the elevator mechanism are set in operation by being mounted on a spindle which passes through and outside the cylinder, and is turned either by a weight. attached to a length of steel wire or, where convenient, by hydraulic power. The turrets contain (1) a gas-holder which supplies gas while the machine is being wound up, should any light be then burning, and (2) a governor to regulate the pressure of the issuing gas. The apparatus works only when gas is being burned, and moves in proportion to the demand on it up to its limit of production. There is therefore no necessity for storing, as indeed would be inpracticable with this form of carburetted gas. The function of the blower is not only, by its revolution, to press forward the gas into the supply pipes, but also to carburet the air by exposing continually renewed thin films of the liquids to its influence on the moist metallic surfaces. The revolution of the blower, moreover, maintains an unceasing agitation in the gasolin, vaporizes the liquid in an equal and uniform manner, and keeps the entire volume at the same temperature throughout. The quantity of gasolin operated on being comparatively large, the temperature of the liquid decreases only slowly, and is in ordinary conditions sufficiently recouped from the external air to keep it in good working order throughout any length of time.

M. Tessie du Motay, who for many years advocated a modified system of lime-light, latterly abandoned that system in favour of a form of carburetted gas. His system necessitates two sets of pipes and a special form of burner,one pipe supplying ordinary coal-gas or highly carburetted hydrogen, and the other leading in a supply of oxygen, whereby a powerful, steady, white light is maintained at the burner. Philipps of Cologne has also utilized oxygen in a comparatively pure state for burning in a lamp with a wick a mixture of heavy hydrocarbons, which in common air would burn with a very smoky flame.

Other sources of gas, such as tar, and even fæcal matters, have been proposed; and many modified forms of gaseous illumination have been brought forward which, even to name here, would occupy space out of proportion to their importance.

THE FUTURE OF COAL-GAS.

The processes involved in the preparation, distribution, and consumption of coal-gas still remain essentially the same as when the system was first elaborated; but in all details of the industry numerous improvements have been introduced, resulting in marked economy and efficiency of the system. In the meantime new applications of importance have been found for coal-gas in connexion with heating and cooking, and as a motive power in gas-engines. Further, collateral industries have been superadded to the gas manufacture, which in themselves are of such value and importance that, were the distillation of coal as a source of artificial light to cease, it would certainly continue to be practised as a source of the raw materials of the coal-tar colours, and of carbolic acid, &c. Were coal-gas to cease to be made primarily and principally for artificial illumination, and to become more a heating and cooking agent, or were it to fall into the position of being a mere collateral product of the manufacture of tar, it is certain that the manufacturing processes would be very materially modified. Costly cannel-gas, with its high illuminating power, is no better suited for a gas engine than common gas; and for heating purposes a much greater yield of gas might be obtained, which, in burning, would evolve more heat than is sought in making illuminating gas. But as matters now stand, the fact that illumination, heat, motive power, and dye-stuffs are all obtained by means of the manufacture as

at present conducted is a consideration of much weight in dealing with rival systems of artificial lighting.

The

Throughout the whole experience of gas manufacture the efforts of inventors have been directed, not only to improve the manufacture of coal-gas, but also to supersede its ordinary processes, and to supplant it by gas yielded by other raw materials or by new systems of illumination. persistent efforts which have been made to improve coal-gas, and the success which many of the plans exhibit in their experimental stage, warrant the conclusion that the processes and results of the manufacture are still susceptible of much improvement. When it is considered how exceedingly small is the total proportion of illuminants in coal-gas to the bulk of the materials dealt with, it is not difficult to imagine that modifications of processes may be devised whereby a great increase of lighting effect might be practically available, and at the same time a greater percentage of the total heat-giving power of the coal secured for domestic and manufacturing purposes. Notwithstanding the confessed imperfections of the system of coal gas-making, the evil odours which attach to the works, the yet more offensive exhalations given off from streets through which the main-pipes are led, the destructive accidents which occasionally occur from gas explosions, and the heat and sulphurous fumes evolved during its combustion,-not one of the numerous substitutes which have been proposed has been able to stand in competition against it in any large town or city where coal is a marketable commodity. As against the system of electric lighting, which is now being brought into competi tion with it, the ultimate fate of gas may be different. It may be regarded as already demonstrated that for busy thoroughfares-almost, it may be said, for open-air lighting generally-and for large halls and enclosed spaces, electric lighting will, in the near future, supersede gas. The advantages of the electric light for such positions in brilliancy, penetration, and purity are so manifest that its use must ultimately prevail, irrespective of the question of comparative cost, and of the fact that municipalities and wealthy corporations have an enormous pecuniary stake in gasproperty. That the electric light will be equally available for domestic illumination is, however, not yet so certain ; and until it is demonstrated that a current may be subdivided practically without limit, that the supply can adapt itself to the demand with the same ease that the pressure of gas is regulated, and that the lights can be raised and lowered equally with gas-lights-till these and other conditions are satisfied, the disuse of gas-lighting is still out of sight. Should these conditions, however, be satisfied, there can be little doubt that gas-lighting will enter on a period of severe competition and struggle for existence; and in the end the material which at one time was regarded as a most troublesome and annoying waste-the gas-tar-will, in all probability, exercise a decisive influence on the continuance of the gas manufacture.

