Vernarecci in Notizie degli scavi, 1880, 458). It already had a bishop in the years 499–502. In 1295 the Malatesta obtained possession of it, and kept it until 1444, when it was sold, with Pesaro, to Federico di Montefeltro of Urbino, and with the latter it passed to the papacy under Urban VIII. in 1631.
FOSSOMBRONI, VITTORIO, Count (1754–1844), Tuscan
statesman and mathematician, was born at Arezzo. He was
educated at the university of Pisa, where he devoted himself
particularly to mathematics. He obtained an official appointment
in Tuscany in 1782, and twelve years later was entrusted
by the grand duke with the direction of the works for the drainage
of the Val di Chiana, on which subject he had published a treatise
in 1789. In 1796 he was made minister for foreign affairs, but
on the French occupation of Tuscany in 1799 he fled to Sicily.
On the erection of the grand duchy into the ephemeral kingdom
of Etruria, under the queen-regent Maria Louisa, he was appointed
president of the commission of finance. In 1809 he went
to Paris as one of the senators for Tuscany to pay homage to
Napoleon. He was made president of the legislative commission
on the restoration of the grand duke Ferdinand III. in 1814,
and subsequently prime minister, which position he retained
under the grand duke Leopold II. His administration, which
was only terminated by his death, greatly contributed to promote
the well-being of the country. He was the real master of Tuscany,
and the bases of his rule were equality of all subjects before the
law, honesty in the administration of justice and toleration of
opinion, but he totally neglected the moral improvement of the
people. At the age of seventy-eight he married, and twelve
years afterwards died, in 1844.
Bibliography.—Gino Capponi, Il Conte V. Fossombroni, A. von Reumont, Geschichte Toscanas unter dem Hause Lothringen-Habsburg (Gotha, 1877); Zobi, Storia civile delta Toscana (Florence, 1850–1853); Galeotti, Delle Leggi e dell’ amministrazione della Toscana (Florence, 1847); Baldasseroni, Leopoldo II. (Florence, 1871); see also under Capponi, Gino; Ferdinand III., of Tuscany, and Leopold II., of Tuscany. (L. V.*)
FOSTER, SIR CLEMENT LE NEVE (1841–1904), English
geologist and mineralogist, the second son of Peter Le Neve
Foster (for many years secretary of the Society of Arts), was
born at Camberwell on the 23rd of March 1841. After receiving
his early education at Boulogne and Amiens, he studied successively
at the Royal School of Mines in London and at the mining
college of Freiburg in Saxony. In 1860 he joined the Geological
Survey in England, working in the Wealden area and afterwards
in Derbyshire. Conjointly with William Topley (1841–1894)
he communicated to the Geological Society of London in 1865
the now classic paper “On the superficial deposits of the Valley
of the Medway, with remarks on the Denudation of the Weald.”
In this paper the sculpturing of the Wealden area by rain and
rivers was ably advocated. Retiring from the Geological
Survey in 1865, Foster devoted his attention to mineralogy
and mining in Cornwall, Egypt and Venezuela. In 1872 he was
appointed an inspector of mines under the home office for
the S.W. of England, and in 1880 he was transferred to the N.
Wales district. In 1890 he was appointed professor of mining
at the Royal College of Science and he held this post until the
close of his life. His later work is embodied largely in the reports
of mines and quarries issued annually by the home office. He
was distinguished for his extensive scientific and practical
knowledge of metalliferous mining and stone quarrying. He
was elected F.R.S. in 1892 and was knighted in 1903. While
investigating the cause of a mining disaster in the Isle of Man
in 1897 his constitution suffered much injury from carbonic-oxide
gas, and he never fully recovered from the effects. He
died in London on the 19th of April 1904. He published Ore and
Stone Mining, 1894 (ed. 5, 1904); and The Elements of Mining
and Quarrying, 1903.
