Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Fenton, Edward" to "Finistere" (part 2)

FESCENNINE VERSES (Fescennina carmina), one of the earliest kinds of Italian poetry, subsequently developed into the Satura and the Roman comic drama. Originally sung at village harvest-home rejoicings, they made their way into the towns, and became the fashion at religious festivals and private gatherings—especially weddings, to which in later times they were practically restricted. They were usually in the Saturnian metre and took the form of a dialogue, consisting of an interchange of extemporaneous raillery. Those who took part in them wore masks made of the bark of trees. At first harmless and good-humoured, if somewhat coarse, these songs gradually outstripped the bounds of decency; malicious attacks were made upon both gods and men, and the matter became so serious that the law intervened and scurrilous personalities were forbidden by the Twelve Tables (Cicero, De re publica, iv. 10). Specimens of the Fescennines used at weddings are the Epithalamium of Manlius (Catullus, lxi. 122) and the four poems of Claudian in honour of the marriage of Honorius and Maria; the first, however, is distinguished by a licentiousness which is absent in the latter. Ausonius in his Cento nuptialis mentions the Fescennines of Annianus Faliscus, who lived in the time of Hadrian. Various derivations have been proposed for Fescennine. According to Festus, they were introduced from Fescennia in Etruria, but there is no reason to assume that any particular town was specially devoted to the use of such songs. As an alternative Festus suggests a connexion with fascinum, either because the Fescennina were regarded as a protection against evil influences (see Munro, Criticisms and Elucidations of Catullus, p. 76) or because fascinum (= phallus), as the symbol of fertility, would from early times have been naturally associated with harvest festivals. H. Nettleship, in an article on “The Earliest Italian Literature” (Journal of Philology, xi. 1882), in support of Munro’s view, translates the expression “verses used by charmers,” assuming a noun fescennus, connected with fas fari.

The locus classicus in ancient literature is Horace, Epistles, ii. 1. 139; see also Virgil, Georgics, ii. 385; Tibullus ii. 1. 55; E. Hoffmann, “Die Fescenninen,” in Rheinisches Museum, li. p. 320 (1896); art. Latin Literature.

FESCH, JOSEPH (1763-1839), cardinal, was born at Ajaccio on the 3rd of January 1763. His father, a Swiss officer in the service of the Genoese Republic, had married the mother of Laetitia Bonaparte, after the decease of her first husband. Fesch therefore stood almost in the relation of an uncle to the young Bonapartes, and after the death of Lucien Bonaparte, archdeacon of Ajaccio, he became for a time the protector and patron of the family. In the year 1789, when the French Revolution broke out, he was archdeacon of Ajaccio, and, like the majority of the Corsicans, he felt repugnance for many of the acts of the French government during that period; in particular he protested against the application to Corsica of the act known as the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy” (July 1790). As provost of the “chapter” in that city he directly felt the pressure of events; for on the suppression of religious orders and corporations, he was constrained to retire into private life.

Thereafter he shared the fortunes of the Bonaparte family in the intrigues and strifes which ensued. Drawn gradually by that family into espousing the French cause against Paoli and the Anglophiles, he was forced to leave Corsica and to proceed with Laetitia and her son to Toulon, in the early part of the autumn of 1793. Failing to find clerical duties at that time (the period of the Terror), he entered civil life, and served in various capacities, until on the appointment of Napoleon Bonaparte to the command of the French “Army of Italy” he became a commissary attached to that army. This part of his career is obscure and without importance. His fortunes rose rapidly on the attainment of the dignity of First Consul by his former charge, Napoleon, after the coup d’état of Brumaire (November 1799). Thereafter, when the restoration of the Roman Catholic religion was in the mind of the First Consul, Fesch resumed his clerical vocation and took an active part in the complex negotiations which led to the signing of the Concordat with the Holy See on the 15th of July 1801. His reward came in the prize of the archbishopric of Lyons, on the duties of which he entered in August 1802. Six months later he received a still more signal reward for his past services, being raised to the dignity of cardinal.

In 1804 on the retirement of Cacault from the position of French ambassador at Rome, Fesch received that important appointment. He was assisted by Châteaubriand, but soon sharply differed with him on many questions. Towards the close of the year 1804 Napoleon entrusted to Fesch the difficult task of securing the presence of Pope Pius VII. at the forthcoming coronation of the emperor at Notre Dame, Paris (Dec. 2nd, 1804). His tact in overcoming the reluctance of the pope to be present at the coronation (it was only eight months after the execution of the duc d’Enghien) received further recognition. He received the grand cordon of the Legion of Honour, became grand-almoner of the empire and had a seat in the French senate. He was to receive further honours. In 1806 one of the most influential of the German clerics, Karl von Dalberg, then prince bishop of Regensburg, chose him to be his coadjutor and designated him as his successor.

Events, however, now occurred which overclouded his prospects. In the course of the years 1806-1807 Napoleon came into sharp collision with the pope on various matters both political and religious. Fesch sought in vain to reconcile the two potentates. Napoleon was inexorable in his demands, and Pius VII. refused to give way where the discipline and vital interests of the church seemed to be threatened. The emperor on several occasions sharply rebuked Fesch for what he thought to be weakness and ingratitude. It is clear, however, that the cardinal went as far as possible in counselling the submission of the spiritual to the civil power. For a time he was not on speaking terms with the pope; and Napoleon recalled him from Rome.

Affairs came to a crisis in the year 1809, when Napoleon issued at Vienna the decree of the 17th of May, ordering the annexation of the papal states to the French empire. In that year Napoleon conferred on Fesch the archbishopric of Paris, but he refused the honour. He, however, consented to take part in an ecclesiastical commission formed by the emperor from among the dignitaries of the Gallican Church, but in 1810 the commission was dissolved. The hopes of Fesch with respect to Regensburg were also damped by an arrangement of the year 1810 whereby Regensburg was absorbed in Bavaria.

In the year 1811 the emperor convoked a national council of Gallican clerics for the discussion of church affairs, and Fesch was appointed to preside over their deliberations. Here again, however, he failed to satisfy the inflexible emperor and was dismissed to his diocese. The friction between uncle and nephew became more acute in the following year. In June 1812, Pius VII. was brought from his first place of detention, Savona, to Fontainebleau, where he was kept under surveillance in the hope that he would give way in certain matters relating to the Concordat and in other clerical affairs. Fesch ventured to write to the aged pontiff a letter which came into the hands of the emperor. His anger against Fesch was such that he stopped the sum of 150,000 florins which had been accorded to him. The disasters of the years 1812-1813 brought Napoleon to treat Pius VII. with more lenity and the position of Fesch thus became for a time less difficult. On the first abdication of Napoleon (April 11th, 1814) and the restoration of the Bourbons, he, however, retired to Rome where he received a welcome. The events of the Hundred Days (March-June, 1815) brought him back to France; he resumed his archiepiscopal duties at Lyons and was further named a member of the senate. On the second abdication of the emperor (June 22nd, 1815) Fesch retired to Rome, where he spent the rest of his days in dignified ease, surrounded by numerous masterpieces of art, many of which he bequeathed to the city of Lyons. He died at Rome on the 13th of May 1839.

See J.B. Monseigneur Lyonnet, Le Cardinal Fesch (2 vols., Lyons, 1841); Ricard, Le Cardinal Fesch (Paris, 1893); H. Welschinger, Le Pape et l’empereur (Paris, 1905); F. Masson, Napoléon et sa famille (4 vols., Paris, 1897-1900).

FESSA, a town and district of Persia in the province of Fars. The town is situated in a fertile plain in 29° N. and 90 m. from Shiraz, and has a population of about 5000. The district has forty villages and extends about 40 m. north-south from Runiz to Nassīrabad and 16 m. east-west from Vāsilabad to Deh Dasteh (Dastajah); it produces much grain, dates, tobacco, opium and good fruit.

FESSENDEN, WILLIAM PITT (1806-1869), American statesman and financier, was born in Boscawen, New Hampshire, on the 16th of October 1806. After graduating at Bowdoin College in 1823, he studied law, and in 1827 was admitted to the bar, eventually settling in Portland, Maine, where for two years he was associated in practice with his father, Samuel Fessenden (1784-1869), a prominent lawyer and anti-slavery leader. In 1832 and in 1840 Fessenden was a representative in the Maine legislature, and in 1841-1843 was a Whig member of the national House of Representatives. When his term in this capacity was over, he devoted himself unremittingly and with great success to the law. He became well known, also, as an eloquent advocate of slavery restriction. In 1845-1846 and 1853-1854 he again served in the state House of Representatives, and in 1854 was chosen by the combined votes of Whigs and Anti-Slavery Democrats to the United States Senate. Within a fortnight after taking his seat he delivered a speech in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which at once made him a force in the congressional anti-slavery contest. From then on he was one of the most eloquent and frequent debaters among his colleagues, and in 1859, almost without opposition, he was re-elected to the Senate as a member of the Republican party, in the organization of which he had taken an influential part. He was a delegate in 1861 to the Peace Congress, but after the actual outbreak of hostilities he insisted that the war should be prosecuted vigorously. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, his services were second in value only to those of President Lincoln and Secretary Salmon P. Chase in efforts to provide funds for the defence of the Union; and in July 1864 Fessenden succeeded Chase as secretary of the treasury. The finances of the country in the early summer of 1864 were in a critical condition; a few days before leaving office Secretary Chase had been compelled to withdraw from the market $32,000,000 of 6% bonds, on account of the lack of acceptable bids; gold had reached 285 and was fluctuating between 225 and 250, while the value of the paper dollar had sunk as low as 34 cents. It was Secretary Fessenden’s policy to avoid a further increase of the circulating medium, and to redeem or consolidate the temporary obligations outstanding. In spite of powerful pressure the paper currency was not increased a dollar during his tenure of the office. As the sales of bonds and treasury notes were not sufficient for the needs of the Treasury, interest-bearing certificates of indebtedness were issued to cover the deficits; but when these began to depreciate the secretary, following the example of his predecessors, engaged the services of the Philadelphia banker Jay Cooke (q.v.) and secured the consent of Congress to raise the balance of the $400,000,000 loan authorized on the 30th of June 1864 by the sale of the so-called “seven-thirty” treasury notes (i.e. notes bearing interest at 7.3% payable in currency in three years or convertible at the option of the holder into 6% 5-20 year gold bonds). Through Cooke’s activities the sales became enormous; the notes, issued in denominations as low as $50, appealed to the patriotic impulses of the people who could not subscribe for bonds of a higher denomination. In the spring of 1865 Congress authorized an additional loan of $600,000,000 to be raised in the same manner, and for the first time in four years the Treasury was able to meet all its obligations. After thus securing ample funds for the enormous expenditures of the war, Fessenden resigned the treasury portfolio in March 1865, and again took his seat in the Senate, serving till his death. In the Senate he again became chairman of the finance committee, and also of the joint committee on reconstruction. He was the author of the report of this last committee (1866), in which the Congressional plan of reconstruction was set forth and which has been considered a state paper of remarkable power and cogency. He was not, however, entirely in accord with the more radical members of his own party, and this difference was exemplified in his opposition to the impeachment of President Johnson and subsequently in his voting for Johnson’s acquittal. He bore with calmness the storm of reproach from his party associates which followed, and lived to regain the esteem of those who had attacked him. He died at Portland, Maine, on the 6th of September 1869.

See Francis Fessenden, Life and Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden (2 vols., Boston, 1907).

FESSLER, IGNAZ AURELIUS (1756-1839), Hungarian ecclesiastic, historian and freemason, was born on the 18th of May 1756 at the village of Zurány in the county of Moson. In 1773 he joined the order of Capuchins, and in 1779 was ordained priest. He had meanwhile continued his classical and philological studies, and his liberal views brought him into frequent conflict with his superiors. In 1784, while at the monastery of Mödling, near Vienna, he wrote to the emperor Joseph II., making suggestions for the better education of the clergy and drawing his attention to the irregularities of the monasteries. The searching investigation which followed raised up against him many implacable enemies. In 1784 he was appointed professor of Oriental languages and hermeneutics in the university of Lemberg, when he took the degree of doctor of divinity; and shortly afterwards he was released from his monastic vows on the intervention of the emperor. In 1788 he brought out his tragedy of Sidney, an exposé of the tyranny of James II. and of the fanaticism of the papists in England. This was attacked so violently as profane and revolutionary that he was compelled to resign his office and seek refuge in Silesia. In Breslau he met with a cordial reception from G.W. Korn the publisher, and was, moreover, subsequently employed by the prince of Carolath-Schönaich as tutor to his sons. In 1791 Fessler was converted to Lutheranism and next year contracted an unhappy marriage, which was dissolved in 1802, when he married again. In 1796 he went to Berlin, where he founded a humanitarian society, and was commissioned by the freemasons of that city to assist Fichte in reforming the statutes and ritual of their lodge. He soon after this obtained a government appointment in connexion with the newly-acquired Polish provinces, but in consequence of the battle of Jena (1806) he lost this office, and remained in very needy circumstances until 1809, when he was summoned to St Petersburg by Alexander I., to fill the post of court councillor, and the professorship of oriental languages and philosophy at the Alexander-Nevski Academy. This office, however, he was soon obliged to resign, owing to his alleged atheistic tendencies, but he was subsequently nominated a member of the legislative commission. In 1815 he went with his family to Sarepta, where he joined the Moravian community and again became strongly orthodox. This cost him the loss of his salary, but it was restored to him in 1817. In November 1820 he was appointed consistorial president of the evangelical communities at Saratov and subsequently became chief superintendent of the Lutheran communities in St Petersburg. Fessler’s numerous works are all written in German. In recognition of his important services to Hungary as a historian, he was in 1831 elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He died at St Petersburg on the 15th of December 1839.

Fessler was a voluminous writer, and during his life exercised great influence; but, with the possible exception of the history of Hungary, none of his books has any value now. He did not pretend to any critical treatment of his materials, and most of his historical works are practically historical novels. He did much, however, to make the study of history popular. His most important works are—Die Geschichten der Ungarn und ihrer Landsassen (10 vols. Leipzig, 1815-1825); Marcus Aurelius (3 vols., Breslau, 1790-1792; 3rd edition, 4 vols., 1799); Aristides und Themistokles (2 vols., Berlin, 1792; 3rd edition, 1818); Attila, König der Hunnen (Breslau, 1794); Mathias Corvinus (2 vols., Breslau, 1793-1794); and Die drei grossen Könige der Hungarn aus dem Arpadischen Stamme (Breslau, 1808).

See Fessler’s Rückblicke auf seine siebzigjährige Pilgerschaft (Breslau, 1824; 2nd edition, Leipzig, 1851).

FESTA, CONSTANZO (c. 1495-1545), Italian singer and musical composer, became a member of the Pontifical choir in Rome in 1517, and soon afterwards maestro at the Vatican. His motets and madrigals (the first book of which appeared in 1537) excited Dr Burney’s warm praise in his History of Music; and, among other church music, his Te Deum (published in 1596) is still sung at important services in Rome. His madrigal, called in English “Down in a flow’ry vale,” is well known.

FESTINIOG (or Ffestiniog), a town of Merionethshire, North Wales, at the head of the Festiniog valley, 600 ft. above the sea, in the midst of rugged scenery, near the stream Dwyryd, 31 m. from Conway. Pop. of urban district (1901), 11,435. There are many large slate quarries in this parish, especially at Blaenau Festiniog, the junction of three railways, London & North Western, Great Western and Festiniog, a narrow-gauge line between Portmadoc and Duffws. This light railway runs at a considerable elevation (some 700 ft.), commanding a view across the valley and lake of Tan y Bwlch. Lord Lyttelton’s letter to Mr Bower is a well-known panegyric on Festiniog. Thousands of workmen are employed in the slate quarries. The Cynfael falls are famous. Near are Beddau gwyr Ardudwy (the graves of the men of Ardudwy), memorials of a fight to recover women of the Clwyd valley from the men of Ardudwy. Near, too, is a rock named “Hugh Lloyd’s pulpit” (Lloyd lived in the time of Charles I., Cromwell and Charles II.).

FESTOON (from Fr. feston, Ital. festone, from a Late Lat. festo, originally a “festal garland,” Lat. festum, feast), a wreath or garland, and so in architecture a conventional arrangement of flowers, foliage or fruit bound together and suspended by ribbons, either from a decorated knot, or held in the mouths of lions, or suspended across the back of bulls’ heads as in the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli. The “motif” is sometimes known as a “swag.” It was largely employed both by the Greeks and Romans and formed the principal decoration of altars, friezes and panels. The ends of the ribbons are sometimes formed into bows or twisted curves; when in addition a group of foliage or flowers is suspended it is called a “drop.” Its origin is probably due to the representation in stone of the garlands of natural flowers, &c., which were hung up over an entrance doorway on fête days, or suspended round the altar.

FESTUS (? Rufus or Rufius), one of the Roman writers of breviaria (epitomes of Roman history). The reference to the defeat of the Goths at Noviodunum (A.D. 369) by the emperor Valens, and the fact that the author is unaware of the constitution of Valentia as a province (which took place in the same year) are sufficient indication to fix the date of composition. Mommsen identifies the author with Rufius Festus, proconsul of Achaea (366), and both with Rufius Festus Avienus (q.v.), the translator of Aratus. But the absence of the name Rufius in the best MSS. is against this. Others take him to be Festus of Tridentum, magister memoriae (secretary) to Valens and proconsul of Asia, where he was sent to punish those implicated in the conspiracy of Theodorus, a commission which he executed with such merciless severity that his name became a byword. The work itself (Breviarium rerum gestarum populi Romani) is divided into two parts—one geographical, the other historical. The chief authorities used are Livy, Eutropius and Florus. It is extremely meagre, but the fact that the last part is based on the writer’s personal recollections makes it of some value for the history of the 4th century.

Editions by W. Förster (Vienna, 1873) and C. Wagener (Prague, 1886); see also R. Jacobi, De Festi breviarii fontibus (Bonn, 1874), and H. Peter, Die geschichtliche Litt. über die römische Kaiserzeit ii. p. 133 (1897), where the epitomes of Festus, Aurelius Victor and Eutropius are compared.

FESTUS, SEXTUS POMPEIUS, Roman grammarian, probably flourished in the 2nd century A.D. He made an epitome of the celebrated work De verborum significatu, a valuable treatise alphabetically arranged, written by M. Verrius Flaccus, a freedman and celebrated grammarian who flourished in the reign of Augustus. Festus gives the etymology as well as the meaning of every word; and his work throws considerable light on the language, mythology and antiquities of ancient Rome. He made a few alterations, and inserted some critical remarks of his own. He also omitted such ancient Latin words as had long been obsolete; these he discussed in a separate work now lost, entitled Priscorum verborum cum exemplis. Of Flaccus’s work only a few fragments remain, and of Festus’s epitome only one original copy is in existence. This MS., the Codex Festi Farnesianus at Naples, only contains the second half of the work (M-V) and that not in a perfect condition. It has been published in facsimile by Thewrewk de Ponor (1890). At the close of the 8th century Paulus Diaconus abridged the abridgment. From his work and the solitary copy of the original attempts have been made with the aid of conjecture to reconstruct the treatise of Festus.

Of the early editions the best are those of J. Scaliger (1565) and Fulvius Ursinus (1581); in modern times, those of C.O. Müller (1839, reprinted 1880) and de Ponor (1889); see J.E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, vol. i. (1906).

