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Guilford Court-House

a village in Guilford co., N. C.; about 5 miles from Greensboro; noted for a battle fought between the Americans under General Greene and the British under Lord Cornwallis, on March 15, 1781. The Americans numbered about 4,400 and the British 2,400. Both armies lost heavily, and the engagement was indecisive.

GUILLOTINE (gi-lo-tēn'), an apparatus for beheading persons at one stroke, adopted by the National Assembly of France during the first revolution, on the proposal of a Dr. Guillotin, after whom it is named. It was made by a German mechanic, named Schmidt , under the direction of Dr. Antoine Louis, secretary of the Academy of Surgery, and was at first called Louison, or Louisette. It was used the first time April 25, 1792, for the execution of a highwayman named Pelletier.

GUINEA (gin'i), the name formerly given a large section of the W. coast of Africa, from the Senegal, in about 14° N. lat., to Cape Negro, in 16° S. lat. It was divided into two parts, Upper and Lower Guinea, the dividing line being taken variously as the equator, the Gaboon, and the Ogoway. The states and political territories comprised within this long stretch of coast-line, commencing from the N., were as follows: the French colony of Senegal, the English settlements on the Gambia, the Portuguese territory of Bissao or Bissajos, the coastal fringe before Futa-Jallon, Sierra Leone, the free negro republic of Liberia, the Ivory and Gold Coasts, the Slave Coast, the Niger delta, and the Kameruns in Upper Guinea; and in Lower Guinea, the Spanish settlements on Corisco Bay, Gaboon, the Kongo Free State, and the Portuguese territories of Ambriz, Angola, and Benguela. The coastline is throughout tolerably uniform, and everywhere flat, with numerous shallow lagoons separated from the ocean by narrow spits of sand, lying parallel to the coast. Proceeding inland, the country rises to the central plateau of the continent by a series of broad terracelike steps, down which the longer rivers are generally precipitated in cataracts and rapids. The Genoese claim to have been the first European navigators to reach, in. 1291, the coasts of Guinea.

GUINEA FOWL They were, however, first regularly visited by merchant adventurers from Rouen and Dieppe from 1364 onward, but not colonized till the end of the 15th century, when the Portuguese, under the enterprising Prince Henry the Navigator, sent out, in 1481, the first colonies to this part of the world.