Page:EB1911 - Volume 12.djvu/663

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GROVE, SIR G.—GRUB

generally throughout Scotland, though not in Orkney, Shetland or the Outer Hebrides, nor in Ireland. On the continent of Europe it has a very wide range, and it extends into Siberia. In Georgia its place is taken by a distinct species, on which a Polish naturalist (Proc. Zool. Society, 1875, p. 267) has conferred the name of T. mlokosiewiczi. Both these birds have much in common with their larger congener the capercally and its eastern representative.

The species of the genus Bonasa, of which the European B. sylvestris is the type, does not inhabit the British Islands. It is perhaps the most delicate game-bird that comes to table. It is the gelinotte of the French, the Haselhuhn of Germans, and Hjerpe of Scandinavians. Like its transatlantic congener B. umbellus, the ruffed grouse or birch-partridge (of which there are two other local forms, B. umbelloides and B. sabinii), it is purely a forest-bird. The same may be said of the species of Canace, of which two forms are found in America, C. canadensis, the spruce-partridge, and C. franklini, and also of the Siberian C. falcipennis. Nearly allied to these birds is the group known as Dendragapus, containing three large and fine forms D. obscurus, D. fuliginosus, and D. richardsoni—all peculiar to North America. Then there are Centrocercus urophasianus, the sage-cock of the plains of Columbia and California, and Pedioecetes, the sharp-tailed grouse, with its two forms, P. phasianellus and P. columbianus, while finally Cupidonia, the prairie-hen, also with two local forms, C. cupido and C. pallidicincta, is a bird that in the United States of America possesses considerable economic value, enormous numbers being consumed there, and also exported to Europe.

The various sorts of grouse are nearly all figured in Elliot’s Monograph of the Tetraoninae, and an excellent account of the American species is given in Baird, Brewer and Ridgway’s North American Birds (iii. 414-465). See also Shooting.  (A. N.) 


GROVE, SIR GEORGE (1820–1900), English writer on music, was born at Clapham on the 13th of August 1820. He was articled to a civil engineer, and worked for two years in a factory near Glasgow. In 1841 and 1845 he was employed in the West Indies, erecting lighthouses in Jamaica and Bermuda. In 1849 he became secretary to the Society of Arts, and in 1852 to the Crystal Palace. In this capacity his natural love of music and enthusiasm for the art found a splendid opening, and he threw all the weight of his influence into the task of promoting the best music of all schools in connexion with the weekly and daily concerts at Sydenham, which had a long and honourable career under the direction of Mr (afterwards Sir) August Manns. Without Sir George Grove that eminent conductor would hardly have succeeded in doing what he did to encourage young composers and to educate the British public in music. Grove’s analyses of the Beethoven symphonies, and the other works presented at the concerts, set the pattern of what such things should be; and it was as a result of these, and of the fact that he was editor of Macmillan’s Magazine from 1868 to 1883, that the scheme of his famous Dictionary of Music and Musicians, published from 1878 to 1889 (new edition, edited by J. A. Fuller Maitland, 1904–1907), was conceived and executed. His own articles in that work on Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schubert are monuments of a special kind of learning, and that the rest of the book is a little thrown out of balance owing to their great length is hardly to be regretted. Long before this he had contributed to the Dictionary of the Bible, and had promoted the foundation of the Palestine Exploration Fund. On a journey to Vienna, undertaken in the company of his lifelong friend, Sir Arthur Sullivan, the important discovery of a large number of compositions by Schubert was made, including the music to Rosamunde. When the Royal College of Music was founded in 1882 he was appointed its first director, receiving the honour of knighthood. He brought the new institution into line with the most useful European conservatoriums. On the completion of the new buildings in 1894 he resigned the directorship, but retained an active interest in the institution to the end of his life. He died at Sydenham on the 28th of May 1900.

His life, a most interesting one, was written by Mr Charles Graves.  (J. A. F. M.) 


GROVE, SIR WILLIAM ROBERT (1811–1896), English judge and man of science, was born on the 11th of July 1811 at Swansea, South Wales. After being educated by private tutors, he went to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he took an ordinary degree in 1832. Three years later he was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn. His health, however, did not allow him to devote himself strenuously to practice, and he occupied his leisure with scientific studies. About 1839 he constructed the platinum-zinc voltaic cell that bears his name, and with the aid of a number of these exhibited the electric arc light in the London Institution, Finsbury Circus. The result was that in 1840 the managers appointed him to the professorship of experimental philosophy, an office which he held for seven years. His researches dealt very largely with electro-chemistry and with the voltaic cell, of which he invented several varieties. One of these, the Grove gas-battery, which is of special interest both intrinsically and as the forerunner of the secondary batteries now in use for the “storage” of electricity, was based on his observation that a current is produced by a couple of platinum plates standing in acidulated water and immersed, the one in hydrogen, the other in oxygen. At one of his lectures at the Institution he anticipated the electric lighting of to-day by illuminating the theatre with incandescent electric lamps, the filaments being of platinum and the current supplied by a battery of his nitric acid cells. In 1846 he published his famous book on The Correlation of Physical Forces, the leading ideas of which he had already put forward in his lectures: its fundamental conception was that each of the forces of nature—light, heat, electricity, &c.—is definitely and equivalently convertible into any other, and that where experiment does not give the full equivalent, it is because the initial force has been dissipated, not lost, by conversion into other unrecognized forces. In the same year he received a Royal medal from the Royal Society for his Bakerian lecture on “Certain phenomena of voltaic ignition and the decomposition of water into its constituent gases.” In 1866 he presided over the British Association at its Nottingham meeting and delivered an address on the continuity of natural phenomena. But while he was thus engaged in scientific research, his legal work was not neglected, and his practice increased so greatly that in 1853 he became a Q.C. One of the best-known cases in which he appeared as an advocate was that of William Palmer, the Rugeley poisoner, whom he defended. In 1871 he was made a judge of the Common Pleas in succession to Sir Robert Collier, and remained on the bench till 1887. He died in London on the 1st of August 1896.

A selection of his scientific papers is given in the sixth edition of The Correlation of Physical Forces, published in 1874.


GROVE (O.E. graf, cf. O.E. græfa, brushwood, later “greave”; the word does not appear in any other Teutonic language, and the New English Dictionary finds no Indo-European root to which it can be referred; Skeat considers it connected with “grave,” to cut, and finds the original meaning to be a glade cut through a wood), a small group or cluster of trees, growing naturally and forming something smaller than a wood, or planted in particular shapes or for particular purposes, in a park, &c. Groves have been connected with religious worship from the earliest times, and in many parts of India every village has its sacred group of trees. For the connexion of religion with sacred groves see Tree-Worship.

The word “grove” was used by the authors of the Authorized Version of the Bible to translate two Hebrew words: (1) ’ēshel, as in Gen. xxi. 33, and 1 Sam. xxii. 6; this is rightly given in the Revised Version as “tamarisk”; (2) asherah in many places throughout the Old Testament. Here the translators followed the Septuagint ἄλσος and the Vulgate lucus. The ’ăshéráh was a wooden post erected at the Canaanitish places of worship, and also by the altars of Yahweh. It may have represented a tree.


GROZNYI, a fortress and town of Russia, North Caucasia, in the province of Terek, on the Zunzha river, 82 m. by rail N.E. of Vladikavkaz, on the railway to Petrovsk. There are naphtha wells close by. The fortifications were constructed in 1819. Pop. (1897) 15,599.


GRUB, the larva of an insect, a caterpillar, maggot. The word is formed from the verb “to grub,” to dig, break up the