FÉTIS, FRANÇOIS JOSEPH (1784-1871), Belgian composer and writer on music, was born at Mons in Belgium on the 25th of March 1784, and was trained as a musician by his father, who followed the same calling. His talent for composition manifested itself at the age of seven, and at nine years old he was an organist at Sainte-Waudru. In 1800 he went to Paris and completed his studies at the conservatoire under such masters as Boieldieu, Rey and Pradher. In 1806 he undertook the revision of the Roman liturgical chants in the hope of discovering and establishing their original form. In this year he married the granddaughter of the Chevalier de Kéralio, and also began his Biographie universelle des musiciens, the most important of his works, which did not appear until 1834. In 1821 he was appointed professor at the conservatoire. In 1827 he founded the Revue musicale, the first serious paper in France devoted exclusively to musical matters. Fétis remained in the French capital till in 1833, at the request of Leopold I., he became director of the conservatoire of Brussels and the king’s chapel-master. He also was the founder, and, till his death, the conductor of the celebrated concerts attached to the conservatoire of Brussels, and he inaugurated a free series of lectures on musical history and philosophy. He produced a large quantity of original compositions, from the opera and the oratorio down to the simple chanson. But all these are doomed to oblivion. Although not without traces of scholarship and technical ability, they show total absence of genius. More important are his writings on music. They are partly historical, such as the Curiosités historiques de la musique (Paris, 1850), and the Histoire universelle de musique (Paris, 1869-1876); partly theoretical, such as the Méthode des méthodes de piano (Paris, 1837), written in conjunction with Moscheles. Fétis died at Brussels on the 26th of March 1871. His valuable library was purchased by the Belgian government and presented to the Brussels conservatoire. His work as a musical historian was prodigious in quantity, and, in spite of many inaccuracies and some prejudice revealed in it, there can be no question as to its value for the student.

FETISHISM, an ill-defined term, used in many different senses: (a) the worship of inanimate objects, often regarded as peculiarly African; (b) negro religion in general; (c) the worship of inanimate objects conceived as the residence of spirits not inseparably bound up with, nor originally connected with, such objects; (d) the doctrine of spirits embodied in, or attached to, or conveying influence through, certain material objects (Tylor); (e) the use of charms, which are not worshipped, but derive their magical power from a god or spirit; (f) the use as charms of objects regarded as magically potent in themselves. A further extension is given by some writers, who use the term as synonymous with the religions of primitive peoples, including under it not only the worship of inanimate objects, such as the sun, moon or stars, but even such phases of primitive philosophy as totemism. Comte applied the term to denominate the view of nature more commonly termed animism.

Derivation.—The word fetish (or fetich) was first used in connexion with Africa by the Portuguese discoverers of the last half of the 15th century; relics of saints, rosaries and images were then abundant all over Europe and were regarded as possessing magical virtue; they were termed by the Portuguese feiticos (i.e. charms). Early voyagers to West Africa applied this term to the wooden figures, stones, &c., regarded as the temporary residence of gods or spirits, and to charms. There is no reason to suppose that the word feitico was applied either to an animal or to the local spirit of a river, hill or forest. Feitico is sometimes interpreted to mean artificial, made by man, but the original sense is more probably “magically active or artful.” The word was probably brought into general use by C. de Brosses, author of Du culte des dieux fétiches (1760), but it is frequently used by W. Bosman in his Description of Guinea (1705), in the sense of “the false god, Bossum” or “Bohsum,” properly a tutelary deity of an individual.

Definition.—The term fetish is commonly understood to mean the worship of or respect for material, inanimate objects, conceived as magically active from a virtue inherent in them, temporarily or permanently, which does not arise from the fact that a god or spirit is believed to reside in them or communicate virtue to them. Taken in this sense fetishism is probably a mark of decadence. There is no evidence of any such belief in Africa or elsewhere among primitive peoples. It is only after a certain grade of culture has been attained that the belief in luck appears; the fetish is essentially a mascot or object carried for luck.

Ordinary Usage.—In the sense in which Dr Tylor uses the term the fetish is (1) a “god-house” or (2) a charm derived from a tutelary deity or spirit, and magically active in virtue of its association with such deity or spirit. In the first of these senses the word is applied to objects ranging from the unworked stone to the pot or the wooden figure, and is thus hardly distinguishable from idolatry. (a) The bohsum or tutelary deity of a particular section of the community is derived from the local gods through the priests by the performance of a certain series of rites. The priest indicates into what object the bohsum will enter and proceeds to the abode of the local god to procure the object in question. After making an offering the object is carried to an appropriate spot and a “fetish” tree set up as a shade for it, which is sacred so long as the bohsum remains beneath it. The fall of the tree is believed to mark the departure of the spirit. A bohsum may also be procured through a dream; but in this case, too, it is necessary to apply to the priest to decide whether the dream was veridical. (b) The suhman or tutelary deity of an individual is not an object selected at random to be the residence of the spirit. It is only procurable at the residence of a Sasabonsum, a malicious non-human being. Various ceremonies are performed, and a spirit connected with the Sasabonsum is finally asked to enter an object. This is then kept for three days; if no good fortune results it is concluded either that the spirit did not enter the object selected, or that it is disinclined to extend its protection. In either case the ceremonies must be commenced afresh. Otherwise offerings and even human sacrifices in exceptional cases are made to the suhman. It is commonly believed that the negro claims the power of coercing his tutelary deity. This is denied by Colonel Ellis. It is certain that coercion of deities is not unknown, but further evidence is required that the negro uses it when his deity is refractory.

The suhman can, it is believed, communicate a part of his powers to various objects in which he does not dwell; these are also termed suhman by the natives and may have given rise to the belief that the practices commonly termed fetishism are not animistic. These charms are many in number; offerings of food and drink are made, i.e. to the portion of the power of the suhman which resides in them. These charms can only be made by the possessor of the suhman.

On the Guinea Coast the spirit implanted in the object is usually, if not invariably, non-human. Farther south on the Congo the “fetish” is inhabited by human souls also. The priest goes into the forest and cuts an image; when a party enters a wood for this purpose they may not mention the name of any living being unless they wish him to die and his soul to enter the fetish. The right person having been selected, his name is mentioned; and he is believed to die within ten days, his soul passing into the nkissi. It is into these figures that the nails are driven, in order to procure the vengeance of the indwelling spirit on some enemy.

In many cases the fetish spirit is believed to leave the “god-house” and pass for the time being into the body of the priest, who manifests the phenomena of possession (q.v.). It is a common error to suppose that the whole of African religion is embraced in the practices connected with these tutelary deities; so far from this being the case, belief in higher gods, not necessarily accompanied with worship or propitiation, is common in many parts of Africa, and there is no reason to suppose that it had been derived in every case, perhaps not in any case, from Christian or Mahommedan missionaries.

See A.B. Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, chs. vii., viii. and xii.; Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, ii. 174; R.E. Dennett in Folklore, vol. xvi.; R.H. Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa (1904); also Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii. 143, and M.H. Kingsley, West African Studies (2nd ed., 1901), where the term is used in a more extended sense.

(N. W. T.)

FETTERCAIRN, a burgh of barony of Kincardineshire, Scotland, 4½ m. N.W. of Laurencekirk. Pop. of parish (1901) 1390. The chief structures include a public hall, library and reading-room, and the arch built to commemorate the visit of Queen Victoria in 1861. The most interesting relic, however, is the market cross, which originally belonged to the extinct town of Kincardine. To the S.W. is Balbegno Castle, dating from 1509, and planned on a scale that threatened to ruin its projector. It contains a lofty hall of fine proportions. Two miles N. is Fasque, the estate of the Gladstones, which was acquired in 1831 by Sir John Gladstone (1764-1851), the father of W.E. Gladstone. The castle, which stands in beautiful grounds, was built in 1809. Sir John Gladstone’s tomb is in the Episcopal church of St Andrew, which he erected and endowed. In the immediate vicinity are the ruins of the royal castle of Kincardine, where, according to tradition, Kenneth III. was assassinated in 1005, although he is more generally said to have been slain in battle at Monzievaird, near Crieff in Perthshire.

FETTERS AND HANDCUFFS, instruments for securing the feet and hands of prisoners under arrest, or as a means of punishment. The old names were manacles, shackbolts or shackles, gyves and swivels. Until within recent times handcuffs were of two kinds, the figure-8 ones which confined the hands close together either in front or behind the prisoner, or the rings from the wrists were connected by a short chain much on the model of the handcuffs in use by the police forces of to-day. Much improvement has been made in handcuffs of late. They are much lighter and they are adjustable, fitting any wrist, and thus the one pair will serve a police officer for any prisoner. For the removal of gangs of convicts an arrangement of handcuffs connected by a light chain is used, the chain running through a ring on each fetter and made fast at both ends by what are known as end-locks. Several recently invented appliances are used as handcuffs, e.g. snaps, nippers, twisters. They differ from handcuffs in being intended for one wrist only, the other portion being held by the captor. In the snap the smaller circlet is snapped to on the prisoner’s wrist. The nippers can be instantly fastened on the wrist. The twister, not now used in England as being liable to injure prisoners seriously, is a chain attached to two handles; the chain is put round the wrist and the two handles twisted till the chain is tight enough.

Leg-irons are anklets of steel connected by light chains long enough to permit of the wearer walking with short steps. An obsolete form was an anklet and chain to the end of which was attached a heavy weight, usually a round shot. The Spanish used to secure prisoners in bilboes, shackles round the ankles secured by a long bar of iron. This form of leg-iron was adopted in England, and was much employed in the services during the 17th and 18th centuries. An ancient example is preserved in the Tower of London. The French marine still use a kind of leg-iron of the bilbo type.

FEU, in Scotland, the commonest mode of land tenure. The word is the Scots variant of “fee” (q.v.). The relics of the feudal system still dominate Scots conveyancing. That system has recognized as many as seven forms of tenure—ward, socage, mortification, feu, blench, burgage, booking. Ward, the original military holding, was abolished in 1747 (20 G. II. c. 20), as an effect of the rising of 1745. Socage and mortification have long since disappeared. Booking is a conveyance peculiar to the borough of Paisley, but does not differ essentially from feu. Burgage is the system by which land is held in royal boroughs. Blench holding is by a nominal payment, as of a penny Scots, or a red rose, often only to be rendered upon demand. In feu holding there is a substantial annual payment in money or in kind in return for the enjoyment of the land. The crown is the first overlord or superior, and land is held of it by crown vassals, but they in their turn may “feu” their land, as it is called, to others who become their vassals, whilst they themselves are mediate overlords or superiors; and this process of sub-infeudation may be repeated to an indefinite extent. The Conveyancing Act of 1874 renders any clause in a disposition against sub-infeudation null and void. In England on the other hand, since 1290, when the statute Quia Emptores was passed, sub-infeudation is impossible, as the new holder simply effaces the grantor, holding by the same title as the grantor himself. Casualties, which are a feature of land held in feu, are certain payments made to the superior, contingent on the happening of certain events. The most important was the payment of an amount equal to one year’s feu-duty by a new holder, whether heir or purchaser of the feu. The Conveyancing Act of 1874 abolished casualties in all feus after that date, and power was given to redeem this burden on feus already existing. If the vassal does not pay the feu-duty for two years, the superior, among other remedies, may obtain by legal process a decree of irritancy, whereupon tinsel or forfeiture of the feu follows. Previously to 1832 only the vassals of the crown had votes in parliamentary elections for the Scots counties, and this made in favour of sub-infeudation as against sale outright. In Orkney and Shetland land is still largely possessed as udal property, a holding derived or handed down from the time when these islands belonged to Norway. Such lands may be converted into feus at the will of the proprietor and held from the crown or Lord Dundas. At one time the system of conveyancing by which the transfer of feus was effected was curious and complicated, requiring the presence of parties on the land itself and the symbolical handing over of the property, together with the registration of various documents. But legislation since the middle of the 19th century has changed all that. The system of feuing in Scotland, as contrasted with that of long leaseholds in England, has tended to secure greater solidity and firmness in the average buildings of the northern country.

See Erskine’s Principles; Bell’s Principles; Rankine, Law of Landownership in Scotland.

FEUCHÈRES, SOPHIE, Baronne de (1795-1840), Anglo-French adventuress, was born at St Helens, Isle of Wight, in 1795, the daughter of a drunken fisherman named Dawes. She grew up in the workhouse, went up to London as a servant, and became the mistress of the duc de Bourbon, afterwards prince de Condé. She was ambitious, and he had her well educated not only in modern languages but, as her exercise books—still extant—show, in Greek and Latin. He took her to Paris and, to prevent scandal and to qualify her to be received at court, had her married in 1818 to Adrien Victor de Feuchères, a major in the Royal Guards. The prince provided her dowry, made her husband his aide-de-camp and a baron. The baroness, pretty and clever, became a person of consequence at the court of Louis XVIII. De Feuchères, however, finally discovered the relations between his wife and Condé, whom he had been assured was her father, left her—he obtained a legal separation in 1827—and told the king, who thereupon forbade her appearance at court. Thanks to her influence, however, Condé was induced in 1829 to sign a will bequeathing about ten million francs to her, and the rest of his estate—more than sixty-six millions—to the duc d’Aumale, fourth son of Louis Philippe. Again she was in high favour. Charles X. received her at court, Talleyrand visited her, her niece married a marquis and her nephew was made a baron. Condé, wearied by his mistress’s importunities, and but half pleased by the advances made him by the government of July, had made up his mind to leave France secretly. When on the 27th of August 1830 he was found hanging dead from his window, the baroness was suspected and an inquiry was held, but the evidence of death being the result of any crime appearing insufficient, she was not prosecuted. Hated as she was alike by legitimatists and republicans, life in Paris was no longer agreeable for her, and she returned to London, where she died in December 1840.

FEUCHTERSLEBEN, ERNST, Freiherr von (1806-1849), Austrian physician, poet and philosopher, was born in Vienna on the 29th of April 1806; of an old Saxon noble family. He attended the “Theresian Academy” in his native city, and in 1825 entered its university as a student of medicine. In 1833 he obtained the degree of doctor of medicine, settled in Vienna as a practising surgeon, and in 1834 married. The young doctor kept up his connexion with the university, where he lectured, and in 1844 was appointed dean of the faculty of medicine. He cultivated the acquaintance of Franz Grillparzer, Heinrich Laube, and other intellectual lights of the Viennese world, interested himself greatly in educational matters, and in 1848, while refusing the presidency of the ministry of education, accepted the appointment of under secretary of state in that department. His health, however, gave way, and he died at Vienna on the 3rd of September 1849. He was not only a clever physician, but a poet of fine aesthetical taste and a philosopher. Among his medical works may be mentioned: Über das Hippokratische erste Buch von der Diät (Vienna, 1835), Ärzte und Publicum (Vienna, 1848) and Lehrbuch der ärztlichen Seelenkunde (1845). His poetical works include Gedichte (Stutt. 1836), among which is the well-known beautiful hymn, which Mendelssohn set to music. “Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rat.” As a philosopher he is best known by his Zur Diätetik der Seele [Dietetics of the soul] (Vienna, 1838), which attained great popularity, and the tendency of which, in contrast to Hufeland’s Makrobiotik (On the Art of Prolonging Life), is to show the true way of rendering life harmonious and lovely. This work had by 1906 gone into fifty editions. Noteworthy also is his Beiträge zur Litteratur-, Kunst- und Lebenstheorie (Vienna, 1837-1841), and an anthology, Geist der deutschen Klassiker (Vienna, 1851; 3rd ed. 1865-1866).

His collected works (with the exception of the purely medical ones) were published in 7 vols. by Fr. Hebbel (Vienna, 1851-1853). See M. Necker, “Ernst von Feuchtersleben, der Freund Grillparzers,” in the Jahrbuch der Grillparzer Gesellschaft, vol. iii. (Vienna, 1893).

FEUD, animosity, hatred, especially a permanent condition of hostilities between persons, and hence applied to a state of private warfare between tribes, clans or families, a “vendetta.” The word appears in Mid. Eng. as fede, which came through the O. Fr. from the O. High Ger. fehida, modern Fehde. The O. Teutonic faiho, an adjective, the source of fehida, gives the O. Eng. fáh, foe. “Fiend,” originally an enemy (cf. Ger. Feind), hence the enemy of mankind, the devil, and so any evil spirit, is probably connected with the same source. The word fede was of Scottish usage, but in the 16th century took the form foode, fewd in English. The New English Dictionary points out that “feud, fee (Lat. feudum) could not have influenced the change, for it appears fifty years later than the first instances of foode, &c., and was only used by writers on feudalism.” For the etymology of “feud” (feudum) see Fee, and for its history see Feudalism.

FEUDALISM (from Late Lat. feodum or feudum, a fee or fiel; see Fee). In every case of institutional growth in history two things are to be clearly distinguished from the beginning for a correct understanding of the process and its results. One of these is the change of conditions in the political or social environment which made growth necessary. The other is the already existing institutions which began to be transformed to meet the new needs. In studying the origin and growth of political feudalism, the distinction is easy to make. The all-prevailing need of the later Roman and early medieval society was protection—protection against the sudden attacks of invading tribes or revolted peasants, against oppressive neighbours, against the unwarranted demands of government officers, or even against the legal but too heavy exactions of the government itself. In the days of the decaying empire and of the chaotic German settlement, the weak freeman, the small landowner, was exposed to attack in almost every relation of life and on every side. The protection which normally it is the business of government to furnish he could no longer obtain. He must seek protection elsewhere wherever he could get it, and pay the price demanded for it. This is the great social fact—the failure of government to perform one of its most primary duties, the necessity of finding some substitute in private life—extending in greater or less degree through the whole formative period of feudalism, which explains the transformation of institutions that brought it into existence. Similar conditions have produced an organization which may be called feudal, in various countries, and in widely separated periods of history. While these different feudal systems have shown a general similarity of organization, there has been also great variation in their details, because they have started from different institutions and developed in different ways. The feudal system with which history most concerns itself is that of medieval western Europe, and it is that which will be here described.

The institutions which the need of protection seized upon when it first began to turn away from the state were twofold. They had both long existed in the private, not public, relations of the Romans, and they had up to this time shown no tendency to grow. One of them related to the person, to the man himself, without reference to property, the other related to land. There are thus distinguished at the beginning those two great sides of feudalism which remained to the end of its history more or less distinct, the personal relation and the land relation. The personal institution needs little description. It was the Roman patron and client relationship which had remained in existence into the days of the empire, in later times less important perhaps legally than socially, and which had been reinforced in Gaul by very similar practices in use among the Celts before their conquest. The description of this institution which has come down to us from Roman sources of the days when feudalism was beginning is not so detailed as we could wish, but we can see plainly enough that it met a frequent need, that it was called by a new name, the patrocinium, and that it was firmly enough entrenched in usage to survive the German conquest, and to be taken up and continued by the conquerors. In its new use, alike in the later Roman and the early German state, the landless freeman who could not support himself went to some powerful man, stated his need, and offered his services, those proper to a freeman, in return for shelter and support. This transaction, which was called commendation, gave rise in the German state to a written contract which related the facts and provided a penalty for its violation. It created a relationship of protection and support on one side, and of free service on the other.

The other institution, relating to land, was that known to the Roman law as the precarium, a name derived from one of its essential features through all its history, the prayer of the suppliant by which the relationship was begun. The precarium was a form of renting land not intended primarily for income, but for use when the lease was made from friendship for example, or as a reward, or to secure a debt. Legally its characteristic feature was that the lessee had no right of any kind against the grantor. The owner could call in his land and terminate the relation at any time, for any reason, or for none at all. Even a definite understanding at the outset that the lease might be enjoyed to a specified date was no protection. It followed of course that the heir had no right in the land which his father held in this way, nor was the heir of the donor bound by his father’s act. The legal character of this transaction is summed up in a well-known passage in the Digest:—Interdictum de precariis merito introductum est, quia nulla eo nomine juris civilis actio esset, magis enim ad donationes et beneficii causam, quam ad negotii contracti spectat precarii conditio. This may be paraphrased as follows:—The precarium tenant may employ the interdict against a third party, because he cannot use the ordinary civil action, his holding being not a matter of business but rather of favour and kindness. It should be noted that from its very beginning the land relationship of feudalism was not created primarily for the grantor’s income, but that it emphasized in the most striking way his continued ownership.

