was afterwards a privy councillor and lord-lieutenant of Kinross-shire. In 1814 he became a baron of Exchequer in Scotland, and was chief commissioner of the newly established jury-court for the trial of civil causes, from 1815 to 1830, when it was merged in the permanent supreme tribunal. He died at Edinburgh on the 17th of February 1839.
ADAMANT (from Gr. άδάμας, untameable), the modern diamond (q.v.), but also a name given to any very hard substance. The Greek word is used by Homer as a personal epithet, and by Hesiod for the hard metal in armour, while Theophrastus applies it to the hardest crystal. By an etymological confusion with the Lat. adamare, to have an attraction for, it also came to be associated with the loadstone; but since the term was displaced by “diamond” it has had only a figurative and poetical use.
ADAMAWA, a country of West Africa, which lies roughly between 6° and 11° N., and 11° and 15° E., about midway between the Bight of Biafra and Lake Chad. It is now divided between the British protectorate of Nigeria (which includes the chief town Yola, q.v.) and the German colony of Cameroon. This region is watered by the Benue, the chief affluent of the Niger, and its tributary the Faro. Another stream, the Yedseram, flows north-east to Lake Chad. The most fertile parts of the country are the plains near the Benue, about 800 ft. above the sea. South and east of the river the land rises to an elevation of 1600 ft., and is diversified by numerous hills and groups of mountains. These ranges contain remarkable rock formations, towers, battlements and pinnacles crowning the hills. Chief of these formations is a gigantic pillar some 450 ft. high and 150 ft. thick at the base. It stands on the summit of a high conical hill. Mount Alantika, about 25 miles south-south-east of Yola, rises from the plain, an isolated granite mass, to the height of 6000 ft. The country, which is very fertile and is covered with luxuriant herbage, has many villages and a considerable population. Durra, ground-nuts, yams and cotton are the principal products, and the palm and banana abound. Elephants are numerous and ivory is exported. In the eastern part of the country the rhinoceros is met with, and the rivers swarm with crocodiles and with a curious mammal called the ayu, bearing some resemblance to the seal.
Adamawa is named after a Fula Emir Adama, who in the early years of the 19th century conquered the country. To the Hausa and Bornuese it was previously known as Fumbina (or Southland). The inhabitants are mainly pure negroes such as the Durra, Batta and Dekka, speaking different languages, and all fetish-worshippers. They are often of a very low type, and some of the tribes are cannibals. Slave-trading was still active among them in the early years of the 20th century. The Fula (q.v.), who first came into the country about the 15th century as nomad herdsmen, are found chiefly in the valleys, the pagan tribes holding the mountainous districts. There are also in the country numbers of Hausa, who are chiefly traders, as well as Arabs and Kanuri from Bornu. The emir of Yola, in the period of Fula lordship, claimed rights of suzerainty over the whole of Adamawa, but the country, since the subjection of the Fula (c. 1900), has consisted of a number of small states under the control of the British and Germans. Garua on the upper Benue, 65 m. east of Yola, is the headquarters of the German administration for the region and the chief trade centre in the north of Adamawa. Yoko is one of the principal towns in the south of the country, and in the centre is the important town of Ngaundere. After Heinrich Barth, who explored the country in 1851, the first traveller to penetrate Adamawa was the German, E. R. Flegel (1882). It has since been traversed by many expeditions, notably that of Baron von Uechtritz and Dr Siegfried Passarge (1893–1894).
An interesting account of Adamawa, its peoples and history, is given by Heinrich Barth in his Travels in North and Central Africa (new edition, London, 1890), and later information is contained in S. Passarge’s Adamawa (Berlin, 1895). (See also Cameroon and Nigeria, and the bibliographies there given.)
