesight permanently impaired; and a constitution enfeebled by premature birth had to withstand successive shocks of severe illness. His schooling began at Leonberg in 1577--the year, as he himself tells us, of a great comet; but domestic bankruptcy occasioned his transference to field-work, in which he was exclusively employed for several years. Bodily infirmity, combined with mental aptitude, were eventually considered to indicate à theological vocation; he was, in 1584, placed at the seminary of Adelberg, and thence removed, two years later, to that of Maulbronn. A brilliant examination for the degree of bachelor procured him, in 1588, admittance on the foundation to the university of Tübingen, where he laid up a copious store of classical erudition, and imbibed Copernican principles from the private instructions of his teacher and life-long friend, Michael Maestlin. As yet, however, he had little knowledge of, and less inclination for, astronomy; and it was with extreme reluctance that he turned aside from the more promising career of the ministry to accept, early in 1594, the vacant chair of that science at Gratz, placed at the disposal of the Tübingen professors by the Lutheran states of Styria. The best recognized function of German astronomers in that day was the construction of prophesying almanacs, greedily bought by a credulous public. Kepler thus found that the first duties required of him were of an astrological nature, and set himself with characteristic alacrity to master the rules of the art as laid down by Ptolemy and Cardan. He, moreover, sought in the events of his own life a verification of the theory of planetary influences; and it is to this practice that we owe the summary record of each year's occurrences which, continued almost to his death, affords for his biography a slight but sure foundation. But his thoughts were already working in a higher sphere. He early attained to the settled conviction that for the actual disposition of the solar system some abstract intelligible reason must exist, and this, after much meditation, he believed himself to have found in an imaginary relation between the "five regular solids" and the number and distances of the planets. He notes with exultation the 9th of July 1595, as the date of the pseudo-discovery, the publication of which in _Prodromus Dissertationum Cosmographicarum seu Mysterium Cosmographicum_ (Tübingen, 1596) procured him much fame, and a friendly correspondence with the two most eminent astronomers of the time, Tycho Brahe and Galileo. Soon after his arrival at Gratz, Kepler contracted an engagement with Barbara von Mühleck, a wealthy Styrian heiress, who, at the age of twenty-three, had already survived one husband and been divorced from another. Before her relatives could be brought to countenance his pretensions, Kepler was obliged to undertake a journey to Württemberg to obtain documentary evidence of the somewhat obscure nobility of his family, and it was thus not until the 27th of April 1597 that the marriage was celebrated. In the following year the archduke Ferdinand, on assuming the government of his hereditary dominions, issued an edict of banishment against Protestant preachers and professors. Kepler immediately fled to the Hungarian frontier, but, by the favour of the Jesuits, was recalled and reinstated in his post. The gymnasium, however, was deserted; the nobles of Styria began to murmur at subsidizing a teacher without pupils; and he found it prudent to look elsewhere for employment. His refusal to subscribe unconditionally to the rigid formula of belief adopted by the theologians of Tübingen permanently closed against him the gates of his _alma mater_. His embarrassment was relieved however by an offer from Tycho Brahe of the position of assistant in his observatory near Prague, which, after a preliminary visit of four months, he accepted. The arrangement was made just in time; for in August 1600 he received definitive notice to leave Gratz, and, having leased his wife's property, he departed with his family for Prague. By Tycho's unexpected death (Oct. 24, 1601) a brilliant career seemed to be thrown open to Kepler. The emperor Rudolph II. immediately appointed him to succeed his patron as imperial mathematician, although at a reduced salary of 500 florins; the invaluable treasure of Tycho's observations was placed at his disposal; and the laborious but congenial task was entrusted to him of completing the tables to which the grateful Dane had already affixed the title of _Rudolphine_. The first works executed by him at Prague were, nevertheless, a homage to the astrological proclivities of the emperor. In _De fundamentis astrologiae certioribus_ (Prague, 1602) he declared his purpose of preserving and purifying the grain of truth which he believed the science to contain. Indeed, the doctrine of "aspects" and "influences" fitted excellently with his mystical conception of the universe, and enabled him to discharge with a semblance of sincerity the most lucrative part of his professional duties. Although he strictly limited his prophetic pretensions to the estimate of tendencies and probabilities, his forecasts were none the less in demand. Shrewd sense and considerable knowledge of the world came to the aid of stellar lore in the preparation of "prognostics" which, not unfrequently hitting off the event, earned him as much credit with the vulgar as his cosmical speculations with the learned. He drew the horoscopes of the emperor and Wallenstein, as well as of a host of lesser magnates; but, though keenly alive to the unworthy character of such a trade, he made necessity his excuse for a compromise with superstition. "Nature," he wrote, "which has conferred upon every animal the means of subsistence, has given astrology as an adjunct and ally to astronomy." He dedicated to the emperor in 1603 a treatise on the "great conjunction" of that year (_Judicium de trigono igneo_); and he published his observations on a brilliant star which appeared suddenly (Sept. 30, 1604), and remained visible for seventeen months, in _De stella nova in pede Serpentarii_ (Prague, 1606). While sharing the opinion of Tycho as to the origin of such bodies by condensation of nebulous matter from the Milky Way, he attached a mystical signification to the coincidence in time and place of the sidereal apparition with a triple conjunction of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The main task of his life was not meanwhile neglected. This was nothing less than the foundation of a new astronomy, in which physical cause should replace arbitrary hypothesis. A preliminary study of optics led to the publication, in 1604, of his _Astronomiae pars optica_, containing important discoveries in the theory of vision, and a notable approximation towards the true law of refraction. But it was not until 1609 that, the "great Martian labour" being at length completed, he was able, in his own figurative language, to lead the captive planet to the foot of the imperial throne. From the time of his first introduction to Tycho he had devoted himself to the investigation of the orbit of Mars, which, on account of its relatively large eccentricity, had always been especially recalcitrant to theory, and the results appeared in _Astronomia nova_ [Greek: haitiologêtos], _seu Physica coelestis tradita commentariis de motibus stellae Martis_ (Prague, 1609). In this, the most memorable of Kepler's multifarious writings, two of the cardinal principles of modern astronomy--the laws of elliptical orbits and of equal areas--were established (see ASTRONOMY: _History_); important truths relating to gravity were enunciated, and the tides ascribed to the influence of lunar attraction; while an attempt to explain the planetary revolutions in the then backward condition of mechanical knowledge produced a theory of vortices closely resembling that afterwards adopted by Descartes. Having been provided, in August 1610, by Ernest, archbishop of Cologne, with one of the new Galilean instruments, Kepler began, with unspeakable delight, to observe the wonders revealed by it. He had welcomed with a little essay called _Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo_ Galileo's first announcement of celestial novelties; he now, in his _Dioptrice_ (Augsburg, 1611), expounded the theory of refraction by lenses, and suggested the principle of the "astronomical" or inverting telescope. Indeed the work may be said to have founded the branch of science to which it gave its name. The year 1611 was marked by Kepler as the most disastrous of his life. The death by small-pox of his favourite child was followed by that of his wife, who, long a prey to melancholy, was on the 3rd of July carried off by typhus. Public calamity was added to private bereavement. On the 23rd of May 1611 Matthias, brother of the emperor, assumed the Bohemian crown in Prague, compelling Rudolph to take refuge in the citadel, where he died on the 20th of January following. Kepler's fidelity in remaining with him to the last did not deprive him of the favour of his successor. Payments of arrears, now amounting to upwards of 4000 florins, was not, however, in the desperate condition of the imperial finances, to be hoped for; and he was glad, while retaining his position as court astronomer, to accept (in 1612) the office of mathematician to the states of Upper Austria. His residence at Linz was troubled by the harsh conduct of the pastor Hitzler, in excluding him from the rites of his church on the ground of supposed Calvinistic leanings--a decision confirmed, with the addition of an insulting reprimand, on his appeal to Württemberg. In 1613 he appeared with the emperor Matthias before the diet of Ratisbon as the advocate of the

