GARSTON, a seaport in the Widnes parliamentary division of Lancashire, England, on the Mersey, 6 m. S.E. of Liverpool. Pop. (1891) 13,444; (1901) 17,289. The docks, belonging to the London & North Western railway company, employ most of the working population. There is about a mile of quayage, with special machinery for the shipping of coal, which forms the chief article of export.
GARTH, SIR SAMUEL (1661-1719), English physician and poet, was born of a good Yorkshire family in 1661. He entered Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1676, graduating B.A. in 1679 and M.A. in 1684. He took his M.D. and became a member of the College of Physicians in 1691. In 1697 he delivered the Harveian oration, in which he advocated a scheme dating from some ten years back for providing dispensaries for the relief of the sick poor, as a protection against the greed of the apothecaries. In 1699 he published a mock-heroic poem, The Dispensary, in six cantos, which had an instant success, passing through three editions within a year. In this he ridiculed the apothecaries and their allies among the physicians. The poem has little interest at the present day, except as a proof that the heroic couplet was written with smoothness and polish before the days of Pope. Garth was a member of the Kit-Kat Club, and became the leading physician of the Whigs, as Radcliffe was of the Tories. In 1714 he was knighted by George I. and he died on the 18th of January 1719. He wrote little besides his best-known work The Dispensary and Claremont, a moral epistle in verse. He made a Latin oration (1700) in praise of Dryden and translated the Life of Otho in the fifth volume of Dryden’s Plutarch. In 1717 he edited a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, himself supplying the fourteenth and part of the fifteenth book.
GARTOK, a trade-market of Tibet, situated on the bank of the Indus on the road between Shigatse and Leh, to the east of Simla. In accordance with the Tibet treaty of 1904, Gartok, together with Yatung and Gyantse, was thrown open to British trade. On the return of the column from Lhasa in that year Gartok was visited by a party under Captain Ryder, who found only a few dozen people in winter quarters, their houses being in the midst of a bare plain. In summer, however, all the trade between Tibet and Ladakh passes through this place.
GARY, a city of Lake county, Indiana, U.S.A., at the southern end of Lake Michigan, about 25 m. S.E. of Chicago, Ill. Pop. (1910 census) 16,802. Gary is served by the Baltimore & Ohio, the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, the Michigan Central, the Pennsylvania, the Wabash, and (for freight only) the Chicago, Lake Shore & Eastern, and the Indiana Harbor Belt railways, and by several steamship lines plying the Great Lakes. There are about 21 sq. m. within the municipal limits, but the city lies chiefly within a tract of about 8000 acres composed at the time of its settlement mainly of sand dunes and swamps intersected from east to west by the Grand Calumet and the Little Calumet rivers, small streams respectively about 1 and 3 m. S. of the lake shore. In 1906 the United States Steel Corporation bought this tract to establish on it a great industrial community, as direct water connexion with the Lake Superior ore region was possible, and it was comparatively accessible to West Virginia coal and Michigan limestone, with unusual railroad facilities. The Steel Corporation began the actual building of the town in June 1906, the first step being the installation of an elaborate system of sewers, and of mains and conduits, for the distribution of water, gas and electricity. The water-supply is taken from the lake at a point 2 m. offshore by means of a tunnel. These public utilities the Steel Corporation controls, and it has built about 500 dwellings, two hotels, a bank, and its own plant. A small patch of land, now within the limits of the city, has been from the beginning in the hands of private owners, but the remainder of the lots (except those already sold) are owned by the Steel Corporation, and are sold under certain restrictions intended to prevent real estate speculation, to guarantee bona fide improvement of the property, and to restrict the sale of intoxicating drinks. Between the Grand Calumet river (which has been dredged out into a canal) and the lake lies the plant of the Steel Corporation, covering about 1200 acres. All the machinery in this great plant is driven by electricity from generators whose motive power is supplied by the combustion of gases from the blast furnaces. From the same sources is also supplied the electricity for lighting the city. The rail mill is operated by three-phase induction motors of from 2000 to 6000 horse-power capacity. The city was chartered in 1906 and was named in honour of Elbert Henry Gary (b. 1846), chairman of the board of directors and chairman of the finance committee of the United States Steel Corporation.
GAS, a general term for one of the three states of aggregation of matter; also more specifically applied to coal-gas, the gaseous product formed in the destructive distillation of coal or other carbonaceous matter (see below, section Gas Manufacture; for gas engines see the separate heading [Gas Engine]).
The Gaseous State.—Matter is studied under three physical phases—solids, liquids and gases, the latter two being sometimes grouped as “fluids.” The study of the physical properties of fluids in general constitutes the science of hydromechanics, and their applications in the arts is termed hydraulics; the special science dealing with the physical properties of gases is named pneumatics.