[Dacoits], gangs of semi-savage Indian brigands and robbers, often 40 or 50 in a gang.
[Da Costa, Isaac], a Dutch poet, born at Amsterdam, of Jewish parents; turned Christian, and after the death of Bilderdijk was chief poet of Holland (1798-1860).
[Dædalus], an architect and mechanician in the Greek mythology; inventor and constructor of the Labyrinth of Crete, in which the Minotaur was confined, and in which he was also imprisoned himself by order of Minos, a confinement from which he escaped by means of wings fastened on with wax; was regarded as the inventor of the mechanic arts.
[Daghestan] (529), a Russian province W. of the Caspian Sea, traversed by spurs of the Caucasus Mountains; chief town Derbend.
[Dago], a marshy Russian island, N. of the Gulf of Riga, near the entrance of the Gulf of Finland.
[Dagobert I.], king of the Franks, son of Clotaire II., reformed the laws of the Franks; was the last of the Merovingian kings who knew how to rule with a firm hand; the sovereign power as it passed from his hands was seized by the mayor of the palace; d. 638.
[Dagon], the national god of the Philistines, represented as half-man, sometimes half-woman, and half-fish; appears to have been a symbol to his worshippers of the fertilising power of nature, familiar to them in the fruitfulness of the sea.
[Daguerreotype], a process named after its inventor, Louis Daguerre, a Frenchman, of producing pictures by means of the camera on a surface sensitive to light and shade, and interesting as the first step in photography.
[Dahl], a Norwegian landscape-painter, born at Bergen; died professor of Painting at Dresden (1788-1857).
[Dahlgren, John Adolph], a U.S. naval officer and commander; invented a small heavy gun named after him; commanded the blockading squadron at Charleston (1809-1870).