The same cause also led him to renew his acquaintance with Mirabeau, whom he found occupied with his duties as a deputy, and with the composition of his journal, the Courier de Provence, in which he was assisted by Duroverai, Claviere, and other Genevese patriots. For a time Dumont took an active and very efficient part in the conduct of this journal, supplying it with reports as well as original articles, and also furnishing Mirabeau withspeeches to be delivered or rather read in the assembly, as related in his highly instructive and interesting posthumous work entitled Souvenirs sur Mirabeau (1832). In fact his friend George Wilson used to relate that one day, when they were dining together at a table d hote at Versailles, he saw Dumont en gaged in writing the most celebrated paragraph of Mirabeau s address to tihe king for the removal of the troops. He also reported such of Mirabeau s speeches as he did not write, embellishing them from his own stores, which were in exhaustible. But this co-operation, so valuable for Mira beau, and so self -devoted on the part of Dumont, was destined soon to come to an end ; for, being attacked in pamphlets as one of Mirabeau s writers, he felt hurt at the notoriety thus given to his name in connection with a man occupying Mirabeau s peculiar position, and resolved to re
turn to England, which he accordingly did in 1791.In the eventful years which followed he continued to live chiefly at Lansdowue House, or at Bowood, where the most remarkable men of Europe were frequent guests. Latterly, he formed an intimate friendship with. Lord Holland, whom he .had known from childhood; and he became a member of the society of familiar friends, the habitual visitors at Holland House, where, during many years, celebrated guests were welcomed of every country, party, religion, and of every liberal profession or station. In 1801 Dumont travelled over various parts of Europe with Lord Henry Petty, afterwards marquis of Lansdowne, and brought back a fresher acquaintance with the mental occupations of the Continental nations, from whom England had for years been widely separated. But Dumont had then opened a new course of more serious occupations, in the editor ship of the works of Bentham already mentioned. In 1801 he published the Traite de la Legislation, the first fruits of his zealous labours to give order, clearness, and vivacity to the profound and original meditations of Bentham, hitherto praised, only by a very few patient readers, and but little better known, even by name, to the English than to the European public. In 1814 the restora tion of Geneva to independence induced Dumont to return to his native place, and he soon became at once the leader and ornament of the supreme council. He devoted particular attention to the judicial and penal systems of his native state, and many improvements on both are due to him. At the time of his death, he was on the eve of proposing a com plete code of law, by which he fondly hoped to make the legislation of Geneva an example to Europe. He died at Milan when on an autumn tour of relaxation in October 1829, in the seventy-first year of his age.
DUMONT D’URVILLE, Jules Sébastien César (1790-1842), a French navigator, born in the town of Coade-sur-Noireau, in Normandy. The death of his father, who before the revolution had held a judicial post in Conde, devolved the care of his education on his mother and his maternal uncle, the Abb6 De Croisilles. Failing to pass the entrance examination for the Ecole Polytechnique, he went to sea in 1807 as a novice on board the " Aquilon, 1 and soon attracted the attention of the captain, Maignon, by his studious disposition. During the next twelve years he gradually rose in his profession, and continued through &11 its multitudinous vicissitudes to increase his scientific and linguistic acquisitions : botany, entomology, English, Gorman, Spanish, Italian, and even Hebrew and Greek were added to the more professional branches. In 1 820, while engaged in a survey of the Mediterranean under Captain Gauthier of the " Chevrette," he was fortunate enough to recognize the Venus of Milo in a Greek statue recently unearthed, and to secure its preservation by the report he presented to the French ambassador at Constanti nople. A wider field for his energies was furnished in 1822 by the exploring expedition of the "Coquille" under the command of his friend Duperrey ; and on its return in 1825 his services were rewarded by promotion to the rank of capitaine de fregate, and he was intrusted with the con trol of a similar enterprise. The "Astrolabe," as he new- named the " Coquille," left Toulon on April 25, 1826, and reached Marseilles again on 25th of March 1829, having traversed the South Atlantic, coasted the Australian continent from .King George s Sound to Port Jackson, laid down various parts of New Zealand, and visited the Fiji Islands, the Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia, New Guinea, Amboyna, Van Diemen s Land, the Caroline Islands, Cele bes, and Mauritius. Promotion to the rank of capitaine de vaisseau was bestowed on the commander in August 1829 ; and in August of the following year he was charged with the delicate task of conveying the exiled King Charles X. to England. His proposal to undertake a voyage of dis covery to the south polar regions was discouraged by Arago and others, who criticised the work of the previous expedi tion in no measured terms ; but at last, in 1837, all difficul ties were surmounted, and on 7th September he set sail from. Toulon with the " Astrolabe " and its convoy " La Zelde." On 15th January 1838 they sighted the Antarctic ice, and soon after their progress southwards was blocked by a con tinuous bank, which they vainly coasted for 300 miles to the east. Returning westward they visited the South Orkney Islands and part of the New Shetlands, and dis covered Joinville Island and Louis Philippe s Land, but were compelled by scurvy to seek succour at Talcahuano in Chili. Thence they proceeded across the Pacific and through the Asiatic archipelago, visiting among others the Fiji and the Pelew Islands, coasting New Guinea, and cir cumnavigating Borneo. In 1840, leaving their sick at Hobart Town, Tasmania, they returned to the Antarctic region, and on the 21st of the month were rewarded by the discovery of Adelie Land, in 140 E. of Greenwich. The 6th of November found them at Toulon. D Urville was at once appointed rear-admiral, and in 1841 he received the gold medal of the Socie te de Geographic. On the 8th of May 1842 he was killed along with his wife and son in a railway accident near Meudon. Though many of his obser vations are no longer regarded as trustworthy on account of the defective character of the instruments employed, he made many important additions to various departments of scientific geography ; and his natural history collections were especially valuable. His principal works are Enum. plantarum quas in insulis ArchipeL aut littoribus Ponti Euxiniy &c., 1822; the Histoire du voyage (5 vols. of the 22) in the great work on the "Astrolabe" expedition in 1826-1829 ; the first part of the Histoire du voyage (10 vols. of the 23) in the series devoted to the expedition from 1837 to 1840 ; Voyages autour du Monde : resume general des voyages de Magellan, <kc., 1833, 1844.
See Berthelot s eloge in Bull, de la Soc. de Gfogr. 2d ser. t. xix. ; Matterer, Notice necrologique, &c., Paris, 1842 ; Isidore Lebrun, " Biographic," &c., in A nnales Maritinus, t. Ixxviii.; De Barins, Vie, voyages, &c., Paris, 1844 ; Lesson. Notice histor., Eochefort, 1846.
in 1739 of a respectable family of Provenge. His father was a commissary of the royal army, and had acquired some celebrity as a poet ; and from him young Dumouriez
received his earliest instructions. His studies were con-