clear sanguine complexion, with a long beard as white as milk—a very handsome man—tall and slender. He wore a goune like an artist’s goune with hanging sleeves.” Dee’s Speculum or mirror, a piece of solid pink-tinted glass about the size of an orange, is preserved in the British Museum.
His principal works are—Propaedeumata aphoristica (London, 1558); Monas hieroglyphica (Antwerp, 1564); Epistola ad Fredericum Commandinum (Pesaro, 1570); Preface Mathematical to the English Euclid (1570); Divers Annotations and Inventions added after the tenth book of English Euclid (1570); Epistola praefixa Ephemeridibus Joannis Feldi, a. 1557; Parallaticae commentationis praxeosque nucleus quidam (London, 1573). The catalogue of his printed and published works is to be found in his Compendious Rehearsal, as well as in his letter to Archbishop Whitgift. A manuscript of Dee’s, relating what passed for many years between him and some spirits, was edited by Meric Casaubon and published in 1659. The Private Diary of Dr John Dee, and the Catalogue of his Library of Manuscripts, edited by J. O. Halliwell, was published by the Camden Society in 1842. There is a life of Dee in Thomas Smith’s Vitae illustrium virorum (1707); English translation by W. A. Ayton, the Life of John Dee (1909).
DEE (Welsh, Dyfrdwy; Lat., and in Milton, Deva), a river of
Wales and England. It rises in Bala Lake, Merionethshire, which
is fed by a number of small streams. Leaving the lake near the
town of Bala it follows a north-easterly course to Corwen, turns
thence E. by S. past Llangollen to a point near Overton, and then
bends nearly north to Chester, and thereafter north-west through
a great estuary opening into the Irish Sea. In the Llangollen
district the Dee crosses Denbighshire, and thereafter forms the
boundary of that county with Shropshire, a detached part of
Flint, and Cheshire. From Bala nearly down to Overton, a
distance of 35 m., during which the river falls about 330 ft., its
course lies through a narrow and beautiful valley, enclosed on the
south by the steep lower slopes of the Berwyn Mountains and on
the north by a succession of lesser ranges. The portion known
as the Vale of Llangollen is especially famous. Here an aqueduct
carrying the Pontcysyllte branch of the Shropshire Union canal
bestrides the valley; it is a remarkable engineering work
completed by Thomas Telford in 1805. The Dee has a total
length of about 70 m. and a fall of 530 ft. Below Overton it
debouches upon its plain track. Below Chester it follows a
straight artificial channel to the estuary, and this is the only
navigable portion. The estuary, which is 14 m. long, and 514 m.
wide at its mouth, between Hilbre Point on the English and
Point of Air on the Welsh side, is not a commercial highway like
the neighbouring mouth of the Mersey, for though in appearance
a fine natural harbour at high tide, it becomes at low tide a vast
expanse of sand, through which the river meanders in a narrow
channel. The navigation, however, is capable of improvement,
and schemes have been set on foot to this end. The tide rushes
in with great speed over the sands, and their danger is illustrated
in the well-known ballad “The Sands of Dee” by Charles
Kingsley. The Dee drains an area of 813 sq. m.
DEE, a river in the south of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, pursuing
a generally easterly direction from its source in the extreme west
of the county till it reaches the North Sea at the city of Aberdeen.
It rises in the Wells of Dee, a spring on Ben Braeriach, one of the
Cairngorms, at a height of 4061 ft. above the sea. It descends
rapidly from this altitude, and by the time that it receives the
Geusachan, on its right bank, about 6 m. from its source, it has
fallen 2421 ft. From the mountains flanking its upper reaches
it is fed by numerous burns named and unnamed. With its
tributaries the river drains an area of 1000 sq. m. Rapid and
turbulent during the first half of its course of 90 m., it broadens
appreciably below Aboyne and the rate of flow is diminished.