As used for protection in later Roman days the precarium gave rise to what was called the commendation of lands, patrocinium fundorum. The poor landowner, likely to lose all that he had from one kind of oppression or another, went to the great landowner, his neighbour, whose position gave him immunity from attack or the power to prevent official abuses, and begged to be protected. The rich man answered, I can only protect my own. Of necessity the poor man must surrender to his powerful neighbour the ownership of his lands, which he then received back as a precarium—gaining protection during his lifetime at the cost of his children, who were left without legal claim and compelled to make the best terms they could. Applied to this use the precarium found extensive employment in the last age of the empire. The government looked on the practice with great disfavour, because it transferred large areas from the easy access of the state to an ownership beyond its reach. The laws repeatedly forbade it under increasing penalties, but clearly it could not be stopped. The motive was too strong on both sides—the need of protection on one side, the natural desire to increase large possessions and means of self-defence on the other.

These practices the Frankish conquerors of Gaul found in full possession of society when they entered into that province. They seem to have understood them at once, and, like much else Roman, to have made them their own without material change. The patrocinium they were made ready to understand by the existence of a somewhat similar institution among themselves, the comitatus, described by Tacitus. In this institution the chief of the tribe, or of some plainly marked division of the tribe, gathered about himself a band of chosen warriors, who formed a kind of private military force and body-guard. The special features of the institution were the strong tie of faith and service which bound the man, the support and rewards given by the lord, and the pride of both in the relationship. The patrocinium might well seem to the German only a form of the comitatus, but it was a form which presented certain advantages in his actual situation. The chief of these was perhaps the fact that it was not confined to king or tribal chief, but that every noble was able in the Roman practice to surround himself with his organized private army. Probably this fact, together with the more general fact of the absorption in most things of the German in the Roman, accounts for the substitution of the patrocinium for the comitatus which took place under the Merovingians.

This change did not occur, however, without some modification of the Roman customs. The comitatus made contributions of its own to future feudalism, to some extent to its institutional side, largely to the ideas and spirit which ruled in it. Probably the ceremony which grew into feudal homage, and the oath of fealty, certainly the honourable position of the vassal and his pride in the relationship, the strong tie which bound lord and man together, and the idea that faith and service were due on both sides in equal measure, we may trace to German sources. But we must not forget that the origin of the vassal relationship, as an institution, is to be found on Roman and not on German soil. The comitatus developed and modified, it did not originate. Nor was the feudal system established in any sense by the settlement of the comitatus group on the conquered land. The uniting of the personal and the land sides of feudalism came long after the conquest, and in a different way.

To the precarium German institutions offered no close parallel. The advantages, however, which it afforded were obvious, and this side of feudalism developed as rapidly after the conquest as the personal. The new German noble was as eager to extend the size of his lands and to increase the numbers of his dependants as the Roman had been. The new German government furnished no better protection from local violence, nor was it able any more effectively to check the practices which were creating feudalism; indeed for a long time it made no attempt to do so. Precarium and patrocinium easily passed from the Roman empire to the Frankish kingdom, and became as firmly rooted in the new society as they had ever been in the old. Up to this point we have seen only the small landowner and the landless man entering into these relations. Feudalism could not be established, however, until the great of the land had adopted them for themselves, and had begun to enter the clientage of others and to hold lands by the precarium tenure. The first step towards this result was easily and quickly taken. The same class continued to furnish the king’s men, and to form his household and body-guard whether the relation was that of the patrocinium or the comitatus, and to be made noble by entering into it. It was later that they became clients of one another, and in part at least as a result of their adoption of the precarium tenure. In this latter step the influence of the Church rather than of the king seems to have been effective. The large estates which pious intentions had bestowed on the Church it was not allowed to alienate. It could most easily make them useful to gain the influence and support which it needed, and to provide for the public functions which fell to its share, by employing the precarium tenure. On the other side, the great men coveted the wide estates of bishop and abbot, and were ready without persuasion to annex portions of them to their own on the easy terms of this tenure, not always indeed observed by the holder, or able to be enforced by the Church. The employment of the precarium by the Church seems to have been one of the surest means by which this form of landholding was carried over from the Romans to the Frankish period and developed into new forms. It came to be made by degrees the subject of written contract, by which the rights of the holder were more definitely defined and protected than had been the case in Roman law. The length of time for which the holding should last came to be specified, at first for a term of years and then for life, and some payment to the grantor was provided for, not pretending to represent the economic value of the land, but only to serve as a mark of his continued ownership.

These changes characterize the Merovingian age of Frankish history. That period had practically ended, however, before these two institutions showed any tendency to join together as they were joined in later feudalism. Nor had the king up to that time exerted any apparent influence on the processes that were going forward. Grants of land of the Merovingian kings had carried with them ownership and not a limited right, and the king’s patrocinium had not widened in extent in the direction of the later vassal relation. It was the advent of the Carolingian princes and the difficulties which they had to overcome that carried these institutions a stage further forward. Making their way up from a position among the nobility to be the rulers of the land, and finally to supplant the kings, the Carolingians had especial need of resources from which to purchase and reward faithful support. This need was greatly increased when the Arab attack on southern Gaul forced them to transform a large part of the old Frankish foot army into cavalry. The fundamental principle of the Frankish military system, that the man served at his own expense, was still unchanged. It had indeed begun to break down under the strain of frequent and distant campaigns, but it was long before it was changed as the recognized rule of medieval service. If now, in addition to his own expenses, the soldier must provide a horse and its keeping, the system was likely to break down altogether. It was this problem which led to the next step. To solve it the early Carolingian princes, especially Charles Martel, who found the royal domains exhausted and their own inadequate, grasped at the land of the Church. Here was enough to endow an army, if some means could be devised to permit its use. This means was found in the precarium tenure. Keeping alive, as it did, the fact of the grantor’s ownership, it did not in form deprive the Church of the land. Recognizing that ownership by a small payment only, not corresponding to the value of the land, it left the larger part of the income to meet the need which had arisen. At the same time undoubtedly the new holder of the land, if not already the vassal of the prince, was obliged to become so and to assume an obligation of service with a mounted force when called upon. This expedient seems to have solved the problem. It gave rise to the numerous precariae verbo regis, of the Church records, and to the condemnation of Charles Martel in the visions of the clergy to worse difficulties in the future life than he had overcome in this. The most important consequences of the expedient, however, were not intended or perceived at the time. It brought together the two sides of feudalism, vassalage and benefice, as they were now commonly called, and from this age their union into what is really a single institution was rapid; it emphasized military service as an essential obligation of the vassal; and it spread the vassal relation between individual proprietors and the sovereign widely over the state.

In the period that followed, the reign of Charlemagne and the later Carolingian age, continued necessities, military and civil, forced the kings to recognize these new institutions more fully, even when standing in a position between the government and the subject, intercepting the public duties of the latter. The incipient feudal baron had not been slow to take advantage of the break-down of the old German military system. As in the last days of the Roman empire the poor landowner had found his only refuge from the exactions of the government in the protection of the senator, who could in some way obtain exemptions, so the poor Frank could escape the ruinous demands of military service only by submitting himself and his lands to the count, who did not hesitate on his side to force such submission. Charlemagne legislated with vigour against this tendency, trying to make it easier for the poor freeman to fulfil his military duties directly to the state, and to forbid the misuse of power by the rich, but he was not more successful than the Roman government had been in a like attempt. Finally the king found himself compelled to recognize existing facts, to lay upon the lord the duty of producing his men in the field and to allow him to appear as their commander. This solved the difficulty of military service apparently, but with decisive consequences. It completed the transformation of the army into a vassal army; it completed the recognition of feudalism by the state, as a legitimate relation between different ranks of the people; and it recognized the transformation in a great number of cases of a public duty into a private obligation.

In the meantime another institution had grown up in this Franco-Roman society, which probably began and certainly assisted in another transformation of the same kind. This is the immunity. Suggested probably by Roman practices, possibly developed directly from them, it received a great extension in the Merovingian period, at first and especially in the interest of the Church, but soon of lay land-holders. By the grant of an immunity to a proprietor the royal officers, the count and his representatives, were forbidden to enter his lands to exercise any public function there. The duties which the count should perform passed to the proprietor, who now represented the government for all his tenants free and unfree. Apparently no modification of the royal rights was intended by this arrangement, but the beginning of a great change had really been made. The king might still receive the same revenues and the same services from the district held by the lord as formerly, but for their payment a private person in his capacity as overlord was now responsible. In the course of a long period characterized by a weak central government, it was not difficult to enlarge the rights which the lord thus obtained, to exclude even the king’s personal authority from the immunity, and to translate the duties and payments which the tenant had once owed to the state into obligations which he owed to his lord, even finally into incidents of his tenure. The most important public function whose transformation into a private possession was assisted by the growth of the immunity was the judicial. This process had probably already begun in a small way in the growth of institutions which belong to the economic side of feudalism, the organization of agriculture on the great estates. Even in Roman days the proprietor had exercised a jurisdiction over the disputes of his unfree tenants. Whether this could by its own growth have been extended over his free tenants and carried so far as to absorb a local court, like that of the hundred, into private possession, is not certain. It seems probable that it could. But in any case, the immunity easily carried the development of private jurisdiction through these stages. The lord’s court took the place of the public court in civil, and even by degrees in criminal cases. The plaintiff, even if he were under another lord, was obliged to sue in the court of the defendant’s lord, and the portion of the fine for a breach of the peace which should have gone to the state went in the end to the lord.

The transfer of the judicial process, and of the financial and administrative sides of the government as well, into private possession, was not, however, accomplished entirely by the road of the immunity. As government weakened after the strong days of Charlemagne, and disorder, invasion, and the difficulty of intercommunication tended to throw the locality more and more upon its own resources, the officer who had once been the means of centralization, the count, found success in the effort for independence which even Charlemagne had scarcely overcome. He was able to throw off responsibility to any central authority, and to exercise the powers which had been committed to him as an agent of the king, as if they were his own private possession. Nor was the king’s aid lacking to this method of dividing up the royal authority, any more than to the immunity, for it became a frequent practice to make the administrative office into a fief, and to grant it to be held in that form of property by the count. In this way the feudal county, or duchy, formed itself, corresponding in most cases only roughly to the old administrative divisions of the state, for within the bounds of the county there had often formed private feudal possessions too powerful to be forced into dependence upon the count, sometimes the vice-comes had followed the count’s example, and often, on the other hand, the count had attached to his county like private possessions of his own lying outside its boundaries. In time the private lord, who had never been an officer of the state, assumed the old administrative titles and called himself count or viscount, and perhaps with some sort of right, for his position in his territories, through the development of the immunity, did not differ from that now held by the man who had been originally a count.

In these two ways then the feudal system was formed, and took possession of the state territorially, and of its functions in government. Its earliest stage of growth was that of the private possession only. Under a government too weak to preserve order, the great landowner formed his estate into a little territory which could defend itself. His smaller neighbours who needed protection came to him for it. He forced them to become his dependants in return under a great variety of forms, but especially developing thereby the precarium land tenure and the patrocinium personal service, and organizing a private jurisdiction over his tenants, and a private army for defence. Finally he secured from the king an immunity which excluded the royal officers from his lands and made him a quasi-representative of the state. In the meantime his neighbour the count had been following a similar process, and in addition he had enjoyed considerable advantages of his own. His right to exact military, financial and judicial duties for the state he had used to force men to become his dependants, and then he had stood between them and the state, freeing them from burdens which he threw with increased weight upon those who still stood outside his personal protection. In ignorance of their danger, and later in despair of getting public services adequately performed in any other way, the kings first adopted for themselves some of the forms and practices which had thus grown up, and by degrees recognized them as legally proper for all classes. It proved to be easier to hold the lord responsible for the public duties of all his dependants because he was the king’s vassal and by attaching them as conditions to the benefices which he held, than to enforce them directly upon every subject.

When this stage was reached the formative age of feudalism may be considered at an end. When the government of the state had entered into feudalism, and the king was as much senior as king; when the vassal relationship was recognized as a proper and legal foundation of public duties; when the two separate sides of early feudalism were united as the almost universal rule, so that a man received a fief because he owed a vassal’s duties, or looked at in the other and finally prevailing way, that he owed a vassal’s duties because he had received a fief; and finally, when the old idea of the temporary character of the precarium tenure was lost sight of, and the right of the vassal’s heir to receive his father’s holding was recognized as the general rule—then the feudal system may be called full grown. Not that the age of growth was really over. Feudal history was always a becoming, always a gradual passing from one stage to another, so long as feudalism continued to form the main organization of society. But we may say that the formative age was over when these features of the system had combined to be its characteristic marks. What follows is rather a perfection of details in the direction of logical completeness. To assign any specific date to the end of this formative age is of course impossible, but meaning by the end what has just been stated, we shall not be far wrong if we place it somewhere near the beginning of the 10th century.

Before we leave the history of feudal origins another word is necessary. We have traced a definite line of descent for feudal institutions from Roman days through the Merovingian and Carolingian ages to the 10th century. That line of descent can be made out with convincing clearness and with no particular difficulty from epoch to epoch, from the precarium and the patrocinium, through the benefice and commendation, to the fief and vassalage. But the definiteness of this line should not cause us to overlook the fact that there was during these centuries much confusion of custom and practice. All round and about this line of descent there was a crowd of varying forms branching off more or less widely from the main stem, different kinds of commendation, different forms of precarium, some of which varied greatly from that through which the fief descends, and some of which survived in much the old character and under the old name for a long time after later feudalism was definitely established. The variety and seeming confusion which reign in feudal society, under uniform controlling principles, rule also in the ages of beginning. It is easy to lose one’s bearings by over-emphasizing the importance of variation and exception. It is indeed true that what was the exception, the temporary offshoot, might have become the main line. It would then have produced a system which would have been feudal, in the wide sense of the term, but it would have been marked by different characteristics, it would have operated in a somewhat different way. The crowd of varying forms should not prevent us from seeing that we can trace through their confusion the line along which the characteristic traits and institutions of European feudalism, as it actually was, were growing constantly more distinct. That is the line of the origin of the feudal system. (See also France: Law and Institutions.)

The growth which we have traced took place within the Frankish empire. When we turn to Anglo-Saxon England we find a different situation and a different result. There precarium and patrocinium were lacking. Certain forms of personal commendation did develop, certain forms of dependent land tenure came into use. These do not show, however, the characteristic marks of the actual line of feudal descent. They belong rather in the varying forms around that line. Scholars are not yet agreed as to what would have been their result if their natural development had not been cut off by the violent introduction of Frankish feudalism with the Norman conquest, whether the historical feudal system, or a feudal system in the general sense. To the writer it seems clear that the latter is the most that can be asserted. They were forms which may rightly be called feudal, but only in the wider meaning in which we speak of the feudalism of Japan, or of Central Africa, not in the sense of 12th-century European feudalism; Saxon commendation may rightly be called vassalage, but only as looking back to the early Frankish use of the term for many varying forms of practice, not as looking forward to the later and more definite usage of completed feudalism; and such use of the terms feudal and vassalage is sure to be misleading. It is better to say that European feudalism is not to be found in England before the Conquest, not even in its beginnings. If these had really been in existence it would require no argument to show the fact. There is no trace of the distinctive marks of Frankish feudalism in Saxon England, not where military service may be thought to rest upon the land, nor even in the rare cases where the tenant seems to some to be made responsible for it, for between these cases as they are described in the original accounts, legally interpreted, and the feudal conception of the vassal’s military service, there is a great gulf.

In turning from the origin of feudalism to a description of the completed system one is inevitably reminded of the words with which de Quincey opens the second part of his essay on style. He says: “It is a natural resource that whatsoever we find it difficult to investigate as a result, we endeavour to follow as a growth. Failing analytically to probe its nature, historically we seek relief to our perplexities by tracing its origin.... Thus for instance when any feudal institution (be it Gothic, Norman, or Anglo-Saxon) eludes our deciphering faculty from the imperfect records of its use and operation, then we endeavour conjecturally to amend our knowledge by watching the circumstances in which that institution arose.” The temptation to use the larger part of any space allotted to the history of feudalism for a discussion of origins does not arise alone from greater interest in that phase of the subject. It is almost impossible even with the most discriminating care to give a brief account of completed feudalism and convey no wrong impression. We use the term “feudal system” for convenience sake, but with a degree of impropriety if it conveys the meaning “systematic.” Feudalism in its most flourishing age was anything but systematic. It was confusion roughly organized. Great diversity prevailed everywhere, and we should not be surprised to find some different fact or custom in every lordship. Anglo-Norman feudalism attained a logical completeness and a uniformity of practice which, in the feudal age proper, can hardly be found elsewhere through so large a territory; but in Anglo-Norman feudalism the exception holds perhaps as large a place as the regular, and the uniformity itself was due to the most serious of exceptions from the feudal point of view—centralization under a powerful monarchy.

But too great emphasis upon variation conveys also a wrong impression. Underlying all the apparent confusion of fact and practice were certain fundamental principles and relationships, which were alike everywhere, and which really gave shape to everything that was feudal, no matter what its form might be. The chief of these are the following: the relation of vassal and lord; the principle that every holder of land is a tenant and not an owner, until the highest rank is reached, sometimes even the conception rules in that rank; that the tenure by which a thing of value is held is one of honourable service, not intended to be economic, but moral and political in character; the principle of mutual obligations of loyalty, protection and service binding together all the ranks of this society from the highest to the lowest; and the principle of contract between lord and tenant, as determining all rights, controlling their modification, and forming the foundation of all law. There was actually in fact and practice a larger uniformity than this short list implies, because these principles tended to express themselves in similar forms, and because historical derivation from a common source in Frankish feudalism tended to preserve some degree of uniformity in the more important usages.

The foundation of the feudal relationship proper was the fief, which was usually land, but might be any desirable thing, as an office, a revenue in money or kind, the right to collect a toll, or operate a mill. In return for the fief, the man became the vassal of his lord; he knelt before him, and, with his hands between his lord’s hands, promised him fealty and service; he rose to his feet and took the oath of fealty which bound him to the obligations he had assumed in homage; he received from his lord ceremonial investiture with the fief. The faithful performance of all the duties he had assumed in homage constituted the vassal’s right and title to his fief. So long as they were fulfilled, he, and his heir after him, held the fief as his property, practically and in relation to all under tenants as if he were the owner. In the ceremony of homage and investiture, which is the creative contract of feudalism, the obligations assumed by the two parties were, as a rule, not specified in exact terms. They were determined by local custom. What they were, however, was as well known, as capable of proof, and as adequate a check on innovation by either party, as if committed to writing. In many points of detail the vassal’s services differed widely in different parts of the feudal world. We may say, however, that they fall into two classes, general and specific. The general included all that might come under the idea of loyalty, seeking the lord’s interests, keeping his secrets, betraying the plans of his enemies, protecting his family, &c. The specific services are capable of more definite statement, and they usually received exact definition in custom and sometimes in written documents. The most characteristic of these was the military service, which included appearance in the field on summons with a certain force, often armed in a specified way, and remaining a specified length of time. It often included also the duty of guarding the lord’s castle, and of holding one’s own castle subject to the plans of the lord for the defence of his fief. Hardly less characteristic was court service, which included the duty of helping to form the court on summons, of taking one’s own cases to that court instead of to some other, and of submitting to its judgments. The duty of giving the lord advice was often demanded and fulfilled in sessions of the court, and in these feudal courts the obligations of lord and vassal were enforced, with an ultimate appeal to war. Under this head may be enumerated also the financial duties of the vassal, though these were not regarded by the feudal law as of the nature of the tenure, i.e. failure to pay them did not lead to confiscation, but they were collected by suit and distraint like any debt. They did not have their origin in economic considerations, but were either intended to mark the vassal’s tenant relation, like the relief, or to be a part of his service, like the aid, that is, he was held to come to the aid of his lord in a case of financial as of military necessity. The relief was a sum paid by the heir for the lord’s recognition of his succession. The aids were paid on a few occasions, determined by custom, where the lord was put to unusual expense, as for his ransom when captured by the enemy, or for the knighting of his eldest son. There was great variety regarding the occasion and amount of these payments, and in some parts of the feudal world they did not exist at all. The most lucrative of the lord’s rights were wardship and marriage, but the feudal theory of these also was non-economic. The fief fell into the hands of the lord, and he enjoyed its revenues during the minority of the heir, because the minor could not perform the duties by which it was held. The heiress must marry as the lord wished, because he had a right to know that the holder of the fief could meet the obligations resting upon it. Both wardship and marriage were, however, valuable rights which the lord could exercise himself or sell to others. These were by no means the only rights and duties which could be described as existing in feudalism, but they are the most characteristic, and on them, or some of them, as a foundation, the whole structure of feudal obligation was built, however detailed.

