DARLINGTON (38), a town in S. of Durham, on the Tees, with large iron and other works; a considerable number of the inhabitants belong to the Society of Friends.

DARMESTETER, JAMES, Orientalist, born in Lorraine, of Jewish descent; a distinguished Zend scholar and authority in Zend literature; in the interpretation of the Zend and other ancient literatures was of the modern critical school (1849-1894).

DARMSTADT (55), the capital of the grand-duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, on the Darm, an affluent of the Rhine, 15 m.  S. of Frankfort; is divided into an old and a new town; manufactures tobacco, paper, carpets, chemicals, &c.

DARNLEY, HENRY STUART, LORD, eldest son of the Earl of Lennox and grand-nephew of Henry VIII.; husband of Queen Mary; was murdered on Feb. 5, 1567, in Kirk-o’-Field, which stood on the site of the present University of Edinburgh.

DARTMOOR, moor in Devonshire, a tableland of an average height of 1200 ft. above the sea-level, and of upwards of 120,000 acres in extent, incapable of cultivation, but affording pasturage for sheep, of which it breeds a small hardy race; it has rich veins of minerals; abounds in British remains, and contains a large convict prison.

DARU, COMTE, a French administrator and litterateur, born at Montpellier; translated Horace when in prison during the Reign of Terror; served as administrator under Napoleon; on the return of the Bourbons devoted himself to letters, and wrote the “History of the Republic of Venice” (1767-1829).

DARWIN, CHARLES ROBERT, great English naturalist and biologist, born at Shrewsbury, grandson of Erasmus Darwin on his father’s side, and of Josiah Wedgwood on his mother’s; studied at Edinburgh and Cambridge; in 1831 accompanied as naturalist without salary the Beagle in her voyage of exploration in the Southern Seas, on the condition that he should have the entire disposal of his collections, all of which he got, and which he ultimately distributed among various public institutions; he was absent from England for five years, and on his return published in 1836 his “Naturalist’s Voyage Round the World,” in 1839-43 accounts of the fruits of his researches and observations in the departments of geology and natural history during that voyage, in 1842 his treatise on the “Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs,” and in 1859 his work on the “Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” a work which has proved epoch-making and gone far to revolutionise thought in the scientific study of, especially, animated nature, and is being applied to higher spheres of being; this work was followed by others more or less confirmatory, finishing off with “The Descent of Man” in 1871, in which he traces the human race to an extinct quadrumanous animal related to that which produced the orang-outang, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla.  He may be said to have taken evolution out of the region of pure imagination, and by giving it a basis of fact, to have