and was educated under Melancthon at Wittemberg, where he made remarkable attainments in classical learning. He laboured for some time as a teacher of literæ humaniores at Nordhausen, and in 1550 was made rector of the convent school of Hefeld, where he died 26th April, 1595. He published several school books on the Greek tongue, which were long in use in the grammar schools of Germany, such as "Erotemata Linguæ Græcæ," 3rd edition, 1565; "Tabulæ Linguæ Græcæ," 1553; "Elegantiæ Linguæ Græcæ," 1561. His principal work was the "Opus Aureum et Gnomologicum," 1559. His labours as a pedagogue and author contributed much to the progress of classical knowledge in Germany in his day.—P. L.
NEARCHUS, a distinguished Macedonian general, was of Cretan extraction. He early attached himself to the fortunes of Alexander, and on the death of Philip he rose to very great influence in the councils of his successor. Alexander appointed him governor of Syria, and he commanded the Macedonian fleet on the Hydaspes in the expedition to the East. This fleet in 325 b.c. he successfully brought round from the Indus to the Persian Gulf, a voyage at that time of almost unexampled length and difficulty. During the greater part of it he had no pilot, but the only loss which he sustained was from the foundering of three ships in a storm. On his arrival at Susa he was treated with great distinction by Alexander, and his services were rewarded with a crown of gold and other substantial marks of the monarch's favour. Nearchus wrote an account of this voyage, which forms the foundation of the latter portion of Arrian's Indica. The truth of the narrative was questioned by Strabo; but subsequent inquiries have fully vindicated its veracity. After the death of Alexander, Nearchus supported Heracles in his pretensions to the throne, and on the division of the empire he obtained the government of Lycia and Pamphylia. He accompanied Antigonus in his wars against Eumenes in 317 b.c., and in 314 b.c. he was chosen one of the councillors of Demetrius; but his advice was rejected by the young king, and the disastrous battle of Gaza followed. The date of his death is not known.—D. M.
NEBENIUS, Karl Friedrich, a German statesman and writer on political economy, was born at Rhodt, near Landau, September 29, 1784, and died at Karlsruhe, June 8th, 1857. He devoted himself to the study of law at Tübingen, and soon after entered the civil service of the grand duchy of Baden, where he was successively promoted to the highest posts of trust and honour. He strenuously advocated the development of liberal principles, and greatly promoted the welfare of his country. He assisted in framing the present constitution, and was an energetic promoter of the Zollverein. In 1846 he was appointed president of the ministry, but resigned in 1849 and retired into private life. Among his numerous and valuable publications we note his "Betrachtungen über den Zustand Grossbritanniens in Staatswirthschaftlicher Hinsicht," 1818; "Der öffentliche Kredit;" "Der Deutsche Zollverein, sein System und seine Zukunft," &c.—K. E.
NEBRUS, a celebrated physician, who is supposed to have lived in the seventh and sixth centuries b.c. He was the thirteenth in descent from Æsculapius, and a native of the island of Cos. His father was Sostratus III., and he had two sons named Gnosdicus and Chrysus. While the Amphyctions were besieging the town of Crissa in Phocis, the plague broke out in the army of the besiegers. They were advised by the oracle of Delphi to obtain from Cos "the young of a stag together with gold." This they interpreted to mean Nebrus and his son Chrysus. Nebrus joined the camp and rendered the besieging army great services, amongst which, according to some, was poisoning the water supply of the town. This barbarity, however, is attributed by Pausanias to the advice of Solon, 591 b.c.—F. C. W.
