Vernet
JEAN EMILE HORACE, a French painter; grandson of Claude Joseph Vernet, a distinguished painter of sea pieces and seaport scenes; son of Antoine Charles Horace Vernet, painter of battle and genre pictures; born in Paris, France, June 30, 1789. His first master in art was his father, and at an early age he acquired the favor of the imperial court by his battle pieces, in which he adopted a realistic treatment in opposition to the classical school of David. His pictures connected with the wars of Napoleon are very numerous. In 1828 Charles X. appointed him director of the French Academy in Rome, a post he ably filled till the end of 1834, producing a series of pictures, partly historical, partly genre. Louis Philippe then commissioned him to paint galleries of the museum at Versailles with scenes relating to the conquest of Algeria, a country which he several times visited.
In 1840 we find him traveling in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria; in 1842 he accompanied the Emperor Nicholas on a journey from St. Petersburg to Sebastopol; ol. and in 1845 he visited Spain and Algeria.
In 1853 he followed the French army to Varna, but soon returned to Paris and produced his last great picture, "The Battle of the Alma." He died in Paris, Jan. 17, 1863.
VERNIER (named after the inventor, Peter Vernier, of Brussels, who described it in a tract printed in 1631), a contrivance for measuring fractional portions of one of the equal spaces into which a scale or limb, or a graduated instrument is divided. The vernier consists of a graduated scale, so arranged as to cover an exact number of spaces on the primary scale, or limb, to which it is applied. The vernier is divided into a number of equal parts, greater or less by 1, than the number of spaces which it covers on the limb. The vernier scale is 1 1-10 inches in length, and is divided into 10 equal parts, each embracing 11-100 of an inch, and therefore exceeding each division of the scale by 1-100 of an inch. If, therefore, any division of the vernier coincide with a division on the scale, that division, counting downward, when the 0 of the vernier coincides with the top of the mercurial col-