his Histoire de la Bastille (7 vols., 1713-24), dedicated to George I. At the time of his death in 1723 he was a major of artillery in the service of the elector of Hesse. His other important work is a Recueil des voyages qui ont servi à l'établissernent de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales aux Provinces Unies (10 vols., new ed., Rouen, 1725).
RENNIE, JOHN (1761-1821), British engineer, was the youngest son of James Rennie, a farmer at Phantassie, Haddingtonshire, where he was born on the 7th of June 1761. On his way to the parish school at East Linton he used to pass the workshop of Andrew Meikle (1719-1800), the inventor of the threshing machine, and its attractions were such that he spent there much of the time that was supposed to be spent at school. In his twelfth year he was placed under Meikle, but after two years he was sent to Dunbar High School, where he showed marked aptitude for mathematics. On his return to Phantassie he occasionally assisted Meikle, and soon began to erect corn mills on his own account. In 1780, while continuing his millwright's business, he began to attend the classes on physical science at Edinburgh University. Four years later he was commissioned by Boulton and Watt, to whom he was introduced by Professor John Robison (1739-1805), his teacher at Edinburgh, to superintend the construction of the machinery for the Albion flour mills, which they were building at the south end of Blackfriars Bridge, London, and a feature of his work there was the use of iron for many portions of the machines which had formerly been made of wood. The completion of these mills established his reputation as a mechanical engineer, and soon secured him a large business as a maker of millwork of all descriptions. But his fame chiefly rests on his achievements in civil engineering. As a canal engineer his services began to be in request about 1790, and the Avon and Kennet, the Rochdale and the Lancaster canals may be mentioned among his numerous works in England. His skill solved the problem of draining and reclaiming extensive tracts of marsh in the eastern counties and on the Solway Firth. As a bridge engineer he was responsible for many structures in England and Scotland, among the most conspicuous being three over the Thames—Waterloo Bridge, Southwark Bridge and London Bridge—the last of which he did not live to see completed. A noteworthy feature in many of his designs was the flat roadway. Among the harbours and docks in the construction of which he was concerned may be mentioned those at Wick, Torquay, Grimsby, Holyhead, Howth, Kingstown and Hull, together with the London dock and the East India dock on the Thames, and he was consulted by the government in respect of improvements at the dockyards of Portsmouth, Sheerness, Chatham and Plymouth, where the breakwater was built from his plans. He died in London on the 4th of October 1821, and was buried in St Paul's. In person he was of great stature and strength, and a bust of him by Chantrey (now in the National Gallery), when exhibited at Somerset House, obtained the name of Jupiter Tonans. Of his family, the eldest son George, who was born in London on the 3rd of September 1791 and died there on the 30th of March 1866, carried on his father's business in partnership with the second son John, who was born in London on the 30th of August 1794 and died near Hertford on the 3rd of September 1874. George devoted himself especially to the mechanical side of the business. John completed the construction of London Bridge, and at its opening in 1831 was made a knight. He succeeded his father as engineer to the Admiralty, and finished the Plymouth breakwater, of which he published an account in 1848. He was also the author of a book on the Theory, Formation and Construction of British and Foreign Harbours (1851-54), and his Autobiography appeared in 1875. He was elected president of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1845, and held the office for three years.
RENO, a city and the county-seat of Washoe county, Nevada, U.S.A., in the W. part of the state, on the Truckee river, and about 244 m. E. of San Francisco. Pop. (1890) 3563; (1900) 4500 (915 foreign-born); (1910 census) 10,867. It is served by the Southern Pacific, the Virginia & Truckee and the Nevada-California-Oregon railways. The city lies near the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, 4484 ft. above the sea, and is in the most humid district of a state which has little rainfall. Among the public institutions are the university of Nevada (see Nevada), a United States Agricultural Experiment Station, a public library (1903), the Nevada Hospital for Mental Diseases (1882), the City and County Hospital and the People's Hospital. At Reno are railway shops (of the Nevada-California-Oregon railway) and reduction works, and the manufactures include flour, foundry and machine-shop products, lumber, beer, plaster and packed meats. Farming and stock-raising are carried on extensively in the vicinity. On the site of the present city a road house was erected in 1859 for the accommodation of travellers and freight teams on their way to and from California. By 1863 this place had become known as Lake's Crossing, and five years later it was chosen as a site for a station by the Central (now the Southern) Pacific railway, then building through the Truckee Valley. The new station was then named Reno, in honour of Gen. Jesse Lee Reno (1823-1862), a Federal officer during the Civil War, who was commissioned brigadier-general of volunteers in November 1861 and major-general of volunteers in July 1862, and led the Ninth Corps at South Mountain, where he was killed. The city twice suffered from destructive fires, in 1873 and 1879. Reno was incorporated as a town in 1879 and chartered as a city in 1899. Its city charter was withdrawn in 1901, but it was rechartered in 1903.
RENOIR, FIRMIN AUGUSTE (1841-), French painter, was born at Limoges in 1841. In his early work he followed, with pronounced modern modifications, certain traditions of the French 18th-century school, more particularly of Boucher, of whom we are reminded by the decorative tendency, the pink and ivory flesh tints and the facile technique of Renoir. In the 'seventies he threw himself into the impressionist movement and became one of its leaders. In some of his paintings he carried the new principle of the division of tones to its extreme, but in his best work, notably in some of his paintings of the nude, he retained much of the refined sense of beauty of colour of the 18th century. Renoir has tried his skill almost in every genre—in portraiture, landscape, flower-painting, scenes of modern life and figure subject; and though he is perhaps the most unequal of the great impressionists, his finest works rank among the masterpieces of the modern French school. Among these are some of his nude “Bathers,” the “Rowers' Luncheon,” the “Ball at the Moulin de la Galette,” “The Box,” “The Terrace,” “La Pensée,” and the portrait of “Jeanne Samary." He is represented in the Caillebotte room at the Luxembourg, in the collection of M. Durand-Ruel, and in most of the collections of impressionist paintings in France and in the United States. Comparatively few of his works have come to England, but the full range of his capacity was seen at the exhibition of impressionist art held at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1905. At the Viau sale in Paris in 1907, a garden scene by Renoir, “La Tonnelle,” realized 26,000 frs., and a little head, “Ingénue,” 25,100 frs.
RENOUF, SIR PETER LE PAGE (1822-1897), Egyptologist, was born in Guernsey, on the 23rd of August 1822. He was educated at Elizabeth College there, and proceeded to Oxford, which, upon his becoming a Roman Catholic, under the influence of Dr Newman, he quitted without taking a degree. Like many other Anglican converts, he proved a thorn in the side of the Ultramontane party in the Roman Church, though he did not, like some of them, return to the communion of the Church of England. He opposed the promulgation of the dogma of Papal Infallibility, and his treatise (1868) upon the condemnation of Pope Honorius for heresy by the council of Constantinople in A.D. 680 was placed upon the index of prohibited books. He had been from 1855 to 1864 professor of ancient history and Oriental languages in the Roman Catholic university which Newman vainly strove to establish in Dublin, and during part of this period edited the Atlantis and the Home and Foreign Review, which latter had to be discontinued on account of the hostility of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. In 1864 he was appointed a government inspector of schools, which position he