Ideally regarded, feudalism covered Europe with a network of these fiefs, rising in graded ranks one above the other from the smallest, the knight’s fee, at the bottom, to the king at the top, who was the supreme landowner, or who held the kingdom from God. Actually not even in the most regular of feudal countries, like England or Germany, was there any fixed gradation of rank, titles or size. A knight might hold directly of the king, a count of a viscount, a bishop of an abbot, or the king himself of one of his own vassals, or even of a vassal’s vassal, and in return his vassal’s vassal might hold another fief directly of him. The case of the count of Champagne, one of the peers of France, is a famous example. His great territory was held only in small part of the king of France. He held a portion of a foreign sovereign, the emperor, and other portions of the duke of Burgundy, of two archbishops, of four bishops, and of the abbot of St Denis. Frequently did great lay lords, as in this case, hold lands by feudal tenure of ecclesiastics.

It is now possible perhaps to get some idea of the way in which the government of a feudal country was operated. The early German governments whose chief functions, military, judicial, financial, legislative, were carried on by the freemen of the nation because they were members of the body politic, and were performed as duties owed to the community for its defence and sustenance, no longer existed. New forms of organization had arisen in which indeed these conceptions had not entirely disappeared, but in which the vast majority of cases a wholly different idea of the ground of service and obligation prevailed. Superficially, for example, the feudal court differed but little from its Teutonic predecessor. It was still an assembly court. Its procedure was almost the same as the earlier. It often included the same classes of men. Saxon Witenagemot and Norman Curia regis seem very much alike. But the members of the feudal court met, not to fulfil a duty owed to the community, but a private obligation which they had assumed in return for the fiefs they held, and in the history of institutions it is differences of this sort which are the determining principles. The feudal state was one in which, as it has been said, private law had usurped the place of public law. Public duty had become private obligation. To understand the feudal state it is essential to make clear to one’s mind that all sorts of services, which men ordinarily owe to the public or to one another, were translated into a form of rent paid for the use of land, and defined and enforced by a private contract. In every feudal country, however, something of the earlier conception survived. A general military levy was occasionally made. Something like taxation occasionally occurred, though the government was usually sustained by the scanty feudal payments, by the proceeds of justice and by the income of domain manors. About the office of king more of this earlier conception gathered than elsewhere in the state, and gradually grew, aided not merely by traditional ideas, but by the active influence of the Bible, and soon of the Roman law. The kingship formed the nucleus of new governments as the feudal system passed away.

Actual government in the feudal age was primitive and undifferentiated. Its chief and almost only organ, for kingdom and barony alike, was the curia—a court formed of the vassals. This acted at once and without any consciousness of difference of function, as judiciary, as legislature, in so far as there was any in the feudal period, and as council, and it exercised final supervision and control over revenue and administration. Almost all the institutions of modern states go back to the curia regis, branching off from it at different dates as the growing complexity of business forced differentiation of function and personnel. In action it was an assembly court, deciding all questions by discussion and the weight of opinion, though its decisions obtained their legal validity by the formal pronunciation of the presiding member, i.e. of the lord whose court it was. It can readily be seen that in a government of this kind the essential operative element was the baron. So long as the government remained dependent on the baron, it remained feudal in its character. When conditions so changed that government could free itself from its dependence on the baron, feudalism disappeared as the organization of society; when a professional class arose to form the judiciary, when the increased circulation of money made regular taxation possible and enabled the government to buy military and other services, and when better means of intercommunication and the growth of common ideas made a wide centralization possible and likely to be permanent. Feudalism had performed a great service, during an age of disintegration, by maintaining a general framework of government, while allowing the locality to protect and care for itself. When the function of protection and local supervision could be resumed by the general government the feudal age ended. In nearly all the states of Europe this end was reached during, or by the close of, the 13th century.

At the moment, however, when feudalism was disappearing as the organization of society, it gave rise to results which in a sense continued it into after ages and even to our own day. One of these results was the system of law which it created. As feudalism passed from its age of supremacy into its age of decline, its customs tended to crystallize into fixed forms. At the same time a class of men arose interested in these forms for their own sake, professional lawyers or judges, who wrote down for their own and others’ use the feudal usages with which they were familiar. The great age of these codes was the 13th century, and especially the second half of it. The codes in their turn tended still further to harden these usages into fixed forms, and we may date from the end of the 13th century an age of feudal law regulating especially the holding and transfer of land, and much more uniform in character than the law of the feudal age proper. This was particularly the case in parts of France and Germany where feudalism continued to regulate the property relations of lords and vassals longer than elsewhere, and where the underlying economic feudalism remained in large part unchanged. In this later pseudo-feudalism, however, the political had given way to the economic, and customs which had once had no economic significance came to have that only.

Feudalism formed the starting-point also of the later social nobilities of Europe. They drew from it their titles and ranks and many of their regulative ideas, though these were formed into more definite and regular systems than ever existed in feudalism proper. It was often the policy of kings to increase the social privileges and legal exemptions of the nobility while taking away all political power, so that it is necessary in the history of institutions to distinguish sharply between these nobilities and the feudal baronage proper. It is only in certain backward parts of Europe that the terms feudal and baronage in any technical sense can be used of the nobility of the 15th century.

(G. B. A.)

Bibliography.—For more detailed information the reader is referred to the articles English Law; France: French Law and Institutions, Villenage; Manor; Scutage; Knight Service; Hide. For a general sketch of Feudalism the chapters in tome ii. of the Histoire générale of Lavisse and Rambaud should be consulted. Other general works are J.T. Abdy, Feudalism (1890); Paul Roth, Feudalität und Unterthanverband (Weimar, 1863); and Geschichte des Beneficialwesens (1850); M.M. Kovalevsky, Ökonomische Entwickelung Europas (1902); E. de Laveleye, De la propriété et de ses formes primitives (1891); and The Origin of Property in Land, a translation by M. Ashley from the works of N.D. Fustel de Coulanges, with an introductory chapter by Professor W.J. Ashley. Two other works of value are Sir H.S. Maine, Village Communities in the East and West (1876); and Léon Gautier, La Chevalerie (Paris, 1884; Eng. trans. by Henry Frith, Chivalry, London, 1891).

For feudalism in England see the various constitutional histories, especially W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, vol. i. (ed. 1897). Very valuable also are the writings of Mr J.H. Round, of Professor F.W. Maitland and of Professor P. Vinogradoff. Among Round’s works may be mentioned Feudal England (1895); Geoffrey de Mandeville (1892); and Studies on the Red Book of the Exchequer (1898). Maitland’s Domesday Book and Beyond (Cambridge, 1897) is indispensable; and the same remark applies to his History of English Law before the time of Edward I. (Cambridge, 1895), written in conjunction with Sir Frederick Pollock. Vinogradoff has illuminated the subject in his Villainage in England (1892) and his English Society in the 11th century (1908). See also J.F. Baldwin, The Scutage and Knight Service in England (Chicago, 1897); Rudolf Gneist, Adel und Ritterschaft in England (1853); and F. Seebohm, The English Village Community (1883).

For feudalism in France see N.D. Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France (Les Origines du système féodal, 1890; Les Transformations de la royauté pendant l’époque carolingienne, 1892); A. Luchaire, Histoire des institutions monarchiques de la France sous les premiers Capétiens, 987-1180 (2nd ed., 1890); and Manuel des institutions françaises: période des Capétiens directs (1892); J. Flach, Les Origines de l’ancienne France (1886-1893); Paul Viollet, Droit public: Histoires des institutions politiques et administratives de la France (1890-1898); and Henri Sée, Les classes rurales et le régime domanial (1901).

For Germany see G. Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte (Kiel and Berlin, 1844 foll.); H. Brunner, Grundzüge der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte (Leipzig, 1901); V. Menzel, Die Entstehung des Lebenswesens (Berlin, 1890); and G.L. von Maurer’s works on the early institutions of the Germans.

Digest, xliii. 26. 12.

Ibid. xliii. 26. 14, and cf. 17.

Salvian, De gub. Dei, v. 8, ed. Halm, p. 62.

H. Brunner, Zeitschr. der sav. Stift. für Rechtsgeschichte, Germ. Abth. viii. 1-38 (1887). Also in his Forschungen, 39-74 (1894).

See F. Dahn, Könige der Germanen, viii. 2, 90 ff.

F. Dahn, Könige der Germanen, viii. 2, 197.

G. Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, vi. 112 ff. (1896). Most fully described in G. Seeliger, Die soziale u. politische Bedeutung d. Grundherrschaft im früheren Mittelalter (1903).

F. Dahn, Könige, viii. 2, 89-90; 95.

FEUERBACH, ANSELM (1829-1880), German painter, born at Spires, the son of a well-known archaeologist, was the leading classicist painter of the German 19th-century school. He was the first to realize the danger arising from contempt of technique, that mastery of craftsmanship was needed to express even the loftiest ideas, and that an ill-drawn coloured cartoon can never be the supreme achievement in art. After having passed through the art schools of Düsseldorf and Munich, he went to Antwerp and subsequently to Paris, where he benefited by the teaching of Couture, and produced his first masterpiece, “Hafiz at the Fountain” in 1852. He subsequently worked at Karlsruhe, Venice (where he fell under the spell of the greatest school of colourists), Rome and Vienna. He was steeped in classic knowledge, and his figure compositions have the statuesque dignity and simplicity of Greek art. Disappointed with the reception given in Vienna to his design of “The Fall of the Titans” for the ceiling of the Museum of Modelling, he went to live in Venice, where he died in 1880. His works are to be found at the leading public galleries of Germany; Stuttgart has his “Iphigenia”; Karlsruhe, the “Dante at Ravenna”; Munich, the “Medea”; and Berlin, “The Concert,” his last important picture. Among his chief works are also “The Battle of the Amazons,” “Pietà,” “The Symposium of Plato,” “Orpheus and Eurydice” and “Ariosto in the Park of Ferrara.”

FEUERBACH, LUDWIG ANDREAS (1804-1872), German philosopher, fourth son of the eminent jurist (see below), was born at Landshut in Bavaria on the 28th of July 1804. He matriculated at Heidelberg with the intention of pursuing an ecclesiastical career. Through the influence of Prof. Daub he was led to an interest in the then predominant philosophy of Hegel and, in spite of his father’s opposition, went to Berlin to study under the master himself. After two years’ discipleship the Hegelian influence began to slacken. “Theology,” he wrote to a friend, “I can bring myself to study no more. I long to take nature to my heart, that nature before whose depth the faint-hearted theologian shrinks back; and with nature man, man in his entire quality.” These words are a key to Feuerbach’s development. He completed his education at Erlangen with the study of natural science. His first book, published anonymously, Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit (1830, 3rd ed. 1876), contains an attack upon personal immortality and an advocacy of the Spinozistic immortality of reabsorption in nature. These principles, combined with his embarrassed manner of public speaking, debarred him from academic advancement. After some years of struggling, during which he published his Geschichte der neueren Philosophie (2 vols., 1833-1837, 2nd ed. 1844), and Abälard und Heloise (1834, 3rd ed. 1877), he married in 1837 and lived a rural existence at Bruckberg near Nuremberg, supported by his wife’s share in a small porcelain factory. In two works of this period, Pierre Bayle (1838) and Philosophie und Christentum (1839), which deal largely with theology, he held that he had proved “that Christianity has in fact long vanished not only from the reason but from the life of mankind, that it is nothing more than a fixed idea” in flagrant contradiction to the distinctive features of contemporary civilization. This attack is followed up in his most important work, Das Wesen des Christentums (1841), which was translated into English (The Essence of Religion, by George Eliot, 1853, 2nd ed. 1881), French and Russian. Its aim may be described shortly as an effort to humanize theology. He lays it down that man, so far as he is rational, is to himself his own object of thought. Religion is consciousness of the infinite. Religion therefore is “nothing else than the consciousness of the infinity of the consciousness; or, in the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature.” Thus God is nothing else than man: he is, so to speak, the outward projection of man’s inward nature. In part 1 of his book he develops what he calls the “true or anthropological essence of religion.” Treating of God in his various aspects “as a being of the understanding,” “as a moral being or law,” “as love” and so on, Feuerbach shows that in every aspect God corresponds to some feature or need of human nature. “If man is to find contentment in God, he must find himself in God.” In part 2 he discusses the “false or theological essence of religion,” i.e. the view which regards God as having a separate existence over against man. Hence arise various mistaken beliefs, such as the belief in revelation which not only injures the moral sence, but also “poisons, nay destroys, the divinest feeling in man, the sense of truth,” and the belief in sacraments such as the Lord’s Supper, a piece of religious materialism of which “the necessary consequences are superstition and immorality.” In spite of many admirable qualities both of style and matter the Essence of Christianity has never made much impression upon British thought. To treat the actual forms of religion as expressions of our various human needs is a fruitful idea which deserves fuller development than it has yet received; but Feuerbach’s treatment of it is fatally vitiated by his subjectivism. Feuerbach denied that he was rightly called an atheist, but the denial is merely verbal: what he calls “theism” is atheism in the ordinary sense. Feuerbach labours under the same difficulty as Fichte; both thinkers strive in vain to reconcile the religious consciousness with subjectivism.

During the troubles of 1848-1849 Feuerbach’s attack upon orthodoxy made him something of a hero with the revolutionary party; but he never threw himself into the political movement, and indeed had not the qualities of a popular leader. During the period of the diet of Frankfort he had given public lectures on religion at Heidelberg. When the diet closed he withdrew to Bruckberg and occupied himself partly with scientific study, partly with the composition of his Theogonie (1857). In 1860 he was compelled by the failure of the porcelain factory to leave Bruckberg, and he would have suffered the extremity of want but for the assistance of friends supplemented by a public subscription. His last book, Gottheit, Freiheit und Unsterblichkeit, appeared in 1866 (2nd ed., 1890). After a long period of decay he died on the 13th of September 1872.

Feuerbach’s influence has been greatest upon the anti-Christian theologians such as D.F. Strauss, the author of the Leben Jesu, and Bruno Bauer, who like Feuerbach himself had passed over from Hegelianism to a form of naturalism. But many of his ideas were taken up by those who, like Arnold Ruge, had entered into the struggle between church and state in Germany, and those who, like F. Engels and Karl Marx, were leaders in the revolt of labour against the power of capital. His work was too deliberately unsystematic (“keine Philosophie ist meine Philosophie”) ever to make him a power in philosophy. He expressed in an eager, disjointed, but condensed and laboured fashion, certain deep-lying convictions—that philosophy must come back from unsubstantial metaphysics to the solid facts of human nature and natural science, that the human body was no less important than the human spirit (“Der Mensch ist was er isst”) and that Christianity was utterly out of harmony with the age. His convictions gained weight from the simplicity, uprightness and diligence of his character; but they need a more effective justification than he was able to give them.

His works appeared in 10 vols. (Leipzig, 1846-1866); his correspondence has been edited with an indifferent biography by Karl Grün (1874). See A. Lévy, La Philosophie de Feuerbach (1904); M. Meyer, L. Feuerbach’s Moralphilosophie (Berlin, 1899); E. v. Hartmann, Geschichte d. Metaphysik (Leipzig, 1899-1900), ii. 437-444: F. Engels, L. Feuerbach und d. Ausgang d. class, deutsch. Philos. (2nd ed., 1895).

(H. St.)

FEUERBACH, PAUL JOHANN ANSELM, Ritter von (1775-1833), German jurist and writer on criminal law, was born at Hainichen near Jena on the 14th of November 1775. He received his early education at Frankfort on Main, whither his family had removed soon after his birth. At the age of sixteen, however, he ran away from home, and, going to Jena, was helped by relations there to study at the university. In spite of poor health and the most desperate poverty, he made rapid progress. He attended the lectures of Karl Leonhard Reinhold and Gottlieb Hufeland, and soon published some literary essays of more than ordinary merit. In 1795 he took the degree of doctor in philosophy, and in the same year, though he only possessed 150 thalers (£22 : 10s.), he married. It was this step which led him to success and fame, by forcing him to turn from his favourite studies of philosophy and history to that of law, which was repugnant to him, but which offered a prospect of more rapid advancement. His success in this new and uncongenial sphere was soon assured. In 1796 he published Kritik des natürlichen Rechts als Propädeutik zu einer Wissenschaft der natürlichen Rechte, which was followed, in 1798, by Anti-Hobbes, oder über die Grenzen der bürgerlichen Gewalt, a dissertation on the limits of the civil power and the right of resistance on the part of subjects against their rulers, and by Philosophische, juristische Untersuchungen über das Verbrechen des Hochverraths. In 1799 he obtained the degree of doctor of laws. Feuerbach, as the founder of a new theory of penal law, the so-called “psychological-coercive or intimidation theory,” occupied a prominent place in the history of criminal science. His views, which he first made known in his Revision der Grundsätze und Grundbegriffe des positiven peinlichen Rechts (1799), were further elucidated and expounded in the Bibliothek für die peinliche Rechtswissenschaft (1800-1801), an encyclopaedic work produced in conjunction with Karl L.W.G. Grolmann and Ludwig Harscher von Almendingen, and in his famous Lehrbuch des gemeinen in Deutschland geltenden peinlichen Rechts (1801). These works were a powerful protest against vindictive punishment, and did much towards the reformation of the German criminal law. The Carolina (the penal code of the emperor Charles V.) had long since ceased to be respected. What in 1532 was an inestimable blessing, as a check upon the arbitrariness and violence of the effete German procedure, had in the course of time outlived its usefulness and become a source of evils similar to those it was enacted to combat. It availed nothing that, at the commencement of the 18th century, a freer and more scientific spirit had been breathed into Roman law; it failed to reach the criminal law. The administration of justice was, before Feuerbach’s time, especially distinguished by two characteristics: the superiority of the judge to all law, and the blending of the judicial and executive offices, with the result that the individual was practically at the mercy of his prosecutors. This state of things Feuerbach set himself to reform, and using as his chief weapon the Revision der Grundbegriffe above referred to, was successful in his task. His achievement in the struggle may be summed up as: nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege (no wrong and no punishment without a remedy). In 1801 Feuerbach was appointed extraordinary professor of law without salary, at the university of Jena, and in the following year accepted a chair at Kiel, where he remained two years. In 1804 he removed to the university of Landshut; but on being commanded by King Maximilian Joseph to draft a penal code for Bavaria (Strafgesetzbuch für das Königreich Bayern), he removed in 1805 to Munich, where he was given a high appointment in the ministry of justice and was ennobled in 1808. Meanwhile the practical reform of penal legislation in Bavaria was begun under his influence in 1806 by the abolition of torture. In 1808 appeared the first volume of his Merkwürdige Criminalfälle, completed in 1811—a work of deep interest for its application of psychological considerations to cases Of crime, and intended to illustrate the inevitable imperfection of human laws in their application to individuals. In his Betrachtungen über das Geschworenengericht (1811) Feuerbach declared against trial by jury, maintaining that the verdict of a jury was not adequate legal proof of a crime. Much controversy was aroused on the subject, and the author’s view was subsequently to some extent modified. The result of his labours was promulgated in 1813 as the Bavarian penal code. The influence of this code, the embodiment of Feuerbach’s enlightened views, was immense. It was at once made the basis for new codes in Württemberg and Saxe-Weimar; it was adopted in its entirety in the grand-duchy of Oldenburg; and it was translated into Swedish by order of the king. Several of the Swiss cantons reformed their codes in conformity with it. Feuerbach had also undertaken to prepare a civil code for Bavaria, to be founded on the Code Napoléon. This was afterwards set aside, and the Codex Maximilianus adopted as a basis. But the project did not become law. During the war of liberation (1813-1814) Feuerbach showed himself an ardent patriot, and published several political brochures which, from the writer’s position, had almost the weight of state manifestoes. One of these is entitled Über deutsche Freiheit und Vertretung deutsche Volker durch Landstände (1514). In 1814 Feuerbach was appointed second president of the court of appeal at Bamberg, and three years later he became first president of the court of appeal at Anspach. In 1821 he was deputed by the government to visit France, Belgium, and the Rhine provinces for the purpose of investigating their juridical institutions. As the fruit of this visit, he published his treatises Betrachtungen über Öffentlichkeit und Mündigkeit der Gerechtigkeitspflege (1821) and Über die Gerichtsverfassung und das gerichtliche Verfahren Frankreichs (1825). In these he pleaded unconditionally for publicity in all legal proceedings. In his later years he took a deep interest in the fate of the strange foundling Kaspar Hauser (q.v.), which had excited so much attention in Europe; and he was the first to publish a critical summary of the ascertained facts, under the title of Kaspar Hauser, ein Beispiel eines Verbrechens am Seelenleben (1832). Shortly before his death appeared a collection of his Kleine Schriften (1833). Feuerbach, still in the full enjoyment of his intellectual powers, died suddenly at Frankfort, while on his way to the baths of Schwalbach, on the 29th of May 1833. In 1853 was published the Leben und Wirken Ans. von Feuerbachs, 2 vols., consisting of a selection of his letters and journals, with occasional notes by his fourth son Ludwig, the distinguished philosopher.