The channel towards its mouth was artificially altered in order
to provide increased dock accommodation at Aberdeen, but,
above, the stream is navigable for only barges and small craft
for a few miles. It runs through scenery of transcendent beauty,
especially in Braemar. About two miles above Inverey it enters
a narrow rocky gorge, 300 yds. long and only a few feet wide at
one part, and forms the rapids and cascades of the famous Linn
of Dee. One of the finest of Scottish salmon streams, it retains
its purity almost to the very end of its run. The principal
places on the Dee, apart from private residences, are Castleton
of Braemar, Ballater, Aboyne, Kincardine O’Neil, Banchory,
Culter and Cults.
DEED (in O. Eng. deâd, from the stem of the verb “to do”),
that which is done, an act, doing; particularly, in law, a contract
in writing, sealed and delivered by the party bound to the party
intended to benefit. Contracts or obligations under seal are called
in English law specialties, and down to 1869 they took precedence
in payment over simple contracts, whether written or not.
Writing, sealing and delivery are all essential to a deed. The
signature of the party charged is not material, and the deed is
not void for want of a date. Delivery, it is held, may be complete
without the actual handing over of the deed; it is sufficient if the
act of sealing were accompanied by words or acts signifying that
the deed was intended to be presently binding; and delivery to
a third person for the use of the party benefited will be sufficient.
On the other hand, the deed may be handed over to a third person
as an escrow,[1] in which case it will not take effect as a deed until
certain conditions are performed. Such conditional delivery
may be inferred from the circumstances attending the transaction,
although the conditions be not expressed in words. A deed
indented, or indenture (so called because written in counterparts
on the same sheet of parchment, separated by cutting a wavy
line between them so as to be identified by fitting the parts
together), is between two or more parties who contract mutually.
The actual indentation is not now necessary to an indenture.
The deed-poll (with a polled or smooth-cut edge, not indented)
is a deed in which one party binds himself without reference
to any corresponding obligations undertaken by another party.
See Contract.
DEEMS, CHARLES (ALEXANDER) FORCE (1820–1893),
American clergyman, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on the
4th of December 1820. He was a precocious child and delivered
lectures on temperance and on Sunday schools before he was
fourteen years old. He graduated at Dickinson College in 1839,
taught and preached in New York city for a few months, in 1840
took charge of the Methodist Episcopal church at Asbury, New
Jersey, and removed in the next year to North Carolina, where
he was general agent for the American Bible Society. He was
professor of logic and rhetoric at the University of North Carolina
in 1842–1847, and professor of natural sciences at Randolph-Macon
College (then at Boydton, Virginia) in 1847–1848, and
after two years of preaching at Newbern, N.C., he held for
four years (1850–1854) the presidency of Greensboro (N.C.)
Female College. He continued as a Methodist Episcopal clergyman
at various pastorates in North Carolina from 1854 to 1865,
for the last seven years being a presiding elder and in 1859 to 1863
being the proprietor of St Austin’s Institute, Wilson. In 1865
he settled in New York City, where in 1866 he began preaching in
the chapel of New York University, and in 1868 he established
and became the pastor of the undenominational Church of the
Strangers, which in 1870 occupied the former Mercer Street
Presbyterian church, purchased and given to Dr Deems by
Cornelius Vanderbilt; there he remained until his death in
New York city on the 18th of November 1893. He was one of
the founders (1881) and president of the American Institute of
Christian Philosophy and for ten years was editor of its organ,
Christian Thought. Dr Deems was an earnest temperance advocate,
as early as 1852 worked (unsuccessfully) for a general prohibition
law in North Carolina, and in his later years allied himself
with the Prohibition party. He was influential in securing from
Cornelius Vanderbilt the endowment of Vanderbilt University,
in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a man of rare personal and
literary charm; he edited The Southern Methodist Episcopal
Pulpit (1846–1852) and The Annals of Southern Methodism
(1855–1857); he compiled Devotional Melodies (1842), and, with
the assistance of Phoebe Cary, one of his parishioners, Hymns
for all Christians (1869; revised, 1881); and he published many
books, among which were: The Life of Dr Adam Clarke (1840);
- ↑ An Anglo-French law term meaning a “scroll” or strip of parchment, cognate with the English “shred.” The modern French écroue is used for the entry of a name on a prison register.
