GAUGE, or Gage (Med. Lat. gauja, jaugia, Fr. jauge, perhaps connected with Fr. jale, a bowl, galon, gallon), a standard of measurement, and also the name given to various instruments and appliances by which measurement is effected. The word seems to have been primarily used in connexion with the process of ascertaining the contents of wine casks; the name gauger is still applied to certain custom-house officials in the United States, and in Scotland it means an exciseman. Thence it was extended to other measurements, and used of the instruments used in making them or of the standards to which they were referred. In the mechanical arts gauges are employed in great variety to enable the workmen to ascertain whether the object he is making is of the proper dimensions (see [Tool]), and similar gauges of various forms are employed to ascertain and to specify the sizes of manufactured articles such as wire and screws. A rain gauge is an apparatus for measuring the amount of the rainfall at any locality, and a wind gauge indicates the pressure and force of the wind. The boilers of steam engines are provided with a water gauge and a steam or pressure gauge. The purpose of the former is to enable the attendant to see whether or not there is a sufficient quantity of water in the boiler. It consists of two cocks or taps communicating with the interior, one being placed at the lowest point to which it is permissible for the water to fall, and the other at the point above which it should not rise; a glass tube connects the two cocks, and when they are both open the water in this stands at the same level as in the boiler. The steam gauge shows the pressure of the steam in the boiler. One of the commonest forms, known as the Bourdon gauge, depends on the fact that a curved tube tends to straighten itself if the pressure within it is greater than that outside it. This gauge therefore consists of a curved or coiled tube of elastic material, and preferably of elliptic section, connected with the boiler and arranged with a multiplying gear so that its bending or unbending actuates a pointer moving over a graduated scale. If the pressure within the tube is less than that outside it, the tube tends to bend or coil itself up further; with a pointer arranged as before, the gauge then becomes a vacuum gauge, indicating how far the pressure in the vessel to which it is attached is below that of the atmosphere. In railway engineering the gauge of a line is the distance between the two rails (see [Railway]). In nautical language, a ship is said to have the weather gage when she is to windward of another, and similarly the lee gage when to leeward of another; in this sense the word is usually spelt “gage,” a spelling which prevails in America for all senses.
GAUHATI, a town of British India, in the Kamrup district of Eastern Bengal and Assam, mainly on the left or south, but partly on the right bank of the Brahmaputra. Pop. (1901) 14,244. It is beautifully situated, with an amphitheatre of wooded hills to the south, but is not very healthy. There are many evidences, such as ancient earthworks and tanks, of its historical importance. During the 17th century it was taken and retaken by Mahommedans and Ahoms eight times in fifty years, but in 1681 it became the residence of the Ahom governor of lower Assam, and in 1786 the capital of the Ahom raja. On the cession of Assam to the British in 1826 it was made the seat of the British administration of Assam, and so continued till 1874, when the headquarters were removed to Shillong in the Khasi hills, 67 m. distant, with which Gauhati is connected by an excellent cart-road. Two much-frequented places of Hindu pilgrimage are situated in the immediate vicinity, the temple of Kamakhya on a hill 2 m. west of the town, and the rocky island of Umananda in the mid-channel of the Brahmaputra. Gauhati is still the headquarters of the district and of the Brahmaputra Valley division, though no longer a military cantonment. It is the river terminus of a section of the Assam-Bengal railway. There are a second-grade college, a government high school, a law class and a training school for masters. Gauhati is an important centre of river trade, and the largest seat of commerce in Assam. Cotton-ginning, flour-milling, and an export trade in mustard seed, cotton, silk and forest produce are carried on. Gauhati suffered very severely from the earthquake of the 12th of June 1897.
GAUL, GILBERT WILLIAM (1855- ), American artist, was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, on the 31st of March 1855. He was a pupil of J.G. Brown and L.E. Wilmarth, and he became a painter of military pictures, portraying incidents of the American Civil War. He was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1880, and in 1882 a full academician, and in the latter year became a member of the Society of American Artists. His important works include: “Charging the Battery,” “News from Home,” “Cold Comfort on the Outpost,” “Silenced,” “On the Look-out,” and “Guerillas returning from a Raid.”
