On some estates citrate of lime is now manufactured in place of concentrated acid. Distilled oil of limes is prepared by distilling the juice, but its value is low in comparison with the expressed oil obtained by hand as described above. Green limes and pickled limes preserved in brine are largely exported to the United States, and more recently green limes have been exported to the United Kingdom. Limalade or preserved limes is an excellent substitute for marmalade. A spineless form of the lime appeared as a sport in Dominica in 1892, and is now grown there and elsewhere on a commercial scale. A form with seedless fruits has also recently been obtained in Dominica and Trinidad independently. The young leaves of the lime are used for perfuming the water in finger-glasses, a few being placed in the water and bruised before use.
LEMONNIER, ANTOINE LOUIS CAMILLE (1844- ), Belgian poet, was born at Ixelles, Brussels, on the 24th of March 1844. He studied law, and then took a clerkship in a government office, which he resigned after three years. Lemonnier inherited Flemish blood from both parents, and with it the animal force and pictorial energy of the Flemish temperament. He published a Salon de Bruxelles in 1863, and again in 1866. His early friendships were chiefly with artists; and he wrote art criticisms with recognized discernment. Taking a house in the hills near Namur, he devoted himself to sport, and developed the intimate sympathy with nature which informs his best work. Nos Flamands (1869) and Croquis d’automne (1870) date from this time. Paris-Berlin (1870), a pamphlet pleading the cause of France, and full of the author’s horror of war, had a great success. His capacity as a novelist, in the fresh, humorous description of peasant life, was revealed in Un Coin de village (1879). In Un Mâle (1881) he achieved a different kind of success. It deals with the amours of a poacher and a farmer’s daughter, with the forest as a background. Cachaprès, the poacher, seems the very embodiment of the wild life around him. The rejection of Un Mâle by the judges for the quinquennial prize of literature in 1883 made Lemonnier the centre of a school, inaugurated at a banquet given in his honour on the 27th of May 1883. Le Mort (1882), which describes the remorse of two peasants for a murder they have committed, is a masterpiece in its vivid representation of terror. It was remodelled as a tragedy in five acts (Paris, 1899) by its author. Ceux de la glèbe (1889), dedicated to the “children of the soil,” was written in 1885. He turned aside from local subjects for some time to produce a series of psychological novels, books of art criticism, &c., of considerable value, but assimilating more closely to French contemporary literature. The most striking of his later novels are: L’Hystérique (1885); Happe-chair (1886), often compared with Zola’s Germinal; Le Possédé (1890); La Fin des bourgeois (1892); L’Arche, journal d’une maman (1894), a quiet book, quite different from his usual work; La Faute de Mme Charvet (1895); L’Homme en amour (1897); and, with a return to Flemish subjects, Le Vent dans les moulins (1901); Petit Homme de Dieu (1902), and Comme va le ruisseau (1903). In 1888 Lemonnier was prosecuted in Paris for offending against public morals by a story in Gil Blas, and was condemned to a fine. In a later prosecution at Brussels he was defended by Edmond Picard, and acquitted; and he was arraigned for a third time, at Bruges, for his Homme en amour, but again acquitted. He represents his own case in Les Deux consciences (1902), L’Île vierge (1897) was the first of a trilogy to be called La Légende de la vie, which was to trace, under the fortunes of the hero, the pilgrimage of man through sorrow and sacrifice to the conception of the divinity within him. In Adam et Ève (1899), and Au Cœur frais de la forêt (1900), he preached the return to nature as the salvation not only of the individual but of the community. Among his other more important works are G. Courbet, et ses œuvres (1878); L’Histoire des Beaux-Arts en Belgique 1830-1887 (1887); En Allemagne (1888), dealing especially with the Pinakothek at Munich; La Belgique (1888), an elaborate descriptive work with many illustrations; La Vie belge (1905); and Alfred Stevens et son œuvre (1906).
Lemonnier spent much time in Paris, and was one of the early contributors to the Mercure de France. He began to write at a time when Belgian letters lacked style; and with much toil, and some initial extravagances, he created a medium for the expression of his ideas. He explained something of the process in a preface contributed to Gustave Abel’s Labeur de la prose (1902). His prose is magnificent and sonorous, but abounds in neologisms and strange metaphors.
See the Revue de Belgique (15th February 1903), which contains the syllabus of a series of lectures on Lemonnier by Edmond Picard, a bibliography of his works, and appreciations by various writers.
LEMONNIER, PIERRE CHARLES (1715-1799), French astronomer, was born on the 23rd of November 1715 in Paris, where his father was professor of philosophy at the collège d’Harcourt. His first recorded observation was made before he was sixteen, and the presentation of an elaborate lunar map procured for him admission to the Academy, on the 21st of April 1736, at the early age of twenty. He was chosen in the same year to accompany P. L. Maupertuis and Alexis Clairault on their geodetical expedition to Lapland. In 1738, shortly after his return, he explained, in a memoir read before the Academy, the advantages of J. Flamsteed’s mode of determining right ascensions. His persistent recommendation, in fact, of English methods and instruments contributed effectively to the reform of French practical astronomy, and constituted the most eminent of his services to science. He corresponded with J. Bradley, was the first to represent the effects of nutation in the solar tables, and introduced, in 1741, the use of the transit-instrument at the Paris observatory. He visited England in 1748, and, in company with the earl of Morton and James Short the optician, continued his journey to Scotland, where he observed the annular eclipse of July 25. The liberality of Louis XV., in whose favour he stood high, furnished him with the means of procuring the best instruments, many of them by English makers. Amongst the fruits of his industry may be mentioned a laborious investigation of the disturbances of Jupiter by Saturn, the results of which were employed and confirmed by L. Euler in his prize essay of 1748; a series of lunar observations extending over fifty years; some interesting researches in terrestrial magnetism and atmospheric electricity, in the latter of which he detected a regular diurnal period; and the determination of the places of a great number of stars, including twelve separate observations of Uranus, between 1765 and its discovery as a planet. In his lectures at the collège de France he first publicly expounded the analytical theory of gravitation, and his timely patronage secured the services of J. J. Lalande for astronomy. His temper was irritable, and his hasty utterances exposed him to retorts which he did not readily forgive. Against Lalande, owing to some trifling pique, he closed his doors “during an entire revolution of the moon’s nodes.” His career was arrested by paralysis late in 1791, and a repetition of the stroke terminated his life. He died at Héril near Bayeux on the 31st of May 1799. By his marriage with Mademoiselle de Cussy he left three daughters, one of whom became the wife of J. L. Lagrange. He was admitted in 1739 to the Royal Society, and was one of the one hundred and forty-four original members of the Institute.
He wrote Histoire céleste (1741); Théorie des comètes (1743), a translation, with additions of Hailey’s Synopsis; Institutions astronomiques (1746), an improved translation of J. Keill’s text-book; Nouveau zodiaque (1755); Observations de la lune, du soleil, et des étoiles fixes (1751-1775); Lois du magnétisme (1776-1778), &c.
See J. J. Lalande, Bibl. astr., p. 819 (also in the Journal des savants for 1801); F. X. von Zach, Allgemeine geog. Ephemeriden iii. 625; J. S. Bailly, Hist. de l’astr. moderne, iii.; J. B. J. Delambre. Hist. de l’astr. au XVIIIe siècle, p. 179; J. Mädler, Geschichte der Himmelskunde, ii. 6; R. Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie, p. 480.