Chapters

1. Chapter 1 2. prologue as a sermon preached in acts. Although Samuel Johnson described 3. 1867. He subsequently edited the _Pesti Napló_, which became virtually 4. 1454. He was buried at Canterbury, in the choir. Kempe was a politician 5. 1586. Kendal was plundered by the Scots in 1210, and was visited by the 6. 1576. His son John (c. 1567-1615), who became the 5th earl, was lord 7. 832. The Pictish Chronicle, however, gives Tuesday, the 13th of February 8. 687. There is some evidence for a successful invasion by the East Saxon 9. 1819. The Bank of the Commonwealth was chartered in 1820 as a state 10. 1822. A court decision denying the legal tender quality of the notes 11. 1900. (E. He.) 12. introduction into Germany of the Gregorian calendar; but the attempt was 13. 17. Later, Kerak was the seat of the archbishop of Petra. The Latin 14. 1793. He had, however, entered the ranks of the Girondins, and had voted 15. 1811. He studied theology at Göttingen, Berlin, Heidelberg and Munich, 16. 1879. More than once the sultan offered him anew the grand vizierate, 17. 950. Their home was in the spurs of the Caucasus and along the shores of 18. 1790. The fortifications have fallen into decay. The name Kherson was 19. 1832. The first mention of the cloth trade for which Kidderminster was 20. 1813. As a boy he was delicate, precocious and morbid in temperament. He 21. 1576. The town is of high antiquarian interest. There is a Protestant 22. 1790. After being bombarded by the Anglo-French fleet in July 1854, it 23. 1622. Sir Robert was a member of all the parliaments between 1603 and 24. 1612. Pepys says that as a boy he satisfied his love of the stage by 25. 1423. It is situated near the confluence of the rivers and glens of the 26. 1795. He then took part in the Italian campaigns of 1796 and 1797, and 27. 1885. Kilmarnock rose into importance in the 17th century by its 28. 4440. The chief buildings include the public library, the Masonic hall 29. 1899. He died in London on the 8th of April 1902, being succeeded in the 30. 1885. On the outbreak of war between the British and the Boers in 1899 31. 1591. With his younger brother John he proceeded from Westminster School 32. 1609. Henry King entered the church, and after receiving various 33. 1838. Another descendant, PETER JOHN LOCKE KING (1811-1885), who was 34. 1550. It is situated on the Firth of Forth, 2¼ m. E. by N. of 35. introduction to Solomon. But Lucian's recension of the Septuagint (ed. 36. introduction (iii.), a contains generalizing statements of Solomon's 37. introduction. Further confusion appears in the Septuagint, which inserts 38. 1867. Lord Kingsdown never married, and his title became extinct. 39. introduction to Mr R. E. Dennett's _Notes on the Folk Lore of the Fjort_ 40. 1894. (A. E. S.) 41. 1887. The twenty-one years spent by Kirk in Zanzibar covered the most

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