Among Drew’s lesser writings are a Life of Dr Thomas Coke (1817), and a work on the deity of Christ (1813). He died at Helston in Cornwall on the 29th of March 1833. He was a man of strong mind, honourable spirit and affectionate disposition, energetic both in speech and in writing.
A memoir of his life by his eldest son appeared in 1834.
DREWENZ, a river of Germany, a right-bank tributary of the Vistula. It rises on the plateau of Hohenstein in East Prussia, 5 m. S.W. of the town of Hohenstein. After passing through the lake of Drewenz (7 m. long), it flows S.W. through flat marshy country, and forms, from just below the town of Strassburg to that of Leibitsch, a distance of 30 m., the frontier between Prussia and Russian Poland. After a course of 148 m. it enters the Vistula from the right, a little above the fortress of Thorn. It is navigable only for rafts. Lake Drewenz is connected with Elbing (and so with the Baltic) by the navigable Elbing-Oberland Canal.
DREXEL, ANTHONY JOSEPH (1826–1893), American banker, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 13th of September 1826. He was the son of Francis M. Drexel (1792–1863), a native of Austrian Tirol, who emigrated to America in 1817, and, after some years spent as a portrait-painter, became a banker and the founder of the house of Drexel & Company. Anthony, who entered his father’s counting-house in 1839, eventually, with his brothers Francis and Joseph, succeeded to the control of the business, and organized the banking houses of Drexel, Morgan & Company, New York, of which his brother Joseph W. (1833–1888) was long the resident head, and of Drexel, Harjes & Company, Paris. In 1864 he joined his friend George W. Childs in the purchase of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and with him in 1892 founded the Printers’ Home for union men at Colorado Springs. In 1891 he founded, and endowed with $2,000,000, the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry in Philadelphia, the buildings for which he constructed at a cost of $750,000. This institution provides technical instruction for both night and day classes and public lecture courses, and has a good museum and a library of 35,000 volumes. Drexel died at Carlsbad, Germany, on the 30th of June 1893.
DREYFUS, ALFRED (1859– ), French soldier, of Jewish parentage, the scandal of whose condemnation for treason and subsequent rehabilitation convulsed French political life between 1894 and 1899, and only ended in 1906, was born in Mülhausen, Upper Alsace, removing to Paris in 1874. After going through the usual course of military instruction with credit, he became a sous-lieutenant in the artillery in 1882, and was promoted captain in 1889; and, after passing through the École de Guerre with distinction, he was appointed to the general staff. His name was, however, unknown to the general public till he was arrested on the 15th of October 1894 on a charge of selling military secrets to Germany, condemned, publicly degraded (January 4, 1895), and transported (March 10) to the Ile du Diable, French Guiana. The story of the subsequent proceedings in this celebrated case is told in the article Anti-Semitism, and need not here be repeated. It was not till 1899 that the unfortunate prisoner was brought back to France for retrial by court-martial, and even then, so strong was the anti-Semitic and military prejudice, he was again found guilty “with extenuating circumstances” at Rennes (September 9), though ten days later he was “pardoned” by President Loubet. It was not till the Cour de Cassation ordered a further investigation, and on the 12th of July 1906 decided that his conviction had been based on a forgery and that Dreyfus was innocent, that the agitation came to a final conclusion. He was then restored to his rank in the army and promoted major. But the anti-Semitic and anti-Dreyfusard spirit in certain French circles could not easily be quelled even then; and on the occasion of the translation of the remains of Emile Zola (Dreyfus’s determined champion) to the Pantheon on the 4th of June 1908, Major Dreyfus was shot at and wounded by a fanatical journalist named Gregori, who was subsequently acquitted by a Paris jury of the charge of attempted murder, his own plea being that he had merely intended a “demonstration.”
See Dreyfus’s own Five Years of my Life (1901), and literature cited under Anti-Semitism.
DRIBURG, a town and spa of Germany, in Prussian Westphalia, pleasantly situated on the Aa and the railway Soest-Höxter-Berlin. Pop. 2600. It has an Evangelical and a Roman Catholic church and some glass manufactures. It is celebrated for its saline-ferruginous springs, discovered in 766, and since 1779 largely frequented in summer. In the vicinity are the ruins of Iburg, a castle destroyed by Charlemagne in 775, and bestowed by him upon the bishopric of Paderborn.
DRIFFIELD (officially Great Driffield), a market town in the Buckrose parliamentary division of the East Riding of Yorkshire, England, 1912 m. N. by W. from Hull, the junction of several branch lines of the North Eastern railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 5766. It is pleasantly situated at the foot of the Wolds, and is connected with Hull by a navigable canal. The church of All Saints is of various dates from Norman onwards. The town is the centre of a rich agricultural district, and large markets and fairs are held. There are works for the manufacture of oil-cake. Driffield is of high antiquity, and numerous tumuli are seen in the vicinity, while there is an excellent private antiquarian museum in the town.
DRIFT (from “drive”), a verb or noun used in various connexions with the sense of propelled motion, especially (but not necessarily) of an aimless sort, undirected. Thus it is possible to speak of a snow-drift, an accumulation driven by the wind; of a ship drifting out of its course; of the drift of a speech, i.e. its general tendency. The word is also used in some technical senses, more immediately resulting from the action of driving something in. But the most important technical use of the word is in geology, as introduced by C. Lyell in 1840 in place of “Diluvium.” The earlier geologists had been in the habit of dividing the Quaternary deposits into an older Diluvium and a younger Alluvium; the latter is still employed in England, but the former has dropped out of use, though it is still retained by some continental writers. The Alluvium was distinguished from Diluvium by the fact that its mammalian fossils were representatives of still living forms, but it is a matter of great difficulty to separate these two divisions in practice. “The term drift is now applied generally to the Quaternary deposits, which consist for the most part of gravel, sand, loam or brickearth and clay; it naturally refers to strata laid down at some distance from the rocks to whose destruction they are largely due; but, although applied to river deposits, the word drift is more appropriately used in reference to the accumulations of the Glacial period.
“The occurrence of stones and boulders far removed from their parent source early attracted the attention of geologists, but for a long period the phenomena, now known as of glacial origin, were unexplained, and the drifts were looked upon as little more than ‘extraneous rubbish,’ the product of geological agents, quite distinct from those which helped to form the more ’solid’ rocks that underlie them.” (See H. B. Woodward, The Geology of England and Wales, 2nd ed., 1887.) The conception of an underlying “solid” geological structure covered by a superficial mantle of “drift” is still retained for certain practical purposes; thus, the Geological Survey of Great Britain issues many of the maps in two forms, the “Solid Edition,” showing the “solid geology,” which embraces all igneous rocks and the stratified rocks older than Pleistocene, and the “Drift Edition,” which shows only such older strata as are unobscured by drift.
In writing and in conversation the geological expression “drift” is now usually understood to mean Glacial drift, including boulder clay and all the varieties of sand, gravel and clay deposits formed by the agency of ice sheets, glaciers and icebergs. But in the “Drift” maps many other types of deposit are indicated, such, for instance, as the ordinary modern alluvium of rivers, and the older river terraces (River-drift of various ages), including gravels, brickearth and loam; old raised sea beaches and blown-sand (Aeolian-drift); the “Head” of Cornwall and Devon, an angular detritus consisting of stones with clay or loam; clay-with-flints, rainwash (landwash), scree and talus;
