LORTZING, GUSTAV ALBERT (1801-1851), German composer, was born at Berlin on the 23rd of October 1801. Both his parents were actors, and when he was nineteen the son began to play youthful lover at the theatres of Düsseldorf and Aachen, sometimes also singing in small tenor or baritone parts. His first opera Ali Pascha von Jannina appeared in 1824, but his fame as a musician rests chiefly upon the two operas Der Wildschütz (1842) and Czar und Zimmermann (1837). The latter, although now regarded as one of the masterpieces of German comic opera, was received with little enthusiasm by the public of Leipzig. Subsequent performance in Berlin, however, provoked such a tempest of applause that the opera was soon placed on all the stages of Germany. It was translated into English, French, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Bohemian, Hungarian and Russian. Der Wildschütz was based on a comedy of Kotzebue, and was a satire on the unintelligent and exaggerated admiration for the highest beauty in art expressed by the bourgeois gentilhomme. Of his other operas it is only necessary to note Der Pole und sein Kind, produced shortly after the Polish insurrection of 1831, and Undine (1845). Lortzing died at Berlin on the 21st of January 1851.
LORY, CHARLES (1823-1889), French geologist, was born at Nantes on the 30th of July 1823. He graduated D. ès Sc. in 1847; in 1852 he was appointed to the chair of geology at the University of Grenoble, and in 1881 to that of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He was distinguished for his researches on the geology of the French Alps, being engaged on the geological survey of the departments of Isère, Drôme and the Hautes Alpes, of which he prepared the maps and explanatory memoirs. He dealt with some of the disturbances in the Savoy Alps, describing the fan-like structures, and confirming the views of J. A. Favre with regard to the overthrows, reversals and duplication of the strata. His contributions to geological literature include also descriptions of the fossils and stratigraphical divisions of the Lower Cretaceous and Jurassic rocks of the Jura. He died at Grenoble on the 3rd of May 1889.
LORY (a word of Malayan origin signifying parrot, in general use with but slight variation of form in many European languages), the name of certain birds of the order Psittaci, mostly from the Moluccas and New Guinea, remarkable for their bright scarlet or crimson colouring, though also, and perhaps subsequently, applied to some others in which the plumage is chiefly green. The lories have been referred to a considerable number of genera, of which Lorius (the Domicella of some authors), Eos and Chalcopsittacus may be here particularized, while under the name of “lorikeets” may be comprehended such genera as Trichoglossus, Charmosyna, Loriculus and Coriphilus. By most systematists some of these forms have been placed far apart, even in different families of Psittaci, but A. H. Garrod has shown (Proc. Zool. Society, 1874, pp. 586-598, and 1876, p. 692) the many common characters they possess, which thus goes some way to justify the relationship implied by their popular designation. A full account of these birds is given in the first part of Count T. Salvadori’s Ornitologia della Papuasia e delle Molucche (Turin 1880), whilst a later classification appeared in Salvadori’s section of the British Museum Catalogue of Birds, xx., 1891.
Though the name lory has often been used for the species of Eclectus, and some other genera related thereto, modern writers would restrict its application to the birds of the genera Lorius, Eos, Chalcopsittacus and their near allies, which are often placed in a subfamily, Loriinae, belonging to the so-called family of Trichoglossidae or “brush-tongued” parrots. Garrod in his investigations on the anatomy of Psittaci was led not to attach much importance to the structure indicated by the epithet “brush-tongued” stating (Proc. Zool. Society, 1874, p. 597) that it “is only an excessive development of the papillae which are always found on the lingual surface.” The birds of this group are very characteristic of the New Guinea subregion,[1] in which occur, according to Count Salvadori, ten species of Lorius, eight of Eos and four of Chalcopsittacus; but none seem here to require any further notice,[2] though among them, and particularly in the genus Eos, are included some of the most richly-coloured birds in the whole world; nor does it appear that more need be said of the lorikeets.
The family is the subject of an excellent monograph by St George Mivart (London, 1896).
(A. N.)
[1] They extend, however, to Fiji, Tahiti and Fanning Island.