ADAMITES, or Adamians, a sect of heretics that flourished in North Africa in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. Basing itself probably
on a union of certain gnostic and ascetic doctrines, this sect pretended that its members were re-established in Adam’s state of original innocency. They accordingly rejected the form of
marriage, which, they said, would never have existed but for sin, and lived in absolute lawlessness, holding that, whatever they
did, their actions could be neither good nor bad. During the middle ages the doctrines of this obscure sect, which did not itself exist long, were revived in Europe by the Brethren and
Sisters of the Free Spirit.
ADAMNAN, or Adomnan (c. 624–704), Irish saint and historian, was born at Raphoe, Donegal, Ireland, about the year 624. In 679 he was elected abbot of Hy or Iona, being ninth in succession from the founder, St Columba. While on a mission to the court of King Aldfrith of Northumberland in 686, he was led to adopt the Roman rules with regard to the time for celebrating Easter and the tonsure, and on his return to Iona he tried without success to enforce the change upon the monks. He died on the 23rd of September 704. Adamnan wrote a Life of St Columba, which, though abounding in fabulous matter, is of great interest and value. The best editions are those published by W. Reeves (1857, new edit. Edinburgh, 1874) and by J. T. Fowler (Oxford, 1894). Adamnan’s other well-known work, De Locis Sanctis (edited by P. Geyer, Itinera Hierosolymitana saeculi, iii.-viii., &c., 1898; vol. 39 of Bienna Corpus Script. Ecc. Latin) was based, according to Bede, on information received from Arculf, a French bishop, who, on his return from the Holy Land, was wrecked on the west coast of Britain, and was entertained for a time at Iona. This was first published at Ingolstadt in 1619 by J. Gretser, who also defended Baronius’ acceptance of Arculf’s narrative against Casaubon. An English translation by G. J. R. Macpherson, Arculfus’ Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, was published by the Pilgrim’s Text Society (London, 1889).
For full bibliography see U. Chevalier, Répert. de sources historiques (1903), p. 40.
ADAMS, ANDREW LEITH (1827–1882), Scottish naturalist and palaeontologist, the second son of Francis Adams of Banchory, Aberdeen, was born on the 21st of March 1827, and was educated to the medical profession. As surgeon in the Army Medical Department from 1848 to 1873, he utilized his opportunities for the study of natural history in India and Kashmir, in Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar and Canada. His observations on the fossil vertebrata of the Maltese Islands led him eventually to give special study to fossil elephants, on which he became an acknowledged authority. In 1872 he was elected F.R.S. In 1873 he was chosen professor of zoology in the Royal College of Science, Dublin, and in 1878 professor of natural history in Queen’s College, Cork, a post which he held until the close of his life. He died at Queenstown on the 29th of July 1882.
Publications.—Notes of a Naturalist in the Nile Valley and Malta (London, 1870); other works of travel; Monograph on the British Fossil Elephants (Palaeontographical Soc.), (London, 1877–1881).
ADAMS, CHARLES FRANCIS (1807–1886), American diplomatist, son of John Quincy Adams, and grandson of John Adams, was born in Boston on the 18th of August 1807. His father, having been appointed minister to Russia, took him in 1809 to St Petersburg, where he acquired a perfect familiarity with French, learning it as his native tongue. After eight years spent in Russia and England, he attended the Boston Latin School for four years, and in 1825 graduated at Harvard. He lived two years in the executive mansion, Washington, during his father’s presidential term, studying law and moving in a society where he met Webster, Clay, Jackson and Randolph. Returning to Boston, he devoted ten years to business and study, and wrote for the North American Review. He also undertook the management of his father’s pecuniary affairs, and actively supported him in his contest in the House of Representatives for the right of petition and the anti-slavery cause. In 1835 he wrote an effective and widely read political pamphlet, entitled, after Edmund Burke’s more famous work, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. He was a member of the Massachusetts general court from 1840 to 1845, sitting for three years in the House of Representatives and for two years in the Senate; and in 1846–1848 he edited a party journal, the Boston Whig. In 1848 he was prominent in politics as a “Conscience Whig,”
