Part 34

GIANT'S CAUSEWAY, a promontory of columnar basalt, situated on the north coast of county Antrim, Ireland. It is divided by whin-dykes into the Little Causeway, the Middle Causeway or "Honeycomb," as it is locally termed, and the Larger or Grand Causeway. The pillars composing it are close-fitting and for the most part somewhat irregular hexagons, made up of articulated portions varying from a few inches to some feet in depth, and concave or convex at the upper and lower surfaces. In diameter the pillars vary from 15 to 20 in., and in height some are as much as 20 ft. The Great Causeway is chiefly from 20 to 30, and for a few yards in some places nearly 40 ft. in breadth, exclusive of outlying broken pieces of rock. It is highest at its narrowest part. At about half a dozen yards from the cliff, widening and becoming lower, it extends outwards into a platform, which has a slight seaward inclination, but is easy to walk upon, and for nearly 100 yds. is always above water. At the distance of about 150 yds. from the cliff it turns a little to the eastward for 20 or 30 yds., and then sinks into the sea. The neighbouring cliffs exhibit in many places columns similar to those of the Giant's Causeway, a considerable exposure of them being visible at a distance of 500 to 600 yds. in the bay to the east. A group of these columns, from their arrangement, have been fancifully named the "Giant's Organ." The most remarkable of the cliffs is the Pleaskin, the upper pillars of which have the appearance of a colonnade, and are 60 ft. in height; beneath these is a mass of coarse black amygdaloid, of the same thickness, underlain by a second range of basaltic pillars, from 40 to 50 ft. in height. The view eastward over Bengore and towards Fair Head is magnificent. Near the Giant's Causeway are the ruins of the castles of Dunseverick and Dunluce, situated high above the sea on isolated crags, and the swinging bridge of Carrick-a-Rede, spanning a chasm 80 ft. deep, and connecting a rock, which is used as a salmon-fishing station, with the mainland. In 1883 an electric railway, the first in the United Kingdom, was opened for traffic, connecting the Causeway with Portrush and Bushmills. After a protracted lawsuit (1897-1898) the Causeway, and certain land in the vicinity, were declared to be private property, and a charge is made for admission.

GIANT'S KETTLE, GIANT'S CAULDRON or POT-HOLE, in physical geography, the name applied to cavities or holes which appear to have been drilled in the surrounding rocks by eddying currents of water bearing stones, gravel and other detrital matter. The size varies from a few inches to several feet in depth and diameter. The commonest occurrence is in regions where glaciers exist or have existed; a famous locality is the Gletscher Garten of Lucerne, where there are 32 giant's kettles, the largest being 26 ft. wide and 30 ft. deep; they are also common in Germany, Norway and in the United States. It appears that water, produced by the thawing of the ice and snow, forms streams on the surface of the glacier, which, having gathered into their courses a certain amount of morainic debris, are finally cast down a crevasse as a swirling cascade or _moulin_. The sides of the crevasse are abraded, and a vertical shaft is formed in the ice. The erosion may be continued into the bed of the glacier, and, the ice having left the district, the giant's kettle so formed is seen as an empty shaft, or as a pipe filled with gravel, sand or boulders. Such cavities and pipes afford valuable evidence as to the former extent of glaciers (see J. Geikie, _The Great Ice Age_). Similar holes are met with in river beds at the foot of cascades, and under some other circumstances. The term "pot-hole" is also sometimes used synonymously with "swallow-hole" (q.v.).

GIAOUR (a Turkish adaptation of the Pers. _gawr_ or _gor_, an infidel), a word used by the Turks to describe all who are not Mahommedans, with especial reference to Christians. The word, first employed as a term of contempt and reproach, has become so general that in most cases no insult is intended in its use; similarly, in parts of China, the term "foreign devil" has become void of offence. A strict analogy to _giaour_ is found in the Arabic _kaffir_, or unbeliever, which is so commonly in use as to have become the proper name of peoples and countries.

GIB, ADAM (1714-1788), Scottish divine and leader of the Antiburgher section of the Scottish Secession Church, was born on the 14th of April 1714 in the parish of Muckhart, Perthshire, and, on the completion of his literary and theological studies at Edinburgh and Perth, was licensed as a preacher in 1740. His eldest brother being a prodigal he succeeded to the paternal estate, but threw the will into the fire on his brother's promising to reform. In 1741 he was ordained minister of the large Secession congregation of Bristo Street, Edinburgh. In 1745 he was almost the only minister of Edinburgh who continued to preach against rebellion while the troops of Charles Edward were in occupation of the town. When in 1747 "the Associate Synod," by a narrow majority, decided not to give full immediate effect to a judgment which had been passed in the previous year against the lawfulness of the "Burgess Oath," Gib led the protesting minority, who separated from their brethren and formed the Antiburgher Synod (April 10th) in his own house in Edinburgh. It was chiefly under his influence that it was agreed by this ecclesiastical body at subsequent meetings to summon to the bar their "Burgher" brethren, and finally to depose and excommunicate them for contumacy. Gib's action in forming the Antiburgher Synod led, after prolonged litigation, to his exclusion from the building in Bristo Street where his congregation had met. In 1765 he made a vigorous and able reply to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, which had stigmatized the Secession as "threatening the peace of the country." From 1753 till within a short period of his death, which took place on the 18th of June 1788, he preached regularly in Nicolson Street church, which was constantly filled with an audience of two thousand persons. His dogmatic and fearless attitude in controversy earned for him the nickname "Pope Gib."

