in the 14th century. They were used down to the 16th and 17th centuries to throw grenades.
SLIVEN, Slivno or formerly Selimnia (Turk. Islimye), a town of Bulgaria, in Eastern Rumelia, at the southern foot of the Balkan Mountains, 105 m. E.N.E. of Philippopolis and near the southern entrance of the defile known as the Iron Gate. Pop. (1006), 25,049. There are numerous mosques in the town, but the greater part of the Turkish population emigrated after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. Sliven contains the government factory, founded in 1834, for the manufacture of military clothing; it is the chief centre in Bulgaria for the rough and fine homespuns known as aba and shayak, and its wine is locally celebrated. Extensive mulberry orchards .have been planted in connexion with the silk industry.
Sliven, the Stlifanos of the Byzantine writers, owed its former strategic importance to its position on one of the trans-Balkan highways to Adrianople and the south. In the middle ages it was a subject of dispute between Byzantium and Bulgaria. After its capture by the Turks (1388) it was one of the voinik towns which remained exempt from taxes and were allowed to elect their own voivode; but these privileges were lost in the 16th century. In 1829 Sliven was occupied by the Russian army under Rudiger and Gorchakov.
SLOANE, SIR HANS (1660–1753), British collector and physician, was born on the 16th of April 1660 at Killyleagh in county Down, Ireland, where his father had settled at the head of a Scotch colony sent over by James I. He had as a youth a taste for collecting objects of natural history and other curiosities. This led him to the study of medicine, which he went to London to pursue, directing his attention to botany, materia medica and pharmacy. His collecting propensities made him useful to John Ray and Robert Boyle. After four years in London he travelled through France, spending some time at Paris and Montpellier, and taking his M.D. degree at the university of Orange in 1683. He returned to London with a considerable collection of plants and other curiosities, of which the former were sent to Ray and utilized by him for his History of Plants. Sloane was quickly elected into the Royal Society, and at the same time he attracted the notice of Thomas Sydenham, who gave him valuable introductions to practice. In 1687 he became fellow of the College of Physicians, and proceeded to Jamaica the same year as physician in the suite of the duke of Albemarle. The duke died soon after landing, and Sloane's visit lasted only fifteen months; but during that time he got together about 800 new species of plants, the island being virgin ground to the
botanist. Of these he published an elaborate catalogue in Latin in 1696; and at a later date (1707–1725) he made the experiences of his visit the subject of two folio volumes. He became secretary to the Royal Society in 1693, and edited the Philosophical Transactions for twenty years. His practice as a physician among the upper classes was large. In the pamphlets written concerning the sale by Dr William Cockburn (1669–1739) of his secret remedy for dysentery and other fluxes, it was stated for the defence that Sloane himself did not disdain the same kind of professional conduct; and some colour is given to that charge by the fact that his only medical publication, an Account of a Medicine for Soreness, Weakness and other Distempers of the Eyes (London, 1745) was not given to the world until its author was in his eighty-fifth year and had retired from practice.
In 1716 Sloane was created a baronet, being the first medical practitioner to receive an hereditary title, and in 1719 he became president of the College of Physicians, holding the office sixteen years. In 1722 he was appointed physician-general to the army, and in 1727 first physician to George II. In 1727 also he succeeded Sir Isaac Newton in the presidential chair of the Royal Society; he retired from it at the age of eighty. Sloane's memory survives more by his judicious investments than by anything that he contributed to the subject matter of natural science or even of his own profession. His purchase of the manor of Chelsea in 1712 has perpetuated his memory in the name of a “place,” a street, and a square. His great stroke as a collector was to acquire (by bequest, conditional on paying off certain debts) in 1701 the cabinet of William Courten, who had made collecting the business of his life. When Sloane retired from active work in 1741 his library and cabinet of curiosities, which he took with him from Bloomsbury to his house in Chelsea, had grown to be of unique value. On his death on the 11th of January 1753 he bequeathed his books, manuscripts, prints, drawings, pictures, medals, coins, seals, cameos and other curiosities to the nation, on condition that parliament should pay to his executors £20,000, which was a good deal less than the value of the collection. The bequest was accepted on those terms by an act passed the same year, and the collection, together with George II.’s royal library, &c, was opened to the public at Bloomsbury as the British Museum in 1759. Among his other acts of munificence may be mentioned his gift to the Apothecaries’ Company of the botanical or physic garden, which they had rented from the Chelsea estate since 1673.
See Weld, History of the Royal Society, i. 450 (London, 1848); and Munk, Roll of the College of Physicians, 2nd ed., i. 466 (London, 1878).
SLOCUM, HENRY WARNER (1827–1894), American general,
was born at Delphi, Onondaga county, New York, on the 24th
of September 1827, and graduated at the United States Military
Academy in 1852. He resigned from the army in 1856 to practise
law at Syracuse, N.Y., and in 1859 he was a member of the state Assembly. When the Civil War broke out he became colonel
(May 1861) of the 27th New York Volunteers, and was promoted
brigadier-general of volunteers (August 1861) and major-general of volunteers (July 1862). He fought in all the Virginia campaigns from the first battle of Bull Run, where he led a regiment, to Gettysburg, where he commanded the XII. corps. With that corps he was transferred in the autumn of 1863 under Hooker’s command to the Tennessee Valley, and took part in the battle of Chattanooga. He remained with the Army of the Cumberland after his corps was merged into that of Hooker, took part in the Atlanta campaign, and after Hooker’s retirement succeeded to the command of the XX. corps (late XI. and XII.). He commanded the Atlanta garrison, and with Sherman took part in the “march to the sea,” and subsequently in the Carolinas campaign from Savannah to Goldsboro, as commander of the left wing. He resigned from the army in September 1865, resumed professional practice at Brooklyn, and was a Democratic representative in Congress in 1869–1873 and again in 1883–1885. In 1876–1884 he was president of the Brooklyn city board of public works. He died at Brooklyn on the 14th of April 1894. A monument of General Slocum by Frederick MacMonnies was unveiled at Brooklyn, N.Y., on the 30th of May 1905.
SLODTZ, RENÉ MICHEL or MICHEL ANGE (1705–1764), French sculptor, was born at Paris. He passed seventeen years at Rome, where he was chosen to execute a statue of St Bruno, one of the best modern works of the class in St Peter’s. He was also the sculptor of the tomb of Marquis Capponi in St John of the Florentines. Other works of his are to be seen at the church of St Louis of France and at Santa Maria della Scala. After his return to France in 1747, Slodtz, in conjunction with his brothers, Antoine Sebastien and Paul, produced many decorative works in the churches of Paris, and, though much has been destroyed, his most considerable achievement—the tomb of Languet de Gergy in St Sulpice (commissioned in 1750)—still exists. Slodtz was, like his brothers, a member of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and many particulars of his life are preserved in a memoir written by Cochin, and also in a letter from the same to the Gazette litteraire, which was reproduced by Castilhon in the Nécrologe of 1766.
Slodtz’s father, Sebastien (1655–1726), was also a sculptor, born at Antwerp; he became a pupil of Girardon and worked mostly under him at Versailles and the Tuileries. His chief works were "Hannibal" in the Tuileries garden, a statue of St Ambrose in the Palais des Invalides, and a bas-relief "Saint Louis sending missionaries to India."
See C. N. Cochin, Mém. inéd. (Paris, 1881); Barbet de Jouy, Sculpture moderne du Louvre (Paris, 1856); Duissieux, Artistes français à l’étranger (Paris, 1852).
