The quartz-dolerites are an important group, hardly less common than the olivine-dolerites. They contain a small amount of quartz, and often micropegmatite, as the last element to consolidate, filling up little angular interspaces between the felspars and pyroxenes, which had previously crystallized. They rarely contain olivine, but pleochroic hypersthene is by no means rare in them (hypersthene-dolerites). Some contain larger individuals of pale green, rather pleochroic augite (the so-called sahlite), and a little brown mica, and brownish-green hornblende may also be present.
Allied to these are olivine-free dolerites with more or less of interstitial glassy base (tholeites, &c.). In the rocks of this group ophitic structure is typically absent, and the presence of an interstitial finely crystalline or amorphous material gives rise to the structure which is known as “intersertal.” Transitions to the porphyritic dolerites and basalts arise by increase in the proportion of this ground-mass. The edges of dolerite sills and dikes often contain much dark brown glass, and pass into tachylytes, in which this material preponderates.
Another interesting group of doleritic rocks contains analcite. They may be ophitic, though often they are not, and they usually contain olivine, while their augite has distinctly purple shades, and a feeble dichroism.
Their characteristic feature is the presence of a small amount of analcite, which never shows crystalline outlines but fills up the interspaces between the other minerals. Some writers held that this mineral has resulted from the decomposition of nepheline; others regard it as a primary mineral. Usually it can be clearly shown to be secondary to some extent, but there is reason to suppose that it is really a pneumatolytic deposit. These rocks are known as teschenites, and have a wide distribution in England, Scotland, on the continent and in America. Often they are comparatively rich in brown hornblende. This last-named mineral is not usually abundant in dolerites, but in a special group, the proterobases, it to a large extent replaces the customary augite. A few dolerites contain much brown mica (mica-dolerites). Nepheline may appear in these rocks, as in the basalts. Typical nepheline-dolerites are scarce, and consist of idiomorphic augite, surrounded by nepheline. Examples are known from the Tertiary volcanic districts of the Rhine.
Dolerites have a very wide distribution, as they are found wherever basalts occur in any number. It is superfluous to cite localities for them as they are among the commonest of igneous rocks. They are much employed for road-mending and for kerbstones, though their dark colour and the tendency they have to weather with a dingy brown crust make them unsuitable for the better classes of architectural work.
(J. S. F.)
DOLET, ÉTIENNE (1509-1546), French scholar and printer, was born at Orleans on the 3rd of August 1509. A doubtful tradition makes him the illegitimate son of Francis I.; but it is evident that he was at least connected with some family of rank and wealth. From Orleans he was taken to Paris about 1521; and after studying under Nicolas Bérauld, the teacher of Coligny, he proceeded in 1526 to Padua. The death of his friend and master, Simon de Villanova, led him, in 1530, to accept the post of secretary to Jean de Langeac, bishop of Limoges and French ambassador to the republic of Venice; he contrived, however, to attend the lectures of the Venetian scholar Battista Egnazio, and found time to write Latin love poems to some Venetian Elena. Returning to France soon afterwards he proceeded to Toulouse to study law; but there he soon became involved in the violent disputes between the different “nations” of the university, was thrown into prison, and finally banished by a decree of the parlement. In 1535 he entered the lists against Erasmus in the famous Ciceronian controversy, by publishing through Sebastien Gryphe (Gryphius) at Lyons a Dialogus de imitatione Ciceroniana; and the following year saw the appearance of his two folio volumes Commentariorum linguae Latinae. This work was dedicated to Francis I., who gave him the privilege of printing during ten years any works in Latin, Greek, Italian or French, which were the product of his own pen or had received his supervision; and accordingly, on his release from an imprisonment occasioned by his justifiable homicide of a painter named Compaing, he began at Lyons his typographical and editorial labours. That he was not altogether unaware of the dangers to which he was exposed from the bigotry of the time is shown not only by the tone of his mottoes—Préserve moi, Seigneur, des calomnies des hommes, and Durior est spectatae virtutis quam incognitae conditio—but also by the fact that he endeavoured first of all to conciliate his opponents by publishing a Cato christianus, or Christian moralist, in which he made profession of his creed. The catholicity of his literary appreciation, in spite of his ultra-Ciceronianism, was soon displayed by the works which proceeded from his press—ancient and modern, sacred and secular, from the New Testament in Latin to Rabelais in French. But before the term of his privilege expired his labours were interrupted by his enemies, who succeeded in imprisoning him (1542) on the charge of atheism. From a first imprisonment of fifteen months Dolet was released by the advocacy of Pierre Duchâtel, bishop of Tulle; from a second (1544) he escaped by his own ingenuity; but, venturing back from Piedmont, whither he had fled in order that he might print at Lyons the letters by which he appealed for justice to the king of France, the queen of Navarre and the parlement of Paris, he was again arrested, branded as a relapsed atheist by the theological faculty of the Sorbonne, and on the 3rd of August 1546 put to the torture, strangled and burned in the Place Maubert. On his way thither he is said to have composed the punning pentameter—Non dolet ipse Dolet, sed pia turba dolet.
Whether Dolet is to be classed with the representatives of Protestantism or with the advocates of anti-Christian rationalism has been frequently disputed; by the principal Protestants of his own time he was not recognized, and by Calvin he is formally condemned, along with Agrippa and his master Villanova, as having uttered execrable blasphemies against the Son of God; but, to judge by the religious character of a large number of the books which he translated or published, such a condemnation is altogether misplaced. His repeated advocacy of the reading of the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue is especially noticeable. A statue of Dolet was erected on the Place Maubert in 1889.
See J. F. Née de la Rochelle, Vie d’Étienne Dolet (1779); Joseph Boulmier, E. Dolet, sa vie, ses œuvres, son martyre (1857); A. F. Didot, Essai sur la typographie (1852) and article in the Nouvelle Biographie générale; L. Michel. Dolet: sa statue, place Maubert: ses amis, ses ennemis (1889); R. C. Christie, Étienne Dolet, the Martyr of the Renaissance (2nd ed., 1889), containing a full bibliography of works published by him as author or printer; O. Galtier, Étienne Dolet (Paris, 1908). The procès, or trial, of Dolet was published (1836) by A. H. Taillandier from the registers of the parlement of Paris.