thousand of Sir Charles Grey's army had fallen its victims, and that this appalling mortality was surpassed by that of the army of St. Domingo in 1795-96, when ten thousand men perished from the same disease. Returning to England in 1795, Dr. Pym proceeded to the Mediterranean, and after serving in Sicily, Malta, and Gibraltar, was placed on the staff of the last-named garrison, and remained in charge of the quarantine department there until 1812, when Lord Liverpool appointed him chief of quarantine at Malta. This institution was so remodelled by Dr. Pym as to become a source of revenue, instead of expenditure, to the government. His sagacity and rare experience proved of singular benefit to the garrison and general population of Gibraltar, on several most important and trying occasions, during his tenure of office there. By his judicious precautionary measures Gibraltar was protected from yellow fever, while this disease was raging in Cadiz and other towns on the south coast of Spain in the years 1800 and 1803. During the following year, however (1804), while Dr. Pym was absent on leave, yellow fever unhappily got a footing in the garrison, having been introduced by a person from Cadiz, where the disorder prevailed to an alarming extent When Dr. Pym returned to Gibraltar, he found the deaths were about one hundred and sixty per day. In less than four months six thousand persons had succumbed to the pestilence. Another invasion of the garrison, by the disease, in 1810, was successfully repelled, after the loss of only thirteen persons. Returning to England in 1813, Dr. Pym was granted a pension of £300 a year for his services. From this time he became the confidential adviser of the government in quarantine matters; and in 1826 he was appointed superintendent-general of quarantine—an office which he administered with remarkable efficiency, while at the same time he gradually but judiciously diminished quarantine restriction in this country, without giving cause for the freedom of communication with other countries being in any way interrupted. At the outbreak of yellow fever at Gibraltar in 1828, Dr. Pym at once volunteered to return to the scene of the labours of his early days. His offer was eagerly accepted by the government, and his eminent services on the occasion were fully acknowledged by the local authorities, as well as by the home government. He was also appointed by the privy council chairman of the central board of health, when this country was invaded by cholera in 1832. His celebrated work on "Bulam, or yellow fever," was published in 1815, and from the opinions therein enunciated he was for many years hotly engaged in controversial warfare. He indeed defended the doctrine of contagion in yellow fever so stoutly and successfully, that he was long regarded as the leader of those who supported that view. The question of the preservative influence of a first attack of yellow fever against a second, had been already to some extent recognized by Valence, Hosack, Arejula, Cabanelli, and others; but to Sir William Pym is undoubtedly due the honour of having established this important property of the disease upon incontrovertible evidence. This was fully admitted by the Royal College of Physicians, and by the army medical board in 1816; and also by the Anglo-French commission, convened at Gibraltar by order of the government in 1828. The commission, which was presided over by the celebrated French physician Louis, with Trousseau as one of the secretaries, thus concluded their report:—"The board cannot close their report on this most interesting subject without acknowledging the large debt of gratitude which science, commerce, and humanity owe to Dr. Pym, to whose talents, sagacious observation, persevering industry, and research, is due the undivided merit of having been the first who steadily investigated and boldly promulgated to the profession the singular and now well established property of the yellow fever." Sir William in the course of his career had been much exposed to the dangers incident to war and pestilence. He was also shipwrecked in the Atheniene frigate, off the coast of Sicily in 1806, when, out of a crew of four hundred and seventy-six persons three hundred and forty-nine perished. He was seized with paralysis shortly after transacting his usual business at the privy council office, on the 16th of March, 1861, and died on the 19th, in the eighty-ninth year of his age.—J. O. M'W.
PYNACKER, Adam, a good Dutch landscape painter, so called from his birthplace, Pynacker, where he was born in 1621. He studied some years in Rome, and has sometimes transferred the brilliant light of Italy to his canvasses; he is, however, often hard in his foregrounds, and occasionally too green for the scale of his landscapes. His distances are fine; his figures were inserted for him often by other painters. There is a good example of his work in the Dulwich gallery. He sometimes executed large decorative pictures to serve the place of tapestries, but these pieces are painted purely from fancy or memory, and are cold and artificial. He died in 1678.—R. N. W.
