DAMPIER, WILLIAM, an English navigator and buccaneer; led a roving and adventurous life, and parting company with his comrades, set off on a cruise in the South Seas; came home and published a “Voyage Round the World”; this led to his employment in further adventures, in one of which Alexander Selkirk accompanied him, but was wrecked on Juan Fernandez; in his last adventure, it is said, he rescued Selkirk and brought him home (1652-1715).

DANA, CHARLES ANDERSON, American journalist, member of BROOK FARM (q. v.), and became editor of the New York Tribune, the Sun, and a cyclopaedia:  b. 1829.

DANA, JAMES DWIGHT, American mineralogist and geologist, born at Utica, New York State; was associated as scientific observer with Commodore Wilkes on his Arctic and Antarctic exploring expeditions, on the results of which he reported; became geological professor in Yale College; author of works on mineralogy and geology, as also on South Sea volcanoes (1813-1895).

DANA, RICHARD HENRY, an American poet and critic; editor of the North American Review, author of the “Dying Raven,” the “Buccaneer,” and other poems (1787-1879).

DANA, RICHARD HENRY, a son of the preceding, lawyer; author of “Two Years before the Mast” (1815-1882).

DANAE, daughter of Acrisius, king of Argos, confined by her father in an inaccessible tower of brass to prevent the fulfilment of an oracle that she should be the mother of a son who would kill him, but Zeus found access to her in the form of a shower of gold, and she became the mother of Perseus, by whose hand Acrisius met his fate.  See PERSEUS.

DANA`IDES, daughters of Danaues, who, for murdering their husbands on the night after marriage, were doomed in the nether world to the impossible task of filling with water a vessel pierced with holes.  See DANAUeS.

DANAUeS, son of Belus, and twin-brother of AEgyptus, whom fearing, he fled from with his fifty daughters to Argos, where he was chosen king; by-and-by the fifty sons of AEgyptus, his brother, came to Argos to woo, and were wedded to, their cousins, whom their father provided each with a dagger to murder her husband, which they did, all except Hypermnestra, whose husband, Lynceus, escaping, succeeded her father as king, to the defeat of the old man’s purpose in the crime.

DANBY, FRANCIS, painter, born near Wexford; settled for a time in Bristol, then in Switzerland, and finally at Exmouth; his works are mostly landscape, instinct with feeling, but some of them are historical, the subjects being taken from Scripture, as the “Passage of the Red Sea,” or from pagan sources, as “Marius among the Ruins of Carthage” (1793-1861).

DANCE, GEORGE, English architect; was architect to the City of London, and designed the Mansion House, his chief work (1700-1768).  GEORGE, his son, built Newgate Prison (1740-1825).

DANCE OF DEATH, an allegorical representation in a dramatic or pictorial form of Death, figuring, originally as a skeleton, and performing his part as a chief actor all through the drama of life, and often amid the gayest scenes of it; a succession of woodcuts by Holbein in representation of this dance is well known.