GAUL, the modern form of the Roman Gallia, the name of the two chief districts known to the Romans as inhabited by Celtic-speaking peoples, (a) Gallia Cisalpina (or Citerior, “Hither”), i.e. north Italy between Alps and Apennines and (b) the far more important Gallia Transalpina (or Ulterior, “Further”), usually called Gallia (Gaul) simply, the land bounded by the Alps, the Mediterranean, the Pyrenees, the Atlantic, the Rhine, i.e. modern France and Belgium with parts of Holland, Germany and Switzerland. The Greek form of Gallia was Γαλατία, but Galatia in Latin denoted another Celtic region in central Asia Minor, sometimes styled Gallograecia.
(a) Gallia Cisalpina was mainly conquered by Rome by 222 B.C.; later it adopted Roman civilization; about 42 B.C. it was united with Italy and its subsequent history is merged in that of the peninsula. Its chief distinctions are that during the later Republic and earlier Empire it yielded excellent soldiers, and thus much aided the success of Caesar against Pompey and of Octavian against Antony, and that it gave Rome the poet Virgil (by origin a Celt), the historian Livy, the lyrist Catullus, Cornelius Nepos, the elder and the younger Pliny and other distinguished writers.[1]
(b) Gaul proper first enters ancient history when the Greek colony of Massilia was founded (? 600 B.C.). Roman armies began to enter it about 218 B.C. In 121 B.C. the coast from Montpellier to the Pyrenees (i.e. all that was not Massiliot) with its port of Narbo (mod. Narbonne) and its trade route by Toulouse to the Atlantic, was formed into the province of Gallia Narbonensis and Narbo itself into a Roman municipality. Commercial motives prompted the step, and Roman traders and land speculators speedily flocked in. Gradually the province was extended north of Massilia, up the Rhone, while the Greek town itself became weak and dependent on Rome.
It is not, however, until the middle of the 1st century B.C. that we have any detailed knowledge of pre-Roman Gaul. The earliest account is that contained in the Commentaries of Julius Caesar. According to this authority, Gaul was at that time divided among three peoples, more or less distinct from one another, the Aquitani, the Gauls, who called themselves Celts, and the Belgae. The first of these extended from the Pyrenees to the Garumna (Garonne); the second, from that river to the Sequana (Seine) and its chief tributary the Matrona (Marne), reaching eastward presumably as far as the Rhenus (Rhine); and the third, from this bounding line to the mouth of the last-named river, thus bordering on the Germans. By implication Caesar recognizes as a fourth division the province of Gallia Narbonensis. By far the greater part of the country was a plain watered by numerous rivers, the chief of which have already been mentioned, with the exception of its great central stream, the Liger or Ligeris (Loire). Its principal mountain ranges were Cebenna or Gebenna (Cévennes) in the south, and Jura, with its continuation Vosegus or Vogesus (Vosges), in the east. The tribes inhabiting Gaul in Caesar’s time, and belonging to one or other of the three races distinguished by him, were numerous. Prominent among them, and dwelling in the division occupied by the Celts, were the Helvetii, the Sequani and the Aedui, in the basins of the Rhodanus and its tributary the Arar (Saône), who, he says, were reckoned the three most powerful nations in all Gaul; the Arverni in the mountains of Cebenna; the Senones and Carnutes in the basin of the Liger; the Veneti and other Armorican tribes between the mouths of the Liger and Sequana. The Nervii, Bellovaci, Suessiones, Remi, Morini, Menapii and Aduatuci were Belgic tribes; the Tarbelli and others were Aquitani; while the Allobroges inhabited the north of the Provincia, having been conquered in 121 B.C. The ethnological divisions thus set forth by Caesar have been much discussed (see [Celt], and articles on the chief tribes).