LONG, George, an English scholar (1800-1879), was born at Poulton in Lancashire, on the 4th of November 1800. From Macclesfield grammar school he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1818. He was elected Craven university scholar in 1821, together with Lord Macaulay and Professor Malden, took his degree in 1822 as wrangler and senior chancellor’s medallist, and tie next year gained a fellowship over the heads of his two distinguished rivals. In 1824 Long went out to be professor of ancient languages in the new university of Virginia. There he married his first wife, the widow of Colonel Selden. In 1828 he returned to England to accept the Greek professorship in the newly-founded university of London. His introductory lecture in 1828 was followed in 1830 by another entitled Observations on the Study of the Latin and Greek Languages. The etymological appendix to this lecture is of interest in the history of classical philology in England, as illustrating the scientific comparative method of teaching the Greek and Latin languages .first adopted in the London university by himself and his colleague, Professor Key. He published a Summary of Herodotus (1829), and editions of Herodotus (1830-33) and Xenophon’s Anabasis (1831). He was one of the founders of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830, and was for twenty years a member of the council, or officer of the society; in the same year he joined the committee of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and was till 1846, when the society was dissolved, one of its most active workers. In 1831 he resigned his professorship and became editor of the society’s Quarterly Journal of Education (1831-35), for which he wrote many articles. He wrote for the society’s Library of Entertaining Knowledge the two volumes ...of The British Museum: Egyptian Antiquities (1832-36), and edited, improved, and wrote parts of the companion volumes Elgin and Phigaleian Marbles (1833) and Townley Marbles (1836). He planned and edited for the Library of Useful Knowledge a Geography of America and the West Indies (1841), of which he wrote a small part, and a Geography of Great Britain: Part I. England and Wales, part of which he also wrote himself. He contributed two maps of Egypt and Persia, ancient and modern, to the society’s Atlas (1831). From 1833 to 1846 he was engaged on the great labour of his life, the editing of the twenty-nine volumes of the Penny Cyclopaedia, to which he was also an extensive contributor of articles. The committee appointed Long and Charles Knight editors, but after the publication of a few numbers Knight took no part in the superintendence of the work, and all the editorial labour was done by Long.
A more colossal and the final venture of the society was its Biograf)hical Dictionary, of which Long was also appointed editor. He wrote numerous articles in the seven volumes which appeared (1842-44), but the great expense did not allow it to proceed beyond the letter A. Long was also a member of the committee of the Society for Central Education, instituted in London in 1837, and contributed two essays to its Second and Third Publications (1838-39). In 1837 he was called to the bar at the Inner Temple. He accepted in 1842 the professorship of Latin in University College, vacated by his friend Mr Key, which he resigned in 1846, on being appointed by the benchers of the Middle Temple their reader on jurisprudence and the civil law. Two Discourses delivered in the Middle Temple Hall, ινith an Outline of the Course, were published in 1847. He wrote all the articles on Roman law in the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Aηtiqzιities, edited by Dr William Smith (1842), and contributed also to the companion Dictionaries of Biography (1844-49) and Geography (1854- 57). His translation of thirteen of Plutarch’s Lives, with copious notes, first came out in five of Knight’s weeklyvolumes under the title of The Civil Wars of Rome (1844— 48). He planned and edited Knight’s Political Dictionary (1845-46), a revision of articles from the Penny Cyclopaedia. Knight published in parts his History of France and its Revolutions, 1789-1848 (1850).
In 1849 he left London and went to Brighton College, where he was classical lecturer until midsummer 1871. He was an excellent teacher, and was beloved by both masters and pupils. Whilst here he edited, at first jointly with the Rev. A. J. Macleane, and after that gentleman’s death by himself, the Bibliotheca Classica series, to which he himself contributed the edition of Cicero’s Orations (1851— 62), a task for which his legal knowledge eminently qualified him. He also revised, making many corrections and additions, Macleane’s editions of Juvenal and Persius (1867) and Horace (1869). He made for Bell’s Grammar School Classics editions, with introductions and notes, of Cicero’s De Senectute and De Amicitia, with a selection from his Epistolae (1850), Caesar’s Gallic War (1853), and Sallust’s Catilina and Jugurtha (1860). He also edited an Atlas of Classical Geography (1854). His translation (f the Thoughts of the Emperor Μ. Aurelius Antoninus was published in 1862. The same year appeared anonymously the amusing and instructive little volume called An Old Man’s Thoughts about Many Things. He was sixty-four when he issued the first of the five large octavo volumes of his Decline of the Roman Republic. In 1871 he resigned his post at Brighton College, and retired to Portfield, Chichester, to take a rest well-earned but from labours ill-rewarded. In 1873 the Queen, on the recommendation of Mr Gladstone, granted him a pension of £100 a year. At Portfield he completed his Roman History (1874), and translated The Discourses of Epictetus, with the Eηcheiridion and Fragments (1877). This was the last work of his laborious and useful life. He died after a long and painful illness on the 10th of August 1879.
