death; and, in spite of numerous applications for mercy, he was executed at Tyburn on the 27th of June 1777. Samuel Johnson was very zealous in pleading for a pardon, and a petition from the city of London received 23,000 signatures. Dr Dodd was a voluminous writer and possessed considerable abilities, with but little judgment and much vanity. He wrote one or two comedies, and his Beauties of Shakespeare, published in 1752, was long a well-known work; while his Thoughts in Prison, a poem in blank verse, written between his conviction and execution, naturally attracted much attention. He published a large number of sermons and other theological works, including a Commentary on the Bible (1765–1770). A list of his fifty-five writings and an account of the writer is included in the Thoughts in Prison.
See also P. Fitzgerald, A Famous Forgery (1865).
DODDER (Frisian dodd, a bunch; Dutch dot, ravelled thread), the popular name of the annual, leafless, twining, parasitic plants forming the genus Cuscuta, formerly regarded as representing a distinct natural order Cuscutaceae, but now generally ranked as a tribe of the natural order Convolvulaceae. The genus contains nearly 100 species and is widely distributed in the temperate and warmer parts of the earth. The slender thread-like stem is white, yellow, or red in colour, bears no leaves, and attaches itself by suckers to the stem or leaves of some other plant round which it twines and from which it derives its nourishment. It bears clusters of small flowers with a four- or five-toothed calyx, a cup-shaped corolla with four or five stamens inserted on its tube, and sometimes a ring of scales below the stamens; the two-celled ovary becomes when ripe a capsule splitting by a ring just above the base. The seeds are angular and contain a thread-like spirally coiled embryo which bears no cotyledons. On coming in contact with the living stem of some other plant the seedling dodder throws out a sucker, by which it attaches itself and begins to absorb the sap of its foster-parent; it then soon ceases to have any connexion with the ground. As it grows, it throws out fresh suckers, establishing itself firmly on the host-plant (fig. 2). After making a few turns round one stem the dodder finds its way to another, and thus it continues twining and branching till it resembles “fine, closely-tangled, wet catgut.” The injury done to flax, clover, hop and bean crops by species of dodder is often very great. C. europaea, the greater dodder (fig. 1) is found parasitic on nettles, thistles, vetches and the hop; C. Epilinum, on flax; C. Epithymum, on furze, ling and thyme. C. Trifolii, the Clover Dodder, is perhaps a subspecies of the last mentioned.
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| Fig. 1.—Cuscuta europaea, Dodder. | Fig. 2.—Cuscuta glomerata. Section through union between parasite and host. | |
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1. Flower removed from 2, Calyx. |
c, stem of host. |
DODDRIDGE, PHILIP (1702–1751), English Nonconformist divine, was born in London on the 26th of June 1702. His father, Daniel Doddridge, was a London merchant, and his mother the orphan daughter of the Rev. John Bauman, a Lutheran clergyman who had fled from Prague to escape religious persecution, and had held for some time the mastership of the grammar school at Kingston-upon-Thames. Before he could read, his mother taught him the history of the Old and New Testament by the assistance of some blue Dutch chimney-tiles. He afterwards went to a private school in London, and in 1712 to the grammar school at Kingston-upon-Thames. About 1715 he was removed to a private school at St Albans, where he was much influenced by the Presbyterian minister, Samuel Clarke. He declined offers which would have led him into the Anglican ministry or the bar, and in 1719 entered the very liberal academy for dissenters at Kibworth in Leicestershire, taught at that time by the Rev. John Jennings, whom Doddridge succeeded in the ministry at that place in 1723, declining overtures from Coventry, Pershore and London (Haberdashers’ Hall). In 1729, at a general meeting of Nonconformist ministers, he was chosen to conduct the academy established in that year at Market Harborough. In the same year he received an invitation from the independent congregation at Northampton, which he accepted. Here he continued his multifarious labours; but the church seems to have decreased, and his many engagements and bulky correspondence interfered seriously with his pulpit work, and with the discipline of his academy, where he had some 200 students to whom he lectured on philosophy and theology in the mathematical or Spinozistic style. In 1751 his health, which had never been good, broke down, and he sailed for Lisbon on the 30th of September of that year; but the change was unavailing, and he died there on the 26th of October. His popularity as a preacher is said to have been chiefly due to his “high susceptibility, joined with physical advantages and perfect sincerity.” His sermons were mostly practical in character, and his great aim was to cultivate in his hearers a spiritual and devotional frame of mind. He laboured for the attainment of a united Nonconformist body, which should retain the cultured element without alienating the uneducated. His principal works are, The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (1745), which best illustrates his religious genius, and has been widely translated; The Family Expositor (6 vols., 1739–1756), Life of Colonel Gardiner (1747); and a Course of Lectures on Pneumatology, Ethics and Divinity (1763). He also published several courses of sermons on particular topics, and is the author of many well-known and justly admired hymns, e.g. “O God of Bethel, by whose hand.” In 1736 both the universities at Aberdeen gave him the degree of D.D.
See Memoirs, by Rev. Job Orton (1766); Letters to and from Dr Doddridge, by Rev. Thomas Stedman (1790); and Correspondence and Diary, in 5 vols., by his grandson, John Doddridge Humphreys (1829). The best life is Stanford’s Philip Doddridge (1880). Doddridge’s academy is now represented by New College, Hampstead, in the library of which there is a large collection of his manuscripts.
