and
in 1687 received a large French colony. In 1695 it was taken and burned
by the British, and in 1791 it suffered the same fate at the hands of
Toussaint L'Ouverture. It then became the capital of King Henri
Christophe's dominions, but since his fall has suffered severely in
numerous revolutions.

CAPILLARY ACTION.[1] A tube, the bore of which is so small that it will
only admit a hair (Lat. _capilla_), is called a capillary tube. When
such a tube of glass, open at both ends, is placed vertically with its
lower end immersed in water, the water is observed to rise in the tube,
and to stand within the tube at a higher level than the water outside.
The action between the capillary tube and the water has been called
capillary action, and the name has been extended to many other phenomena
which have been found to depend on properties of liquids and solids
similar to those which cause water to rise in capillary tubes.

The forces which are concerned in these phenomena are those which act
between neighbouring parts of the same substance, and which are called
forces of cohesion, and those which act between portions of matter of
different kinds, which are called forces of adhesion. These forces are
quite insensible between two portions of matter separated by any
distance which we can directly measure. It is only when the distance
becomes exceedingly small that these forces become perceptible. G.H.
Quincke (_Pogg. Ann._ cxxxvii. p. 402) made experiments to determine the
greatest distance at which the effect of these forces is sensible, and
he found for various substances distances about the twenty-thousandth
part of a millimetre.

_Historical_.--According to J.C. Poggendorff (_Pogg. Ann._ ci. p. 551),
Leonardo da Vinci must be considered as the discoverer of capillary
phenomena, but the first accurate observations of the capillary action
of tubes and glass plates were made by Francis Hawksbee
(_Physico-Mechanical Experiments_, London, 1709, pp. 139-169; and _Phil.
Trans._, 1711 and 1712), who ascribed the action to an attraction
between the glass and the liquid. He observed that the effect was the
same in thick tubes as in thin, and concluded that only those particles
of the glass which are very near the surface have any influence on the
phenomenon. Dr James Jurin (_Phil. Trans._, 1718, p. 739, and 1719, p.
1083) showed that the height at which the liquid is suspended depends on
the section of the tube at the surface