[1] It seems first to occur (O. Salusbury Brereton, Archaeologia, iii. 157) as “grows” in an ordinance for the regulation of the royal household dated “apud Eltham, mens. Jan. 22 Hen. VIII.,” i.e. 1531, and considering the locality must refer to black game. It is found in an Act of Parliament 1 Jac. I. cap. 27, § 2, i.e. 1603, and, as reprinted in the Statutes at Large, stands as now commonly spelt, but by many writers or printers the final e was omitted in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1611 Cotgrave had “Poule griesche. A Moore-henne; the henne of the Grice [in ed. 1673 “Griece”] or Mooregame” (Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, s.v. Poule). The most likely derivation seems to be from the old French word griesche, greoche or griais (meaning speckled, and cognate with griseus, grisly or grey), which was applied to some kind of partridge, or according to Brunetto Latini (Trés. p. 211) to a quail, “porce que ele fu premiers trovée en Grece.” The Oxford Dictionary repudiates the possibility of “grouse” being a spurious singular of an alleged plural “grice,” and, with regard to the possibility of “grows” being a plural of “grow,” refers to Giraldus Cambrensis (c. 1210), Topogr. Hib. opera (Rolls) v. 47: “gallinae campestres, quas vulgariter grutas vocant.”
[2] It was successfully, though with much trouble, introduced by Mr Oscar Dickson on a tract of land near Gottenburg in Sweden (Svenska Jägarförbundets Nya Tidskrift, 1868, p. 64 et alibi).
[3] A very interesting subject for discussion would be whether Lagopus scoticus or L. albus has varied most from the common stock of both. Looking to the fact that the former is the only species of the genus which does not assume white clothing in winter, an evolutionist might at first deem the variation greatest in its case; but then it must be borne in mind that the species of Lagopus which turn white differ in that respect from all other groups of the family Tetraonidae. Furthermore every species of Lagopus (even L. leucurus, the whitest of all) has its first set of remiges coloured brown. These are dropped when the bird is about half-grown, and in all the species but L. scoticus white remiges are then produced. If therefore the successive phases assumed by any animal in the course of its progress to maturity indicate the phases through which the species has passed, there may have been a time when all the species of Lagopus wore a brown livery even when adult, and the white dress donned in winter has been imposed upon the wearers by causes that can be easily suggested. The white plumage of the birds of this group protects them from danger during the snows of a protracted winter. But the red grouse, instead of perpetuating directly the more ancient properties of an original Lagopus that underwent no great seasonal change of plumage, may derive its ancestry from the widely-ranging willow-grouse, which in an epoch comparatively recent (in the geological sense) may have stocked Britain, and left descendants that, under conditions in which the assumption of a white garb would be almost fatal to the preservation of the species, have reverted (though doubtless with some modifications) to a comparative immutability essentially the same as that of the primal Lagopus.
GROVE, SIR GEORGE (1820-1900), English writer on music, was born at Clapham on the 13th of August 1820. He was articled to a civil engineer, and worked for two years in a factory near Glasgow. In 1841 and 1845 he was employed in the West Indies, erecting lighthouses in Jamaica and Bermuda. In 1849 he became secretary to the Society of Arts, and in 1852 to the Crystal Palace. In this capacity his natural love of music and enthusiasm for the art found a splendid opening, and he threw all the weight of his influence into the task of promoting the best music of all schools in connexion with the weekly and daily concerts at Sydenham, which had a long and honourable career under the direction of Mr (afterwards Sir) August Manns. Without Sir George Grove that eminent conductor would hardly have succeeded in doing what he did to encourage young composers and to educate the British public in music. Grove’s analyses of the Beethoven symphonies, and the other works presented at the concerts, set the pattern of what such things should be; and it was as a result of these, and of the fact that he was editor of Macmillan’s Magazine from 1868 to 1883, that the scheme of his famous Dictionary of Music and Musicians, published from 1878 to 1889 (new edition, edited by J. A. Fuller Maitland, 1904-1907), was conceived and executed. His own articles in that work on Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schubert are monuments of a special kind of learning, and that the rest of the book is a little thrown out of balance owing to their great length is hardly to be regretted. Long before this he had contributed to the Dictionary of the Bible, and had promoted the foundation of the Palestine Exploration Fund. On a journey to Vienna, undertaken in the company of his lifelong friend, Sir Arthur Sullivan, the important discovery of a large number of compositions by Schubert was made, including the music to Rosamunde. When the Royal College of Music was founded in 1882 he was appointed its first director, receiving the honour of knighthood. He brought the new institution into line with the most useful European conservatoriums. On the completion of the new buildings in 1894 he resigned the directorship, but retained an active interest in the institution to the end of his life. He died at Sydenham on the 28th of May 1900.
His life, a most interesting one, was written by Mr Charles Graves.
(J. A. F. M.)
GROVE, SIR WILLIAM ROBERT (1811-1896), English judge and man of science, was born on the 11th of July 1811 at Swansea, South Wales. After being educated by private tutors, he went to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he took an ordinary degree in 1832. Three years later he was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn. His health, however, did not allow him to devote himself strenuously to practice, and he occupied his leisure with scientific studies. About 1839 he constructed the platinum-zinc voltaic cell that bears his name, and with the aid of a number of these exhibited the electric arc light in the London Institution, Finsbury Circus. The result was that in 1840 the managers appointed him to the professorship of experimental philosophy, an office which he held for seven years. His researches dealt very largely with electro-chemistry and with the voltaic cell, of which he invented several varieties. One of these, the Grove gas-battery, which is of special interest both intrinsically and as the forerunner of the secondary batteries now in use for the “storage” of electricity, was based on his observation that a current is produced by a couple of platinum plates standing in acidulated water and immersed, the one in hydrogen, the other in oxygen. At one of his lectures at the Institution he anticipated the electric lighting of to-day by illuminating the theatre with incandescent electric lamps, the filaments being of platinum and the current supplied by a battery of his nitric acid cells. In 1846 he published his famous book on The Correlation of Physical Forces, the leading ideas of which he had already put forward in his lectures: its fundamental conception was that each of the forces of nature—light, heat, electricity, &c.—is definitely and equivalently convertible into any other, and that where experiment does not give the full equivalent, it is because the initial force has been dissipated, not lost, by conversion into other unrecognized forces. In the same year he received a Royal medal from the Royal Society for his Bakerian lecture on “Certain phenomena of voltaic ignition and the decomposition of water into its constituent gases.” In 1866 he presided over the British Association at its Nottingham meeting and delivered an address on the continuity of natural phenomena. But while he was thus engaged in scientific research, his legal work was not neglected, and his practice increased so greatly that in 1853 he became a Q.C. One of the best-known cases in which he appeared as an advocate was that of William Palmer, the Rugeley poisoner, whom he defended. In 1871 he was made a judge of the Common Pleas in succession to Sir Robert Collier, and remained on the bench till 1887. He died in London on the 1st of August 1896.