in Spain, covering an area of 38,000 sq. ft., which is almost unique in India as being entirely covered in. Since the opening of a station on the Great India Peninsula railway, Gulbarga has become a centre of trade, with cotton-spinning and weaving mills. It is also the headquarters of a district and division of the same name. The district, as recently reconstituted, has an area of 6004 sq. m.; pop. (1901), 1,041,067.
GULF STREAM,[1] the name properly applied to the stream
current which issues from the Gulf of Mexico and flows north-eastward,
following the eastern coast of North America, and
separated from it by a narrow strip of cold water (the Cold Wall),
to a point east of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. The
Gulf Stream is a narrow, deep current, and its velocity is estimated
at about 80 m. a day. It is joined by, and often indistinguishable
from, a large body of water which comes from
outside the West Indies and follows the same course. The term
was formerly applied to the drift current which carries the mixed
waters of the Gulf Stream and the Labrador current eastwards
across the Atlantic. This is now usually known as the “Gulf
Stream drift,” although the name is not altogether appropriate.
See Atlantic.
GULFWEED, in botany, a popular name for the seaweed
Sargassum bacciferum, one of the brown seaweeds (Phaeophyceae),
large quantities of which are found floating in the Gulf of Mexico,
whence it is carried northwards by the Gulf Stream, small
portions sometimes being borne as far as the coasts of the British
Isles. It was observed by Columbus, and is remarkable among
seaweeds for its form, which resembles branches bearing leaves and
berries; the latter, to which the species-name bacciferum refers,
are hollow floats answering the same purpose as the bladders
in another brown seaweed, Fucus vesiculosus, which is common
round the British Isles between high and low water.
GULL, SIR WILLIAM WITHEY, 1st Bart. (1816–1890),
English physician, was the youngest son of John Gull, a barge-owner
and wharfinger of Thorpe-le-Soken, Essex, and was born
on the 31st of December 1816 at Colchester. He began life
as a schoolmaster, but in 1837 Benjamin Harrison, the treasurer
of Guy’s Hospital, who had noticed his ability, brought him up
to London from the school at Lewes where he was usher, and
gave him employment at the hospital, where he also gained
permission to attend the lectures. In 1843 he was made a
lecturer in the medical school of the hospital, in 1851 he was
chosen an assistant physician, and in 1856 he became full
physician. In 1847 he was elected Fullerian professor of
physiology in the Royal Institution, retaining the post for the
usual three years, and in 1848 he delivered the Gulstonian
Lectures at the College of Physicians, where he filled every office
of honour but that of president. He died in London on the 29th
of January 1890 after a series of paralytic strokes, the first of
which had occurred nearly three years previously. He was
created a baronet in 1872, in recognition of the skill and care he
had shown in attending the prince of Wales during his attack
of typhoid in 1871. Sir William Gull’s fame rested mainly on
his success as a clinical practitioner; as he said himself, he was
“a clinical physician or nothing.” This success must be largely
ascribed to his remarkable powers of observation, and to the
great opportunities he enjoyed for gaining experience of disease.
He was sometimes accused of being a disbeliever in drugs.
That was not the case, for he prescribed drugs like other
physicians when he considered them likely to be beneficial.
He felt, however, that their administration was only a part of
the physician’s duties, and his mental honesty and outspokenness
prevented him from deluding either himself or his patients with
unwarranted notions of what they can do. But though he
regarded medicine as primarily an art for the relief of physical
suffering, he was far from disregarding the scientific side of his
profession, and he made some real contributions to medical
science. His papers were printed chiefly in Guy’s Hospital
Reports and in the proceedings of learned societies: among the
subjects he wrote about were cholera, rheumatic fever, taenia,
paraplegia and abscess of the brain, while he distinguished for
the first time (1873) the disease now known as myxoedema,
describing it as a “cretinoid state in adults.”