FOSTER, GEORGE EULAS (1847– ), Canadian politician
and financier, was born in New Brunswick on the 3rd of
September 1847, of U.E. Loyalist descent. After a brilliant
university career at the university of Brunswick, at Edinburgh
and Heidelberg, he returned to Canada and taught in various
local schools, eventually becoming professor of classics and
history in the local university. In 1882 he became Conservative
member for King’s County, N.B., in the Dominion parliament,
and in 1885 entered the cabinet of Sir John Macdonald as minister
of marine and fisheries; in 1888 he became minister of finance,
which position he held till the defeat of his party in 1896. A
careful and even brilliant financier, and a keen debater, he
became known as a strong believer in protection for Canadian
industries and in preferential trade within the British empire.
FOSTER, JOHN (1770–1843), English author and dissenting
minister, generally known as the “Essayist,” was born in a small
farmhouse near Halifax, Yorkshire, on the 17th of September
1770. Partly from constitutional causes, but partly also from
the want of proper companions, as well as from the grave and
severe habits of his parents, his earlier years were enshrouded
in a somewhat gloomy and sombre atmosphere, which was never
afterwards wholly dissipated. His youthful energy, finding no
proper outlet, developed within him a tendency to morbid
intensity of thought and feeling; and, according to his own
testimony, before he was twelve years old he was possessed of
a “painful sense of an awkward but entire individuality.”
The small income accruing to Foster’s parents from their farm they supplemented by weaving, and at an early age he began to assist them by spinning wool by the hand wheel, and from his fourteenth year by weaving double stuffs. Even “when a child,” however, he had the “feelings of a foreigner in the place”; and though he performed his monotonous task with conscientious diligence, he succeeded so indifferently in fixing his wandering thoughts upon it that his work never without difficulty passed the ordeal of inspection. He had acquired a great taste for reading, to gratify which he sometimes shut himself up alone in a barn, afterwards working at his loom “like a horse,” to make up for lost time. He had also at this period “a passion for making pictures with a pen.” Shortly after completing his seventeenth year he became a member of the Baptist church at Hebden Bridge, with which his parents were connected; and with the view of preparing himself for the ministerial office he began about the same time to attend a seminary at Brearley Hall conducted by his pastor Dr Fawcett.
After remaining three years at Brearley Hall he was admitted to the Baptist College, Bristol, and on finishing his course of study at this institution he obtained an engagement at Newcastle-on-Tyne, where he preached to an audience of less than a hundred persons, in a small and dingy room situated near the river at the top of a flight of steps called Tuthill Stairs. At Newcastle he remained only three months. In the beginning of 1793 he proceeded to Dublin, where, after failing as a preacher, he attempted to revive a classical and mathematical school, but with so little success that he did not prosecute the experiment for more than eight or nine months. From 1797 to 1799 he was minister of a Baptist church at Chichester, but though he applied himself with more earnestness and perseverance than formerly to the discharge of his ministerial duties, his efforts produced little apparent impression, and the gradual diminution of his hearers necessitated his resignation. After employing himself for a few months at Battersea in the instruction of twenty African youths brought to England by Zachary Macaulay, with the view of having them trained to aid as missionaries to their fellow-countrymen, he in 1800 accepted the charge of a small congregation at Downend, Bristol, where he continued about four years. In 1804, chiefly through the recommendation of Robert Hall, he became pastor of a congregation at Frome, but a swelling in the thyroid gland compelled him in 1806 to resign his charge. In the same year he published the volume of Essays on which his literary fame most largely if not mainly rests. They were written in the form of letters addressed to the lady whom he afterwards married, and consist of four papers,—“On a Man writing Memoirs of himself”; “On Decision of Character”; “On the Application of the Epithet Romantic”; and “On some Causes by which Evangelical Religion has been rendered unacceptable to Men of Cultivated Taste.” The success of this work was immediate, and was so considerable that on resigning his charge he determined to adopt literature as his profession.
