DERNA, a town on the north coast of Cyrenaica, Africa (anc. Darnis-Zarine), 224 m. E. of Bengasi by road (railway as far as El Merg). Pop. (1921) about io,000. Situated below the eastern butt of Jebel Akhdar on a small but rich deltaic plain, watered by fine perennial springs, it has a growing population and trades in fruits grown in its extensive palm gardens, and in hides and wool brought down by the nomads from the interior. The bay is open from north-west round to south-east and often inaccessible in win ter and spring. A portion of the people is of Moorish stock, of Andalusian origin, which emigrated in ; the descendants preserve a fine facial type. It was the easternmost city of the Pentapolis of Cyrenaica. There is a lighthouse west of the bay. The names Darnis and Zarine are philologically identical and prob ably refer to the same place. No traces are left of the ancient town except some rock tombs. Darnis continued to be of some impor tance in early Muslim times as a station on the Alexandria Kairouan road, and has served on more than one occasion as a base for Egyptian attacks on Cyrenaica and Tripolitan'a. In 18o5 the government of the United States, in dispute with the dey of Tripoli on account of piracies on American shipping, landed a force under William Eaton (q.v.) to co-operate in the attack on Derna then being made by Sidi Ahmet, an elder brother of the dey. After 1835 Derna passed under direct Ottoman control, and subsequently served as the point whence the sultan exerted a precarious but in creasing control over eastern Cyrenaica and Marmarica. It passed to Italy in 1912. There is a caravan route to Tobruk (1 15 m.) . DERNBURG, HEINRICH (1829-1907), German legal scholar, was born on March 3, 1829, at Mainz, and died at Berlin on Nov. 23, 1907. He was made professor at Zurich (1854), at Halle (1862), at Berlin (1873) and from 1866 was in the Prussian Upper House. His chief publications are Die Kompensation (1854) ; Das Pfandrecht (2 vols., 186o) ; Die Institutionen des Cajus (1869) ; Lehrbuch des preuss. Privatreclits (3 vols., 1871 96) ; Pandekton (3 vols., 1884) and Das burgerliche Recht des Deutschen Reichs u. Preussens (5 vols., 1898).