In addition to the works already noticed, Long was the author of two papers in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, a few in the early numbers of the Penny Magazine, and several in the Classical Museum and English Journal of Education. He also wrote on “Grammar Schools,” in Knight’s Store of Knowledge.
Long has exercised by his writings, and indirectly through some of his London university pupils, a wide influence on the teaching of the Greek and Latin languages in England. The publication of the Bibliotheca Classica (begun in 1851) did important service, and set English scholars an excellent example, at a time when editions with English notes containing accurate learning and sound scholarship were, with very few exceptions, not to be found. Some of the volumes of this series still remain the standard English editions. In the knowledge of Roman law Long stood by himself amongst English scholars, and his well-known articles on that subject were the first valuable contribution to the study from any English writer. He had also a profound knowledge of ancient geography. He was an excellent French, German, and Italian scholar, and also read Spanish. His extensive and accurate learning may be explained from the combination of a tenacious memory with a clear judicial intellect. His character was as elevated as his intellect. Its simplicity and manly independence may be seen partly in his writings. His faculty for discriminating evidence and his strong common sense appear in everything that he wrote. (H. J. Μ.)
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LONG BRANCH, a fashionable seaside resort of the United States, in Ocean township, Monmouth county, New Jersey. The old village lies about a mile inland, but the watering-place proper is for the most part situated on the bluffs and plateau immediately above the beach. The bathing-grounds are excellent; there are fine drives along the beach in the vicinity; upwards of twenty thousand visitors can find accommodation in the hotels alone, of which there are no less than thirty-three; and there are besides hundreds of private residences occupied mainly by the wealthier classes from New York and Philadelphia. Since 1874 it can be reached directly from New York both by railway and by steamers. Long Branch has a corporation of seven commissioners. Its permanent population in 1880 was 3833, in 1882 about 5000.
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LONG ISLAND, an island with an area of 1682 square miles lying off the coast of the United States, between 40° 33' and 41° 10' N. lat,, and forming part of the State of New York. While the length from east to west is about 120 miles, the width nowhere exceeds 24 miles, and in some places falls to 12 or 15. The western end is separated from the city and State of New York by the East River, which is nowhere more than three quarters of a mile in breadth, and has been spanned by a great suspension bridge; but between the main body of the island and the mainland (Connecticut, Rhode Island) lies Long Island Sound, widening out to a breadth of 20 miles. The sound, however, is comparatively shallow, the depth in the eastern and seaward portion being usually under 200 feet, while in the portion west of Connecticut river it is nowhere more than 170 feet, and in general only 75-100 feet. Geologically the island is very interesting, consisting, as it does for the most part, of an immense morainal deposit of glacial drift. A range of hills extends with some interruptions for about 60 miles in the line of its longer axis, varying in height from 150 to 384 feet above sea-level. Fort Pond Hill for instance is 194 feet; Neaρeague, 135; Amagansett, 161; Shinecock, 140; Osborn’s Hill, near Riverhead, 293; Ruland’s, south of Coram, 340; West Hills (Jane’s Hill), 354; Layton’s Hill, 380; Westbury, 260; Hempstead...
Harbour Hill, 384; John M. Clarke’s Hill, 326. From the foot of the hills southward stretches a vast nearly level plain, with an average height of 70 feet, and consisting of post-glacial stratified sand and gravel; and across this run a large number of shallow parallel watercourses, remarkable mainly for the regularity with which they present an elevated bank on the western side and a long declivity on the eastern. On the northern side of the range the surface is very uneven, some of the elevations exceeding 200 feet, and deep fiord valleys stretching down to the sound, and forming a series of excellent harbours. The glacial drift of Long Island is of immense depth, and contains a wonderful number of boulders. “At the eastern extremity,” says Lyell on the authority of Mather, “they are of such kinds of granite, gneiss, mica, slate, greenstone, and syenite as may have come across the sound from parts of Rhode Island. Opposite the mouth of the Connecticut river they are of such varieties of gneiss and hornblende slate as correspond with the rocks of the region through which that river passes. Still further west they consist of red sandstone and conglomerate and the trap of that country, and lastly, adjoining the city of New York, we find serpentine, red sandstone, and various granitic and crystalline rocks which have come from the district immediately to the north.” One of the boulders near Manhasset measures 54 feet long and 40 feet wide, and rises 16 feet above the level of the soil. Of the numerous lakelets scattered throughout Long Island it is enough to mention Ronkonkoma, near Lakeland, the waters of which are said to decrease and increase in regular periods of four years. Much of the surface of the country is still covered with wood—oak, hickory, and chestnut growing freely on the unmodified drift, and pine forests extending for about fifty miles through the sandy plains. A good rich loam abounds in the northern districts, and the lighter soils of the south are easily rendered productive. Marketgardening especially is carried on with success. The climate is comparatively mild, the mean annual temperature being 49° to 51°, the maximum for the year between 95° and 100°, and the minimum 4° to 8°. The average rainfall is about 421 inches. Towards its western end more especially, the northern coast of Long Island presents a number of important bays—Glen Cove, Oyster Bay, Huntington Bay, Smithtown Bay, <fcc.; the western extremity is deeply bifurcated by a very irregular inlet, broken up by various islands into Gardiner’s Bay, Little Peconic, and Great Peconic; and along a large part of the southern coast stretches a remarkable series of lagoons, formed by a line of dunes varying in breadth from ∣ to 1 mile, and connected at various points with the ocean. These last—of which the most important is Great South Bay, 40 miles long by about 5 or 6 miles wide—are of great service to the island, and an Act has been passed to increase their utility by connecting them by canals. Coney Island and Rockaway Beach, the most frequented of the many seaside resorts in the Island, lie near the south-western extremity. As regards both birds and fishes, Long Island seems a kind of meeting place between the arctic and the equatorial species. In winter, for instance, it is visited by the eider-duck, the little white goose, the great cormorant, and the auk, in summer by the turkey buzzard, the swallow-tailed kite, and the fork-tailed flycatcher. A few deer are still to be found; and various tracts of country and islands in the great bays are stocked with game and fish by sportsmen’s clubs. The east portion of the island is one of the chief seats of the menhaden fisheries, and the oyster beds of both the north and the south coast are of great value. Those of the Great South Bay (furnishing, amongst others, the famous “blue points”) alone give employment in the season to 1500 fishermen. (See E. Ingersoll, “The Oyster Industry,” in the Tenth Census publications of the United States, 1881.)
