SABIANISM.  See SABAEANS.

SABINE, a river of Texas which, rising in the extreme N. of the State, flows SE. and S., forming for 250 m. the boundary between Louisiana and Texas, passes through Sabine Lake into the Gulf of Mexico after a navigable course of 500 in.

SABINE, SIR EDWARD, a noted physicist, born in Dublin; served in artillery in 1803, maintained his connection with it till his retirement in 1874 as general, but owes his celebrity to his important investigations into the nature of terrestrial magnetism; accompanied as a scientist Boss and Parry in their search for the North-West Passage (1819-20); was President both of the Royal Society from 1861 to 1879 and of the British Association in 1853 (1788-1883).

SABINES, an ancient Italian people of the Aryan stock, near neighbours of ancient Borne, a colony of whom is said to have settled on the Quirinal, and contributed to form the moral part of the Roman people.  Numa, the second king of the city, was a Sabine.  See ROMULUS.

SABLE ISLAND, a low, sandy, barren island in the Atlantic, 110 m. off the E. coast of Nova Scotia; is extremely dangerous to navigation, and is marked by three lighthouses; is gradually being washed away.

SABOTS, a species of wooden shoes extensively worn by the peasants of France, Belgium, &c.; each shoe is hollowed out of a single block of wood (fir, willow, beech, and ash); well adapted for marshy districts.

SACERDOTALISM, a tendency to attach undue importance to the order and the ministry of priests, to the limitation of the operation of Divine grace.

SACHEVEREL, HENRY, an English Church clergyman, born at Maryborough, who became notorious in the reign of Queen Anne for his embittered attack (contained in two sermons in 1700) on the Revolution Settlement and the Act of Toleration; public feeling was turning in favour of the Tories, and the impolitic impeachment of Sacheverel by the Whig Government fanned popular feeling to a great height in his favour; was suspended from preaching for three years, at the expiry of which time the Tories, then in power, received him with ostentatious marks of favour; was soon forgotten; was an Oxford graduate, and a friend of Addison; a man of no real ability (1672-1724).

SACHS, HANS, a noted early German poet, born at Nuernberg; the son of a tailor, by trade a shoemaker; learned “the mystery of song” from a weaver; was a contemporary of Luther, who acknowledged his services in the cause of the Reformation; in his seventy-fourth year (1568), on examining his stock for publication, found that he had written 6048 poetical pieces, among them 208 tragedies and comedies, and this besides having all along kept house, like an honest Nuernberg burgher, by assiduous and sufficient shoemaking; a man standing on his own basis; wrote “Narrenschneiden,” a piece in which the doctor cures a bloated and lethargic patient by “cutting out half-a-dozen fools from his interior”; he sunk into oblivion during the 17th century, but his memory was revived by Goethe in the 18th (1494-1576).