NECKER, Jacques, a celebrated financier, for some time prime minister of Louis XVI., was born on the 30th September, 1732, at Geneva, where his father, a Pomeranian, was long professor of public law. Carefully educated, he was placed in a Paris bank of which he rose to be head; and entering as a partner the well-known establishment of Thelusson, he made a large fortune after twenty years' devotion to business and speculation. In 1764 he married the beautiful and learned Susanne Curchod, the daughter of a protestant pastor in the Pays de Vaud, and who would have become the wife of the young Gibbon, had not the father of the future historian of the Decline and Fall forbidden the banns. Madame Necker threw open her salons to philosophers and financiers, and thus aided the ambition of a husband far from brilliant, however vain and aspiring. He had published an éloge of Colbert and a denunciation of Turgot's free-trade policy in corn, when, partly through intrigue, partly from his credit and reputation, he was appointed in 1776 by Maurepas director of the treasury. The apparent cause of his appointment was a scheme which in that year he submitted to the minister, for repairing the ruined finances of France; and to France, on the eve of a war to support the American revolution, the raising of money was a necessity. Necker's nominal chief, the controller of finances, soon resigned; but Necker was not appointed to the vacant office. He was made director-general, not controller-general, of the finances, and had not a seat in the council of ministers. The expenses of the American war forced him to call for successive loans, which his credit and character made acceptable. Meanwhile he courted popularity by refusing to accept an official salary; by establishing on a small scale real provincial parliaments, with powers of self-taxation; by apparently taking the public into his confidence, as when in 1780 he published his famous compte rendu, or financial report, an act without a parallel, and in which he showed upon paper an excess of income over expenditure. At last borrowing and popularity-hunting failed, and nothing was left him but Turgot's old system of retrenchment. Then the court and nobility began to grumble, and the king to grow cold. To make head against his enemies Necker insisted on a seat in the council of ministers; and when this was refused him as a protestant, he resigned, May, 1781, to the grief of the public, who believed in his compte rendu. He withdrew to the banks of Lake Leman, where he had purchased Coppet, afterwards celebrated as the residence of his daughter, Madame de Stael, and thence he issued in 1784 his work, "Administration des Finances," of which, it is said, eighty thousand copies were sold in a few days. Four years afterwards, on the eve of the great revolution, when the king had consented to convoke the states-general, and when the ruin of French finance had been consummated by Calonne and Loménie de Brienne, Necker was recalled, August, 1788, with his old title of director-general of finances, but with the functions of prime minister. He foresaw, but took no precautions to meet, the coming storm. He permitted the tiers-etat to send as many representatives to the new assembly as the two other estates of the realm together; something very like universal suffrage was allowed; no qualification was exacted from the elected; and the question of questions, whether the states-general should sit and vote in one body or in three bodies, was left unsettled. By this course Necker indeed retained his popularity for a time. When the tiers-etat had settled the question of joint or separate deliberation of the states by declaring itself a national assembly, and when the king resolved to employ force to dissolve it, Necker was dismissed, July 11, 1789; and he was still so popular that his dismissal was one of the pretexts for the insurrection which ended in the capture of the Bastile. Ten days afterwards he was once mere recalled from Basle, which he had reached on his way to Switzerland, and his reception at Paris on his return was triumphal. But the Revolution had gone too far for the success of a man like Necker, who would not obey it, and had not genius enough to guide it. Mirabeau, whom he had slighted or neglected, now took his revenge, and thwarted him at every step. As the Revolution proceeded it left the moderate Necker far behind; and when, in September, 1790, in sorrow and disgust he gave in his resignation, not only did the assembly receive it without emotion, but he had to make his way to Switzerland as a fugitive, through the country which a few months before had risen round him with enthusiasm as he returned to Paris. From his retirement at Coppet he issued in 1792 a plaidoyer for Louis XVI., then on his trial, and for this he was declared an emigrant, and punished by the confiscation of his property in France. He published some other works, political, financial, and religious, and lived unmolested till his death at Geneva, on the 9th of April, 1804. In that year some of his literary remains were edited by his gifted and admiring daughter, Madame de Stael; and in 1820-22 a collected edition of his writings was published at Paris by his grandson, M. de Stael.—His wife, Susanne Curchod de la Nasse, equally celebrated for her beauty, her accomplishments, and her virtues, was born in 1739. No care or expense was spared in her education; she was conversant with the classics and modern languages. After her marriage her judicious and liberal encouragement of learned men would
