GERA, the chief town of the principality of Reuss-Schleiz, stands in a valley on the banks of the White Elster, 35 miles S.S.W. cf Leipsic. It has been all rebuilt since a great fire in 1780, and the streets are in general wide and straight, and contain many handsome houses. The principal buildings are the churches of St Salvator’s and St Trinity, the town-hall, the buildings of the imperial bank and of the Gera bank, the music hall, and the central hall. Its educational establishments include a gymnasium, a general town school (which contains a real school of the first order, a higher female school, and three citizen schools), a commercial school, anormal school, and a weaving school. The castle of Osterstein, the residence of the prince of Reuss, dates from the 9th century, but has been nearly all rebuilt within the last thirty years. Gera has long been noted for its industrial activity. Its manufactures comprise woollen, cotton, and silk goods, tapestry, artificial flowers, oil-cloth, leather, hats, tobacco, soap, beer, vinegar, chocolate, glue, porcelain and other earthenware, bricks, musical instruments, and carriages.

Gera was raised to the rank of a town in the 11th century, at which time it belonged to the counts of Groitch. In the 12th century it came into the possession of the lords of Reus∙>. It was stormed and sacked by the Bohemians in 1450, was two-thirds burned down by the Swedes in 1639 during the Thirty Years’ War, and suffered afterwards from great conflagrations in 1686 and 1780, being in the latter year almost completely destroyed. The population in 1875 was 20,810, nearly all of whom are Protestants.

GERACE or Gieraci, a town of Italy in the province of Reggio di Calabria, about 59 miles from Reggio on the railway between that city and Monasterace, is situated on a limestone hill not far from the coast, 30 miles N.N.E. of Cape Spartivento, between the rivers Merico and Novito. It is the seat of a bishop and of a subprefect, and has a civil and criminal court dependent on that of Catanzaro. The citadel, formerly of great strength, was reduced to ruins by the earthquake of 1793; and the cathedral was at the same time so severely injured that only a portion of the crypt remained available for public worship. There is a good trade in a white wine known as Vino Greco; silk is manufactured; and the warm sulphur springs of the neigbourhood attract patients to the town. About 5 miles off, at Torre di Gerace, are the ruins of the Greek city of Locri Epi zephyrii, from which Gerace derived materials for its buildings, and more especially fine marble columns for the cathedral. The population in 1871 was 7257. This Gerace is not to be confounded with Gerace Siculo, a town of between 3000 and 4000 inhabitants, 4 miles from Cefalu, which was the first place in Sicily erected into a marquisate.

GERANIUM is the name of a genus of poly petalous exogenous plants, which is taken by botanists as the type of the natural order Geraniaceae. The name, as a scientific appellation, has a much more restricted application than when taken in its popular sense. Formerly the genus Geranium was almost conterminous with the order Geraniaceae, which latter had then a more limited meaning than is given to it by those of our leading botanists of the present day who include in it the Tropaeolaceae, the 0xali- daceae, and the Balsaminaceae. Then as now the geranium was very popular as a garden plant, and the species included in the original genus became widely known under that name, which has more or less clung to them ever since, in spite of scientific changes which have removed the larger number of them to the genus Pelargonium. This result has been probably brought about in some degree by an error of the nurserymen, who seem in many cases to have acted on the conclusion that the group commonly known as Scarlet Geraniums were really geraniums and not pelargoniums, and have in consequence inserted them under the former name in their trade catalogues. In fact it may be said that, from a popular point of view, the pelargoniums of the botanist are better known as geraniums than are the geraniums themselves....

a royal city of the Philistines, situate not far from the angle where the south and west sides of Palestine meet.

GERARD of Cremona (1114-1187), the mediaeval translator of Ptolemy and Avicenna, was born at Cremona, Lombardy, in 1114. Dissatisfied with the meagre philosophies of his Italian teachers, he went to Toledo to study among the Moors, who were at that time the chief depositaries and interpreters of the wisdom of the ancients; and, having thus acquired a knowledge of the Arabic language, he appears to have devoted the remainder of his life to the business of'making Latin translations from its literature. The date of his return to his native town is uncertain, but he is known to have died there in 1187. His original version of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine was the basis of all the very numerous subsequent Latin editions of that well-known work; and the Latin translation by which alone Ptolemy’s Almagest until the discovery of the original μeyaλη σvvτaLLς was known to Europe is also ascribed to him. In addition to these, he translated various other treatises in medicine, mathematics, and astronomy, to the number, it is said, of sixty-six; but some of the works with which he has been credited (including the translation of the Almansorius of Er-Razi or Rhazes) are more probably due to a later Gerard also called “Cremonensis,” but more precisely “de Sabloneta,” See Boncompagni, Della Vita e delle Opere di Gherardo Cremonense e di G her ar do da Sabbionetta....