Administratively Long Island consists of King’s County (72 square miles), Queen’s County (410), and Suffolk (1200), which·in 1880 bad the following population:— [table]
Of the thirteen or fourteen Indian tribes living in the island at the time of its discovery, the only remnants are about fifty Shinecocks and Montauks.
Besides Brooklyn, which had 566,689 inhabitants, King’s County contained Flatbush town, 7634; Flatlands town, 3127; Gravesend town (including Coney Island village), 3676; New Lots town, 13,681; and New Utrecht town, 4742. In Queen’s county are Flushing town, 15,919; Hempstead town (including East Rockaway, Garden City, and sixteen other villages), 18,160; Jamaica town, 10,089; Long Island City, 17,129; Newtown town, 9798; North Hempstead town, 7562; and Oyster Bay town, 11,923. In Suffolk there are no cities, and none of the villages have 500 inhabitants. The “towns” are Babylon, Brookhaven, East Hampton, Huntington, Islip, Riverhead, Shelter Island, Smithtown, Southampton, and Southhold. Garden City was built by A. T. Stewart as a model suburban settlement, and contains a fine cathedral. Hicksville is associated with the memory of Elias Hicks the Quaker missionary. Sag Harbour was formerly a great whaling station, and still maintains a good coasting trade. Five miles from Flushing is Creedmore rifle range, the finest in the United States. On Gardiner’s Island the pirate Kidd concealed the treasures partly recovered by the governor of Massachusetts in 1699.
Long Island was so called by its Dutch discoverers in 1609, and the name Nassau, bestowed in 1693 by the colonial legislature, never found popular acceptance. Breucklen (Brooklyn), Amersfoort (Flatlands), Vlissingen (Flushing), Busdorf (Jamaica), and New Utrecht were founded by the Dutch between 1630 and 1654; and between 1640 and 1665 the English from the New England colonies established Southold, Southampton, Easthampton, Hempstead, Huntington, Oyster Bay, Smithtown, Islip, &c. Though the charter granted by James I. in 1620 expressly excluded territory actually possessed or inhabited by any other Christian prince or state, the grantees in 1635 conveyed to the earl of Stirling among other lands the island of Matowacks or Long Island. A treaty concluded between Dutch and English at Hartford (Connecticut) in 1650 suιτendered to England all the land south of Oyster Bay; but, though it was ratified by the states-general of Holland in 1656, no action was taken by the English Government. Long Island was included in the territory assigned to the duke of York in 1663-64, and in 1654 an English squadron conquered the Dutch in time of peace, and set up a government in the duke’s name. When the Dutch governor, who had recovered New York in 1673, issued a proclamation requiring the submission of the Long Island towns, they all obeyed except the three most eastern; but the treaty of Westminster in 1674 left Long Island to the English, and it became a regular colony of the crown. In the beginning of the war of American independence, Long Island naturally played a prominent part. The efforts made by Washington to defend it were frustrated by the British under Cornwallis in 1776, and it remained in their hands till the close of the contest.
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LONG ISLAND CITY, a city of the United States, the capital of Queen’s County, New York, situated on the west coast of Long Island, and separated from New York by the East River and from Brooklyn by the Newtown Creek. The area, which includes what were the post villages of Astoria, Newtown, and Ravenswood, measures 3 miles from east to west and 5 miles from north to south, and the general plan of the place is constructed on a spacious scale. The river frontage extends to about 10 miles. Hunter’s Point, as the south-west portion is called, contains the terminal dépôts of several railway lines, extensive warehouses for the storage of petroleum, and a variety of industrial establishments—such as graniteworks, chemical works, engine-works. In the Astoria district there are factories for pianos, carriages, and carpets. Long Island City dates from 1870; in 1874 its population was about 16,000, and in 1880 17,117.
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