but soon came under the yoke of the Franks. Nomenoe, the lieutenant of Louis I., the Pious, in Brittany, assumed the title of king in 843, and one of his brothers was the founder of a line of counts who distinguished themselves against the Normans in the 9th and 10th centuries. Valines became part of the duchy of Brittany at the end of the 10th century. The estates of Brittany met there for the first time in 1203 to urge Philip Augustus to avenge the death of Arthur of Brittany. In' the course of the War of Succession the town was besieged four times in 1342. Duke John IV. built here the castle of L’Hermine and made it his habitual residence. In 1487 the town was for a year in the hands of Charles VIII. of France. In 1532 Brittany was definitively united to France. The estates met at Vannes several times in the 17th and 18th centuries. During the Revolution this town was the scene of the execution in 1795 of some of the prisoners after the royalist disaster at Quiberon.
VAN RENSSELAER, STEPHEN (1764–1839), American
political leader and soldier, “last of the patroons,” was born at New York City on the 1st of November 1764. He was fifth in descent from Killian Van Rensselaer (c. 1580–1645), the original patroon of Rensselaerwyck, New York, who acquired his large estates between 1630 and 1637. Stephen was graduated at Harvard in 1782. In 1780–90 he was a member of the New York Assembly, and from 1791 to 1795 served as a member of the state Senate. He was lieutenant-governor of New York (1795–1801) for the two terms in which John Jay was governor.
In 1801 he presided over the state constitutional convention,
and from 1808 to 1810 was again in the Assembly. He was
an ardent promoter of the Erie Canal, and as a commissioner
to examine the proposed route, &c., he reported favourably to
the Assembly in 1811. In the second war with Great Britain
he commanded the First Division of the detached militia of the
state of New York, with the rank of major-general, and on the
13th of October 1812 was defeated at the battle of Queenston
Heights. As he was a Federalist he was severely criticised
and censured for this defeat and resigned from the army. At
the close of the war the Erie Canal project was renewed, and
from 1816 till his death he was a member of the board of canal
commissioners, and for nearly fifteen years was its president.
In 1818 he was again elected to the Assembly; in 1819 he
became a regent of the State University of which he was for a
time chancellor; and in 1821 he was a delegate to the New
York constitutional convention. From 1822 to 1829 he was
a member of the National House of Representatives,[1] and there voted for John Quincy Adams for the presidency, and served as chairman of the committee on agriculture. In 1820–23 he sent out at his own expense Professors Amos Eaton (1776–1842) and Edward Hitchcock to make extensive surveys, results of which were published as An Agricultural and Geological Survey of the District adjoining the Erie Canal (Albany, 1824). In 1824 he founded a school in Troy which was incorporated two years later as the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He died at Albany, New York, on the 26th of January 1839.
See D. D. Barnard, A Discourse on the Life, Services and Character of Stephen Van Rensselaer (Albany, 1839).
VANSITTART, HENRY (1732–1770 or 1771), Anglo-Indian
governor, was born in London on the 3rd of June 1732. His
father, Arthur van Sittart (1691–1760), and his grandfather,
Peter van Sittart (1651–1705), were both wealthy merchants
and directors of the Russia company. Peter, a merchant
adventurer, who had migrated from Danzig to London about
1670, was also a director of the East India company. The
family name is taken from the town of Sittard in Limburg.
Educated at Reading school and at Winchester college, Henry
Vansittart joined the society of the Franciscans, or the “Hellfire club,” at Medmenham, his elder brothers, Arthur and Robert, being also members of this fraternity. In 1745 he entered the
service of the East India company and sailed for Fort St David; here he showed himself very industrious, made the acquaintance of Robert Clive and rose rapidly from one position to another. As a member of the council of Madras he helped to defend the city against the French in 1759, and in July 1760 he went to Bengal as president of the council and governor of Fort William. Courageously facing the difficulties of his new position, which included a serious lack of funds, he deposed the subadar of Bengal, Mir Jafar, whom he replaced by his son-in-law, Mir Kasim, a circumstance which increased the influence of England in the province. He was, however, less successful in another direction. Practically all the company’s servants were traders in their private capacity, and as they claimed various privileges and exemptions this system was detrimental to the interests of the native princes and gave rise to an enormous amount of corruption. Vansittart sought to check this, and in 1762 he made a treaty with Mir Kasim, but the majority of his council were against him and in the following year this was repudiated. Reprisals on the part of the subadar were followed by war, and, annoyed at the failure of his pacific schemes, the governor resigned and returned to England in 1764. His conduct was attacked before the board of directors in London, but events seemed to prove that he was in the right, and in 1769 he became a director of the company, having in the previous year obtained a seat in parliament. He was now sent on an important mission to India; he left England in September 1769, but the ship in which he sailed was lost at sea late in 1770 or early in 1771. One of his five sons was Nicholas Vansittart, Baron Bexley (q.v.). To defend his conduct in Bengal Vansittart published some papers as A Narrative of the Transactions in Bengal from 1760 to 1764 (London, 1766).
Vansittart’s brother, Robert Vansittart (1728–1789), who was educated at Winchester and at Trinity College, Oxford, was regius professor of civil law at Oxford from 1757 until his death on the 31st of January 1789. Another brother, George Vansittart (1745–1825), of Bisham Abbey, Berkshire, was the father of General George Henry Vansittart (1768–1824) and of Vice-Admiral Henry Vansittart (1777–1843).
VAN’T HOFF, JACOBUS HENDRICUS (1852– ), Dutch chemist and physicist, was born in Rotterdam on the 30th of August 1852. He studied from 1869 to 1871 at the polytechnic at Delft, in 1871 at the university of Leiden, in 1872 with F. A. Kekulé at Bonn, in 1873 with C. A. Wurtz at Paris, and in 1874, when he took his doctor’s degree, with E. Mulder at Utrecht. In 1876 he became lecturer on physics at the veterinary school at Utrecht, and two years later he was chosen professor of chemistry, mineralogy and geology in Amsterdam University. In 1894 he declined an invitation to the chair of physics at Berlin University, but in 1896 he went to Berlin as professor to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, with a salary and a laboratory, but freedom to do whatever he liked; and at the same time he accepted an honorary professorship in the university so that he might lecture if he were so minded. On taking up these appointments he announced that, the application of mathematics to chemistry remaining his chief aim, he proposed to devote himself to the study of the formation of oceanic salt deposits, with special reference to the Stassfurt deposits. He may be regarded as the founder of the doctrine of stereoisomerism (q.v.), for he was the first, in 1874, to introduce
a definite mechanical theory of valency, and to connect
the optical activity exhibited by many carbon compounds
with their chemical constitution. In respect of this doctrine
of the “asymmetric carbon atom,” van’t Hoff’s name is generally linked with that of J. A. le Bel (born on the 21st of January 1847, at Pechelbronn, Lower Alsace), who, only two months later, independently enunciated the theory of asymmetric combinations with carbon; though it must be noted that J. Wislicenus, to whom van’t Hoff, in fact, acknowledged his indebtedness, had already suggested that in order to explain the constitution of certain organic bodies, the tridimensional arrangement of atoms in space must be taken into account. For this work van’t Hoff and Le Bel received the Davy medal
- ↑ He succeeded his cousin, Solomon Van Rensselaer (1744–1852), who was in the regular army in 1792–1800, who had fought under General Anthony Wayne at Maumee Rapids in 1794 and under Stephen Van Rensselaer at Queenston Heights in 1812, and who was in the House of Representatives in 1819–1822.
