(E. M. T.)
DIPOENUS and SCYLLIS, early Greek sculptors, who worked together, and are said to have been pupils of Daedalus. Pliny assigns to them the date 580 b.c., and says that they worked at Sicyon, which city from their time onwards became one of the great schools of sculpture. They also made statues for Cleonae and Argos. They worked in wood, ebony and ivory, and apparently also in marble. It is curious that no inscription bearing their names has come to light.
DIPPEL, JOHANN KONRAD (1673-1734), German theologian and alchemist, son of a Lutheran pastor, was born at the castle of Frankenstein, near Darmstadt, on the 10th of August 1673. He studied theology at Giessen. After a short visit to Wittenberg he went to Strassburg, where he lectured on alchemy and chiromancy, and occasionally preached. He gained considerable popularity, but was obliged after a time to quit the city, owing to his irregular manner of living. He had up to this time espoused the cause of the orthodox as against the pietists; but in his two first works, published under the name “Christianus Democritus,” Orthodoxia Orthodoxorum (1697) and Papismus vapulans Protestantium (1698), he assailed the fundamental positions of the Lutheran theology. He held that religion consisted not in dogma but exclusively in love and self-sacrifice. To avoid persecution he was compelled to wander from place to place in Germany, Holland, Denmark and Sweden. He took the degree of doctor of medicine at Leiden in 1711. He discovered Prussian blue, and by the destructive distillation of bones prepared the evil-smelling product known as Dippel’s animal oil. He died near Berleburg on the 25th of April 1734.
An enlarged edition of Dippel’s collected works was published at Berleburg in 1743. See the biographies by J. C. G. Ackermann (Leipzig, 1781), H. V. Hoffmann (Darmstadt, 1783), K. Henning (1881) and W. Bender (Bonn, 1882); also a memoir by K. Bucher in the Historisches Taschenbuch for 1858.
DIPSOMANIA (from Gr. δίψα, thirst, and μανία, madness), a term formerly applied to the attacks of delirium (q.v.) caused by alcoholic poisoning. It is now sometimes loosely used as equivalent to the condition of incurable inebriates, but strictly should be confined to the pathological and insatiable desire for alcohol, sometimes occurring in paroxysms.
DIPTERA (δίς, double, πτερά, wings), a term (first employed in its modern sense by Linnaeus, Fauna Suecica, 1st ed., 1746, p. 306) used in zoological classification for one of the Orders into which the Hexapoda, or Insecta, are divided. The relation of the Diptera (two-winged flies, or flies proper) to the other Orders is dealt with under [Hexapoda] (q.v.).