Bibliography.-Clegg, A Practical Treatise on the Manufacture and Distribution of Coal-Gas, new edition, London, 1869; Hughes, A Treatise on Gas- Works and Manufacturing Coal-Gas, 5th edition by Richards, London, 1875; Richards, A Practical Treatise on the Manufacture and Distribution of Coal-Gas, London, 1877; Accum, Practical Treatise on Gas-Light, 4th ed., 1818; Journal for GasLighting, London; Bowditch, The Analysis, Technical Valuation, and Purification of Coal-Gas, London, 1867; Banister, Gas Manipulation, new ed. by Sugg, London, 1867; Servier, Traité pratique de la fabrication et de la distribution du gaz d'éclairage, Paris, 1868; Payen, Précis de Chemie industrielle, 6th edition, Paris, 1877 Schilling, Handbuch der Steinkohlen-Gas-Beleuchtung, Munich, 1860; Diehl and Illgen, Gasbeleuchtung und Gasverbrauch, Iserlohn, 1872; Ilgen, Die Gasindustrie der Gegenwart, Leipsic, 1874; Bolley, Technologie, vol. i., Brunswick, 1862; Wagner's Jahresbericht und verwandte Beleuchtungsart, Munich; Reissig, Handbuch der der chemischen Technologie, Leipsic; Journal für Gasbeleuchtung Holz und Torf Gas-Fabrikation, Munich, 1868. (J. PA.)

GASCOIGNE, GEORGE (c. 1535-1577), one of the great pioneers of Elizabethan poetry, was born about 1535-as is believed, in Westmoreland. He was the son and heir of Sir John Gascoigne. He studied at Cambridge, and was admitted to Gray's Inn in 1555. His youth was unsteady, and his father disinherited him In 1565 he had written his tragi. comedy of The Glass of Government, not printed until 1576. In 1566 his first published verses were prefixed to a book called The French Littleton, and he brought out on the stage of Gray's Inn two very remarkable dramas, Supposes, the earliest existing English play in prose, and Jocasta, the first attempt to naturalize the Greek tragedy. Of the latter only the second, third, and fourth acts were from his hand. Soon after this he married. In 1572 there was published A Hundred sundry Flowers bound up in one small Poey, a pirated collection of Gascoigne's lyrics, he having started in March of that year to serve as a volunteer under the Prince of Orange. He was wrecked on the coast of Holland and nearly lost his life, but obtained a captain's commission, and acquired considerable military reputation. An intrigue, however, with a lady in the Hague, nearly cest him his life. He regained his position, and fought well at the siege of Middleburg, but was captured under the walls of Leyden, and sent back to England after an imprisonment of four months. In 1575 he issued an authoritative edition of his poems under the name of Posies. In the summer of the same year he devised a poetical entertainment for Queen Elizabeth, then visiting Kenilworth; this series of masques was printed in 1576 as The Princely Pleasures. Later on in 1575 he greeted the queen at Woodstock with his Tale of Hemetes, and presented her on next New Year's day with the MS. of the same poem, which is now in the British Museum. He completed in 1576 his two most important works, The Complaint of Philomene, and The Steel Glass, the first of which had occupied him since 1562; they were printed in a single volume. Later on in the same year he published A delicate Diet for dainty-mouthed Drunkards. He fell into a decline and died at Stamford on the 7th of October 1577. We are indebted for many particulars of his life to a rare poem published in the same year by George Whetstone, and entitled A Remembrance of the Wellemployed Life and Godly End of George Gascoigne, Esquire. In his poem of The Steel Glass, in blank verse, Gascoigne introduced the Italian style of satire into our literature. He was a great innovator in point of metrical art, and he prefixed to the work in question a prose essay on poetry, which contains some very valuable suggestions. His great claim to remembrance was well summed up in the next generation by Thomas Nash, who remarked in his prefate to Greene's Menaphon, that " Master Gascoigne is not to be abridged of his deserved esteem, who first beat the path to that perfection which our best poets aspired to since his departure, whereto he did ascend by comparing the Italian with the English." The works of Gascoigne were collected in 1587, and partly republished in 1810 and 1821. The best modern edition of the principal poems is that edited, with full bibliographical notes, by E. Arber in 1868.