Principal publications: _Tables for the Four Evangelists_ (1770, and with author's name, 1800); _The Present Truth, a Display of the Secession Testimony_ (2 vols., 1774); _Vindiciae dominicae_ (Edin., 1780). See Chambers's _Eminent Scotsmen_; also article UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.

GIBARA, or JIBARA (once "Punta del Yarey" and "Yarey de Gibara"), a north-coast city of Oriente Province, Cuba, 80 m. N.W. of Santiago de Cuba. Pop. (1907) 6170. It is served by railway to the S.S.W., to Holguin and Cacocum (where it connects with the main line between Santiago and Havana), and is a port of call for the American Munson Line. It lies on a circular harbour, about 1 m. in diameter, which, though open to the N., affords fair shelter. At the entrance to the harbour is San Fernando, an old fort (1817), and the city is very quaint in appearance. At the back of the city are three stone-topped hills, Silla, Pan and Tabla, reputed to be those referred to by Columbus in his journal of his first voyage. Enclosing the town is a stone wall, built by the Spaniards as a defence against attack during the rebellion of 1868-1878. Gibara is the port of Holguin. It exports cedar, mahogany, tobacco, sugar, tortoise-shell, Indian corn, cattle products, coco-nuts and bananas; and is the centre of the banana trade with the United States. Gibara is an old settlement, but it did not rise above the status of a petty village until after 1817; its importance dates from the opening of the port to commerce in 1827.

GIBBON, EDWARD (1737-1794), English historian, was descended, he tells us in his autobiography, from a Kentish family of considerable antiquity; among his remoter ancestors he reckons the lord high treasurer Fiennes, Lord Say and Sele, whom Shakespeare has immortalized in his _Henry VI._ His grandfather was a man of ability, an enterprising merchant of London, one of the commissioners of customs under the Tory ministry during the last four years of Queen Anne, and, in the judgment of Lord Bolingbroke, as deeply versed in the "commerce and finances of England" as any man of his time. He was not always wise, however, either for himself or his country; for he became deeply involved in the South Sea Scheme, in the disastrous collapse of which (1720) he lost the ample wealth he had amassed. As a director of the company, moreover, he was suspected of fraudulent complicity, taken into custody and heavily fined; but L10,000 was allowed him out of the wreck of his estate, and with this his skill and enterprise soon constructed a second fortune. He died at Putney in 1736, leaving the bulk of his property to his two daughters--nearly disinheriting his only son, the father of the historian, for having married against his wishes. This son (by name Edward) was educated at Westminster[1] and Cambridge, but never took a degree, travelled, became member of parliament, first for Petersfield (1734), then for Southampton (1741), joined the party against Sir Robert Walpole, and (as his son confesses, not much to his father's honour) was animated in so doing by "private revenge" against the supposed "oppressor" of his family in the South Sea affair. If so, revenge, as usual, was blind; for Walpole had sought rather to moderate than to inflame public feeling against the projectors.

The historian was born at Putney, Surrey, April 27 (Old Style), 1737. His mother, Judith Porten, was the daughter of a London merchant. He was the eldest of a family of six sons and a daughter, and the only one who survived childhood; his own life in youth hung by so mere a thread as to be again and again despaired of. His mother, between domestic cares and constant infirmities (which, however, did not prevent an occasional plunge into fashionable dissipation in compliance with her husband's wishes), did but little for him. The "true mother of his mind as well as of his health" was a maiden aunt--Catherine Porten by name--with respect to whom he expresses himself in language of the most grateful remembrance. "Many anxious and solitary days," says Gibbon, "did she consume with patient trial of every mode of relief and amusement. Many wakeful nights did she sit by my bedside in trembling expectation that each hour would be my last." As circumstances allowed, she appears to have taught him reading, writing and arithmetic--acquisitions made with so little of remembered pain that "were not the error corrected by analogy," he says, "I should be tempted to conceive them as innate." At seven he was committed for eighteen months to the care of a private tutor, John Kirkby by name, and the author, among other things, of a "philosophical fiction" entitled the _Life of Automathes_. Of Kirkby, from whom he learned the rudiments of English and Latin grammar, he speaks gratefully, and doubtless truly, so far as he could trust the impressions of childhood. With reference to _Automathes_ he is much more reserved in his praise, denying alike its originality, its depth and its elegance; but, he adds, "the book is not devoid of entertainment or instruction."