GERASA, the modern Gerash or Jerash, a city of Palestine, in the Decapolis of Peraea, situated amid the mountains of Gilead, about 1757 feet above the level of the sea, at a distance of 20 miles from the Jordan and 21 miles to the north of Philadelphia. Of its origin nothing is known. Its name is never mentioned in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament the only reference to its existence is the alternative reading of Gerasenes for Gadarenes in Matthew viii. 28. From Josephus we learn that it was captured by Alexander Jannaeus, burned by the Jews in revenge for the massacre at Caesarea, and again plundered and depopulated by Annius the general of Vespasian; but in spite of these disasters it was still in the 2d and 3d centuries of the Christian era one of the wealthiest and most flourishing cities of Palestine. As late as 1121 it gave employment to the soldiers of Baldwin II., who found it defended by a castle built by a king of Damascus; but at the beginning of the following century the Arabian geographer Yakut speaks of it as deserted and overthrown. The ruins of Jerash, discovered by Seitzen about 1806 and since then frequently visited and described, still attest the splendour of the Roman city. They are distributed along both banks of theKerwan, a brook which flows south through the Wady-ed-Dêr to join the Zerka or Jabbok; but all the principal buildings are situated on the level ground to the right of the stream. The town walls, which can still be traced and indeed are partly standing, had a circuit of not more than 2 miles, and the main street was less than half a mile in length; but remains of buildings skirt the road for fully a mile beyond the south gate, and show that the town had far outgrown the limit of its fortifications. The most striking feature of ...

GÉRARD, Étienne Maurice, Count (1773-1852), a distinguished French general, was born at Damvilliers in the department of Meuse, 4th April 1773. He joined the second battalion of the Meuse in 1791, and served in the campaigns of 1792-1793 under Generals Dumouriez and Jourdan. In 1798 he accompanied Bernadotte as aide-decamp in his embassy to Vienna. In 1799 he was named chief of a squadron, and in 1800 colonel. He distinguished himself by a brilliant charge against the Russian imperial guard at the battle of Austerlitz, and being raised to the rank of general in November 1806, played a prominent part in the battles of Halle, Jena, and Erfurt; and for his conduct in the battle of Wagram, where he greatly contributed to the victory, he was created a baron. In the Spanish campaign of 1810 and 1811 he gained special distinction at the battle of Fuentes-de-Onoro; and in the subsequent expedition to Russia he was present at the capture of Smolensk, had a principal share in the victory of Walontina-Gora, displayed such bravery and ability in the battle of the Moskova that he was made general of division, ≈and by his coolness and energy in the disastrous retreat from Moscow saved the rearguard of the French army at the passage of the Wilna. In the campaign of 1813, in command of a division under Macdonald, he took part in the battles of Lützen, Bautzen, Goldberg, and Leipsic, where he was dangerously wounded. After the battle of Bautzen he was created by Napoleon a count of the empire. In the campaign of France of 1814, in command of the army of reserves composed chiefly of recruits, he by his skilful manoeuvres powerfully assisted in securing the victories of Nogent, Nangis, and Montereau-sur-Yonne. After the first restoration he was named by Louis XVIII. grand cross of ...

GÉRARD DE NERVAL (1808-1855) is the adopted name of Gérard Labrunie, a French litterateur, and that by which he is generally known. The son of an officer in the army, and born at Paris, May 21, 1808, he received his early education chiefly from his father, who taught him German, and he afterwards studied at the college of Charlemagne. He made his literary début by the publication of a volume of political odes, and in 1828 he published a translation of Goethe’s Faust, of which Goethe himself expressed high approval, and the choruses of which were afterwards made use of by Berlioz for his legendsymphony, The Damnation of Faust. Several other translations from the German, contributed chiefly to the Mercure de France, a number of poetical pieces, and three comedies combined to acquire for him, at the age of twenty-one, a considerable literary reputation, and led to his being associated with Theophile Gautier in the preparation of the dramatic feuilleton for the Presse. On the death of Jennie Colon, an actress with whom he had contracted a liaison, he resigned his connexion with the Presse, and travelled in various parts of Europe, leading a somewhat dissipated life. He contributed an account of his travels to the Revue des Deτιx Mondes and other periodicals. After his return to Paris in 1844 he resumed for a short time the feuilleton. From 1841 he was subject to periodical attacks of insanity, aud he committed suicide by hanging, 25th January 1855. The literary style of Gérard is simple and unaffected, and he has a peculiar faculty of giving to his imaginative creations an air of naturalness and reality. In a series of novelletes, afterwards published under the name of Les Illuminés ou les Précurseurs du Socialisme (1852), he gave a sort of analysis of the ...