suddenly turned the course of his life. He belonged to the liberals or democrats, and the triumph of the aristocratic party, through the interference of the courts of France and Sardinia, made residence in his native town impossible, though he was not among the number of the proscribed. He therefore went to join his mother and sisters at St Petersburg. In this he was probably influenced in part by the example of his townsman Pierre Lefort, the first tutor, minister, and general of the tsar. At St Petersburg he was for eighteen months pastor of the French church. In 1785 he removed to London, Lord Shelburne, then a minister of state, having invited him to undertake the education of his sons. It was at the house of Lord Shelburne, now 1st marquess of Lansdowne, where he was treated as a friend or rather member of the family, that he became acquainted with many illustrious men, amongst others Fox, Sheridan, Lord Holland and Sir Samuel Romilly. With the last of these he formed a close and enduring friendship, which had an important influence on his life and pursuits.
In 1788 Dumont visited Paris with Romilly. During a stay of two months in that city he had almost daily intercourse with Mirabeau, and a certain affinity of talents and pursuits led to an intimacy between two persons diametrically opposed to each other in habits and in character. On his return from Paris Dumont made the acquaintance of Jeremy Bentham. Filled with admiration for the genius of Bentham, Dumont made it one of the chief objects of his life to recast and edit the writings of the great English jurist in a form suitable for the ordinary reading public. This literary relationship was, according to Dumont’s own account, one of a somewhat peculiar character. All the fundamental ideas and most of the illustrative material were supplied in the manuscripts of Bentham; Dumont’s task was chiefly to abridge by striking out repeated matter, to supply lacunae, to secure uniformity of style, and to improve the French. The following works of Bentham were published under his editorship: Traité de législation civile et pénale (1802), Théorie des peines et des récompenses (1811), Tactique des assemblées législatives (1815), Traité des preuves judiciaires (1823) and De l’organization judiciaire et de la codification (1828).
In the summer of 1789 Dumont went to Paris. The object of the journey was to obtain through Necker, who had just returned to office, an unrestricted restoration of Genevese liberty, by cancelling the treaty of guarantee between France and Switzerland, which prevented the republic from enacting new laws without the consent of the parties to this treaty. The proceedings and negotiations to which this mission gave rise necessarily brought Dumont into connexion with most of the leading men in the Constituent Assembly, and made him an interested spectator, sometimes even a participator, indirectly, in the events of the French Revolution. The same cause also led him to renew his acquaintance with Mirabeau, whom he found occupied with his duties as a deputy, and with the composition of his journal, the Courier de Provence. For a time Dumont took an active and very efficient part in the conduct of this journal, supplying it with reports as well as original articles, and also furnishing Mirabeau with speeches to be delivered or rather read in the assembly, as related in his highly instructive and interesting posthumous work entitled Souvenirs sur Mirabeau (1832). In fact his friend George Wilson used to relate that one day, when they were dining together at a table d’hôte at Versailles, he saw Dumont engaged in writing the most celebrated paragraph of Mirabeau’s address to the king for the removal of the troops. He also reported such of Mirabeau’s speeches as he did not write, embellishing them from his own stores, which were inexhaustible. But this co-operation soon came to an end; for, being attacked in pamphlets as one of Mirabeau’s writers, he felt hurt at the notoriety thus given to his name in connexion with a man occupying Mirabeau’s peculiar position, and returned to England in 1791.
In 1801 he travelled over various parts of Europe with Lord Henry Petty, afterwards 3rd marquess of Lansdowne, and on his return settled down to the editorship of the works of Bentham already mentioned. In 1814 the restoration of Geneva to independence induced Dumont to return to his native place, and he soon became the leader of the supreme council. He devoted particular attention to the judicial and penal systems of his native state, and many improvements on both are due to him. He died at Milan when on an autumn tour on the 29th of September 1829.
DUMONT D’URVILLE, JULES SÉBASTIEN CÉSAR (1790–1842), French navigator, was born at Condé-sur-Noireau, in Normandy, on the 23rd of May 1790. The death of his father, who before the revolution had held a judicial post in Condé, devolved the care of his education on his mother and his maternal uncle, the Abbé de Croizilles. Failing to pass the entrance examination for the École Polytechnique, he went to sea in 1807 as a novice on board the “Aquilon.” During the next twelve years he gradually rose in the service, and added a knowledge of botany, entomology, English, German, Spanish, Italian and even Hebrew and Greek to the professional branches of his studies. In 1820, while engaged in a hydrographic survey of the Mediterranean, he was fortunate enough to recognize the Venus of Milo (Melos) in a Greek statue recently unearthed, and to secure its preservation by the report he presented to the French ambassador at Constantinople. A wider field for his energies was furnished in 1822 by the circumnavigating expedition of the “Coquille” under the command of his friend Duperrey; and on its return in 1825 his services were rewarded by promotion to the rank of capitaine de frégate, and he was entrusted with the control of a similar enterprise, with the especial purpose of discovering traces of the lost explorer La Pérouse, in which he was successful. The “Astrolabe,” as he renamed the “Coquille,” left Toulon on the 25th of April 1826, and returned to Marseilles on the 25th of March 1829, having traversed the South Atlantic, coasted the Australian continent from King George’s Sound to Port Jackson, charted various parts of New Zealand, and visited the Fiji Islands, the Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia, New Guinea, Amboyna, Van Diemen’s Land, the Caroline Islands, Celebes and Mauritius. Promotion to the rank of capitaine de vaisseau was bestowed on the commander in August 1829; and in August of the following year he was charged with the delicate task of conveying the exiled king Charles X. to England. His proposal to undertake a voyage of discovery to the south polar regions was discouraged by Arago and others, who criticized the work of the previous expedition in no measured terms; but at last, in 1837, all difficulties were surmounted, and on the 7th of September he set sail from Toulon with the “Astrolabe” and its convoy “La Zélée.” On the 15th of January 1838 they sighted the Antarctic ice, and soon after their progress southward was blocked by a continuous bank, which they vainly coasted for 300 m. to the east. Returning westward they visited the South Orkney Islands and part of the New Shetlands, and discovered Joinville Island and Louis Philippe Land, but were compelled by scurvy to seek succour at Talcahuano in Chile. Thence they proceeded across the Pacific and through the Asiatic archipelago, visiting among others the Fiji and the Pelew Islands, coasting New Guinea, and circumnavigating Borneo. In 1840, leaving their sick at Hobart Town, Tasmania, they returned to the Antarctic region, and on the 21st of the month were rewarded by the discovery of Adélie Land, which D’Urville named after his wife, in 140° E. The 6th of November found them at Toulon. D’Urville was at once appointed contre-amiral, and in 1841 he received the gold medal of the Société de Géographie. On the 8th of May 1842 he was killed, with his wife and son, in a railway accident near Meudon.
His principal works are—Enumeratio plantarum quas in insulis Archipelagi aut littoribus Ponti Euxini, &c. (1822); Voyage de la corvette “l’Astrolabe,” 1826–1829 (Paris, 1830–1835), and Voyage au pôle sud et dans l’Océanie, 1837–1840 (Paris, 1842–1854), in each of which his scientific colleagues had a share; Voyages autour du monde; résumé général des voyages de Magellan, &c. (Paris, 1833 and 1844). An island (also called Kairu) off the north coast of New Guinea, and a cape on the same coast, bear the name of D’Urville.