See also, for an estimate of Feuerbach’s life and work, Marquardtsen, in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, vol. vi.; and an “in memoriam” notice in Die allgemeine Zeitung (Augsburg), 15th Nov. 1875, by Professor Dr Karl Binding of Leipzig University.

FEUILLANTS, CLUB OF THE, a political association which played a prominent part during the French Revolution. It was founded on the 16th of July 1791 by several members of the Jacobin Club, who refused to sign a petition presented by this body, demanding the deposition of Louis XVI. Among the dissident members were B. Barère; and E.J. Sieyès, who were later joined by other politicians, among them being Dupont de Nemours. The name of Feuillants was popularly given to this group of men, because they met in the fine buildings which had been occupied by the religious order bearing this name, in the rue Saint-Honoré, near the Place Vendôme, in Paris. The members of the club preserved the title of Amis de la Constitution, as being a sufficient indication of the line they intended to pursue. This consisted in opposing everything not contained in the Constitution; in their opinion, the latter was in need of no modification, and they hated alike all those who were opposed to it, whether émigrés or Jacobins; they affected to avoid all political discussion, and called themselves merely a “conservative assembly.”

This attitude they maintained after the Constituent Assembly had been succeeded by the Legislative, but not many of the new deputies became members of the club. With the rapid growth of extreme democratic ideas the Feuillants soon began to be looked upon as reactionaries, and to be classed with “aristocrats.” They did, indeed, represent the aristocracy of wealth, for they had to pay a subscription of four louis, a large sum at that time, besides six livres for attendance. Moreover, the luxury with which they surrounded themselves, and the restaurant which they had annexed to their club, seemed to mock the misery of the half-starved proletariat, and added to the suspicion with which they were viewed, especially after the popular triumphs of the 20th of June and the 10th of August 1792 (see French Revolution). A few days after the insurrection of the 10th of August, the papers of the Feuillants were seized, and a list was published containing the names of 841 members proclaimed as suspects. This was the death-blow of the club. It had made an attempt, though a weak one, to oppose the forward march of the Revolution, but, unlike the Jacobins, had never sent out branches into the provinces. The name of Feuillants, as a party designation, survived the club. It was applied to those who advocated a policy of “cowardly moderation,” and feuillantisme was associated with aristocratie in the mouths of the sansculottes.

The act of separation of the Feuillants from the Jacobins was published in a pamphlet dated the 16th of July 1791, beginning with the words, Les Membres de l’assemblée nationale ... (Paris, 1791). The statutes of the club were also published in Paris. See also A. Aulard, Histoire politique de la Révolution française (Paris, 1903), 2nd ed., p. 153.

FEUILLET, OCTAVE (1821-1890), French novelist and dramatist, was born at Saint-Lô, Manche, on the 11th of August 1821. He was the son of a Norman gentleman of learning and distinction, who would have played a great part in politics “sans ses diables de nerfs,” as Guizot said. This nervous excitability was inherited, though not to the same excess, by Octave, whose mother died in his infancy and left him to the care of the hyper-sensitive invalid. The boy was sent to the lycée Louis-le Grand, in Paris, where he achieved high distinction, and was destined for the diplomatic service. In 1840 he appeared before his father at Saint-Lô, and announced that he had determined to adopt the profession of literature. There was a stormy scene, and the elder Feuillet cut off his son, who returned to Paris and lived as best he could by a scanty journalism. In company with Paul Bocage he began to write for the stage, and not without success; at all events, he continued to exist until, three years after the quarrel, his father consented to forgive him. Enjoying a liberal allowance, he now lived in Paris in comfort and independence, and he published his early novels, none of which is quite of sufficient value to retain the modern reader. The health and spirits of the elder M. Feuillet, however, having still further declined, he summoned his son to leave Paris and bury himself as his constant attendant in the melancholy château at Saint-Lô. This was to demand a great sacrifice, but Octave Feuillet cheerfully obeyed the summons. In 1851 he married his cousin, Mlle Valérie Feuillet, who helped him to endure the mournful captivity to which his filial duty bound him. Strangely enough, in this exile—rendered still more irksome by his father’s mania for solitude and by his tyrannical temper—the genius of Octave Feuillet developed. His first definite success was gained in the year 1852, when he published the novel Bellah and produced the comedy La Crise. Both were reprinted from the Revue des deux mondes, where many of his later novels also appeared. He wrote books which have long held their place, La Petite Comtesse (1857), Dalila (1857), and in particular that universal favourite, Le Roman d’un jeune homme pauvre (1858). He himself fell into a nervous state in his “prison,” but he was sustained by the devotion and intelligence of his wife and her mother. In 1857, having been persuaded to make a play of the novel of Dalila, he brought out this piece at the Vaudeville, and enjoyed a brilliant success; on this occasion he positively broke through the consigne and went up to Paris to see his play rehearsed. His father bore the shock of his temporary absence, and the following year Octave ventured to make the same experiment on occasion of the performance of Un Jeune Homme pauvre. To his infinite chagrin, during this brief absence his father died. Octave was now, however, free, and the family immediately moved to Paris, where they took part in the splendid social existence of the Second Empire. The elegant and distinguished young novelist became a favourite at court; his pieces were performed at Compiègne before they were given to the public, and on one occasion the empress Eugénie deigned to play the part of Mme de Pons in Les Portraits de la Marquise. Feuillet did not abandon the novel, and in 1862 he achieved a great success with Sibylle. His health, however, had by this time begun to decline, affected by the sad death of his eldest son. He determined to quit Paris, where the life was far too exciting for his nerves, and to regain the quietude of Normandy. The old château of the family had been sold, but he bought a house called “Les Paillers” in the suburbs of Saint-Lô, and there he lived, buried in his roses, for fifteen years. He was elected to the French Academy in 1862, and in 1868 he was made librarian of Fontainebleau palace, where he had to reside for a month or two in each year. In 1867 he produced his masterpiece of Monsieur de Camors, and in 1872 he wrote Julia de Tréœur, which is hardly less admirable. His last years, after the sale of “Les Paillers,” were passed in a ceaseless wandering, the result of the agitation of his nerves. He was broken by sorrow and by ill-health, and when he passed away in Paris on the 29th of December 1890, his death was a release. His last book was Honneur d’artiste (1890). Among the too-numerous writings of Feuillet, the novels have lasted longer than the dramas; of the former three or four seem destined to retain their charm as classics. He holds a place midway between the romanticists and the realists, with a distinguished and lucid portraiture of life which is entirely his own. He drew the women of the world whom he saw around him with dignity, with indulgence, with extraordinary penetration and clairvoyance. There is little description in his novels, which sometimes seem to move on an almost bare and colourless stage, but, on the other hand, the analysis of motives, of emotions, and of “the fine shades” has rarely been carried further. Few have written French with greater purity than Feuillet, and his style, reserved in form and never excessive in ornament, but full of wit and delicate animation, is in admirable uniformity with his subjects and his treatment. It is probably in Sibylle and in Julia de Trécœur that he can now be studied to most advantage, though Monsieur de Camors gives a greater sense of power, and though Le Roman d’un jeune homme pauvre still preserves its popularity.

See also Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis, vol. v.; F. Brunetière, Nouveaux Essais sur la littérature contemporaine (1895).

(E. G.)

FEUILLETON (a diminutive of the Fr. feuillet, the leaf of a book), originally a kind of supplement attached to the political portion of French newspapers. Its inventor was Bertin the elder, editor of the Débats. It was not usually printed on a separate sheet, but merely separated from the political part of the newspaper by a line, and printed in smaller type. In French newspapers it consists chiefly of non-political news and gossip, literature and art criticism, a chronicle of the fashions, and epigrams, charades and other literary trifles; and its general characteristics are lightness, grace and sparkle. The feuilleton in its French sense has never been adopted by English newspapers, though in various modern journals (in the United States especially) the sort of matter represented by it is now included. But the term itself has come into English use to indicate the instalment of a serial story printed in one part of a newspaper.

FEUQUIÈRES, ISAAC MANASSÈS DE PAS, Marquis de (1590-1640), French soldier, came of a distinguished family of which many members held high command in the civil wars of the 16th century. He entered the Royal army at the age of thirty, and soon achieved distinction. In 1626 he served in the Valtelline, and in 1628-1629 at the celebrated siege of La Rochelle, where he was taken prisoner. In 1629 he was made Maréchal de Camp, and served in the fighting on the southern frontiers of France. After occupying various military positions in Lorraine, he was sent as an ambassador into Germany, where he rendered important services in negotiations with Wallenstein. In 1636 he commanded the French corps operating with the duke of Weimar’s forces (afterwards Turenne’s “Army of Weimar”). With these troops he served in the campaigns of 1637 (in which he became lieutenant-general), 1638 and 1639. At the siege of Thionville (Diedenhofen) he received a mortal wound. His lettres inédites appeared (ed. Gallois) in Paris in 1845.

His son Antoine Manassès de Pas, Marquis de Feuquières (1648-1711), was born at Paris in 1648, and entered the army at the age of eighteen. His conduct at the siege of Lille in 1667, where he was wounded, won him promotion to the rank of captain. In the campaigns of 1672 and 1673 he served on the staff of Marshal Luxemburg, and at the siege of Oudenarde in the following year the king gave him command of the Royal Marine regiment, which he held until he obtained a regiment of his own in 1676. In 1688 he served as a brigadier at the siege of Philipsburg, and afterwards led a ravaging expedition into south Germany, where he acquired much booty. Promoted Maréchal de Camp, he served under Catinat against the Waldenses, and in the course of the war won the nickname of the “Wizard.” In 1692 he made a brilliant defence of Speierbach against greatly superior forces, and was rewarded with the rank of lieutenant-general. He bore a distinguished part in Luxemburg’s great victory of Neerwinden or Landen in 1693. Marshal Villeroi impressed him less favourably than his old commander Luxemburg, and the resumption of war in 1701 found him in disfavour in consequence. The rest of his life, embittered by the refusal of the marshal’s baton, he spent in compiling his celebrated memoirs, which, coloured as they were by the personal animosities of the writer, were yet considered by Frederick the Great and the soldiers of the 18th century as the standard work on the art of war as a whole. He died in 1711. The Mémoires sur la guerre appeared in the same year and new editions were frequently published (Paris 1711, 1725, 1735, &c., London 1736, Amsterdam subsequently). An English version appeared in London 1737, under the title Memoirs of the Marquis de Feuquières, and a German translation (Feuquières geheime Nachrichten) at Leipzig 1732, 1738, and Berlin 1786. They deal in detail with every branch of the art of war and of military service.

FÉVAL, PAUL HENRI CORENTIN (1817-1887), French novelist and dramatist, was born on the 27th of September 1817, at Rennes in Brittany, and much of his best work deals with the history of his native province. He was educated for the bar, but after his first brief he went to Paris, where he gained a footing by the publication of his “Club des phoques” (1841) in the Revue de Paris. The Mystères de Londres (1844), in which an Irishman tries to avenge the wrongs of his countrymen by seeking the annihilation of England, was published under the ingenious pseudonym “Sir Francis Trolopp.” Others of his novels are: Le Fils du diable (1846); Les Compagnons du silence (1857); Le Bossu (1858); Le Poisson d’or (1863); Les Habits noirs (1863); Jean le diable (1868), and Les Compagnons du trésor (1872). Some of his novels were dramatized, Le Bossu (1863), in which he had M. Victorien Sardou for a collaborator, being especially successful in dramatic form. His chronicles of crime exercised an evil influence, eventually recognized by the author himself. In his later years he became an ardent Catholic, and occupied himself in revising his earlier works from his new standpoint and in writing religious pamphlets. Reverses of fortune and consequent overwork undermined his mental and bodily health, and he died of paralysis in the monastery of the Brothers of Saint John in Paris on the 8th of March 1887.

His son, Paul Féval (1860- ), became well known as a novelist and dramatist. Among his works are Nouvelles (1890), Maria Laura (1891), and Chantepie (1896).

FEVER (Lat. febris, connected with fervere, to burn), a term generally used to include all conditions in which the normal temperature of the animal body is markedly exceeded for any length of time. When the temperature reaches as high a point as 106° F. the term hyperpyrexia (excessive fever) is applied, and is regarded as indicating a condition of danger; while, if it exceeds 107° or 108° for any length of time, death almost always results. The diseases which are called specific fevers, because of its being a predominant factor in them, are discussed separately under their ordinary names. Occasionally in certain specific fevers and febrile diseases the temperature may attain the elevation of 110°-112° prior to the fatal issue. For the treatment of fever in general, see Therapeutics.

Pathology.—Every rise of temperature is due to a disturbance in the heat-regulating mechanism, the chief variable in which is the action of the skin in eliminating heat (see Animal Heat). Although for all practical purposes this mechanism works satisfactorily, it is not by any means perfect, and many physiological conditions cause a transient rise of temperature; e.g. severe muscular exercise, in which the cutaneous eliminating mechanism is unable at once to dispose of the increased amount of heat produced in the muscles. Pathologically, the heat-regulating mechanism may be disturbed in three different ways: 1st, by mechanical interference with the nervous system; 2nd, by interference with heat elimination; 3rd, by the action of various poisons.

1. In the human subject, fever the result of mechanical interference with the nervous system rarely occurs, but it can readily be produced in the lower animals by stimulating certain parts of the great brain, e.g. the anterior portion of the corpus striatum. This leads to a rise of temperature with increased heat production. The high temperature seems to cause disintegration of cell protoplasm and increased excretion of nitrogen and of carbonic acid. Possibly some of the cases of high temperature recorded after injuries to the nervous system may be caused in this way; but some may also be due to stimulation of vaso-constrictor fibres to the cutaneous vessels diminishing heat elimination. So far the pathology of this condition has not been studied with the same care that has been devoted to the investigation of the third type of fever.

2. Fever may readily be produced by interference with heat elimination. This has been done by submitting dogs to a temperature slightly below that of the rectum, and it is seen in man in Sunstroke. The typical nervous symptoms of fever are thus produced, and the rate of chemical change in the tissues is accelerated, as is shown by the increased excretion of carbonic acid. The protoplasm is also injured and the proteids are broken down, and thus an increased excretion of nitrogen is produced and the cells undergo degenerative changes.

3. The products of various micro-organisms have a toxic action on the protoplasm of a large number of animals, and among the symptoms of this toxic action one of the most frequent is a rise in temperature. While this is by no means a necessary accompaniment, its occurrence is so general that the term Fever has been applied to the general reaction of the organism to the microbial poison. Toxins which cause a marked rise of temperature in men may cause a fall in other animals. It is not the alteration of temperature which is the great index of the severity of the struggle between the host and the parasite, but the death and removal to a greater or lesser extent of the protoplasm of the host. In this respect fever resembles poisoning with phosphorus and arsenic and other similar substances. The true measure of the intensity of a fever is the extent of disintegration of protoplasm, and this may be estimated by the amount of nitrogen excreted in the urine. The increased disintegration of protoplasm is also indicated by the rise in the excretion of sulphur and phosphorus and by the appearance in the urine of acetone, aceto-acetic and β-oxybutyric acids (see Nutrition). Since the temperature is generally proportionate to the intensity of the toxic action, its height is usually proportionate to the excretion of nitrogen. But sometimes the rise of temperature is not marked, while the excretion of nitrogen is very decidedly increased. When the temperature is sufficiently elevated, the heat has of itself an injurious action on the protoplasm, and tends to increase disintegration just as when heat elimination is experimentally retarded. But the increase due to rise of temperature is small compared to that produced by the destructive action of the microbial products. In the beginning of a fever the activity of the metabolism is not increased to any marked extent, and any increase is necessarily largely due to the greater activity of the muscles of the heart and respiratory mechanism, and to the muscular contractions which produce the initial rigors. Thus the excretion of carbon dioxide—the great measure of the activity of metabolism—is not usually increased, and there is no evidence of an increased combustion. In the later stages the increased temperature may bring about an acceleration in the rate of chemical change; but this is comparatively slight, less in fact than the increase observed on taking muscular exercise after rest. The rise of temperature is primarily due to diminished heat elimination. This diminished giving off of heat was demonstrated by means of the calorimeter by I. Rosenthal, while E. Maragliano showed that the cutaneous vessels are contracted. Even in the later stages, until defervescence occurs, heat elimination is inadequate to get rid of the heat produced.

The toxic action is manifested not only by the increased disintegration of protoplasm, but also by disturbances in the functions of the various organs. The activity of the digestive glands is diminished and appetite is lost. Food is therefore not taken, although when taken it appears to be absorbed in undiminished quantities. As a result of this the patient suffers from inanition, and lives largely on his own fats and proteids, and for this reason rapidly emaciates. The functions of the liver are also diminished in activity. Glycogen is not stored in the cells, and the bile secretion is modified, the essential constituents disappearing almost entirely in some cases. The production of urea is also interfered with, and the proportion of nitrogen in the urine not in the urea increases. This is in part due to the increased disintegration of proteids setting free sulphur and phosphorus, which, oxidized into sulphuric and phosphoric acids, combine with the ammonia which would otherwise have been changed to urea. Thus the proportion of ammonia in the urine is increased. Concurrently with these alterations in the functions of the liver-cells, a condition of granular degeneration and probably a state of fatty degeneration makes its appearance. That the functional activity of the kidneys is modified, is shown by the frequent appearance of proteoses or of albumen and globulin in the urine. Frequently the toxin acts very markedly on the protoplasm of the kidney epithelium, and causes a shedding of the cells and sometimes inflammatory reaction. The muscles are weakened, but so far no satisfactory study has been made of the influence of microbial poisons on muscular contraction. A granular and fatty degeneration supervenes, and the fibres waste. The nervous structures, especially the nerve-cells, are acted upon, and not only is their functional activity modified, but they also undergo structural changes of a chromatolytic nature. The blood shows two important changes—first, a fall in the alkalinity due to the products of disintegration of protoplasm; and, secondly, an increase in the number of leucocytes, and chiefly in the polymorpho-nuclear variety. This is best marked in pneumonia, where the normal number is often increased twofold and sometimes more than tenfold, while it is altogether absent in enteric fever.

An interesting general modification in the metabolism is the enormous fall in the excretion of chlorine, a fall far in excess of what could be accounted for by inanition, and out of all proportion to the fall in the sodium and potassium with which the chlorine is usually combined in the urine. The fevered animal in fact stores chlorine in its tissues, though in what manner and for what reason is not at present known.