GULL (Welsh gwylan, Breton, goelann, whence Fr. goéland),
the name commonly adopted, to the almost entire exclusion
of the O. Eng. Mew (Icel. máfur, Dan. maage, Swedish
måse, Ger. Meve, Dutch meeuw, Fr. mouette), for a group
of sea-birds widely and commonly known, all belonging to the
genus Larus of Linnaeus, which subsequent systematists have
broken up in a very arbitrary and often absurd fashion. The
family Laridae is composed of two chief groups, Larinae and
Sterninae—the gulls and the terns, though two other subfamilies
are frequently counted, the skuas (Stercorariinae), and that
formed by the single genus Rhynchops, the skimmers; but
there seems no strong reason why the former should not be
referred to the Larinae and the latter to the Sterninae.
Taking the gulls in their restricted sense, Howard Saunders, who has subjected the group to a rigorous revision (Proc. Zool. Society, 1878, pp. 155-211), admits forty-nine species of them, which he places in five genera instead of the many which some prior investigators had sought to establish. Of the genera recognized by him, Pagophila and Rhodostethia have but one species each, Rissa and Xema two, while the rest belong to Larus. The Pagophila is the so-called ivory-gull, P. eburnea, names which hardly do justice to the extreme whiteness of its plumage, to which its jet-black legs offer a strong contrast. The young, however, are spotted with black. An inhabitant of the most northern seas, examples, most commonly young birds of the year, find their way in winter to more temperate shores. Its breeding-place has seldom been discovered, and the first of its eggs ever seen by ornithologists was brought home by Sir L. M’Clintock in 1853 from Cape Krabbe (Journ. R. Dubl. Society, i. 60, pl. 1); others were subsequently obtained by Dr Malmgren in Spitsbergen. Of the species of Rissa, one is the abundant and well-known kittiwake, R. tridactyla, of circumpolar range, breeding, however, also in comparatively low latitudes, as on the coasts of Britain, and in winter frequenting southern waters. The other is R. brevirostris, limited to the North Pacific, between Alaska and Kamchatka. The singular fact requires to be noticed that in both these species the hind toe is generally deficient, but that examples of each are occasionally found in which this functionless member has not wholly disappeared. We have then the genus Larus, which ornithologists have attempted most unsuccessfully to subdivide. It contains the largest as well as the smallest of gulls. In some species the adults assume a dark-coloured head every breeding-season, in others any trace of dark colour is the mark of immaturity. The larger species prey fiercely on other kinds of birds, while the smaller content themselves with a diet of small animals, often insects and worms. But however diverse be the appearance, structure or habits of the extremities of the series of species, they are so closely connected by intermediate forms that it is hard to find a gap between them that would justify a generic division. Forty-three species of this genus are recognized by Saunders. About fifteen belong to Europe and fourteen to North America, of which (excluding stragglers) some five only are common to both countries. Our knowledge of the geographical distribution of several of them is still incomplete. Some have a very wide range, others very much the reverse, as witness L. fuliginosus, believed to be confined to the Galapagos, and L. scopulinus and L. bulleri to New Zealand,—the last indeed perhaps only to the South Island. The largest species of the group are the glaucous gull and greater black-backed gull, L. glaucus and L. marinus, of which the former is circumpolar, and the latter nearly so—not being hitherto found between Labrador and Japan. The smallest species is the European L. minutus, though the North American L. philadelphia does not much exceed it in size. Many of the gulls congregate in vast numbers to breed, whether on rocky cliffs of the sea-coast
- ↑ The word “gulf,” a portion of the sea partially enclosed by the coast-line, and usually taken as referring to a tract of water larger than a bay and smaller than a sea, is derived through the Fr. golfe, from Late Gr. κόλφος, class. Gr. κόλπος, bosom, hence bay, cf. Lat. sinus. In University slang, the term is used of the position of those who fail to obtain a place in the honours list at a public examination, but are allowed a “pass.”
