DUMB WAITER

This article appears in Volume V08, Page 662 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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DUMB WAITER ,' a small oblong or circular table to hold reserve plates, knives and forks, and other necessaries for a

meal

MEAL

. This piece of furniture originated in England towards the end of the 18th century, and some exceedingly elegant examples were designed by

Sheraton

SHERATON,
THOMAS
(c. 1751-1806)

and his school. They were usually circular, with three diminishing tiers, sometimes surrounded by a continuous or interrupted pierced gallery in

wood

or brass. The smaller varieties are now much used in England for the display of small silver objects in drawing-rooms.
DUM-DUM, a town and cantonment in British India at the head of an administrative subdivision in the

district

DISTRICT

of the Twenty-four Parganas, in the presidency division of Bengal, with a station on the Eastern Bengal railway, 42 m. N.E. of Calcutta. It was the headquarters of the Bengal artillery from 1783 to 1853, when they were transferred to Meerut as a more central station; and its possession of a cannon foundry and a percussion-cap factory procured for it the name of the Woolwich of India. The barracksstill occupied by small detachmentsare brick-built and commodious; and among the other buildings are St Stephen's

Protestant

PROTESTANT

church, a Roman Catholic chapel, a European and native

hospital

, a large bazaar and an English school. The population in 1901 of North Dum-Dum was 9916, and of South Dum-Dum 10,904. It was at Dum-Dum that the treaty of 1757 was signed by which the nawab of Bengal ratified the privileges of the English, allowed Calcutta to be fortified, and bestowed freedom of trade. On the 7th of December 1908 a serious explosion occurred by accident at the Dum-Dum arsenal, resulting in death or serious injury to about 50 native workmen.
At the Dum-Dum foundry the hollow-nosed "Dum-Dum " (Mark IV.) bullets were manufactured, the supposed use of which by the British during the Boer War caused considerable comment in 1899. Their peculiarity consisted in their expanding on
' The term " dumb," strictly meaning mute or destitute of speech (see DEAF AND DUMB), is applied in this and other analogous cases (e.g. dumb-bell, dumb-barge) as connoting the absence of some normal capacity in the term with which it is associated.
impact and thus creating an ugly wound, and they had been adopted in Indian frontier fighting owing to the failure of the usual type of bullets to stop the rushes of fanatical tribesmen. They were not, in fact, used during the Boer War. Other and improvised forms of expanding bullet were used in India and the Sudan, the commonest methods of securing expansion being to file down the point until the lead core was exposed and to make longitudinal slits in the nickel envelope. All these forms of bullet have come to be described colloquially, and even in diplomatic correspondence, as " dum-dum bullets," and their alleged use by Russian troops in the Russo-Japanese War of 19041905 formed the subject of a protest on the part of the Japanese government. The proposals made at the second Hague Conference to forbid the use of these bullets by international agreement were agreed to by all the powers except

Great

GREAT

Britain and the United States.
DUMESNIL; MARIE FRANgOISE (17131803), French actress, whose real name was Marchand, was born in Paris on the 2nd of January 1713. She began her stage career in the provinces, whence she was summoned in 1737 to make her debut at the Comedie Francaise as Clytemnestre in fphigenie en Tauride. She at once came into the front rank, playing Cleopatre, Phedre, Athalie and Hermione with

great

GREAT

effect, and when she created Merope (1743) Voltaire says that she kept the

audience

AUDIENCE (from Lat. audire, to hear)

in tears for three successive acts. She retired from the stage in 1776, but lived until the loth of February 1803. Her rival, Clairon, having spoken ill of her, she authorized the publication of a Memoire de Marie Francoise Dumesnil, en reponse aux memoires d'Hippolyte Clairon (1800).

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