Authorities.—Von Noorden, Lehrbuch der Pathologie des Stoffwechsels (Berlin, 1893); Metabolism and Practical Medicine, vol. ii., article “Fever” by F. Kraus (1907); Dr A. Rabe, Die modernen Fiebertheorien (Berlin, 1894); Dr G.B. Ughetti, Das Fieber, trans. by Dr R. Teuscher (Jena, 1895); Dr M. Lövit, “Die Lehre von Fieber,” Vorlesungen über allgemeine Pathologie, erstes Heft (Jena, 1897); Louis Guinon, “De la fièvre,” in Bouchard’s Traité de pathologie générale, t. iii. 2nd partie (Paris, 1899); Sir J.B. Sanderson, “The Doctrine of Fever,” in Allbutt’s System of Medicine, vol. i. p. 139 (London, 1896).

(D. N. P.)

FEYDEAU, ERNEST-AIMÉ (1821-1873), French author, was born in Paris, on the 16th of March 1821. He began his literary career in 1844, by the publication of a volume of poetry, Les Nationales. Either the partial failure of this literary effort, or his marriage soon afterwards to a daughter of the economist Blanqui, caused him to devote himself to finance and to archaeology. He gained a great success with his novel Fanny (1858), a success due chiefly to the cleverness with which it depicted and excused the corrupt manners of a certain portion of French society. This was followed in rapid succession by a series of fictions, similar in character, but wanting the attraction of novelty; none of them enjoyed the same vogue as Fanny. Besides his novels Feydeau wrote several plays, and he is also the author of Histoire générale des usages funèbres et des sépultures des peuples anciens (3 vols., 1857-1861); Le Secret du bonheur (sketches of Algerian life) (2 vols., 1864); and L’Allemagne en 1871 (1872), a clever caricature of German life and manners. He died in Paris on the 27th of October 1873.

See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, vol. xiv., and Barbey d’Aurevilly, Les Œuvres et les hommes au XIXe siècle.

FEZ (Fās), the chief city of Morocco, into which empire it was incorporated in 1548. It lies in 34° 6′ 3″ N., 4° 38′ 15″ W., about 230 m. N.E. of Marrākesh, 100 m. E. from the Atlantic and 85 m. S. of the Mediterranean. It is beautifully situated in a deep valley on the Wad Fās, an affluent of the Wad Sebu, which divides the town into two parts—the ancient town, Fās el Bali, on the right bank, and the new, Fās el Jadīd, on the left.

Like many other Oriental cities, Fez from a distance appears a very attractive place. It stretches out between low hills, crowned by the ruins of ancient fortresses, and though there is nothing imposing, there is something particularly impressive in the sight of that white-roofed conglomeration of habitations, broken only by occasional mosque towers or, on the outskirts, by luxuriant foliage. Except on the south side the city is surrounded by hills, interspersed with groves of orange, pomegranate and other fruit trees, and large olive gardens.

From its peculiar situation Fez has a drainage superior to that of most Moorish towns. When the town becomes very dirty, the water is allowed to run down the streets by opening lids for the purpose in the conduits and closing the ordinary exits, so that it overflows and cleanses the pavements. The Fasis as a rule prefer to drink the muddy river water rather than that of the pure springs which abound in certain quarters of the town. But the assertion that the supply and drainage system are one is a libel, since the drainage system lies below the level of the fresh river water, and was organized by a French renegade, under Mohammed XVI., about the close of the 18th century. The general dampness of the town renders it unhealthy, however, as the pallid faces of the inhabitants betoken, but this is considered a mark of distinction and is jealously guarded.

Most of the streets are exceedingly narrow, and as the houses are high and built in many cases over the thoroughfares these are often very dark and gloomy, though, since wooden beams, rough stones and mortar are used in building, there is less of that ruined, half-decayed appearance so common in other Moorish towns where mud concrete is the material employed.

As a commercial town Fez is a great depot for the trade of Barbary and wares brought from the east and south by caravans. The manufactures still carried on are those of yellow slippers of the famous Morocco leather, fine white woollen and silk haiks, of which it is justly proud, women’s embroidered sashes, various coarse woollen cloths and blankets, cotton and silk handkerchiefs, silk cords and braids, swords and guns, saddlery, brass trays, Moorish musical instruments, rude painted pottery and coloured tiles. Until recent times the city had a monopoly of the manufacture of Fez caps, for it was supposed that the dye which imparts the dull crimson hue of these caps could not be procured elsewhere; they are now, however, made both in France and Turkey. The dye is obtained from the juice of a berry which grows in large quantities near the town, and is also used in the dyeing of leather. Some gold ornaments are made, the gold being brought from the interior by caravans which trade regularly with Timbuktu.

As in other capitals each trade has a district or street devoted chiefly to its activities. Old Fez is the business portion of the town, new Fez being occupied principally by government quarters and the Jews’ mellah. The tradesman usually sits cross-legged in a corner of his shop with his goods so arranged that he can reach most of them without moving.

In the early days of Mahommedan rule in Morocco, Fez was the seat of learning and the empire’s pride. Its schools of religion, philosophy and astronomy enjoyed a great reputation in Africa and also in southern Europe, and were even attended by Christians. On the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, refugees of all kinds flocked to Fez, and brought with them some knowledge of arts, sciences and manufactures, and thither flocked students to make use of its extensive libraries. But its glories were brief, and though still “the university town” of Morocco, it retains but a shadow of its greatness. Its library, estimated by Gerhard Rohlfs in 1861 to contain 5000 volumes, is open on Fridays, and any Moor of known respectability may borrow volumes on getting an order and signing a receipt for them. There are about 1500 students who read at the Karueein. They pay no rents, but buy the keys of the rooms from the last occupants, selling them again on leaving.

The Karueein is celebrated as the largest mosque in Africa, but it is by no means the most magnificent. On account of the vast area covered, the roof, supported by three hundred and sixty-six pillars of stone, appears very low. The side chapel for services for the dead contains twenty-four pillars. All these columns support horse-shoe arches, on which the roof is built, long vistas of arches being seen from each of the eighteen doors of the mosque. The large lamp is stated to weigh 1763 ℔ and to have 509 lights, but it is very seldom lit. The total number of lights in the Karueein is given as seventeen hundred, and they are said to require 3½ cwt. of oil for one filling. The mosque of Mulai Idris, built by the founder of Fez about the year 810, is considered so sacred that the streets which approach its entrance are forbidden to Jews, Christians or four-footed beasts. The sanctity of the shrine in particular is esteemed very great, and this accounts for the crowds which daily flock to it. The Tumiat door leading to it was once very fine, but is now much faded. Opposite to it is a refuge for friendless sharifas—the female descendants of Mahomet—built by Mohammed XVII.

It is believed that the foundation stone of Fez was laid in 808 by Idris II. Since then its history has been chequered, as it was successfully besieged no fewer than eight times in the first five hundred years of its existence, yet only once knew foreign masters, when in 1554 the Turks took possession of it without a siege and held it for a short time. Fez became the chief residence of the Filali dynasty, who obtained possession of the town in 1649 (see further Morocco: History).

The population has been very varyingly estimated; probably the inhabitants number under one hundred thousand, even when the court is in residence.

See H. Gaillard, Une Ville de l’Islam. Fès (Paris, 1905); C. René-Leclerc, “Le commerce et l’industrie à Fez” in Renseignements col. comité afrique française (1905).

FEZZAN (the ancient Phazania, or country of the Garamantes), a region of the Sahara, forming a “kaimakamlik” of the Ottoman vilayet of Tripoli (q.v.). Its frontiers, ill-defined, run from Bonjem, within 50 m. of the Mediterranean on the north, south-westward to the Akakus range of hills, which separates Fezzan from Ghat, thence eastward for over 400 m., and then turn north and west to Bonjem again, embracing an area of about 156,000 sq. m.

Physical Features.—The general form of the country is determined by the ranges of hills, including the Jebel-es-Suda (highest peak about 4000 ft.), the Haruj-el-Aswad and the Haruj-el-Abiad, which between 14° and 19° E. and 27° and 29° N. form the northern edge of a broad desert plateau, and shut off the northern region draining to the Mediterranean from the depressions in which lie the oases of Fezzan proper in the south. The central depression of Hofra (“ditch”), as it is called, lies in about 26° N. It does not form a continuous fertile tract, but consists of a monotonous sandy expanse somewhat more thickly studded with oases than the surrounding wastes. The Hofra at its lowest part is not more than 600 ft. above the sea-level, and in this hollow is situated the capital Murzuk. It has a general east to west direction. North-west of the Hofra is a long narrow valley, the Wadi-el-Gharbi, which trends north-east and is the most fertile district of Fezzan. It contains several perennial springs and lake-like basins. One of these basins, the saline Bahr-el-Dud (“Sea of Worms”), has an extent of 600 sq. m., and is in places 26 ft. deep. Southwards the Hofra rises to a height of 2000 ft., and in this direction lies the oasis of Gatron, followed by Tejerri on the verge of the desert, which marks the southern limit of the date and the northern of the dum palm. Beyond Tejerri the Saharan plateau rises continuously to the Tibesti highlands. (See further Tripoli.)

Climate.—The average temperature of Murzuk was found by Rohlfs to be 70° F. Frost is not uncommon in the winter months. The climate is a very regular one, and is in general healthy, the dryness of the air in summer making the heat more bearable than on the sea coast. An almost perpetual blue sky overhangs the desert, and the people of Fezzan are so unaccustomed to and so ill-prepared for wet weather that, as in Tuat and Tidikelt, they pray to be spared from rain. Water is found almost everywhere at small depths.

Flora and Fauna.—The date-palm is the characteristic tree of Fezzan, and constitutes the chief wealth of the land. Many different kinds of date-palms are found in the oases: in that of Murzuk alone more than 30 varieties are counted, the most esteemed being named the Tillis, Tuati and Auregh. In all Fezzan the date is the staple food, not only for men, but for camels, horses and dogs. Even the stones of the fruit are softened and given to the cattle. The huts of the poorer classes are entirely made of date-palm leaves, and the more substantial habitations consist chiefly of the same material. The produce of the tree is small, 100 full-grown trees yielding only about 40 cwt. of dates. Besides the date there are numerous olive, fig and almond trees. Various grains are cultivated. Wheat and barley are sown in winter, and in spring, summer and autumn several kinds of durra, especially ksob and gafoli. Cotton flourishes, is perennial for six or seven years, and gives large pods of moderate length of staple.

There are no large carnivora in Fezzan. In the uninhabited oases gazelles and antelopes are occasionally found. The most important animal is the camel, of which there are two varieties, the Tebu or Sudan camel and the Arabian, differing very much in size, form and capabilities. Horses and cattle are not numerous. Among birds are ostriches, falcons, vultures, swallows and ravens; in summer wild pigeons and ducks are numerous, but in winter they seek a warmer climate. There are no remarkable insects or snakes. A species of Artemia or brine shrimp, about a quarter of an inch in length, of a colour resembling the bright hue of the gold fish, is fished for with cotton nets in the “Sea of Worms,” and mixed with dates and kneaded into a paste, which has the taste and smell of salt herring, is considered a luxury by the people of Fezzan.

Inhabitants.—The total population is estimated at between 50,000 and 80,000. The inhabitants are a mixed people, derived from the surrounding Teda and Bornu on the south, Tuareg of the plateaus on the west, Berbers and Arabs from the north. The primitive inhabitants, called by their Arab conquerors Berāuna, are believed to have been of Negro origin. They no longer persist as a distinct people. In colour the present inhabitants vary from black to white, but the prevailing hue of skin is a Malay-like yellow, the features and woolly hair being Negro. The chief languages are the Kanuri or Bornu language and Arabic. Many understand Targish, the Teda and the Hausa tongues. If among such a mixed people there can be said to be any national language, it is that of Bornu, which is most widely understood and spoken. The people of Sokna, north of the Jebel-es-Suda, have a peculiar Berber dialect which Rohlfs found to be very closely allied to that of Ghadames. The men wear a haik or barakan like those of Tripoli, and a fez; short hose, and a large loose shirt called mansarīa, with red or yellow slippers, complete their toilet. Yet one often sees the large blue or white tobe of Bornu, and the litham or shawl-muffler of the Tuareg, wound round the mouth to keep out the blown sand of the desert. The women, who so long as they are young have very plump forms, and who are generally small, are more simply dressed, as a rule, in the barakan, wound round their bodies; they seldom wear shoes, but generally have sandals made of palm leaf. Like the Arab women they load arms and legs with heavy metal rings, which are of silver among the more wealthy. The hair, thickly greased with butter, soon catching the dust which forms a crust over it, is done up in numberless little plaits round the head, in the same fashion as in Bornu and the Hausa countries. Children run about naked until they attain the age of puberty, which comes very early, for mothers of ten or twelve years of age are not uncommon. The Fezzani are of a gay disposition, much given to music and dancing.

Towns and Trade.—Murzuk, the present capital, which is in telegraphic communication with the town of Tripoli, lies in the western corner of the Hofra depression, in 25° 55′ N. and 14° 10′ E. It was founded about 1310, about which time the kasbah or citadel was built. The Turks repaired it, as well as the town-wall, which has, however, again fallen into a ruinous condition. Murzuk, which had in 1906 some 3000 inhabitants, is cut in two by a wide street, the dendal. The citadel and most of the houses are built of salt-saturated dried mud. Sokna, about midway between Tripoli and Murzuk, situated on a great gravel plain north of the Suda range, has a population of about 2500.

Garama (Jerma-el-Kedima), the capital under the Garamantes and the Romans, was in the Wadi-el-Gharbi. It was a flourishing town at the time of the Arab conquest but is now deserted. Among the ruins is a well-preserved stone monument marking the southern limit of the Roman dominions in this part of Africa. The modern Jerma is a small place a little north of the site of Garama. Zuila, the capital under the Arabs, lies in a depression called the Sherguia east of Murzuk on the most direct caravan route to Barca and Egypt. Of Traghen, the capital under the Nesur dynasty, which was on the same caravan route and between Zuila and Murzuk, little besides the ruined kasbah remains.

Placed roughly midway between the countries of the central Sudan and Tripoli, Fezzan serves as a depot for caravans crossing the Sahara; its commerce is unimportant. Its most important export is that of dates. Slave dealing, formerly the most lucrative occupation of the people, is moribund owing to the stoppage of slave raiding by the European governments in their Sudan territories.

History.—The country formed part of the territory of the Garamantes, described by Herodotus as a very powerful people. Attempts have been made to identify the Garamantes with the Berāuna of the Arabs of the 7th century, and to the period of the Garamantes Duveyrier assigns the remains of remarkable hydraulic works, and certain tombs and rock sculptures—indications, it is held, of a Negro civilization of ancient date which existed in the northern Sahara. The Garamantes, whether of Libyan or Negro origin, had certainly a considerable degree of civilization when in the year 19 B.C. they were conquered by the proconsul L. Cornelius Balbus Minor and their country added to the Roman empire. By the Romans it was called Phazania, whence the present name Fezzan. After the Vandal invasion Phazania appears to have regained independence and to have been ruled by a Berāuna dynasty. At this time the people were Christians, but in 666 the Arabs conquered the country and all traces of Christianity seem speedily to have disappeared. Subject at first to the caliphs, an independent Arab dynasty, that of the Beni Khattab, obtained power early in the 10th century. In the 13th century the country came under the rule of the king of Kanem (Bornu), but soon afterwards the Nesur, said to have been a native or Berāuna dynasty, were in power. More probably the Nesur were hereditary governors originally appointed by the rulers of Kanem. In the 14th century the Nesur were conquered and dethroned by an Arab tribe, that of Khorman, who reduced the people of Fezzan to a state of slavery, a position from which they were rescued about the middle of the 16th century by a sherif of Morocco, Montasir-b.-Mahommed, who founded the dynasty of Beni Mahommed. This dynasty, which came into frequent conflict with the Turks, who had about the same time that Montasir secured Fezzan established themselves in Tripoli, gradually extended its borders as far as Sokna in the north. It was the Beni Mahommed who chose Murzuk as their capital. They became intermittently tributary to the pasha of Tripoli, but within Fezzan the power of the sultans was absolute. They maintained a body-guard of mamelukes, mostly Europeans—Greeks, Genoese, or their immediate descendants. The annual tribute was paid to the pasha either in money or in gold, senna or slaves. The last of the Beni Mahommed sultans was killed in the vicinity of Traghen in 1811 by El-Mukkeni, one of the lieutenants of Yusef Pasha, the last sovereign but one of the independent Karamanli dynasty of Tripoli. El-Mukkeni now made himself sultan of Fezzan, and became notorious by his slaving expeditions into the central Sudan, in which he advanced as far as Bagirmi. In 1831, Abd-el-Jelil, a chief of the Walid-Sliman Arabs, usurped the sovereign authority. After a troublous reign of ten years he was slain in battle by a Turkish force under Bakir Bey, and Fezzan was added to the Turkish empire. Towards the end of the 19th century the Turks, alarmed at the increase of French influence in the neighbouring countries, reinforced their garrison in Fezzan. The kaimakamlik is said to yield an annual revenue of £6000 only to the Tripolitan treasury.

Authorities.—The most notable of the European travellers who have visited Fezzan, and to whose works reference should be made for more detailed information regarding it, are, taking them in the order of date, as follows: F. Hornemann, 1798; G.F. Lyon, 1819; D. Denham, H. Clapperton and W. Oudney, 1822; J. Richardson, 1845; H. Barth, 1850-1855; E. Vogel, 1854; H. Duveyrier, 1859-1861; M. von Beurmann, 1862; G. Rohlfs, 1865; G. Nachtigal, 1869; P.L. Monteil, 1892; H. Vischer, 1906. Nachtigal’s Sahara and Sudan, vol. i. (Berlin, 1879), gathers up much of the information in earlier works, and a list of the Beni Mahommed sovereigns is given in A.M.H.J. Stokvis, Manuel d’histoire, vol. i. (Leiden, 1888), p. 471. Miss Tinné (q.v.), who travelled with Nachtigal as far as Murzuk, was shortly afterwards murdered at the Sharaba wells on the road to Ghat.

FIACRE, SAINT (Celt. Fiachra), an anchorite of the 7th century, of noble Irish descent. We have no information concerning his life in his native country. His Acta, which have scarcely any historical value, relate that he left Ireland, and came to France with his companions. He approached St Faro, the bishop of Meaux, to whom he made known his desire to live a life of solitude in the forest. St Faro assigned him a spot called Prodilus (Brodolium), the modern Breuil, in the province of Brie. There St Fiacre built a monastery in honour of the Holy Virgin, and to it added a small house for guests, to which he himself withdrew. Here he received St Chillen (? Killian), who was returning from a pilgrimage to Rome, and here he remained until his death, having acquired a great reputation for miracles. His remains rested for a long time in the place which he had sanctified. In 1568, at the time of the religious troubles, they were transferred to the cathedral of Meaux, where his shrine may still be seen in the sacristy. Various relics of St Fiacre were given to princes and great personages. His festival is celebrated on the 30th of August. He is the patron of Brie, and gardeners invoke him as their protector. French hackney-coaches received the name of fiacre from the Hôtel St Fiacre, in the rue St Martin, Paris, where one Sauvage, who was the first to provide cabs for hire, kept his vehicles.

See Acta Sanctorum, Augusti vi. 598-620; J. O’Hanlon, Lives of the Irish Saints, viii. 421-447 (Dublin, 1875-1904); J.C. O’Meagher, “Saint Fiacre de la Brie,” in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 3rd series, ii. 173-176.

(H. De.)

