Bologna Universities. At Paris, in 1732, Algarotti met, and became a friend of, Voltaire, and joined the Deistic school. He wrote a manual of Newtonian physics for women (Il Newtonianismo per le dame, 1733) and a number of greatly esteemed volumes on art, philosophy, poetry, physics, and history. Frederick the Great attracted him to his court of learning and made him Count and Chamberlain (1747). Augustus III of Saxony appointed him Councillor of War. His writings (10 vols., 1778-84) very freely express his Deism; and Cardinal Ganganelli (afterwards Pope Clement XIV), who greatly admired him, tried in vain to convert him. "You are," the Cardinal wrote, " one of those rare men whom one would fain love even beyond the grave" (Von Reumont's Ganganelli, 1847, Br. lxxii). There is a good recent biography of Algarotti by E. Northcott (F. Algarotti, 1917). Frederick the Great erected a monument to him at Pisa. D. May 3, 1764.
Allbutt, Sir Thomas Clifford, K.C.B., M.A., M.D., D.Sc., LL.D., F.R.S., physician. B. July 20, 1836. Ed, St. Peter's, York, and Cambridge University (Caius), where he took first class in the Natural Science Tripos. Allbutt was physician to various institutions until 1889, when he was appointed Commissioner in Lunacy. In 1892 he resigned this position and became Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge. He was Vice-President of the Royal Society 1914-16. He has sat on many Royal Commissions, has written many volumes on medicine, and has been Lane Lecturer, Goulstonian Lecturer, and Harveian Orator. He invented the Short Clinical Thermometer. In his genial and learned Harveian Oration (Science and Medieval Thought, 1901) Sir Thomas expresses his mild but thorough dissent from the creeds. "I wonder," he says, "if we are glad that the riddle of the origin and issues of being, which tormented their eager hearts, is not solved, but proved insoluble."
Allen, Charles Grant Blairfindie, B.A., writer. B. (Canada) Feb. 24, 1848. Grant Allen was the son of a minister of the Irish Church who had emigrated to Canada. He was educated at first by his father, then by a tutor from Yale. In 1862 he was sent to Europe, and studied, successively, at the College Imperial of Dieppe, the King Edward's School at Birmingham, and Oxford University (Merton). From 1873 to 1876 he was professor of mental and moral philosophy in a college for the blacks at Spanish Town, Jamaica, where he developed his Agnostic and other radical views of life. On his return to England he devoted himself to journalism and letters. His Physiological Æsthetics (1877), which he dedicated to Herbert Spencer, won for him considerable regard among students of science and philosophy, and he sustained this by his Vignettes from Nature (1881), The Evolutionist at Large (1881) The Colours of Flowers (1882), Colin Clout's Calendar (1883), and The Evolution of the Idea of God (1897). He was greatly esteemed by Huxley and Darwin, and his refined character and wealth of culture endeared him to all the advanced thinkers of his day. After 1883 he wrote a number of novels and guide books, and published some verse. His Agnosticism is best seen in a posthumous collection of essays (The Hand of God, 1909) published by the R. P. A. D. Oct. 28, 1899.
Allen, Colonel Ethan, American politician. B. Jan. 10, 1737. As Colonel of the "Green Mountain Boys," Allen played an important part in the War of Separation, and he was afterwards a member of the Vermont State-Legislature. In 1781 he issued what seems to have been the first anti-Christian publication in America, Reason the Only Oracle of Man. A statue has been raised in his honour at Montpelier (Vermont). D. Feb. 13, 1789.
Allen, John, M.D., writer. B. Feb. 3, 1771. Ed. Edinburgh University. He
