DRUMMOND, HENRY, popular scientist and Christian teacher, born in Stirling; was educated at Edinburgh and Tuebingen; studied for the Free Church; lectured on natural science; became famous by the publication of “Natural Law in the Spiritual World,” a book which took with the Christian public at once, and had an enormous sale, which was succeeded by “Tropical Africa,” a charmingly-written book of travel, and by a series of booklets, commencing with “The Greatest Thing in the World,” intended to expound and commend the first principles of the Christian faith; his last work except one, published posthumously, entitled the “Ideal Life,” was the “Ascent of Man,” in which he posits an altruistic element in the process of evolution, and makes the goal of it a higher and higher life (1851-1897).

DRUMMOND, CAPTAIN THOMAS, civil engineer, born in Edinburgh; inventor of the Drummond Light; was employed in the trigonometrical survey of Great Britain and Ireland; became Under-Secretary for Ireland, and was held in high favour by the Irish (1797-1840).

DRUMMOND, WILLIAM, of Hawthornden, a Scottish poet, named the “Petrarch of Scotland,” born in Hawthornden; studied civil law at Bourges, but poetry had more attractions for him than law, and on the death of his father he returned to his paternal estate, and devoted himself to the study of it and the indulgence of his poetic tastes.  “His work was done,” as Stopford Brooke remarks, “in the reign of James I., but is the result of the Elizabethan influence extending to Scotland.  Drummond’s sonnets and madrigals have some of the grace of Sidney, and he rose at intervals into grave and noble verse, as in his sonnet on John the Baptist.”  He was a devoted Royalist; his first poem was “Tears” on the death of James I.’s eldest son Henry, and the fate of Charles I. is said to have cut short his days; the visit of Ben Jonson to him at Hawthornden is well known (1585-1649).

DRUMMOND LIGHT, an intensely-brilliant and pure white light produced by the play of an oxyhydrogen flame upon a ball of lime, so called from the inventor, Captain Thomas Drummond.

DRURY, DRU, a naturalist, born in London; bred a silversmith; took to entomology; published “Illustrations of Natural History”; his principal work “Illustrations of Exotic Entomology” (1725-1803).

DRURY LANE, a celebrated London theatre founded in 1663, in what was a fashionable quarter of the city then; has since that time been thrice burnt down; was the scene of Garrick’s triumphs, and of those of many of his illustrious successors, though it is now given up chiefly to pantomimes and spectacular exhibitions.

DRUSES, a peculiar people, numbering some 80,000, inhabiting the S. of Lebanon and Anti-lebanon, with the Maronites on the N., whose origin is very uncertain, only it is evident, though they speak the Arab language, they belong to the Aryan race; their religion, a mixture of Christian, Jewish, and Mohammedan beliefs, is grounded on faith in the unity and the incarnation of God; their form of government is half hierarchical and half feudalistic; in early times they were under emirs of their own, but in consequence of the sanguinary, deadly, and mutually exterminating strife between them and the Christian Maronites in 1860, they were put under a Christian governor appointed by the Porte.