GALOIS, EVARISTE (1811-1832), French mathematician, was born on the 25th of October 1811, and killed in a duel on the 31st of May 1832. An obituary notice by his friend Auguste Chevalier appeared in the Revue encyclopédique (1832); and his collected works are published, Journal de Liouville (1846), pp. 381-444, about fifty of these pages being occupied by researches on the resolubility of algebraic equations by radicals. This branch of algebra he notably enriched, and to him is also due the notion of a group of substitutions (see [Equation]: Theory of Equations; also [Groups, Theory of]).
His collected works, with an introduction by C.F. Picard, were published in 1897 at Paris.
GALSTON, a police burgh and manufacturing town of Ayrshire, Scotland. Pop. (1901) 4876. It is situated on the Irvine, 5 m. E. by S. of Kilmarnock, with a station on the Glasgow & South-Western railway. The manufactures include blankets, lace, muslin, hosiery and paper-millboard, and coal is worked in the vicinity. About 1 m. to the north, amid the “bonnie woods and braes,” is Loudoun Castle, a seat of the earl of Loudoun.
GALT, SIR ALEXANDER TILLOCH (1817-1893), Canadian statesman, was the youngest son of John Galt the author. Born in London on the 6th of September 1817, he emigrated to Canada in 1835, and settled in Sherbrooke, in the province of Quebec, where he entered the service of the British American Land Company, of which he rose to be chief commissioner. Later he was one of the contractors for extending the Grand Trunk railway westward from Toronto. He entered public life in 1849 as Liberal member for the county of Sherbrooke, but opposed the chief measure of his party, the Rebellion Losses Bill, and in the same year signed a manifesto in favour of union with the United States, believing that in no other way could Protestant and Anglo-Saxon ascendancy over the Roman Catholic French majority in his native province be maintained. In the same year he retired from parliament but re-entered it in 1853, and was till 1872 the chief representative of the English-speaking Protestants of Quebec province. On the fall of the Brown-Dorion administration in 1858 he was called on to form a ministry, but declined the task, and became finance minister under Sir John Macdonald and Sir George Cartier on condition that the federation of the British North American provinces should become a part of their programme. From 1858 to 1862 and 1864 to 1867 he was finance minister, and did much to reduce the somewhat chaotic finances of Canada into order. To him are due the introduction of the decimal system of currency and the adoption of a system of protection to Canadian manufactures. To his diplomacy was due the coalition in 1864 between Macdonald, Brown and Cartier, which carried the federation of the British North American provinces, and throughout the three years of negotiation which followed his was one of the chief influences. He became finance minister in the first Dominion ministry, but suddenly and mysteriously resigned on the 4th of November 1867. After his retirement he gave to the administration of Sir John Macdonald a support which grew more and more fitful, and advocated independence as the final destiny of Canada. In 1871 he was again offered the ministry of finance on condition of abandoning these views, but declined. In 1877 he was the Canadian nominee on the Anglo-American fisheries commission at Halifax, and rendered brilliant service. In 1880 he was appointed Canadian high commissioner to Great Britain, but retired in 1883 in favour of Sir Charles Tupper. During this period he advocated imperial federation. He was Canadian delegate at the Paris Monetary Conference of 1881, and to the International Exhibition of Fisheries in 1883. From this date till his death on the 19th of September 1893 he lived in retirement. No Canadian statesman has had sounder or more abundant ideas, but a certain intellectual fickleness made him always a somewhat untrustworthy colleague in political life.
(W. L. G.)
GALT, JOHN (1779-1839), Scottish novelist, was born at Irvine, Ayrshire, on the 2nd of May 1779. He received his early education at Irvine and Greenock, and read largely from one of the public libraries while serving as a clerk in a mercantile office. In 1804 he went to settle in London, where he published anonymously a poem on the Battle of Largs. After unsuccessful attempts to succeed in business Galt entered at Lincoln’s Inn, but was never called to the bar. He obtained a commission from a British firm to go abroad to find out whether the Berlin and Milan decrees could be evaded. He met Byron and Sir John Hobhouse at Gibraltar, travelled with Byron to Malta, and met him again at Athens. He was afterwards employed by the Glasgow merchant Kirkman Finlay on similar business at Gibraltar, and in 1814 visited France and Holland. His early works are the Life and Administration of Wolsey, Voyages and Travels, Letters from the Levant, the Life of Benjamin West, Historical Pictures and The Wandering Jew; and he induced Colburn to publish a periodical containing dramatic pieces rejected by London managers. These were afterwards edited by Galt as the New British Theatre, which included some plays of his own. He first showed his real power as a writer of fiction in The Ayrshire Legatees, which appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1820. This was followed in 1821 by his masterpiece—The Annals of the Parish; and, at short intervals, Sir Andrew Wylie, The Entail, The Steam-Boat and The Provost were published. These humorous studies of Scottish character are all in his happiest manner. His next works were Ringan Gilhaize (1823), a story of the Covenanters; The Spaewife (1823), which relates to the times of James I. of Scotland; Rothelan (1824), a novel founded on the reign of Edward III.; The Omen (1825), which was favourably criticized by Sir Walter Scott; and The Last of the Lairds, another picture of Scottish life.
In 1826 he went to America as secretary to the Canada Land Company. He carried out extensive schemes of colonization, and opened up a road through what was then forest country between Lakes Huron and Erie. In 1827 he founded Guelph in upper Canada, passing on his way the township of Galt on the Grand river, named after him by the Hon. William Dixon. But all this work proved financially unprofitable to Galt. In 1829 he returned to England commercially a ruined man, and devoted himself with great ardour to literary pursuits, of which the first fruit was Lawrie Todd—one of his best novels. Then came Southennan, a tale of Scottish life in the times of Queen Mary. In 1830 he was appointed editor of the Courier newspaper—a post he soon relinquished. His untiring industry was seen in the publication, in rapid succession, of a Life of Byron, Lives of the Players, Bogle Corbet, Stanley Buxton, The Member, The Radical, Eben Erskine, The Stolen Child, his Autobiography, and a collection of tales entitled Stories of the Study. In 1834 appeared his Literary Life and Miscellanies, dedicated by permission to William IV., who sent the author a present of £200. As soon as this work was published Galt retired to Greenock, where he continued his literary labours till his death on the 11th of April 1839.