FIARS PRICES, in the law of Scotland, the average prices of each of the different sorts of grain grown in each county, as fixed annually by the sheriff, usually after the verdict of a jury; they serve as a rule for ascertaining the value of the grain due to feudal superiors, to the clergy or to lay proprietors of teinds, to landlords as a part or the whole of their rents and in all cases where the price of grain has not been fixed by the parties. It is not known when or how the practice of “striking the fiars,” as it is called, originated. It probably was first used to determine the value of the grain rents and duties payable to the crown. In confirmation of this view it seems that at first the duty of the sheriffs was merely to make a return to the court of exchequer of the prices of grain within their counties, the court itself striking the fiars; and from an old case it appears that the fiars were struck above the true prices, being regarded rather as punishments to force the king’s tenants to pay their rents than as the proper equivalent of the grain they had to pay. Co-existent, however, with these fiars, which were termed sheriffs’ fiars, there was at an early period another class called commissaries’ fiars, by which the values of teinds were regulated. They have been traced back to the Reformation, and were under the management of the commissary or consistorial courts, which then took the place of the bishops and their officials. They have now been long out of use, but they were perhaps of greater antiquity than the sheriffs’ fiars, and the model upon which these were instituted. In 1723 the court of session passed an Act of Sederunt for the purpose of regulating the procedure in fiars courts. Down to that date the practice of striking the fiars was by no means universal over Scotland; and even in those counties into which it had been introduced, there was, as the preamble of the act puts it, “a general complaint that the said fiars are struck and given out by the sheriffs without due care and inquiry into the current and just prices.” The act in consequence provided that all sheriffs should summon annually, between the 4th and the 20th of February, a competent number of persons, living in the shire, of experience in the prices of grain within its bounds, and that from these they should choose a jury of fifteen, of whom at least eight were to be heritors; that witnesses and other evidence as to the price of grain grown in the county, especially since the 1st of November preceding until the day of inquiry, were to be brought before the jury, who might also proceed on “their own proper knowledge”; that the verdict was to be returned and the sentence of the sheriff pronounced by the 1st of March; and further, where custom or expediency recommended it, the sheriff was empowered to fix fiars of different values according to the different qualities of the grain. It cannot be said that this act has remedied all the evils of which it complained. The propriety of some of its provisions has been questioned, and the competency of the court to pass it has been doubted, even by the court itself. Its authority has been entirely disregarded in one county—Haddingtonshire—where the fiars are struck by the sheriff alone, without a jury; and when this practice was called in question the court declined to interfere, observing that the fiars were better struck in Haddingtonshire than anywhere else. The other sheriffs have in the main followed the act, but with much variety of detail, and in many instances on principles the least calculated to reach the true average prices. Thus in some counties the averages are taken on the number of transactions, without regard to the quantities sold. In one case, in 1838, the evidence was so carelessly collected that the second or inferior barley fiars were 2s. 4d. higher than the first. Formerly the price was struck by the boll, commonly the Linlithgowshire boll; now the imperial quarter is always used.

The origin of the plural word fiars (feors, feers, fiers) is uncertain. Jamieson, in his Dictionary, says that it comes from the Icelandic fe, wealth; Paterson derives it from an old French word feur, an average; others connect it with the Latin forum (i.e. market). The New English Dictionary accepts the two latter connexions. On the general subject of fiars prices see Paterson’s Historical Account of the Fiars in Scotland (Edin., 1852); Connell, On Tithes; Hunter’s Landlord and Tenant.

FIBRES (or Fibers, in American spelling; from Lat. fibra, apparently connected either with filum, thread, or findere, to split), the general term for certain structural components of animal and vegetable tissue utilized in manufactures, and in respect of such uses, divided for the sake of classification into textile, papermaking, brush and miscellaneous fibres.

I. Textile Fibres are mostly products of the organic world, elaborated in their elongated form to subserve protective functions in animal life (as wool and epidermal hairs, &c.) or as structural components of vegetable tissues (flax, hemp and wood cells). It may be noted that the inorganic world provides an exception to this general statement in the fibrous mineral asbestos (q.v.), which is spun or twisted into coarse textiles. Other silicates are also transformed by artificial processes into fibrous forms, such as “glass,” which is fused and drawn or spun to a continuous fibre, and various “slags” which, in the fused state, are transformed into “slag wool.” Lastly, we note that a number of metals are drawn down to the finest dimensions, in continuous lengths, and these are woven into cloth or gauze, such metallic cloths finding valuable applications in the arts. Certain metals in the form of fine wire are woven into textile fabrics used as dress materials. Such exceptional applications are of insignificant importance, and will not be further considered in this article.

The common characteristics of the various forms of matter comprised in the widely diversified groups of textile fibres are those of the colloids. Colloidal matter is intrinsically devoid of structure, and in the mass may be regarded as homogeneous; whereas crystalline matter in its proximate forms assumes definite and specific shapes which express a complex of internal stresses. The properties of matter which condition its adaptation to structural functions, first as a constituent of a living individual, and afterwards as a textile fibre, are homogeneous continuity of substance, with a high degree of interior cohesion, and associated with an irreducible minimum of elasticity or extensibility. The colloids show an infinite diversity of variations in these essential properties: certain of them, and notably cellulose (q.v.), maintain these characteristics throughout a cycle of transformations such as permit of their being brought into a soluble plastic form, in which condition they may be drawn into filaments in continuous length. The artificial silks or lustra-celluloses are produced in this way, and have already taken an established position as staple textiles. For a more detailed account of these products see Cellulose.

The animal fibres are composed of nitrogenous colloids of which the typical representatives are the albumens, fibrines and gelatines. They are of highly complex constitution and their characteristics have only been generally investigated. The vegetable fibre substances are celluloses and derivatives of celluloses, also typically colloidal bodies. The broad distinction between the two groups is chiefly evident in their relationship to alkalis. The former group are attacked, resolved and finally dissolved, under conditions of action by no means severe. The celluloses, on the other hand, and therefore the vegetable fibres, are extraordinarily resistant to the action of alkalis.

The animal fibres are relatively few in number but of great industrial importance. They occur as detached units and are of varying dimensions; sheep’s wool having lengths up to 36 in., the fleeces being shorn for textile uses at lengths of 2 to 16 in.; horse hair is used in lengths of 4 to 24 in., whereas the silks may be considered as being produced in continuous length, “reeled silks” having lengths measured in hundreds of yards, but “spun silks” are composed of silk fibres purposely broken up into short lengths.

The vegetable fibres are extremely numerous and of very diversified characteristics. They are individualized units only in the case of seed hairs, of which cotton is by far the most important; with this exception they are elaborated as more or less complex aggregates. The bast tissues of dicotyledonous annuals furnish such staple materials as flax, hemp, rhea or ramie and jute. The bast occurs in a peripheral zone, external to the wood and beneath the cortex, and is mechanically separated from the stem, usually after steeping, followed by drying.

The commercial forms of these fibres are elongated filaments composed of the elementary bast cells (ultimate fibres) aggregated into bundles. The number of these as any part of the filament may vary from 3 to 20 (see figs.). In the processes of refinement preparatory to the spinning (hackling, scutching) and in the spinning process itself, the fibre-bundles are more or less subdivided, and the divisibility of the bundles is an element in the textile value of the raw material. But the value of the material is rather determined by the length of the ultimate fibres (for, although not the spinning unit, the tensile strength of the yarn is ultimately limited by the cohesion of these fibres), qualified by the important factor of uniformity.

Thus, the ultimate fibre of flax has a length of 25 to 35 mm.; jute, on the other hand, 2 to 3 mm.; and this disparity is an essential condition of the difference of values of these fibres. Rhea or ramie, to cite another typical instance, has an ultimate fibre of extraordinary length, but of equally conspicuous variability, viz. from 50 to 200 mm. The variability is a serious impediment in the preparation of the material for spinning and this defect, together with low drawing or spinning quality, limits the applications of this fibre to the lower counts or grades of yarn.

The monocotyledons yield still more complex fibre aggregates, which are the fibro-vascular bundles of leaves and stems. These complex structures as a class do not yield to the mechanical treatment by which the bast fibres are subdivided, nor is there any true spinning quality such as is conditioned by bringing the ultimate fibres into play under the drawing process, which immediately precedes the twisting into yarn. Such materials are therefore only used for the coarsest textiles, such as string or rope. An exception to be noted in passing is to be found in the pine apple (Ananassa Sativa) the fibres of which are worked into yarns and cloth of the finest quality. The more important fibres of this class are manila, sisal, phormium. A heterogeneous mass of still more complex fibre aggregates, in many cases the entire stem (cereal straws, esparto), in addition to being used in plaited form, e.g. in hats, chairs, mats, constitute the staple raw material for paper manufacturers, requiring a severe chemical treatment for the separation of the ultimate fibres.

In this class we must include the woods which furnish wood pulps of various classes and grades. Chemical processes of two types, (a) acid and (b) alkaline, are also employed in resolving the wood, and the resolution not only effects a complete isolation of the wood cells, but, by attacking the hydrolysable constituents of the wood substance (lignocellulose), the cells are obtained in the form of cellulose. These cellulose pulps are known in commerce as “sulphite pulps” and “soda pulps” respectively. In addition to these raw materials or “half stuffs” the paper-maker employs the rejecta of the vegetable and textile industries, scutching, spinning and cloth wastes of all kinds, which are treated by chemical (boiling) and mechanical means (beating) to separate the ultimate fibres and reduce them to the suitable dimensions (0.5-2.0 mm.). These papermaking fibres have also to be reckoned with as textile raw materials, in view of a new and growing industry in “pulp yarns” (Papierstoffgarn), a coarse textile obtained by treating paper as delivered in narrow strips from the paper machine; the strips are reeled, dried to retain 30-40% moisture, and in this condition subjected to the twisting operation, which confers the cylindrical form and adds considerably to the strength of the fibrous strip. The following are the essential characteristics of the economically important fibres.

Animal.—A. Silk. (a) The true silks are produced by the Bombyx Mori, the worm feeding on the leaves of the mulberry. The fibre is extruded as a viscous liquid from the glands of the worm, and solidifies to a cylindrical thread. The cohesion of these threads in pairs gives to raw silk the form of a dual cylinder (Plate I. fig. 2). For textile purposes the thread is reeled from the cocoon, and several units, five and upwards, are brought together and suitably twisted. (b) The “Wild” silks are produced by a large variety of insects, of which the most important are the various species of Antherea, which yield the Tussore silks. These silks differ in form and composition from the true silks. While they consist of a “dual” thread, each unit of these is complex, being made up of a number of fibrillae. This unit thread is quadrangular in section, and of larger diameter than the true silk, the mean breadth being 0.052 mm., as compared with 0.018, the mean diameter of the true silks. The variations in structure as well as in dimensions are, however, very considerable.

B. Epidermal hairs. Of these (a) wool, the epidermal protective covering of sheep, is the most important. The varying species of the animal produce wools of characteristic qualities, varying considerably in fineness, in length of staple, in composition and in spinning quality. Hence the classing of the fleeces or raw wool followed by the elaborate processes of selection, i.e. “sorting” and preparation, which precede the actual spinning or twisting of the yarn. These consist in entirely freeing the fibres and sorting them mechanically (combing, &c.), thereafter forming them into continuous lengths of parallelized units. This is followed by the spinning process which consists in a simultaneous drawing and twisting, and a continuous production of the yarn with the structural characteristics of worsted yarns. The shorter staple—from 5 to 25% of average fleeces—is prepared by the “carding” process for the spinning operation, in which drawing and twisting are simultaneous, the length spun being then wound up, and the process being consequently intermittent. This section of the industry is known as “woollen spinning” in contrast to the former or “worsted spinning.”

(b) An important group of raw material closely allied to the wools are the epidermal hairs of the Angora goat (mohair), the llama, alpaca. Owing to their form and the nature of the substance of which they are composed, they possess more lustre than the wools. They present structural differences from sheep wools which influence the processes by which they are prepared or spun, and the character of the yarns; but the differences are only of subordinate moment.

(c) Various animal hairs, such as those of the cow, camel and rabbit, are also employed; the latter is largely worked into the class of fabrics known as felts. In these the hairs are compacted together by taking advantage of the peculiarity of structure which causes the imbrications of the surface.

(d) Horse hair is employed in its natural form as an individual filament or monofil.

Vegetable Fibres.—The subjoined scheme of classification sets out the morphological structural characteristics of the vegetable fibres:—

Produced from

Dicotyledons. Monocotyledons.

A. Seed hairs. D. Fibro-vascular bundles.

B. Bast fibres. E. Entire leaves and stems.

C. Bast aggregates.

In the list of the more important fibrous raw materials subjoined, the capital letter immediately following the name refers the individual to its position in this classification. In reference to the important question of chemical composition and the actual nature of the fibre substance, it may be premised that the vegetable fibres are composed of cellulose, an important representative of the group of carbohydrates, of which the cotton fibre substance is the chemical prototype, mixed and combined with various derivatives belonging to the subgroups. (a) Carbohydrates. (b) Unsaturated compounds of benzenoid and furfuroid constitutions. (c) “Fat and wax” derivatives, i.e. groups belonging to the fatty series, and of higher molecular dimensions—of such compound celluloses the following are the prototypes:—

(a) Cellulose combined and mixed with “pectic” bodies (i.e. pecto-celluloses), flax, rhea.

(b) Cellulose combined with unsaturated groups or ligno-celluloses, jute and the woods.

(c) Cellulose combined and mixed with higher fatty acids, alcohols, ethers, cuto-celluloses, protective epidermal covering of leaves.

The letters a, b, c in the table below and following the capitals, which have reference to the structural basis of classification, indicate the main characteristics of the fibre substances. (See also Cellulose.)

Miscellaneous.—Various species of the family Palmaceae yield fibrous products of value, of which mention must be made of the following. Raffia, epidermal strips of the leaves of Raphia ruffia (Madagascar), R. taedigera (Japan), largely employed as binder twine in horticulture, replacing the “bast” (linden) formerly employed. Coir, the fibrous envelope of the fruit of the Cocos nucifera, extensively used for matting and other coarse textiles. Carludovica palmata (Central America) yields the raw material for Panama hats, the Corypha australis (Australia) yields a similar product. The leaves of the date palm, Phoenix dactylifera, are employed locally in making baskets and mats, and the fibro-vascular bundles are isolated for working up into coarse twine and rope; similarly, the leaves of the Elaeis guineensis, the fruit of which yields the “palm oil” of commerce, yield a fibre which finds employment locally (Africa) for special purposes. Chamaerops humilis, the dwarf palm, yields the well-known “Crin d’Afrique.” Locally (Algiers) it is twisted into ropes, but its more general use, in Europe, is in upholstery as a stuffing material. The cereal straws are used in the form of plait in the making of hats and mats. Esparto grass is also used in the making of coarse mats.

Botanical Identity.
Genus and Order. Country of Origin. Dimensions of Ultimate. Textile Uses.

Cotton, A.a Gossypium Tropical and subtropical 12-40 mm. 0.019-0.025. Universal. Also as a raw material

Malvaceae countries Av. 28 mm. in chemical industries, notably

explosives, celluloid.

Flax, B.a Linum Temperate (and subtropical) 6.60 mm. 0.011-0.025. General. Special effects in lustre

Linaceae countries, chiefly European Av. 28 mm. damasks. In India and America

plants grown for seed (linseed).

Hemp, B.a Cannabis Temperate countries, chiefly 5-55 mm. 0.016-0.050. Coarser textiles, sail-cloth,

Cannabineae Europe Av. 22. mm. Av. 0.022 rope and twine.

Ramie, B.a Boehmeria Tropical countries (some 60-200 mm. 0.03-0.08. Coarse textiles. Cost of preparation

Urticaceae temperate) Av. 120 mm. Av. 0.050 for fine textiles prohibitive.

Jute, B.b Corchorus Tropical countries, chiefly 1.5-5 mm. 0.020-0.025. Coarse textiles, chiefly “Hessians”

Tiliaceae India Av. 2.5 mm. Av. 0.022 and sacking. “Line” spun yarns

used in cretonne and furniture

textiles.

B.b Crotalaria India 4.0-12.0. 0.025-0.050. Twine and rope. Coarse textiles.

Leguminosae Av. 7.5. Av. 0.022

Hibiscus, B.b Hibiscus Tropical, chiefly India 2-6 mm. 0.014-0.033. Coarse textiles. H. Elams has been

Av. 4 mm. Av. 0.021 extensively used in making mats.

Sida, B.b Sida Tropical and subtropical 1.5-4 mm. 0.013-0.02. Coarse textiles. Appears capable of

Malvaceae Av. 2 mm. Av. 0.015 substituting jute.

Lime or Linden, Tilia European countries, chiefly 1.5 mm. 0.014-0.020. Matting and binder twine.

C.b Tiliaceae Russia Av. 2 mm. Av. 0.016

Mulberry, C Broussonetia Far East 5-31 mm. 0.02-0.04. Paper and paper cloths.

Moraceae Av. 15 mm. Av. 0.03

Monocotyledons—

Manila, D Musa Tropical countries, chiefly 3-12 mm. 0.016-0.032. Twine and ropes. Produces papers

Musaceae Philippine Islands Av. 6 mm. Av. 0.024 of special quality.

Sisal, D Agave Tropical countries, chiefly 1.5-4 mm. 0.020-0.032. Twine and ropes.

Amaryllideae Central America Av. 2.5. Av. 0.024

Yucca do. 0.5-6 mm. 0.01-0.02. do.

Liliaceae

Sansevieria East Indies, Ceylon, East 1.5-6 mm. 0.015-0.026. do.

Liliaceae Africa Av. 3 mm. Av. 0.020

Phormium, D Phormium tenax New Zealand 5.0-15 mm. 0.010-0.020. Twine and ropes. Distinguished by

Liliaceae Av. 9 mm. Av. 0.016 high yield of fibre from green

leaf.

Pine-apple, D Ananassa Tropical East and West 3.0-9.0 mm. 0.004-0.008. Textiles of remarkable fineness.

Bromeliaceae Indies Av. 5. Av. 0.006 Exceptional fineness of ultimate

fibre.

The processes by which the fibres are transformed into textile fabrics are in the main determined by their structural features. The following are the distinctive types of treatment.

A. The fibre is in virtually continuous lengths. The textile yarn is produced by assembling together the unit threads, which are wound together and suitably twisted (silk; artificial silk).

B. The fibres in the form of units of variable short dimensions are treated by more or less elaborate processes of scutching, hackling, combing, with the aim of producing a mass of free parallelized units of uniform dimensions; these are then laid together and drawn into continuous bands of sliver and roving, which are finally drawn and twisted into yarns. In this group are comprised the larger number of textile products, such as cotton, wool, flax and jute, and it also includes at the other extreme the production of coarse textiles, such as twine and rope.

C. The fibres of still shorter dimensions are treated in various ways for the production of a fabric in continuous length.

The distinction of type of manufacturing processes in which the relatively short fibres are utilized, either as disintegrated units or comminuted long fibres, follows the lines of division into long and short fibres; the long fibres are worked into yarns by various processes, whereas the shorter fibres are agglomerated by both dry and wet processes to felted tissues or felts. It is obvious, however, that these distinctions do not constitute rigid dividing lines. Thus the principles involved in felting are also applied in the manipulation of long fibre fabrics. For instance, woollen goods are closed or shrunk by milling, the web being subjected to a beating or hammering treatment in an apparatus known as “the Stocks,” or is continuously run through squeezing rollers, in weak alkaline liquids. Flax goods are “closed” by the process of beetling, a long-continued process of hammering, under which the ultimate fibres are more or less subdivided, and at the same time welded or incorporated together. As already indicated, paper, which is a web composed of units of short dimensions produced by deposition from suspension in water and agglomerated by the interlacing of the component fibres in all planes within the mass, is a species of textile. Further, whereas the silks are mostly worked up in the extreme lengths of the cocoon, there are various systems of spinning silk wastes of variable short lengths, which are similar to those required for spinning the fibres which occur naturally in the shorter lengths.

The fibres thus enumerated as commercially and industrially important have established themselves as the result of a struggle for survival, and each embodies typical features of utility. There are innumerable vegetable fibres, many of which are utilized in the locality or region of their production, but are not available for the highly specialized applications of modern competitive industry to qualify for which a very complex range of requirements has to be met. These include primarily the factors of production and transport summed up in cost of production, together with the question of regularity of supply; structural characteristics, form and dimensions, including uniformity of ultimate unit and adaptability to standard methods of preparing and spinning, together with tenacity and elasticity, lustre. Lastly, composition, which determines the degree of resistance to chemical disintegrating influences as well as subsidiary questions of colour and relationship to colouring matters. The quest for new fibres, as well as modified methods of production of those already known, require critical investigation from the point of view of established practice. The present perspective outline of the group will be found to contain the elements of a grammar of the subject. But those who wish to pursue the matter will require to amplify this outlined picture by a study of the special treatises which deal with general principles, as well as the separate articles on the various fibres.