In his ninth year (1746), during a "lucid interval of comparative health," he was sent to a school at Kingston-upon-Thames; but his former infirmities soon returned, and his progress, by his own confession, was slow and unsatisfactory. "My timid reserve was astonished by the crowd and tumult of the school; the want of strength and activity disqualified me for the sports of the play-field.... By the common methods of discipline, at the expense of many tears and some blood, I purchased the knowledge of the Latin syntax," but manifestly, in his own opinion, the _Arabian Nights_, Pope's _Homer_, and Dryden's _Virgil_, eagerly read, had at this period exercised a much more powerful influence on his intellectual development than Phaedrus and Cornelius Nepos, "painfully construed and darkly understood."

In December 1747 his mother died, and he was taken home. After a short time his father removed to the "rustic solitude" of Buriton (Hants), but young Gibbon lived chiefly at the house of his maternal grandfather at Putney, where, under the care of his devoted aunt, he developed, he tells us, that passionate love of reading "which he would not exchange for all the treasures of India," and where his mind received its most decided stimulus. Of 1748 he says, "This year, the twelfth of my age, I shall note as the most propitious to the growth of my intellectual stature." After detailing the circumstances which unlocked for him the door of his grandfather's "tolerable library," he says, "I turned over many English pages of poetry and romance, of history and travels. Where a title attracted my eye, without fear or awe I snatched the volume from the shelf." In 1749, in his twelfth year, he was sent to Westminster, still residing, however, with his aunt, who, rendered destitute by her father's bankruptcy, but unwilling to live a life of dependence, had opened a boarding-house for Westminster school. Here in the course of two years (1749-1750), interrupted by danger and debility, he "painfully climbed into the third form"; but it was left to his riper age to "acquire the beauties of the Latin and the rudiments of the Greek tongue." The continual attacks of sickness which had retarded his progress induced his aunt, by medical advice, to take him to Bath; but the mineral waters had no effect. He then resided for a time in the house of a physician at Winchester; the physician did as little as the mineral waters; and, after a further trial of Bath, he once more returned to Putney, and made a last futile attempt to study at Westminster. Finally, it was concluded that he would never be able to encounter the discipline of a school; and casual instructors, at various times and places, were provided for him. Meanwhile his indiscriminate appetite for reading had begun to fix itself more and more decidedly upon history; and the list of historical works devoured by him during this period of chronic ill-health is simply astonishing. It included, besides Hearne's _Ductor historicus_ and the successive volumes of the _Universal History_, which was then in course of publication, Littlebury's _Herodotus_, Spelman's _Xenophon_, Gordon's _Tacitus_, an anonymous translation of Procopius; "many crude lumps of Speed, Rapin, Mezeray, Davila, Machiavel, Father Paul, Bower, &c., were hastily gulped. I devoured them like so many novels; and I swallowed with the same voracious appetite the descriptions of India and China, of Mexico and Peru." His first introduction to the historic scenes the study of which afterwards formed the passion of his life took place in 1751, when, while along with his father visiting a friend in Wiltshire, he discovered in the library "a common book, the continuation of Echard's _Roman History_." "To me the reigns of the successors of Constantine were absolutely new; and I was immersed in the passage of the Goths over the Danube, when the summons of the dinner bell reluctantly dragged me from my intellectual feast." Soon afterwards his fancy kindled with the first glimpses into Oriental history, the wild "barbaric" charm of which he never ceased to feel. Ockley's book on the Saracens "first opened his eyes" to the striking career of Mahomet and his hordes; and with his characteristic ardour of literary research, after exhausting all that could be learned in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tatars and Turks, he forthwith plunged into the French of D'Herbelot, and the Latin of Pocock's version of Abulfaragius, sometimes understanding them, but oftener only guessing their meaning. He soon learned to call to his aid the subsidiary sciences of geography and chronology, and before he was quite capable of reading them had already attempted to weigh in his childish balance the competing systems of Scaliger and Petavius, of Marsham and Newton. At this early period he seems already to have adopted in some degree the plan of study he followed in after life and recommended in his _Essai sur l'etude_--that is, of letting his subject rather than his author determine his course, of suspending the perusal of a book to reflect, and to compare the statements with those of other authors--so that he often read portions of many volumes while mastering one.

