Lexington in 1780, and was chartered as Liberty Hall Academy in 1782. In 1798 its name was changed to Washington Academy, in recognition of a gift from George Washington of some shares of canal stock, which he refused to receive from the Virginia legislature. In 1802 the Virginia branch of the Society of the Cincinnati disbanded and turned over to the academy its funds, about $25,000; in 1813 the academy took the name Washington College; and in 1871 its corporate name was changed to Washington and Lee University, the addition to the name being made in honour of General Robert E. Lee, who was the president of the college from August 1865 until his death in 1870. He was succeeded by his son, General George Washington Custis Lee (b. 1832), president from 1871 to 1897, and Dr William Lyne Wilson (1843–1900), the eminent political leader and educator, was president from 1897 to 1900. In 1908–1909 the university comprised a college, a school of commerce, a school of engineering and a school of law, and had a library of 47,000 volumes, 23 instructors and 565 students. In the Lee Memorial chapel, on the campus, General Robert E. Lee is buried, and over his grave is a notable recumbent statue of him by Edward Virginius Valentine (b. 1838). The Virginia Military Institute was established in March 1839, when its cadet corps supplanted the company of soldiers maintained by the state to garrison the Western Arsenal at Lexington. The first superintendent (1839–1890) was General Francis Henney Smith (1812–1890), a graduate (1833) of the United States Military Academy; and from 1851 until the outbreak of the Civil War “Stonewall” Jackson was a professor in the Institute—he is buried in the Lexington cemetery and his grave is marked by a monument. On the campus of the institute is a fine statue, “Virginia Mourning Her Dead,” by Moses Ezekiel (b. 1844), which commemorates the gallantry of a battalion of 250 cadets from the institute, more than 50 of whom were killed or wounded during the engagement at New Market on the 15th of May 1864. In 1908–1909 the institute had 21 instructors and 330 cadets. Flour is manufactured in Lexington and lime in the vicinity. The town owns and operates its water-works. The first settlers of Rockbridge county established themselves in 1737 near the North river, a short distance below Lexington. The first permanent settlement on the present site was made about 1778. On the 11th of June 1864, during the occupation of the town by Federal troops under General David Hunter, most of the buildings in the town and those of the university were damaged and all those of the institute, except the superintendent’s headquarters, were burned.
LEYDEN, JOHN (1775–1811), British orientalist and man of letters, was born on the 8th of September 1775 at Denholm on the Teviot, not far from Hawick. Leyden’s father was a shepherd, but contrived to send his son to Edinburgh University to study for the ministry. Leyden was a diligent but somewhat miscellaneous student, reading everything apparently, except theology, for which he seems to have had no taste. Though he completed his divinity course, and in 1798 received licence to preach from the presbytery of St Andrews, it soon became clear that the pulpit was not his vocation. In 1794 Leyden had formed the acquaintance of Dr Robert Anderson, editor of The British Poets, and of The Literary Magazine. It was Anderson who introduced him to Dr Alexander Murray, and Murray, probably, who led him to the study of Eastern languages. They became warm friends and generous rivals, though Leyden excelled, perhaps, in the rapid acquisition of new tongues and acquaintance with their literature, while Murray was the more scientific philologist. Through Anderson also he came to know Richard Heber, by whom he was brought under the notice of Sir Walter Scott, who was then collecting materials for his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Leyden was admirably fitted for helping in this kind of work, for he was a borderer himself, and an enthusiastic lover of old ballads and folk-lore. Scott tells how, on one occasion, Leyden walked 40 m. to get the last two verses of a ballad, and returned at midnight, singing it all the way with his loud, harsh voice, to the wonder and consternation of the poet and his household.
Leyden meanwhile compiled a work on the Discoveries and Settlements of Europeans in Northern and Western Africa, suggested by Mungo Park’s travels, edited The Complaint of Scotland, printed a volume of Scottish descriptive poems, and nearly finished his Scenes of Infancy, a diffuse poem based on border scenes and traditions. He also made some translations from Eastern poetry, Persian and Arabic. At last his friends got him an appointment in India on the medical staff, for which he qualified by a year’s hard work. In 1803 he sailed for Madras, and took his place in the general hospital there. He was promoted to be naturalist to the commissioners going to survey Mysore, and in 1807 his knowledge of the languages of India procured him an appointment as professor of Hindustani at Calcutta; this he soon after resigned for a judgeship, and that again to be a commissioner in the court of requests in 1809, a post which required a familiarity with several Eastern tongues. In 1811 he joined Lord Minto in the expedition to Java. Having entered a library which was said to contain many Eastern MSS., without having the place aired, he was seized with Batavian fever, and died, after three days’ illness, on the 28th of August 1811.
LEYDEN JAR, or Condenser, an electrical appliance consisting in one form of a thin glass jar partly coated inside and outside with tin foil, or in another of a number of glass plates similarly coated. When the two metal surfaces are connected for a short time with the terminals of some source of electromotive force, such as an electric machine, an induction coil or a voltaic battery, electric energy is stored up in the condenser in the form of electric strain in the glass, and can be recovered again in the form of an electric discharge.
The earliest form of Leyden jar consisted of a glass vial or thin
Florence flask, partly full of water, having a metallic nail inserted
through the cork which touched the water. The
bottle was held in the hand, and the nail presented
to the prime conductor of an electrical machine. If
Early
history.
the person holding the bottle subsequently touched the nail, he
experienced an electric shock. This experiment was first made
by E. G. von Kleist of Kammin in Pomerania in 1745,[1] and it
was repeated in another form in 1746 by Cunaeus and P. van
Musschenbroek, of the university of Leyden (Leiden), whence the
term Leyden jar.[2] J. H. Winkler discovered that an iron chain
wound round the bottle could be substituted for the hand, and Sir
William Watson in England shortly afterward showed that iron
filings or mercury could replace the water within the jar. Dr
John Bevis of London suggested, in 1746, the use of sheet lead
coatings within and without the jar, and subsequently the use
of tin foil or silver leaf made closely adherent to the glass.
Benjamin Franklin and Bevis devised independently the form of
condenser known as a Franklin or Leyden pane, which consists
of a sheet of glass, partly coated on both sides with tin foil or
silver leaf, a margin of glass all round being left to insulate the
two tin foils from each other. Franklin in 1747 and 1748 made
numerous investigations on the Leyden jar, and devised a method
of charging jars in series as well as in parallel. In the former
method, now commonly known as charging in cascade, the jars
are insulated and the outside coating of one jar is connected to
the inside coating of the next and so on for a whole series, the
inside coating of the first jar and the outside coating of the last
jar being the terminals of the condenser. For charging in
parallel a number of jars are collected in a box, and all the outside
coatings are connected together metallically and all the
inside coatings brought to one common terminal. This arrangement
is commonly called a battery of Leyden jars. To Franklin
also we owe the important knowledge that the electric charge
resides really in the glass and not in the metal coatings, and that
when a condenser has been charged the metallic coatings can
be exchanged for fresh ones and yet the electric charge of the
condenser remains.
In its modern form the Leyden jar consists of a wide-mouthed bottle of thin English flint glass of uniform thickness,
