Dollar, a town and police burgh, Scotland, Clackmannanshire, 10 miles E. by N. of Stirling, noted for its academy, founded by John Macnab, who left £90,000 for this purpose. The building, a handsome structure in the Grecian style, was erected in 1819. The population of the village is 1497.
Dollart, The, a gulf of the North Sea, at the mouth of the Ems, between the Dutch province of Groningen and Hanover. It was originally dry land, and was formed by irruptions of the sea which took place in 1277 and 1530, overwhelming thirty-four large villages and numerous hamlets.
Döllinger (deul´ing-ėr), Johann Joseph Ignaz, a celebrated German theologian and leader of the Old Catholic party, was born at Bamberg, in Bavaria, in 1799, died in 1890. In 1822 he entered the Church, and soon after published The Doctrine of the Eucharist during the First Three Centuries, a work which won him the position of lecturer on Church history at the University of Munich. In later years he took an active part in the political struggles of the time as representative of the university in the Bavarian Parliament, and as delegate at the Diet of Frankfurt voted for the total separation of Church and State. In 1861 he delivered a course of lectures, in which he attacked the temporal power of the Papacy. But it was first at the Œcumenical Council of 1869-70 that Dr. Döllinger became famous over Europe by his opposition to the doctrine of Papal infallibility. In consequence of his opposition to the Vatican decrees, he was excommunicated in 1871 by the Archbishop of Munich. A few months later he was elected rector of the University of Munich, where he remained until his death. When the sentence of his excommunication was pronounced, he received honorary degrees from the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh. Among his numerous works are: Origins of Christianity, A Sketch of Luther, The Papacy, Lectures on the Reunion of the Churches, and Papal Legends of the Middle Ages.
Dol´lond, John, an English optician of French descent, born in 1706, died in 1761. He devoted his attention to the improvement of refracting telescopes, and succeeded in constructing object-glasses in which the refrangibility of the rays of light was corrected.
Dolls, representing more or less realistically the human form, have, for more than fifty centuries, been the common playthings of children, more especially of girls, whose maternal instinct impels them to lavish upon these often crude surrogates all the affection and devotion which their elders display towards real babies. But in ancient times, and even in the ritual of many modern religions, worship is not infrequently paid to human images, which in ancient times, and among the less cultured modern peoples, are hardly distinguishable from dolls, such as children regard as playthings and their fancy endows with a crude animism. In the earliest times in which members of our own species, Homo sapiens, are known to have lived in Europe, i.e. at the latter part of the so-called Old Stone (palæolithic) Age, it was the custom to make grotesque representations of the female
form as small figurines of clay or stone, which were regarded as amulets identified with the Great Mother, the giver of birth or life to mankind. As 'givers of life' such amulets were believed to be able to protect their possessors against the risk of death, because they were regarded in the most literal sense of the term as life-giving. But it was not merely against the risk of death that such amulets were believed to be potent: they could add 'vital substance' to the living and the dead, rejuvenating and reinvigorating the former, and enhancing the chances of continued existence and survival to the latter. Enormous respect was naturally paid to figurines supposed to possess such far-reaching powers; and when the Great Mother came to be identified with various animals, such as the cow, pig, &c., the amulet was identified with these 'givers of life' and sometimes represented in their shape. This is intimately associated with the origin of totemism (q.v.). It is probable that the modern doll is in part at least the survivor of these primitive images of the deities of early peoples. The fact that modern dolls are usually of the female sex may also be due to the fact of the earliest prototype of the doll being an amulet representing the Great Mother.
Dol´man, a long robe worn by the Turks as an upper garment. It is open in front, and has narrow sleeves. It has given its name to a kind of loose jacket worn by ladies, and to the jacket worn by hussars.
Dol´men, a Celtic name meaning 'table-stone'. Although some apply the name to prehistoric stone chambers covered with more than one slab (really 'corridor tombs'), the Dolmen proper, whether round or square, has a single cover-slab, and three, four, or even more stones supporting it. Some authorities consider the name dolmen as simply a French equivalent for cromlech (q.v.).
Dolomieu (dol-o-myeu), Déodat Guy Silvain Tancrède Gratet de, a French geologist and mineralogist, born in 1750 at Dolomieu (Isère), died in 1801. After some years of military service, he devoted himself to geological researches. He accompanied the French expedition to Egypt, but was shipwrecked on his return off the coast of Taranto, and imprisoned and harshly treated by the Neapolitan Government. Among his works are: Voyages aux Îles de Lipari (1783), Sur le Tremblement de Terre de la Calabre (1784), Philosophie minéralogique (1802).
Dol´omite, a mineral, the main constituent of magnesian limestone. It is composed of carbonate of calcium and carbonate of magnesium in equal molecular quantities, and varies from grey or yellowish-white to yellowish-brown. Dolomite is easily scratched with the knife, and is semi-transparent. It effervesces only slightly in cold hydrochloric acid. Its rhombohedral crystals are sometimes called bitter-spar. A variety is pearl spar, which has crystals with curvilinear faces and a pearly lustre.