Towards his sixteenth year he tell us "nature displayed in his favour her mysterious energies," and all his infirmities suddenly vanished. Thenceforward, while never possessing or abusing the insolence of health, he could say "few persons have been more exempt from real or imaginary ills." His unexpected recovery revived his father's hopes for his education, hitherto so much neglected if judged by ordinary standards; and accordingly in January 1752 he was placed at Esher, Surrey, under the care of Dr Francis, the well-known translator of Horace. But Gibbon's friends in a few weeks discovered that the new tutor preferred the pleasures of London to the instruction of his pupils, and in this perplexity decided to send him prematurely to Oxford, where he was matriculated as a gentleman commoner of Magdalen College, 3rd April 1752. According to his own testimony he arrived at the university "with a stock of information which might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy might be ashamed." And indeed his huge wallet of scraps stood him in little stead at the trim banquets to which he was invited at Oxford, while the wandering habits by which he had filled it absolutely unfitted him to be a guest. He was not well grounded in any of the elementary branches, which are essential to university studies and to all success in their prosecution. It was natural, therefore, that he should dislike the university, and as natural that the university should dislike him. Many of his complaints of the system were certainly just; but it may be doubted whether any university system would have been profitable to him, considering his antecedents. He complains especially of his tutors, and in one case with abundant reason; but, by his own confession, they might have recriminated with justice, for he indulged in gay society, and kept late hours. His observations, however, on the defects of the English university system, some of which have only very recently been removed, are acute and well worth pondering, however little relevant to his own case. He remained at Magdalen about fourteen months. "To the university of Oxford," he says, "I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life."

But thus "idle" though he may have been as a "student," he already meditated authorship. In the first long vacation--during which he, doubtless with some sarcasm, says that "his taste for books began to revive"--he contemplated a treatise on the age of Sesostris, in which (and it was characteristic) his chief object was to investigate not so much the events as the probable epoch of the reign of that semi-mythical monarch, whom he was inclined to regard as having been contemporary with Solomon. "Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book"; but the discovery of his own weakness, he adds, was the first symptom of taste. On his first return to Oxford the work was "wisely relinquished," and never afterwards resumed. The most memorable incident, however, in Gibbon's stay at Oxford was his temporary conversion to the doctrines of the church of Rome. The bold criticism of Middleton's recently (1749) published _Free Enquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church_ appears to have given the first shock to his Protestantism, not indeed by destroying his previous belief that the gift of miraculous powers had continued to subsist in the church during the first four or five centuries of Christianity, but by convincing him that within the same period most of the leading doctrines of popery had been already introduced both in theory and in practice. At this stage he was introduced by a friend (Mr Molesworth) to Bossuet's _Variations of Protestantism_ and _Exposition of Catholic Doctrine_ (see Gibbon, _Decline and Fall_, c. xv., note 79). "These works," says he, "achieved my conversion, and I surely fell by a noble hand." In bringing about this "fall," however, Parsons the Jesuit appears to have had a considerable share; at least Lord Sheffield has recorded that on the only occasion on which Gibbon talked with him on the subject he imputed the change in his religious views principally to that vigorous writer, who, in his opinion, had urged all the best arguments in favour of Roman Catholicism. But be this as it may, he had no sooner adopted his new creed than he resolved to profess it; "a momentary glow of enthusiasm" had raised him above all temporal considerations, and accordingly, on June 8, 1753, he records that having "privately abjured the heresies" of his childhood before a Catholic priest of the name of Baker, a Jesuit, in London, he announced the same to his father in an elaborate controversial epistle which his spiritual adviser much approved, and which he himself afterwards described to Lord Sheffield as having been "written with all the pomp, the dignity, and self-satisfaction of a martyr."

The elder Gibbon heard with indignant surprise of this act of juvenile apostasy, and, indiscreetly giving vent to his wrath, precipitated the expulsion of his son from Oxford, a punishment which the culprit, in after years at least, found no cause to deplore. In his _Memoirs_ he speaks of the results of his "childish revolt against the religion of his country" with undisguised self-gratulation. It had delivered him for ever from the "port and prejudice" of the university, and led him into the bright paths of philosophic freedom. That his conversion was sincere at the time, that it marked a real if but a transitory phase of genuine religious conviction, we have no reason to doubt, notwithstanding the scepticism he has himself expressed. "To my present feelings it seems incredible that I should ever believe that I believed in transubstantiation," he indeed declares; but his incredulous astonishment is not unmixed with undoubting pride. "I could not blush that my tender mind was entangled in the sophistry which had reduced the acute and manly understandings of a Chillingworth or a Bayle." Nor is the sincerity of the Catholicism he professed in these boyish days in any way discredited by the fact of his subsequent lack of religion. Indeed, as one of the acutest and most sympathetic of his critics has remarked, the deep and settled grudge he has betrayed towards every form of Christian belief, in all the writings of his maturity, may be taken as evidence that he had at one time experienced in his own person at least some of the painful workings of a positive faith.