P G P I 275 appeared before the judges who condemned him to the stake. It is necessary to dwell at length upon Poggio s devotion to the task of recovering the classics, and upon his disengagement from all but humanistic interests, because these were the most marked feature of his character and career. In literature he embraced the whole sphere of contemporary studies, and distinguished himself as an orator, a writer of rhetorical treatises, a panegyrist of the dead, a violent impugner of the living, a translator from the Greek, an epistolographer and grave historian, and a facetious compiler of fabliaux in Latin. Of his moral essays it may suffice to notice the disserta tions On Nobility, On Vicissitudes of Fortune, On the Misery of Human Life, On the Infelicity of Princes, and On Marriage in Old Age. These compositions belonged to a species which, since Petrarch set the fashion, were very popular among Italian scholars. They have lost their value, except for the few matters of fact em bedded in a mass of commonplace meditation, and for some occasionally brilliant illustrations. Poggio s History uf Florence, written in avowed imitation of Livy s manner, requires separate mention, since it exemplifies by its defects the weakness of that merely stylistic treatment which deprived so much of Bruni s, Carlo Aretino s, and Bembo s work of historical weight. A somewhat different criticism must be passed on the Facetiae,, a collection of humorous and indecent tales expressed in such Latinity as Poggio could command. This book is chiefly remarkable for its unsparing satires on the monastic orders and the secular clergy. It is also noticeable as illustrating the Latinizing tendency of an age which gave classic form to the lightest essays of the fancy. Poggio, it may be observed, was a fluent and copious writer in the Latin tongue, but not an elegant scholar. His knowledge of the ancient authors was wide, but his taste was not select, and his erudition was superficial. His translation of Xenophon s Cyropxdia into Latin cannot be praised for accuracy. Among contemporaries he passed for one of the most formidable polemical or gladiatorial rhetoricians; and a considerable section of his extant works are invectives. One of these, the Dialogue against Hypocrites, was aimed in a spirit of vindictive hatred at the vices of ecclesiastics ; another, written at the request of Nicholas V., covered the anti-pope Felix with scurrilous abuse. But his most famous compositions in this kind are the personal invec tives which he discharged against Filelfo and Valla. All the resources of a copious and unclean Latin vocabulary were employed to degrade the objects of his satire ; and every crime of which humanity is capable was ascribed to them without discrimination. In Filelfo and Valla Poggio found his match ; and Italy was amused for years with the spectacle of their indecent combats. To dwell upon such literary infamies would be below the dignity of the historian, were it not that these habits of the early Italian humanists imposed a fashion upon Europe which extended to the later age of Scaliger s contentions with Scioppius and Milton s with Salmasius. The greater part of Poggio s long life was spent in attendance to his duties in the papal curia at Eome and elsewhere. But about the year 1452 he finally retired to Florence, where he was admitted to the burghership, and on the death of Carlo Aretino in 1453 was appointed chancellor and historiographer to the republic. He had already built himself a villa in Valdarno, which he adorned with a collection of antique sculpture, coins, and inscriptions. In 1435 he had married a girl of eighteen named Vaggia, of the famous Buondel- nionte blood. His declining days were spent in the dis charge of his honourable Florentine office and in the com position of his history. He died in 1459, and was buried in the church of Santa Croce. A statue by Donatello and a picture by Antonio del Pollajuolo remained to com memorate a citizen who chiefly for his services to human istic literature deserved the notice of posterity. Poggio s works were printed at Basel in 1538, " ex a:dibus Henrici Petri." Dr Shepherd s Life of Poggio Bracciolini is a good authority on his biography. For his position in the history of the revival, students may consult Voigt s Wiederlclcbung dcs dassichcn Altcrthums, and Symonds s Renaissance in Italy. (J. A. S. ) POGY, a popular name for the fish Clupea menhaden, almost universally in use in the States of Maine and Massachusetts (see MENHADEN, vol. xvi. p. 10). POINSOT, Louis (1777-1859), mathematician, was born at Paris January 3, 1777. In 1794 he became a scholar at the Polytechnic School, which he left in 1796 to act as a civil engineer. In 1804 he was appointed pro fessor of mathematics at the Lyceum, in 1809 professor of applied mathematics and in 1816 examiner at the Polytechnic School. On the death of Lagrange in 1813, Poinsot was elected to his place in the French Academy ; and in 1840 he became a member of the superior council of public instruction. In 1846 he was made an officer of the legion of honour ; and on the formation of the senate in 1852 he was chosen a member of that body. He died at Paris, December 5, 1859. Poinsot s earliest work was | his Siemens de Statique, in which he introduces the idea of statical couples and investigates their properties. In the I Theorie Nouvelle de la Rotation des Corps he treats the ! motion of a rigid body geometrically, and shows that the most general motion of such a body can be represented at any instant by a rotation about an axis combined with a i translation parallel to this axis, and that any motion of a body of which one point is fixed may be produced by the rolling of a cone fixed in the body on a cone fixed in i space. The previous treatment of the motion of a rigid body had in every case been purely analytical, and so gave no aid to the formation of a mental picture of the body s motion ; and the great value of this work lies in the fact that, as Poinsot himself says in the introduction, it enables us to represent to ourselves the motion of a rigid body as clearly as that of a moving point. Poinsot also con tributed a number of papers on pure and applied mathe matics to Liouville s Journal and to the Journal of the Polytechnic School. POINT DE GALLE. See GALLE, vol. x. p. 40. POINTE A PITRE, the principal port of the island of GUADELOUPE (q.v.). POISONS. An exact definition of the word "poison" is by no means easy. There is no legal definition of what constitutes a poison, and the definitions usually proposed are apt to include either too much or too little. Gene rally, a poison may be defined to be a substance having an inherent deleterious property, rendering it capable of destroying life by whatever avenue it is taken into the system; or it is a substance which when introduced into the | system, or applied externally, injures health or destroys life irrespective of mechanical means or direct thermal changes. In popular language, a poison is a substance capable of destroying life when taken in small quantity ; but a sub stance which destroys life by mechanical means as, e.g., powdered glass, is not, strictly speaking, a poison. The subject of toxicology forms one of the most important branches of MEDICAL JURISPRUDENCE (q.v.). The medical jurist should be familiar with the nature and actions of poisons, the symptoms which they produce, the circum stances which modify their working, the pathological results of their action, and the methods of combating these. Action of Poisons. Poisons may exert a twofold action. This may be either local, or remote, or both local and remote. The local action of a poison is usually one of corrosion, inflammation, or a direct effect upon the sensory
or motor nerves. The remote actions of poisons are