PYNE, James B., vice-president of the Society of British Artists, was born December 5, 1800, at Bristol. He was articled to a solicitor in that city, but when his term was ended abandoned the law, and for some years practised as a teacher of drawing, &c. He removed to London in 1835, and slowly secured public recognition. For some years he exhibited at the Royal Academy, but about 1842 he joined the Society of British Artists, and from that time his pictures were chiefly shown in the gallery of that society. Many of his later pictures represent scenes in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland; the earlier were mostly British His style, alike as regards composition, handling, and colour, was peculiar and strongly marked. He published lithographic facsimiles of a series of Windsor and its Vicinity, and another of the English Lake District, and wrote some papers on landscape design and colour for the Art Journal. He died on the 29th of July, 1870.—J. T—e.
PYNE, William Henry, artist and author, was the son of a tradesman in London, where he was born in 1769. He practised landscape and figure painting, and was one of the founders of the Society of Painters in Water Colours, 1805; but is now best known by his various publications. Of these the chief are a series of six hundred sketches of figures—"Microcosm, or a picturesque delineation of the arts, agriculture, &c., of Great Britain," folio, 1803, a work of considerable value; "Royal Residences," 3 vols., 4to, 1819, with one hundred coloured illustrations from drawings by himself and other artists; the "Funeral of the Princess Charlotte," &c. Later he wrote a series of amusing but somewhat highly coloured papers of gossip on artists and others, in the Literary Gazette, republished in 3 vols., 8vo, under the title of "Wine and Walnuts;" and subsequently another series in Fraser's Magazine. He also conducted a short-lived critical journal, entitled the Somerset House Gazette. He died May 29, 1843.—J. T—e.
PYNSON, Richard, one of the earliest printers in England, was a Norman by birth, and was naturalized in this country by patent in 1493. Little is known with certainty of his career. He probably worked at the press for Caxton, whom, in his edition of Chaucer, he styles "his worshipful master." He appears to have practised the art on his own account, first at Westminster, and then in Fleet Street, near St. Dunstan's, where he assumed the sign of St. George. In the colophon to an edition of Littleton's Tenures, printed in 1525, Pynson abuses in very gross terms the printer, Redman, who had without apology adopted one of Pynson's devices in several of his own books. Nevertheless Redman succeeded to the business carried on at the sign of St. George, having, as is supposed, bought out Pynson. The latter is said to have been a great favourite with Margaret, King Henry VII.'s mother, and he was appointed king's printer in 1503. He died about 1529. His special distinction consists in his being the first to introduce the Roman letter into English printing.—(See Ames' History of Printing, by Dibdin.)—R. H.
PYREICUS, a Greek painter, who lived probably about the time of Alexander's successors. He is remarkable as having been the first artist to distinguish himself in painting low subjects. He was famous for his pictures of barbers' shops and cobblers' stalls, shell-fish, eatables of all kinds, and such subjects as in modern times have attracted the Dutch painters. The matter of the pictures of Pyreicus was mean, but the art which produced them was great; yet the Greeks called this kind of painting dirt-painting—Rhyparography. The French, in somewhat a similar spirit, have called this kind of art genre painting, and the artists, Peintres du genre bas; that is, painters of the low class of subjects, as distinct from history or portrait; whence the abbreviated term genre, now used in most European countries.—R. N. W.
PYRRHO, one of the most remarkable philosophers of the ancient world, whose sceptical spirit and method have deeply influenced human thought, and whose name is associated with an intellectual temperament of which mankind always supplies some representatives. This founder of a famous philosophical sect, can himself be only dimly discovered through the mist of legendary tradition. Pyrrho is known almost exclusively in the
