GEEL, GAL JAKOn (1789-1862). A distin guished Dutch scholar, born at Amsterdam. and educated at the Athenreum of that city, princi pally under Van Lennep. After living at The Hague from the year 1811 as a family tutor, he became second librarian at Leyden in 1823, and in 1833 head librarian and honorary professor. He had made himself meanwhile known as a classical philologist by editions of Theocritus, with the Scholia (1820) ; of the Anecdote Hemster husiana (1826) ; of the Scholia in Suetonium of Ruhnken (1828) ; of the Excerpta Vaticana of Polybius (1829) ; and his Historia Critica Sophistarum Grcecorum (1823) had called forth several treatises on the same subject from Ger man philologists. In 1840 appeared his edition of the Olympicus of Dio Chrysostom, accom panied by a Commentarius de Reliquis Dionis Orationibus; and in 1846 he issued the Phoenissce of Euripides, with a commentary, in opposition to Hermann. All these works, which are written
in pure and pleasing Latin, are models of thor ough scholarship, as well as of taste and method. Geel contributed further to the revival of clas sical learning in the Netherlands by the es tablishment, along with Bake, Peerlkamp, and Hamaker, of the Bibliotheca Critica Nova, in 1825. The national literature is also indebted to him not only for the translation of German and English works into Dutch, but also for original treatises on various nsthetical subjects. He won, moreover, the gratitude of the learned throughout Europe by his liberality as a libra rian, and especially by his Catalogus Codicum Manuseriptorum, qui rode ab Anno 1741 Biblio thecw Lugduni Batavorum Accesserunt (1852).