SEPOY, the name given to a native of India employed as a soldier in the British service in India.

SEPTEMBER, the ninth month of the year, so called as having been the seventh in the Roman calendar.

SEPTEMBER MASSACRES.  An indiscriminate slaughter in Paris which commenced on Sunday afternoon, September 2, 1792, “a black day in the annals of men,” when 30 priests on their way to prison were torn from the carriages that conveyed them, and massacred one after the other, all save Abbe Secard, in the streets by an infuriated mob; and continued thereafter through horror after horror for a hundred hours long, all done in the name of justice and in mock form of law—­a true Reign of Terror.

SEPTUAGINT, a version, and the oldest of any known to us, of the Hebrew Scriptures in Greek, executed at Alexandria, in Egypt, by different translators at different periods, commencing with 280 B.C.; it is known as the Alexandria version, while the name Septuagint, or LXX., was given to it on the ground of the tradition that it was the work of 70, or rather 72, Jews, who had, it is alleged, been Drought from Palestine for the purpose, and were fabled, according to one tradition, to have executed the whole in as many days, and, according to another, to have each done the whole apart from the rest, with the result that the version of each was found to correspond word for word with that of all the others; it began with the translation of the Pentateuch and was continued from that time till 130 B.C. by the translation of the rest, the whole being in reality the achievement of several independent workmen, who executed their parts, some with greater some with less ability and success; it is often literal to a painful degree, and it swarms with such pronounced Hebraisms, that a pure Greek would often fail to understand it.  It was the version current everywhere at the time of the planting of the Christian Church, and the numerous quotations in the New Testament from the Old are, with few exceptions, quotations from it.

SEPULVEDA, JUAN GINES, Spanish historian, born at Pozo-Blanco, near Cordova; in 1536 became historiographer to Charles V. and tutor to the future Philip II.; was subsequently canon of Salamanca; author of several historical works, of which a “History of Charles V.” is the most important, a work characterised by broad humanistic proclivities unusual in his day and country; d. 1574.

SERAGLIO, in its restricted sense applied in the East to a harem or women’s quarters in a royal household; the former residence of the sultan of Turkey, occupies a beautiful site on the E. side of Constantinople, on a projecting piece of land between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmora, enclosing within its 3 m. of wall government buildings, mosques, gardens, &c., chief of which is the harem, which occupies an inner enclosure.

SERAING (34), a manufacturing town of Belgium, on the Meuse, 4 m.  SW. of Liege; noted for its extensive machine-shops (locomotives, &c.); established in 1817 by John Cockerill, and now, with forges, coal-mines, &c., giving employment to some 12,000 men.