lways, schools, representative government, and a
legal code based on old Dutch law; PIETERMARITZBURG (q. v.) is
the capital; Natal was discovered in 1497 by Vasco da Gama, and after
being annexed to Cape Colony in 1844, was declared, 11 years later, a
separate colony.

NATHAN, a Jewish prophet who had the courage to charge King David to
his face with a heinous crime he had committed and convict him of his
guilt, to his humiliation in the dust.

NATION OF SHOPKEEPERS, Napoleon Bonaparte's contemptuous name for
the English.

NATIONAL ANTHEM, its authorship has been long matter of controversy,
and it is uncertain to this day; it has been ascribed to H. Carey and to
Dr. John Bull.

NATIONAL CONVENTION, the revolutionary assembly of France,
consisting of 749 members chosen by universal suffrage, which on 22nd
September 1792 supplanted the Legislative Assembly, proclaimed the
Republic, and condemned Louis XVI. to the guillotine; in spite of its
perplexities and internal discords, it was successful in suppressing the
Royalists in La Vendee and the south, and repelling the rest of Europe
leagued against it, not only in arms, but in the field of diplomacy; it
laid the foundation of several of the academic institutions of the
country, which have since contributed to its glory as well as welfare,
and collected them together in the world-famous Institute; its work done,
"weary of its own existence, and all men sensibly weary of it," it
willingly deceased in an act of self-dissolution in favour of a Directory
of Five on 20th October 1795.

NATIONAL COVENANT. See COVENANT.

NATIONAL GUARD, THE, a militia of citizens organised in the
municipality of Paris in 1790, with Lafayette as commandant, but
suppressed in 1827, and again suppressed in 1872, after two revivals, in
consequence of their taking part with the Commune of the latter date.

NATURAL SELECTION, name given by Darwin to the survival of certain
plants and animals that are fitted, and the decease contemporaneously of
certain others that are not fitted, to a new environment.

NATURAL SUPERNATURALISM, Carlyle's name in "Sartor" for the
supernatural found latent in the natural, and manifesting itself in it,
or of the miraculous in the common and everyday course of things; name of
a chapter which, says Dr. Stirling, "contains the very first word of a
higher philosophy as yet spoken in Great Britain, the very first English
word towards the restoration and