DWIGHT, THEODORE WILLIAM (1822-1892), American jurist and educationalist, cousin of Theodore Dwight Woolsey and of Timothy Dwight, was born on the 18th of July 1822 in Catskill, New York. His father, Benjamin Woolsey Dwight (1780-1850), an abolitionist and reformer, removed to Clinton, New York, in 1831. The son graduated at Hamilton College in 1840, studied physics under S.F.B. Morse and John William Draper, taught classics in Utica Academy in 1840-1841, and studied law for one year at Yale. He was tutor at Hamilton in 1841-1846, at the same time teaching law privately; was made Maynard professor of law, history, civil polity, and political economy in 1846; received recognition of his law school in 1853, and in 1858 accepted an invitation to Columbia to teach law upon his own condition that he should found a law school. He himself was this school for many years and did not retire from it until 1891, about a year before his death, at Clinton, New York, on the 28th of June 1892. A man of broad culture, he was best known as the founder of a famous school of law and a famous method of legal teaching, which was broadly educational and which called for class-room recitation on the text-book studied and opposed mere “taking notes” on lectures. His questioning was illustrative and its method Socratic. He was a non-resident professor of law at Cornell (1869-1871) and at Amherst (1870-1872). Dwight was an able jurist, frequently acted as referee in difficult questions, in 1874-1875 was a judge of the New York commission of appeals, appointed to clear the docket of the court of appeals, and in 1886 was counsel for the five Andover professors charged with heresy. He was a prominent figure in political and social (notably prison) reforms; published in 1867 a Report on the Prisons and Reformatories of the United States and Canada, the result of his labours on a New York state prison commission with Enoch Cobb Wines (1806-1879); favoured indeterminate sentences; drew up the bill for the establishment of the Elmira Reformatory; and organized the State Charities Aid Association. He edited Sir Henry Maine’s Ancient Law (1864); was associate editor of the American Law Register and legal editor of Johnson’s Cyclopaedia; and published Charitable Uses: Argument in the Rose Will Case (1863).
DWIGHT, TIMOTHY (1752-1817), American divine, writer, and educationalist, was born at Northampton, Massachusetts, on the 14th of May 1752. His father, Timothy Dwight, a graduate of Yale College (1744), was a merchant, and his mother was the third daughter of Jonathan Edwards. He was remarkably precocious, and is said to have learned the alphabet at a single lesson, and to have been able to read the Bible before he was four years old. In 1769 he graduated at Yale College, and then for two years taught in a grammar school at New Haven. He was a tutor in Yale College from 1771 to 1777; and then, having been licensed to preach, was a chaplain for a year in a regiment of troops engaged in the War of Independence, inspiring the troops both by his sermons and by several stirring war songs, the most famous of which is “Columbia.” From 1778 until 1783 he lived at Northampton, studying, farming, preaching, and dabbling in politics. From 1783 until 1795 he was pastor of the Congregational church at Greenfield Hill, Connecticut, where he opened an academy which at once acquired a high reputation and attracted pupils from all parts of the Union. From 1795 until his death at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 11th of January 1817, he was president of Yale College, and by his judicious management, by his remarkable ability as a teacher—he taught a variety of subjects, including theology, metaphysics, logic, literature and oratory,—and by his force of character and magnetic personality, won great popularity and influence, and restored that institution to the high place from which it had fallen before his appointment. President Dwight was also well known as an author. In verse he wrote an ambitious epic in eleven books, The Conquest of Canaan, finished in 1774, but not published until 1785; a somewhat ponderous and solemn satire, The Triumph of Infidelity (1788), directed against Hume, Voltaire and others; Greenfield Hill (1794), the suggestion for which seems to have been derived from John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill; and a number of minor poems and hymns, the best known of which is that beginning “I love thy kingdom, Lord.” Many of his sermons were published posthumously under the titles Theology Explained and Defended (5 vols., 1818-1819), to which a memoir of the author by his two sons, W.T. and Sereno E. Dwight, is prefixed, and Sermons by Timothy Dwight (2 vols., 1828), which had a large circulation both in the United States and in England. Probably his most important work, however, is his Travels in New England and New York (4 vols., 1821-1822), which contains much material of value concerning social and economic New England and New York during the period 1796-1817.
See W.B. Sprague’s “Life of Timothy Dwight” in vol. iv. (second series) of Jared Sparks’s Library of American Biography, and especially an excellent chapter in Moses Coit Tyler’s Three Men of Letters (New York, 1895).
