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an important function in industry, being principally employed for the oiling of wool and in lubrication. It is also a good deal consumed in the falsification of more valuable oils, for which its neutral properties well adapt it; and it in turn is adulterated with cotton seed oil, &c.
LARDNER, Dionysius (1793-1859), a prolific scientific writer, was born at Dublin, April 3, 1793. His father was a solicitor, and intended his son to follow the same calling. After some years of uncongenial desk work, Lardner, determining on a university career, entered Trinity College, Dublin, and graduated B.A. in 1817. In 1828 he became professor of natural philosophy and astronomy at University College, London, a position which he held till 1840, when he eloped with a married lady, and had to leave the country. After a most successful lecturing tour through the principal cities of the United States, which realized 200,000 dollars, he returned to Europe in 1845. He settled at Paris, and continued to reside there till within a few months of his death, which took place at Naples, April 29, 1859.
Though lacking in real originality or brilliancy, Lardner showed himself to be a successful popularizer of science. He was the author of numerous mathematical and physical treatises on such subjects as algebraic geometry (1823), the differential and integral calculus (1825), the steam engine (1828), besides hand-books on various departments of natural philosophy (1854-56); but it is as the editor of Lardner's Cyclopædia, (1830-44) that he will be best remembered. To this scientific library of 134 volumes many of the ablest savants of the day contributed, Lardner himself being the author of the treatises on arithmetic, geometry, heat, hydrostatics and pneumatics, mechanics (in conjunction with Kater), and electricity (in conjunction with Walker). The Cabinet Library (12 vols., 1830-32) and the Museum of Science and Art (12 vols., 1854-56) are his other chief undertakings. A few original papers appear in the Royal Irish Academy's Transactions (1624), in the Royal Society's Proceedings (1831-36), and in the Astronomical Society's Monthly Notices (1852-53); and two Reports to the British Association on railway constants (1838, 1841) are from his pen.
LARDNER, Nathaniel (1684-1768), author of The Credibility of the Gospel History, was born at Hawkhurst, Kent, in 1684. After having studied for the Presbyterian ministry in London, and also at Utrecht and Leyden, he in 1709 took licence as a preacher; but, failing to gain acceptance in the pulpit, he in 1713 entered the family of a lady of rank as tutor and domestic chaplain, and in this position he remained until 1721. In 1724 he was appointed to deliver the Tuesday evening lecture in the Presbyterian chapel, Old Jewry, London, and in 1729 he became assistant minister to the Presbyterian congregation in Crutched Friars. He died at Hawkhurst on July 24, 1768.
An anonymous volume of Memoirs appeared in 1769; and a life by Kippis is prefixed to the edition of the Works of Lardner, published in 11 vols. 8vo in 1788, in 4 vols. 4to in 1817, and 10 vols. 8vo in 1827. The full title of his principal work – a work which, though now quite out of date, gives its author a permanent place of some respectability in the history of Christian apologetics – is The Credibility of the Gospel History; or the Principal Facts of the New Testament confirmed by Passages of Ancient Authors, who were contemporary with our Saviour or his Apostles, or lived near their time. Part i., in 2 vols. 8vo, appeared in 1727; the publication of part ii., in 12 vols. 8vo, began in 1733 and ended in 1755. In 1730 there was a second edition of part i., and the Additions and Alterations were also published separately. A Supplement, otherwise entitled A History of the Apostles and Evangelists, Writers of the New Testament, was added in 3 vols. (1756-57), and reprinted in 1760. Other works by Lardner are A large Collection of Ancient Jewish and Heathen Testimonies to the Truth of the Christian Revelation, with Notes and Observations, 4 vols. 4to, 1764-67; The History of the Heretics of the two first Centuries after Christ, published posthumously in 1780; a considerable number of occasional sermons; and A Letter concerning the question whether the Logos supplied the place of the Human Soul in the Person of Jesus Christ. In this tract, written in 1730 and published in 1759, Lardner indicated his preference for the Unitarian view.
LARES were Roman deities, whose character and worship share in the obscurity that envelops all antique Roman religion. They belonged to the cult us of the dead, from which so much of Roman and Greek religion was derived; they were the deified ancestors still living in their graves in the house, and worshipped by the family as their guardians and protectors. But the dead were powerful also to do harm, unless they were duly propitiated with all the proper rites; they were spirits of terror as well as of good; in this fearful sense the names Lemures and still more Larvæ were appropriated to them. The name Lar has been thought to bean Etruscan word, meaning "lord"; it is a common personal name or title in Etruria. We find certainly, from a very early time, a distinction between Lares privati and Lares publici. The former were worshipped in the house by the family alone, and the Lar familiaris was conceived as the head of the family and of the family cultus. The Lares publici belonged to the state religion; and their worship, after having fallen into neglect, was restored by Augustus and to some extent remodelled. It is therefore difficult to distinguish how far the known rites of the cultus are ancient; but it seems certain that the genius of Augustus, as refounder of the state, was added, and that the original Lares præstites were two in number. Schwegler and others have maintained that this pair are the twin brothers so frequent in early religions, the Romulus and Remus of the Roman foundation-legend; that the tale of the twins is in most of its elements derived from the religion of the two Lares; that Acca Larentia, the fostermother of the twins, is the same as Lara, Larunda, Mania, or Muta, the mother of the Lares; and that the Larentalia, celebrated on December 23, was a feast of the Lares. But the two sets of legends must be strictly distinguished: the difference in the quantity of the opening syllable shows that Larentia has no connexion with Larunda and the Lares; the Larentalia was a festival of Jupiter and Acca Larentia, in which the Lares had no place; and Mommsen argues that Remus was a late addition to the foundation legend, in which originally Romulus alone was known. As restored by Augustus, the Lares præstites were the guardians of the state and protectors of its unity; and, in lesser circles, every division of the city had likewise its Lares compitales, now three in number, who had their own ædicula at the cross roads and their special festival, Compitalia. The temple of the city Lares (sacellum Laruni) was near the top of the Via Sacra.
The worship of the private Lares, who had their home either on the hearth of the atrium or in their own little shrine, lararium, persisted throughout the pagan period, but in later time changed its character to a great extent. The emperor Alexander Severus had images of Abraham, Christ, and Alexander the Great among his household Lares. These domestic Lares were worshipped daily, but with special rites on the kalends, nones, and ides of every month; they shared with the family in every festival; when the young bride entered the house for the first time she offered a sacrifice to them; when the boy assumed the toga virilis he dedicated his childish bulla to the Lar familiaris. Marquardt maintains that there was only one Lar in each household, and that the two Lares compitales were the .guardians of the two roads that intersected at the compita. The Lemures as distinguished from the Lares were propitiated at the festival of the Lemuralia, on the 9th, 11th, and 13th of May. In it the dead were propitiated, and the strange unexplained ceremony of throwing the argei into the river was performed. A legend of the birth of the Lares makes them children of the god Mercury and a female figure, Larunda, Lara, or Lala. The fact that the dog was sacred to them, and that a stone figure of a dog stood in the Sacellum Larum, deserves notice in illustration of this legend, for the dog is connected with the Greek god Hermes. Probably this may have arisen under Greek influence. Other classes of Lares mentioned as early as the republican period are the Lares rurales, viales, permarini. To the last-named Aurelius dedicated a temple in commemoration of the naval victory over Antiochus, 190 B.C. The generally accepted view is that the Lares are represented as young men, crowned with laurel, dressed in short high-girt tunics, holding horns and cups in their hands; but Marquardt, in accordance with his view that there was only one Lar, considers that these two figures are penates, and on a coin of the gens Cæsia the Lares are represented as two young men with chlamys and