GASCOIGNE, SIR WILLIAM, was chief-justice of England in the reign of Henry IV. Both history and tradition testify to the fact that he was one of the great lawyers who in times of doubt and danger have asserted the principle that the head of the state is subject to law, and that the traditional practice of public officers, or the expressed voice of the nation in parliament, and not the will of the monarch or any part of the legislature, must guide the tribunals of the country. The judge was a descendant of an ancient Yorkshire family. The date of his birth is uncertain, but it appears from the Year Books that he practised as an advocate in the reigns of Edward III and Richard IL On the banishment of Henry of

Lancaster, Gascoigne was appointed one of his attorneys, and soon after Henry's accession to the throne was made chief-justice of the Court of King's Bench. After the suppression of the rising in the north in 1405, Henry eagerly pressed the judge to pronounce sentence upon Scrope, the archbishop of York, and the earl marshal Thomas Mowbray, who had been implicated in the revolt. The judge absolutely refused to do so, asserting the right of the prisoners to be tried by their peers. Although both were afterwards executed, the chief-justice had no part in the transaction. The often told tale of his committing the Prince of Wales to prison has of course been doubted by modern critics, out it is both picturesque and characteristic. The judge had directed the punishment of one of the prince's riotous companions, and the prince who was present and enraged at the sentence struck or grossly insulted the judge. Gascoigne immediately committed him to prison, using firm and forcible language, which brought him to a more reasonable mood, and secured his voluntary obedience to the sentence. The king is said to have approved of the act, but there appears to be good ground for the supposition that Gascoigne was removed from his post or resigned soon after the accession of Henry V. He died in 1419, and was buried in the parish church of Harewood in Yorkshire. Some biographies of the judge have stated that he died in 1412, but this is clearly disproved by Foss in his Lives of the Judges; and although it is clear that Gascoigne did not hold office long under Henry V., it is not absolutely impossible that the scene in the fifth act of the second part of Shakespeare's Henry IV. has some historical basis, and that the judge's resignation was voluntary. GASCONY, an old province in the S.W. of France, nearly identical with the Novempopulania or Aquitama Tertia of the Romans. Its original boundaries cannot be stated with perfect accuracy, but it included what are now the departments of Landes, Gers, and Hautes-Pyrénées, and parts of those of Haute-Garonne and Ariége. Its capital was Auch. About the middle of the 6th century there was an incursion into this region of Vascons or Vasques from Spain, but whether of a hostile kind or not is uncertain; but as the original inhabitants, in common with those of the rest of Aquitaine were also Vasques, it is probable that the province owes its name Gascony less to this new incursion than to the fact that its inhabitants continued so long to maintain their independence. In 602 they suffered defeat from the Franks and were compelled to pay tribute, but they continued to be governed by their own hereditary dukes, and gradually extended the limits of their dominions to the Garonne. The province was overrun by Charlemagne but never completely subdued, and in 872 it formally renounced the authority of the French kings; but through the extinction of the male line of hereditary dukes of Gascony in 1054 it came into the possession of the dukes of Guienne (or Aquitaine), with which province its history was from that time identified (see Aquitania and GUIENNE).