His fifth son, Sereno Edwards Dwight (1786-1850), born in Greenfield Hill, Connecticut, graduated at Yale in 1803, was a tutor there in 1806-1810, and successfully practised law in New Haven in 1810-1816. Licensed to preach in 1816, he was the chaplain of the United States Senate for one year, was pastor of the Park Street church, Boston, in 1817-1826, and in 1833-1835 was president of Hamilton College, Clinton, New York. His career was wrecked by accidental mercury poisoning, which interfered with his work in Boston and at Hamilton College, and made his life after 1839 solitary and comparatively uninfluential. His publications include Life and Works of Jonathan Edwards (10 vols., 1830); The Hebrew Wife (1836), an argument against marriage with a deceased wife’s sister; and Select Discourses (1851); to which was prefixed a biographical sketch by his brother William Dwight (1795-1865), who was also successively a lawyer and a Congregational preacher.
President Dwight’s grandson, Timothy Dwight (1828- ), a famous preacher and educationalist, was born at Norwich, Connecticut, on the 16th of November 1828. He graduated at Yale in 1849, continued his studies there and at Bonn and Berlin, was professor of sacred literature and New Testament Greek in the Yale Divinity School from 1858 to 1886, was licensed to preach in 1861, and from 1886 to 1899 was president of Yale, which during his administration greatly prospered and became in name and in fact a university. Dr Dwight was also a member in 1876-1885 of the American committee for the revision of the English Bible, was an editor from 1866 to 1874 of the New Englander, which later became the Yale Review, and besides editing and annotating several volumes of the English translation of H.A.W. Meyer’s Kritisch-exegetischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament, and writing many magazine articles, published a collection of sermons entitled Thoughts of and for the Inner Life (1899).
DYAKS, or Dayaks, the name given to the wild tribes found in Borneo by the Malays on their first settlement there. Whether they are the aborigines of the island or the successors of a Negrito people whom they expelled is uncertain. If the latter, they are descendants of an early pre-Malayan immigration. In any case, though regarded by the Malays as aliens, the Dyaks are of the same stock as the Malays. For themselves they have no general name; but, broken as they are into numerous tribes, they are distinguished by separate tribal names, many of which seem to be merely those of the rivers on which their settlements are situated. Sir Harry Keppel, who attempted to form a classification of the Dyaks according to their ethnographical affinity, divides them into five principal branches. The first of these, which he calls the north-western, includes the natives of Sadong, Sarawak, Sambas, Landak, Tayan, Melionow and Sangow. They all speak the same language, and are remarkable for their dependence on the Malay princes. The second branch, which is called emphatically the Malayan from its greater retention of Malay characteristics, occupies the north coast in Banting, Batang-Lupar, Rejang and part of the valley of the Kapuas. To the third or Parian branch belong the Dyaks of the rivers Kuti and Passir, who are said to speak a language like that of Macassar. The fourth consists of the Beyadjoes, who are settled in the valley of the Banjermassin; and the fifth and lowest comprises the Manketans and Punans, who are still nomadic and ignorant of agriculture.
Physically the Dyaks differ little from the Malays except in their slimmer figure, lighter colour, more prominent nose and higher forehead. In disposition they are as cheerful as the Malay is morose. The typical Dyak is rather slightly built, but is active and capable of enduring great fatigue. His features are distinctly marked and often well formed. The forehead is generally high, and the eyes are dark; the cheek-bones are broad; the hair is black, and the colour of the skin a pure reddish brown, frequently, in the female, approaching the Chinese complexion. The beard is generally scanty, and in many tribes the men pull out all the hair of the face. Both sexes file, dye, and sometimes bore holes in the teeth and insert gold buttons. In dress there is considerable variety, great alterations having resulted from foreign influence. The original and still prevailing style is simple, consisting of a waistcloth, generally of blue cotton, for the men, and a tight-fitting petticoat for the women, who acquire a peculiar mincing gait from its interference with their walking. The favourite ornaments of both sexes are brass rings for the legs and arms, hoops of rattan decorated in various ways, necklaces of white and black beads, and crescent-shaped ear-rings of a large size. The lobes of the ears are distended sometimes nearly to the shoulders by disks of metal and bits of stick. Tattooing is practised by most of the tribes, and the skulls of infants are artificially deformed. The men usually go bare-headed, or wear a bright-coloured kerchief. The custom of betel-chewing being most universal, the betel-pouch is always worn at the side. The weapons in use are a curved sword and a long spear. The bow is unknown, but its place among some tribes is partly supplied by the blowpipe, in the boring of which they show great skill. When going to war the Dyak wears a strong padded jacket, which proves no bad defence. A curious custom among some tribes is the imprisonment of young girls for two or three years before puberty, during which time they are not allowed to see even their mothers.