long the
council of the empire, presided over by the grand vizier.

See Von Kremer, _Culturgeschichte des Orients_, i. 64, 198.
(D. B. MA.)

FOOTNOTE:

[1] The divan in this sense has been known in Europe certainly since
about the middle of the 18th century. It was fashionable, roughly
speaking, from 1820 to 1850, wherever the romantic movement in
literature penetrated. All the boudoirs of that generation were
garnished with divans; they even spread to coffee-houses, which were
sometimes known as "divans" or "Turkish divans"; and a "cigar divan"
remains a familiar expression.

DIVER, a name that when applied to a bird is commonly used in a sense
even more vague than that of loom, several of the sea ducks or
_Fuligulinae_ and mergansers being frequently so called, to say nothing
of certain of the auks or _Alcidae_ and grebes; but in English
ornithological works the term diver is generally restricted to the
Family known as _Colymbidae_, a very well-marked group of aquatic birds,
possessing great, though not exceptional, powers of submergence, and
consisting of a single genus _Colymbus_ which is composed of three, or
at most four, species, all confined to the northern hemisphere. This
Family belongs to the _Cecomorphae_ of T. H. Huxley, and is usually
supposed to occupy a place between the _Alcidae_ and _Podicipedidae_;
but to which of these groups it is most closely related is undecided.
Professor Brandt in 1837 (_Beitr. Naturgesch. Vogel_, pp. 124-132)
pointed out the osteological differences of the grebes and the divers,
urging the affinity of the latter to the auks; while, thirty years
later, Professor Alph. Milne-Edwards (_Ois. foss. France_, i. pp.
279-283) inclined to the opposite view, chiefly relying on the
similarity of a peculiar formation of the tibia in the grebes and
divers,[1] which indeed is very remarkable, and, in the latter group,
attracted the attention of Willughby more than 230 years ago. On the
other hand Professor Brandt, and Rudolph Wagner shortly after (Naumann's
_Vogel Deutschlands_, ix. p. 683, xii. p. 395), had already shown that
the structure of the knee-joint in the grebes and divers differs in that
the former have a distinct and singularly formed _patella_ (which is
undeveloped in the latter) in addition to the prolonged, pyramidally
formed, procnemial process--which last may, from its exaggeration, be
regarded as a character almost peculiar t