GASKELL, ELIZABETH CLEGHORN (1810-1865), one of the most distinguished of England's women-novelists, was born at Cheyne Row, Chelsea, September 29, 1810. She was the second child of William Stevenson, of whom an account is given in the Annual Biography and Obituary for 1830. Mr Stevenson, who began life as classical tutor in the Manchester Academy, and preached also at Doblane, near that town, afterwards relinquished his ministry and became a farmer in East Lothian; and later, on the failure of his farming enterprises, he kept a boarding-house for students in Drummond Street, Edinburgh, where he also became editor of the Scots Magazine, and contributed largely to the Edinburgh Review. At the time of his daughter's birth Mr Stevenson had been appointed Keeper

of the Records to the Treasury, and was living in Chelsea, | still a diligent contributor to various periodicals of the day. Mrs Stevenson, Mrs Gaskell's mother, was a Miss Holland, of Sadlebridge in Cheshire, an aunt of the late Sir Henry Holland. She died at the birth of her daughter, who was in a manner adopted, when she was only a month old, by ker mother's sister, Mrs Lumb This lady had married a wealthy Yorkshire gentleman, but a few months after her marriage, and before the birth of her child, discovered that her husband was insane, and fled from him to her old home in the little market town of Knutsford, in Cheshire. Mrs Lumb's own daughter having died, she transferred all her affection to the little Elizabeth, between whom and her there existed through life the strongest bond of affection. During Elizabeth's childhood at Knutsford she was visited now and then by her sailor-brother; but while she was still a girl he went to India, where he somewhat mysteriously, and without any apparent motive, disappeared, and all further trace of him was lost. She was afterwards sent for about two years to a school kept by a Miss Byerley at Stratford-on-Avon, and on leaving school went for a time to live with her father, who had married again. Under his guidance she continued her studies, reading with him in history and literature, and working, chiefly by herself, at Latin, Italian, and French, in all of which she was in later life proficient. Having tenderly nursed her father in his last illness, she returned to her aunt at his death in 1829; and, with the exception of one or two visits to Newcastle, London, and Edinburgh, she continued to live at Knutsford till her marriage. She had at this time a reputation for great beauty; and even in later life her exquisitely-shaped soft eyes retained their light, and her smile its wonderful sweetness. Her marriage to the Rev. William Gaskell, M.A., of Cross Street Chapel, Manchester, took place August 30, 1832, at Knutsford church; and during the earlier years of her married life Mrs Gaskell lived very quietly in Manchester, surrounded by a few intimate and cultured friends, and devoting all her time and abilities to the cares of a necessarily frugal household. Among these friendships, that with Miss Catherine Winkworth and her sisters was perhaps the longest and most cherished. From the first, although she never visited the poor as a member of any organized society, she sought by all means in her power to relieve the misery which, in a town like Manchester, she was constantly witnessing. She gave the most devoted help and tender sympathy to such cases of individual distress as came under her notice. She assisted Mr Travers Madge in his missionary work amongst the poor, and was the friend and helper of Thomas Wright, the prison philanthropist. She also made several individual friendships among poor people, and knew personally one or two types of the Chartist working-man. She was specially interested in the young working-women of Manchester, and for some years held a weekly evening class at her own house for talking with them and teaching them. Of Mrs Gaskell's seven children, two were still-born, and another, her only son, born between the third and fourth of her four living daughters, died at the age of ten months. The death of this baby is said to have been the cause of Mrs Gaskell's beginning to write, when she was urged by her husband to do so, in order to turn her thoughts from her own grief. She began by writing a short paper called "An Account of Clopton Hall," for William Howitt's Visits to Remarkable Places. This was followed by one or two short stories, such as the "Sexton's Hero," for the People's Journal; and then she wrote Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life. On its completion, she sent it to one publisher in London who rejected it unread, and then to Messrs Chapman and Hall, who, after keeping the manuscript for a year without acknowledgment, wrote to her accepting the novel for

publication, and offering the authoress £100 for the copy right. The appearance of Mary Barton in 1848 caused great excitement in Manchester, and a strong partisanship was felt for and against its anonymous author. After its publication Mrs Gaskell paid several visits in London, where she made many friends, among whom we may mention Dickens, Forster, Mrs Jameson, Lord Houghton, Mrs Stowe, Ruskin, and Florence Nightingale. Her friendship with Charlotte Bronte also dates from about this time, when the two authoresses met at the house of Sir James and Lady Kay Shuttleworth, near Bowness, in Westmoreland, and Mrs Gaskell received her first impressions of the shy "little lady in a black silk gown," who afterwards became personally her dear friend,-although, from a literary point of view, they could hardly help being rivals,—and the story of whose life, when it was ended, Mrs Gaskell was destined to write with such consummate care and tender appréciation. But Mary Barton was to prove only the first of a series of scarcely less popular publications, which appeared either independently or in periodicals such as Household Words. It was followed in 1850 by The Moorland Cottage. Cranford and Ruth appeared in 1853; North and South, in 1855; The Life of Charlotte Bronte, in 1857; Round the Sofa, in 1859; Right at Last, in 1860; Sylvia's Lovers, in 1863; and Cousin Phillis and Wives and Daughters, in 1865.

