a seaport-town of European Turkey, Rumelia, on the coast of the Black Sea, 80 miles N.E. of Adrianople. It has a large harbour, and a considerable trade is carried on in wine and timber. The only manufacture is the preparation of salt from the sea-water. Siseboli occupies the site of the ancient Apollonia, afterwards called Sosopolis, whence the modern name. Pop. 8000, mostly Greeks.

SIMONDI, Jean Charles Leonard Simonde De, an eminent historian and political economist, was the last of the Simondis, an old and a noble family of Tuscany, and was born at Geneva on the 9th of May 1773. His kindred were staunch Ghibellines, and, on the extinction of the republic of Pisa in the fourteenth century, they were compelled to seek refuge on this side the Alps, and accordingly took up their quarters at Dauphiné in France. The grandfather of the historian is reported to have borne arms in the troops of France; while his father chose to do battle with the armies of the prince of darkness, in the character of evangelical minister in the town of Bossex. As to his maternal ancestry less is known. His mother was a woman of a very superior mind, however, and, as is so often the case with great men, she seems to have transmitted to her son the better part of his genius. The Simondis, at the birth of the historian, were in comfortable circumstances, and occupied a country mansion, Chatelaine, near the city of Geneva, at the confluence of the Rhone and the Arve. Here the genius of the future annalist had the amplest room to develop itself. Of river, lake, and mountain he possessed one of the most fascinating views in the whole world. Add to this the delicious charm of an enchanting garden, in which he could wander as in the primeval bowers of paradise, and we have presented to the mind one of the very richest spots conceivable for the early growth of a man of genius. But the young dreams of Sismondi were destined to be rudely broken. His father, trusting to the financial policy of his friend Necker, had placed the whole of his moveable property in the French funds. The failure of the banking system of France plunged the Sismondis up to the lips in poverty. Leonardo became a clerk in a counting-house at Lyons, and bore his change of fortune with surprising firmness. The outbreak of the revolution, in 1792, drove the youth from his ledgers back to Geneva. The convulsions which shook the whole of Europe did not pass by this ancient city of the mountain land. The Sismondis, father and son, were heavily fined and imprisoned. On their liberation, in 1793, they resolved to turn their back on Switzerland till more prosperous times, and with this intent they sailed for England. A fit of home-sickness on the part of Sismondi's mother, put a check upon his inquiries into the life, literature, and manners of the English people. Returning again to Chatelaine, the father and son were again compelled to submit to a grievous incarceration. M. Caila, one of the most intimate friends of the family, had sought shelter in their house, and was subsequently dragged from under their roof to instant death. Unable to bear the horrid burden of existence, as it was then experienced in France, the Sismondis resolved to move to their ancestral country, and settled in Tuscany in 1795. The young historian purchased a small estate at Val Chiusa, near Pescia, whither he removed the rest of his family. He set to work with determined resolution to improve the condition of agriculture, and, if possible, to free the inhabitants of his country from the galling yoke to which they were then nationally subjected. He spent five years of incessant labour upon his farm and upon his books. Under the mild skies of Italy he began the study of history, and he resolved to dedicate his first efforts to a delineation of the glory and a representation of the disgrace of the Italian republics. In the meanwhile he entertained certain opinions, which cannot be designated as other than crude, vacillating, and hypothetical on political economy, which he resolved to give to the world. He returned to Geneva in 1801, and published his Tableau de l'Agriculture de la Toscane in 1801, which was succeeded by De la Richesse Commerciale in 1803. History, however, was his forte, and he devoted himself to it with untiring zeal to the end of his life. In 1807 appeared the first volume of his Histoire des Républiques Italiennes, and he completed the sixteen volumes in 1818. During the composition of this work he had much intercourse with the literary society which then flocked to Geneva from the adjoining country of France. The most distinguished of these exiles were Necker the financier, his daughter Madame de Staël, and Benjamin Constant. Sismondi had been appointed secretary to the Chamber of Commerce of the department of Leman, which then formed part of France. In 1810, after his father's death, Sismondi delivered in his native city a course of lectures On the Literature of the South of Europe, which were published in 1813, and which have since been rendered into English by T. Roscoe. This work is written in a luminous, free, independent style, and is very valuable wherever the author touches on Italian literature. With the literature of Spain and Portugal he had only a second-hand acquaintance, and of course no force of intelligence could make his book anything more than a second-hand estimate of the genius and influence of the writers of the countries of Cervantes and of Sismondi. This same year, 1813, marked his first visit to the French capital. During his residence in Paris he made the acquaintance of young Guizot, and attracted the notice of Napoleon by his brilliant articles in the Moniteur on the counter-revolution. In 1819 he visited England, and took home with him to Geneva a sister-in-law of Sir James Mackintosh, by his second marriage. Having removed his English bride to Chênes, near Geneva, he prosecuted his Histoire des Français, and completed all it was his lot to finish of it in twenty years after its first appearance, 1821-42, 29 vols. In 1822 he wrote a heavy historical novel, called Julia Severa, or the Year 492, in which he endeavoured to depict the fall of the Roman empire. He was shortly after elected a member of the legislative council of Geneva, and employed the influence of his eminent historical position to gain for his fellow-citizens those rights to which they held themselves entitled. In 1832 he wrote his abridgment of the Italian Republics for Larder's Cyclopaedia, and translated the same work into French. He published in English and French his History of the Fall of the Roman Empire, and the Decline of Civilization from 250 to 1000, 2 vols., 1835; and next year the first part of his Études sur la Constitutions des Peuples Libres, 3 vols., which he completed in 1838. He likewise finished his Études sur l'Economie Politique about the same period. In his later years he gained himself enemies by advocating the expulsion of Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte from the states of Switzerland. On the 25th of June 1842 this eminent historian died, in his seventieth year. Besides the works already mentioned, Sismondi wrote a large number of smaller pieces, critical, historical, philosophical, and biographical, numbering seventy-three in all.