[Donatello], a great Italian sculptor, born at Florence, where he was apprenticed to a goldsmith; tried his hand at carving in leisure hours; went to Rome and studied the monuments of ancient art; returned to Florence and executed an "Annunciation," still preserved in a chapel in Santa Croce, which was followed by marble statues of St. Peter, St. Mark, and St. George, before one of which, that of St. Mark, Michael Angelo exclaimed, "Why do you not speak to me?"; he executed tombs and figures, or groups in bronze as well as marble; his schoolmasters were the sculptors of Greece, and the real was his ultimate model (1383-1460).
[Donati], an Italian astronomer, born at Pisa; discoverer of the comet of 1858, called Donati's comet (1826-1873).
[Donatists], a sect in N. Africa, founded by Donatus, bishop of Carthage, in the 4th century, that separated from the rest of the Church and formed itself into an exclusive community, with bishops and congregations of its own, on the ground that no one was entitled to be a member of Christ's body, or an overseer of Christ's flock, who was not of divine election, and that in the face of an attempt, backed by the Emperor Constantine, to thrust a bishop on the Church at Carthage, consecrated by an authority that had betrayed and sold the Church to the world; the members of it were subject to cruel persecutions in which they gloried, and were annihilated by the Saracens in the 7th century.
[Donatus], a Latin grammarian and rhetorician of the 4th century, the teacher of St. Jerome; the author of treatises in grammar known as Donats, and, along with the sacred Scriptures, the earliest examples of printing by means of letters cut on wooden blocks, and so appreciated as elementary treatises that they gave name to treatises of the kind on any subject; he wrote also scholia to the plays of Terence.
[Donau], the German name for the Danube.
[Doncaster] (26), a market and manufacturing town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, well built, in a pleasant country, on the right bank of the Don, 33 m. S. of York; famous for its races, the St. Leger in particular, called after Colonel St. Leger, who instituted them in 1776.
[Dondra Head], the southern extremity of Ceylon, once the site of the capital.
[Donegal] (185), a county in the NW. of Ireland, in the province of Ulster, the most mountainous in the country; is mossy and boggy, and is indented along the coast with bays, and fringed with islands.
[Donetz], a tributary of the Russian Don, the basin of which forms one large coal-field, reckoned to be as large as all Yorkshire, and is reckoned one of the largest of any in the world.
[Dongola, New], a town in Nubia, on the left bank of the Nile, above the third cataract, 20° N. and over 700 m. from Cairo; was founded by the Mamelukes.