During these years-years of increasing worldly prosperity and literary distinction-Mrs Gaskell often went abroad, chiefly to Paris and Rome, but once for a long visit to Heidelberg, and once also to Brussels, to collect information about Charlotte Bronte's school-days. In Paris her genius was warmly appreciated; and, while she was a guest among them, Guizot, Montalembert, and Odillon Barrot vied in doing her honour. Of her visits in England some of the pleasantest were to Oxford, where she counted among her friends Mr Jowett and Mr Stanley (dean of Westminster). At other times, when she was busy writing one of her novels, she would leave home with one or two of her children, and carry her manuscript to some quiet country place, where she could write undisturbed. When she was at home, although she was enthusiastically interested in the political questions of the day, and her warm, impulsive nature made her ready at any time to give personal help and sympathy where it seemed to be needed, Mrs Gaskell refrained from taking active part in public movements or social reforms, if we except, indeed, the great sewing-school movement in Manchester at the time of the cotton famine in 1863. Her life was thoroughly literary and domestic. She read much: Goldsmith, Pope, Cowper, and Scott were the favourite authors of her girlhood; in later life she admired Ruskin and Macaulay extremely, and delighted in many old French memoirs of the time of Madame de Sévigné, whose life she often planned to write. It is remembered of her that one day, when she was reading George Eliot's first and anonymous story Amos Barton, she looked up and said, "I prophesy that the writer of this will be a great writer some day." The prospect of the awful cotton famine in Manchester in 1862 set Mrs Gaskell anxiously thinking what could be done to relieve the coming distress, and she decided, "without any suggestions from others, on a plan of giving relief and employment together to the women mill-hands, which was an exact prototype of the great system of relief afterwards publicly adopted, namely, the sewing-schools." When these were formed, Mrs Gaskell "merged her private scheme in the public one, and worked most laboriously in the sewing-school nearest her home." This was but three years before her death. Still busy writing her novel Wives and Daughters, she was staying with her children at Holybourne, Alton, in Hampshire, a house which she had just purchased as a surprise and

gift to her husband, when she died suddenly of heart disease, about 5 o'clock on Sunday evening, November 12, 1865. Her remains were carried to the churchyard of the Old Presbyterian Meeting-house at Knutsford, where her childhood and girlhood had been spent, and which she had left as a bride, three-and-thirty years before. A memorial tablet in memory of Mrs Gaskell was erected by her husband's congregation, in Cross Street Chapel, Manchester a tribute not only to her genius, and the spirit in which it was exercised, but to the "tenderness and fidelity" of the wife and mother who had lived long amongst them,

With this knowledge of the facts of Mrs Gaskell's life, it is not difficult to trace the sources of her inspirations. Some of her shorter tales, it is true, seem to have been suggested merely by her readings; and, carefully as she collected their materials, these are the least satisfactory of her writings. But by far the most of what she wrote was founded on observation and experience. Mrs Gaskell has reproduced, with slight variations, in her novel North and South, the incident in her father's youth, when he and his friend and fellow-student, the Rev. George Wicke of Monton, believing it wrong to be "hired teachers of religion," resigned their ministries and sought a livelihood otherwise. The beautiful story in "Mary Barton" of the two working-men who brought the baby from London to Manchester is a version of an anecdote about Mrs Gaskell's own infancy, of her being taken to Knutsford, after her mother's death, by a friend who chanced to be travelling that way. The little county town of "Cranford"—with its population of widows and maiden ladies, and its horror of the masculine portion of society-is Knutsford, so long Mrs Gaskell's home. In Cranford every character, if not every incident, is real; and the pathetic little story of Poor Peter can have been suggested only by the disappearance of that sailor brother who used to visit Mrs Gaskell in her girlhood, and whose mysterious loss also must have interested her always afterwards in "disappearances "—the title of one of her papers in Household Words. Pleasant months spent at Morecambe Bay and Silverdale initiated her in the mysteries of rural and farm life. Her visits to France were the origin of her tales of the Huguenots and the French refugees at the time of the Revolution. The Edinburgh of her girlhood appears in one or two of her stories, briefly but vividly sketched. Her schooldays at Stratford-on-Avon are remembered in Lois the Witch; and, if only in a little story like the visit to Heppenheim, we can trace her excursions from Heidelberg along the broad, white Bergstrasse. But it is most of all in Mary Barton, a story of the trials and sorrows of the poor in Manchester, whom she had had so many opportunities of observing, that Mrs Gaskell gave her personal knowledge and experience to the world. Her severest critic, Mr W. R. Greg, admits Mrs Gaskell's knowledge of her subject, but objects to the impression left by the novel on the mind of the reader as inaccurate and harmful, "Were Mary Barton," he says, "to be only read by Manchester men and master manufacturers, it could scarcely fail to be serviceable, because they might profit by its suggestions, and would at once detect its exaggerations and mistakes;" but on the general public he fears its effect will be "mischievous in the extreme." One doubts whether a calm solution of a great economic difficulty, such as that which Mrs Gaskell treats of, could ever be given in a novel; and certainly the warm-hearted, impulsive authoress of Mary Barton had no such aim in view. It is probable that she wrote without any distinct economic theories. Earnest, benevolent intentions she no doubt had, but she was far more of an artist than a reformer. Had it not been so, Mary Barton would not

rank so high in the literature of fiction as it does. It is no work of occasion, the chief interest of which departs when the occasion itself is over. It is a thoroughly artistic production, and for power of treatment and intense interest of plot has seldom been surpassed. It is as the authoress of Mary Barton that Mrs Gaskell will be remembered. Of her other works, Ruth is singularly inferior to its predecessor; but North and South, which takes the side of the master manufacturers, as Mary Barton did that of the men, has been scarcely less popular with the public. Perhaps the two best of Mrs Gaskell's productions, each in its own way, are the exquisitely humorous Cranford and Cousin Phillis, which has been fitly called an idyll in prose Wives and Daughters, even in its uncompleted state, is artistically almost faultless, and full of a quiet restful beauty entirely its own. George Sand was a great admirer of this novel, and Mrs Gaskell's family still cherish a saying of hers about it :-"It is a book," she once said to Lord Houghton, "that might be put into the hands of an innocent girl, while at the same time it would rivet the attention of the most blasé man of the world." Her one work which is not a novel-her Life of Charlotte Bronte-it is difficult to praise too highly, either as a biography proper, or as a narrative written with the consummate skill of the novelist. Some people, indeed, have thought that Mrs Gaskell transgressed the bounds of the biographer in publishing so many details of Miss Bronte's domestic and private life; but the case was a peculiar one. The character of Charlotte Bronte's writings made it advisable that her reader, in order properly to understand her, should be admitted to some of the hitherto hidden facts of her short, sad life. Mrs Gaskell, knowing and esteeming Charlotte Bronte in the character of friend, daughter, and wife, hoped in some degree to justify to the world the morbid, unhealthy tone which pervaded her genius; and surely, if any hand was to draw the curtain, none could have done it more tenderly than that of her friend. (F. M.)

GASSENDI, PIERRE (1592-1655), one of the most eminent French philosophers, was born of poor but respectable parentage at Champtercier, near Digne, in Provence, on the 22d January 1592. At a very early age he gave indications of remarkable mental powers, and at the instance of his uncle, the curé of his native village, he was sent to the college at Digne. He made rapid progress in his studies, showing particular aptitude for languages and mathematics, and it is said that at the age of sixteen he was invited to lecture on rhetoric at the college. He cannot have retained this post for any length of time, for soon afterwards he entered the university of Aix, to study philosophy under Fesaye. In 1612 he was called to the college of Digne to lecture on theology: Four years later he received the degree of doctor of theology at Avignon, and in 1617 be took orders as a priest. In the same year he was called to the chair of philosophy at Aix, and seems gradually to have withdrawn from theological study and teaching.

At Aix he lectured principally on the Aristotelian philosophy, conforming as far as possible to the orthodox methods. At the same time, however, he prosecuted his favourite studies, physics and astronomy, and by the discoveries of Galileo, Kepler, and others became more and more dissatisfied with the Peripatetic system. It was, indeed, the very period of violent revolt against the autho rity of Aristotle, and Gassendi shared to the full the practical and empirical tendencies of the age. He, too, began to draw up in form his objections to the Aristotelian philosophy, but did not at first venture to publish them. The portion shown to his friends Peiresc and Gautier, however, was so vehemently approved by them that in 1624, after he had left Aix for a canonry at Grenoble, le printed the first part of his Exercitationes paradoxica