Analysis and Identification.—For the analysis of textile fabrics and the identification of component fibre, a special treatise must be consulted. The following general facts are to be noted as of importance.

All animal fibres are effectively dissolved by 10% solution of caustic potash or soda. The fabric or material is boiled in this solution for 10 minutes and exhaustively washed. Any residue will be vegetable or cellulose fibre. It must not be forgotten that the chemical properties of the fibre substances are modified more or less by association in combination with colouring matters and mordants. These may, in many cases, be removed by treatments which do not seriously modify the fibre substances.

Wool is distinguished from silk by its relative resistance to the action of sulphuric acid. The cold concentrated acid rapidly dissolves silk as well as the vegetable fibres. The attack on wool is slow, and the epidermal scales of wool make their appearance. The true silks are distinguished from the wild silks by the action of concentrated hydrochloric acid in the cold, which reagent dissolves the former, but has only a slight effect on Tussore silk. After preliminary resolution by these group reagents, the fabric is subjected to microscopical analysis for the final identification of its component fibres (see H. Schlichter, Journal Soc. Chem. Ind., 1890, p. 241).

A scheme for the commercial analysis or assay of vegetable fibres, originally proposed by the author, and now generally adopted, includes the following operations:—

1. Determination of moisture.

2. Determination of ash left after complete ignition.

3. Hydrolysis:

(a) loss of weight after boiling the raw fibre with a 1% caustic soda solution for five minutes;

(b) loss after boiling for one hour.

4. Determination of cellulose: the white residue after

(a) boiling for five minutes with 1% caustic soda,

(b) exposure to chlorine gas for one hour,

(c) boiling with basic sodium sulphite solution.

5. Mercerizing: the loss of weight after digestion with a 20% solution of sodium hydrate for one hour in the cold.

6. Nitration: the weight of the product obtained after digestion with a mixture of equal volumes of sulphuric and nitric acids for one hour in the cold.

7. Acid purification: treatment of the raw fibre with 20% acetic acid for one minute, the product being washed with water and alcohol, and then dried.

8. Determination of the total carbon by combustion.

II. Papermaking.—The papermaking industry (see Paper) employs as raw materials a large proportion of the vegetable fibre products already enumerated, and, for the reasons incidentally mentioned, they may be, and are, employed in a large variety of forms: in fact any fibrous material containing over 30% “cellulose” and yielding ultimate fibres of a length exceeding 1 mm. can be used in this industry. Most important staples are cotton and flax; these are known to the paper-maker as “rag” fibres, rags, i.e. cuttings of textile fabrics, new and old, being their main source of supply. These are used for writing and drawing papers. In the class of “printings” two of the most important staples are wood pulp, prepared by chemical treatment from both pine and foliage woods, and in England esparto cellulose, the cellulose obtained from esparto grass by alkali treatment; the cereal straws are also used and are resolved into cellulose by alkaline boiling followed by bleaching. In the class of “wrappings” and miscellaneous papers a large number of other materials find use, such as various residues of manufacturing and preparing processes, scutching wastes, ends of rovings and yarns, flax, hemp and manila rope waste, adansonia bast, and jute wastes, raw (cuttings) and manufactured (bagging). Other materials have been experimentally tried, and would no doubt come into use on their papermaking merits, but as a matter of fact the actually suitable raw materials are comprised in the list above enumerated, and are limited in number, through the influence of a number of factors of value or utility.

III. Brush Fibres, &c.—In addition to the textile industries there are manufactures which utilize fibres of both animal and vegetable character. The most important of these is brush-making. The familiar brushes of everyday use are extremely diversified in form and texture. The supplies of animal fibres are mainly drawn from the badger, hog, bear, sable, squirrel and horse. These fibres and bristles cover a large range of effects. Brushes required for cleansing purposes are composed of fibres of a more or less hard and resilient character, such as horse hairs, and other tail hairs and bristles. For painting work brushes of soft quality are employed, graduating for fine work into the extreme softness of the “camel hair” pencil. Of vegetable fibres the following are used in this industry. The Caryota urens furnishes the Kittul fibre, obtained from the base of the leaf stalks. Piassava is obtained from the Attalea funifera, also from the Leopoldina piassaba (Brazil). Palmyra fibre is obtained from the Borassus flabellifer. These are all members of the natural order of the Palmaceae. Mexican fibre, or Istle, is obtained from the agave. The fibre known as Whisk, largely used for dusting brushes, is obtained from various species of the Gramineae; the “Mexican Whisk” from Epicampeas macroura; and “Italian Whisk” from Andropogon. The coir fibre mentioned above in connexion with coarse textiles is also extensively used in brush-making. Aloe and Agave fibres in their softer forms are also used for plasterers’ brushes. Many of the whitewashes and cleansing solutions used in house decoration are alkaline in character, and for such uses advantage is taken of the specially resistant character of the cellulose group of materials.

Stuffing and Upholstery.—Another important use for fibrous materials is for filling or stuffing in connexion with the seats and cushions in upholstery. In the large range of effects required, a corresponding number and variety of products find employment. One of the most important is the floss or seed-hair of the Eriodendron anfractuosum, known as Kapok, the use of which in Europe was created by the Dutch merchants who drew their supplies from Java. The fibre is soft, silky and elastic, and maintains its elasticity in use. Many fibres when used in the mass show, on the other hand, a tendency to become matted and compressed in use, and to restore them to their original state the fibre requires to be removed and subjected to a teasing or carding process. This defect limits the use of other “flosses” or seed hairs in competition with Kapok. Horse hair is extensively used in this industry, as are also wool flocks and other short animal hairs and wastes.

Hats and Matting.—For these manufactures a large range of the fibrous products above described are employed, chiefly in their natural or raw state.

Bibliography.—The list of works appended comprises only a small fraction of the standard literature of the subject, but they are sufficiently representative to enable the specialist, by referring to them, to cover the subject-matter. F.H. Bowman, The Structure of the Wood Fibre (1885), The Structure of Cotton Fibre (1882); Cross, Bevan and King, Indian Fibres and Fibrous Substances (London, 1887); C.F. Cross, Report on Miscellaneous Fibres, Colonial Indian Exhibition, 1886 (London, 1887); Cross and Bevan, Cellulose, Researches on Cellulose, i. and ii. (London, 1895-1905); C.R. Dodge, A Descriptive Catalogue of Useful Fibre Plants of the World (Report No. 9, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Washington, 1897); von Höhmel, Die Mikroskopie der technisch verwendeten Faserstoffe (Leipzig, 1905); J.J. Hummel, The Dyeing of Textile Fabrics (London, 1885); J.M. Matthews, The Textile Fibres, their Physical, Microscopical and Chemical Properties (New York, 1904); H. Müller, Die Pflanzenfaser (Braunschweig, 1877); H. Schlichter, “The Examination of Textile Fibres and Fabrics” (Jour. Soc. Chem. Ind., 1890, 241); M. Vetillart, Études sur les fibres végétales textiles (Paris, 1876); Sir T.H. Wardle, Silk and Wild Silks, original memoirs in connexion with Col. Ind. Ex., 1886, Jubilee Ex. Manchester, 1887; Sir G. Watt, Dictionary of Economic Products of India (London, 1891); Wiesner, Die Rohstoffe des Pflanzenreichs (Leipzig, 1873); O.N. Witt, Chemische Technologie der Gespinnstfasern (Braunschweig, 1888); Kew Bulletin; The Journal of the Imperial Institute; The Journal of the Society of Arts; W.I. Hannam, The Textile Fibres of Commerce (London, 1902); J. Jackson, Commercial Botany; J. Zipser, Die Textilen Rohmaterialien (Wien, 1895); F. Zetzsche, Die wichtigsten Faserstoffe der europäischen Industrie (Leipzig, 1895).

(C. F. C.)

See also Alpaca, Felt, Mohair, Shoddy and Wool.

Col. Ind. Exhibition, 1886, Miscellaneous Reports.

FIBRIN, or Fibrine, a protein formed by the action of the so-called fibrin-ferment on fibrinogen, a constituent of the blood-plasma of all vertebrates. This change takes place when blood leaves the arteries, and the fibrin thus formed occasions the clotting which ensues (see Blood). To obtain pure coagulated fibrin it is best to heat blood-plasma (preferably that of the horse) to 56° C. The usual method of beating a blood-clot with twigs and removing the filamentous fibrin which attaches itself to them yields a very impure product containing haemoglobin and much globulin; moreover, it is very difficult to purify. Fibrin is a very voluminous, tough, strongly elastic, jelly-like substance; when denaturalized by heat, alcohol or salts, it behaves as any other coagulated albumin.

FICHTE, IMMANUEL HERMANN (originally Hartmann) VON (1797-1879), German philosopher, son of J.G. Fichte, was born at Jena on the 18th of July 1797. Having held educational posts at Saarbrücken and Düsseldorf, in 1836 he became extraordinary professor of philosophy at Bonn, and in 1840 full professor. In 1842 he received a call to Tübingen, retired in 1867, and died at Stuttgart on the 8th of August 1879. The most important of his comprehensive writings are: System der Ethik (1850-1853), Anthropologie (1856, 3rd ed. 1876), Psychologie (1864-1873), Die theistische Weltansicht (1873). In 1837 he had founded the Zeitschrift für Philosophie as an organ of his views, more especially on the subject of the philosophy of religion, where he was in alliance with C.H. Weisse; but, whereas Weisse thought that the Hegelian structure was sound in the main, and that its imperfections might be mended, Fichte held it to be incurably defective, and spoke of it as a “masterpiece of erroneous consistency or consistent error.” Fichte’s general views on philosophy seem to have changed considerably as he advanced in years, and his influence has been impaired by certain inconsistencies and an appearance of eclecticism, which is strengthened by his predominantly historical treatment of problems, his desire to include divergent systems within his own, and his conciliatory tone. His philosophy is an attempt to reconcile monism (Hegel) and individualism (Herbart) by means of theism (Leibnitz). He attacks Hegelianism for its pantheism, its lowering of human personality, and imperfect recognition of the demands of the moral consciousness. God, he says, is to be regarded not as an absolute but as an Infinite Person, whose nature it is that he should realize himself in finite persons. These persons are objects of God’s love, and he arranges the world for their good. The direct connecting link between God and man is the “genius,” a higher spiritual individuality existing in man by the side of his lower, earthly individuality. Fichte, in short, advocates an ethical theism, and his arguments might easily be turned to account by the apologist of Christianity. In his conception of finite personality he recurs to something like the monadism of Leibnitz. His insistence on moral experience is connected with his insistence on personality. One of the tests by which Fichte discriminates the value of previous systems is the adequateness with which they interpret moral experience. The same reason that made him depreciate Hegel made him praise Krause (panentheism) and Schleiermacher, and speak respectfully of English philosophy. It is characteristic of Fichte’s almost excessive receptiveness that in his latest published work, Der neuere Spiritualismus (1878), he supports his position by arguments of a somewhat occult or theosophical cast, not unlike those adopted by F.W.H. Myers. He also edited the complete works and literary correspondence of his father, including his life.

See R. Eucken, “Zur Erinnerung I. H. F.,” in Zeitschrift für Philosophie, ex. (1897); C.C. Scherer, Die Gotteslehre von I. H. F. (1902); article by Karl Hartmann in Allegemeine deutsche Biographie xlviii. (1904). Some of his works were translated by J.D. Morell under the title of Contributions to Mental Philosophy (1860).

FICHTE, JOHANN GOTTLIEB (1762-1814), German philosopher, was born at Rammenau in Upper Lusatia on the 19th of May 1762. His father, a ribbon-weaver, was a descendant of a Swedish soldier who (in the service of Gustavus Adolphus) was left wounded at Rammenau and settled there. The family was distinguished for piety, uprightness, and solidity of character. With these qualities Fichte himself combined a certain impetuosity and impatience probably derived from his mother, a woman of a somewhat querulous and jealous disposition.

At a very early age the boy showed remarkable mental vigour and moral independence. A fortunate accident which brought him under the notice of a neighbouring nobleman, Freiherr von Miltitz, was the means of procuring him a more excellent education than his father’s circumstances would have allowed. He was placed under the care of Pastor Krebel at Niederau. After a short stay at Meissen he was entered at the celebrated school at Pforta, near Naumburg. In 1780 he entered the university of Jena as a student of theology. He supported himself mainly by private teaching, and during the years 1784-1787 acted as tutor in various families of Saxony. In 1787, after an unsuccessful application to the consistory for pecuniary assistance, he seems to have been driven to miscellaneous literary work. A tutorship at Zürich was, however, obtained in the spring of 1788, and Fichte spent in Switzerland two of the happiest years of his life. He made several valuable acquaintances, among others Lavater and his brother-in-law Hartmann Rahn, to whose daughter, Johanna Maria, he became engaged.

Settling at Leipzig, still without any fixed means of livelihood, he was again reduced to literary drudgery. In the midst of this work occurred the most important event of his life, his introduction to the philosophy of Kant. At Schulpforta he had read with delight Lessing’s Anti-Goeze, and during his Jena days had studied the relation between philosophy and religion. The outcome of his speculations, Aphorismen über Religion und Deismus (unpublished, date 1790; Werke, i. 1-8), was a species of Spinozistic determinism, regarded, however, as lying altogether outside the boundary of religion. It is remarkable that even for a time fatalism should have been predominant in his reasoning, for in character he was opposed to such a view, and, as he has said, “according to the man, so is the system of philosophy he adopts.”

Fichte’s Letters of this period attest the influence exercised on him by the study of Kant. It effected a revolution in his mode of thinking; so completely did the Kantian doctrine of the inherent moral worth of man harmonize with his own character, that his life becomes one effort to perfect a true philosophy, and to make its principles practical maxims. At first he seems to have thought that the best method for accomplishing his object would be to expound Kantianism in a popular, intelligible form. He rightly felt that the reception of Kant’s doctrines was impeded by their phraseology. An abridgment of the Kritik der Urtheilskraft was begun, but was left unfinished.

Fichte’s circumstances had not improved. It had been arranged that he should return to Zürich and be married to Johanna Rahn, but the plan was overthrown by a commercial disaster which affected the fortunes of the Rahn family. Fichte accepted a post as private tutor in Warsaw, and proceeded on foot to that town. The situation proved unsuitable; the lady, as Kuno Fischer says, “required greater submission and better French” than Fichte could yield, and after a fortnight’s stay Fichte set out for Königsberg to see Kant. His first interview was disappointing; the coldness and formality of the aged philosopher checked the enthusiasm of the young disciple, though it did not diminish his reverence. He resolved to bring himself before Kant’s notice by submitting to him a work in which the principles of the Kantian philosophy should be applied. Such was the origin of the work, written in four weeks, the Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (Essay towards a Critique of all Revelation). The problem which Fichte dealt with in this essay was one not yet handled by Kant himself, the relations of which to the critical philosophy furnished matter for surmise. Indirectly, indeed, Kant had indicated a very definite opinion on theology: from the Critique of Pure Reason it was clear that for him speculative theology must be purely negative, while the Critique of Practical Reason as clearly indicated the view that the moral law is the absolute content or substance of any religion. A critical investigation of the conditions under which religious belief was possible was still wanting. Fichte sent his essay to Kant, who approved it highly, extended to the author a warm reception, and exerted his influence to procure a publisher. After some delay, consequent on the scruples of the theological censor of Halle, who did not like to see miracles rejected, the book appeared (Easter, 1792). By an oversight Fichte’s name did not appear on the title-page, nor was the preface given, in which the author spoke of himself as a beginner in philosophy. Outsiders, not unnaturally, ascribed the work to Kant. The Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung went so far as to say that no one who had read a line of Kant’s writings could fail to recognize the eminent author of this new work. Kant himself corrected the mistake, at the same time highly commending the work. Fichte’s reputation was thus secured at a stroke.

The Critique of Revelation marks the culminating point of Fichte’s Kantian period. The exposition of the conditions under which revealed religion is possible turns upon the absolute requirements of the moral law in human nature. Religion itself is the belief in this moral law as divine, and such belief is a practical postulate, necessary in order to add force to the law. It follows that no revealed religion, so far as matter or substance is concerned, can contain anything beyond this law; nor can any fact in the world of experience be recognized by us as supernatural. The supernatural element in religion can only be the divine character of the moral law. Now, the revelation of this divine character of morality is possible only to a being in whom the lower impulses have been, or are, successful in overcoming reverence for the law. In such a case it is conceivable that a revelation might be given in order to add strength to the moral law. Religion ultimately then rests upon the practical reason, and expresses some demand or want of the pure ego. In this conclusion we can trace the prominence assigned by Fichte to the practical element, and the tendency to make the requirements of the ego the ground for all judgment on reality. It was not possible that having reached this point he should not press forward and leave the Kantian position.

This success was coincident with an improvement in the fortunes of the Rahn family, and the marriage took place at Zürich in October 1793. The remainder of the year he spent at Zürich, slowly perfecting his thoughts on the fundamental problems left for solution in the Kantian philosophy. During this period he published anonymously two remarkable political works, Zurückforderung der Denkfreiheit von den Fürsten Europas and Beiträge zur Berichtigung der Urtheile des Publicums über die französische Revolution. Of these the latter is much the more important. The French Revolution seemed to many earnest thinkers the one great outcry of modern times for the liberty of thought and action which is the eternal heritage of every human being. Unfortunately the political condition of Germany was unfavourable to the formation of an unbiassed opinion on the great movement. The principles involved in it were lost sight of under the mass of spurious maxims on social order which had slowly grown up and stiffened into system. To direct attention to the true nature of revolution, to demonstrate how inextricably the right of liberty is interwoven with the very existence of man as an intelligent agent, to point out the inherent progressiveness of state arrangements, and the consequent necessity of reform or amendment, such are the main objects of the Beiträge; and although, as is often the case with Fichte, the arguments are too formal and the distinctions too wire-drawn, yet the general idea is nobly conceived and carried out. As in the Critique of Revelation so here the rational nature of man and the conditions necessary for its manifestation or realization become the standard for critical judgment.

Towards the close of 1793 Fichte received an invitation to succeed K.L. Reinhold as extraordinary professor of philosophy at Jena. This chair, not in the ordinary faculty, had become, through Reinhold, the most important in the university, and great deliberation was exercised in selecting his successor. It was desired to secure an exponent of Kantianism, and none seemed so highly qualified as the author of the Critique of Revelation. Fichte, while accepting the call, desired to spend a year in preparation; but as this was deemed inexpedient he rapidly drew out for his students an introductory outline of his system, and began his lectures in May 1794. His success was instantaneous and complete. The fame of his predecessor was altogether eclipsed. Much of this success was due to Fichte’s rare power as a lecturer. In oral exposition the vigour of thought and moral intensity of the man were most of all apparent, while his practical earnestness completely captivated his hearers. He lectured not only to his own class, but on general moral subjects to all students of the university. These general addresses, published under the title Bestimmung des Gelehrten (Vocation of the Scholar), were on a subject dear to Fichte’s heart, the supreme importance of the highest intellectual culture and the duties incumbent on those who had received it. Their tone is stimulating and lofty.

The years spent at Jena were unusually productive; indeed, the completed Fichtean philosophy is contained in the writings of this period. A general introduction to the system is given in the tractate Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre (On the Notion of the Theory of Science), 1794, and the theoretical portion is worked out in the Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (Foundation of the whole Theory of Science, 1794) and Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen d. Wissenschaftslehre (Outline of what is peculiar in the Theory of Science, 1794). To these were added in 1797 a First and a Second Introduction to the Theory of Science, and an Essay towards a new Exposition of the Theory of Science. The Introductions are masterly expositions. The practical philosophy was given in the Grundlage des Naturrechts (1796) and System der Sittenlehre (1798). The last is probably the most important of all Fichte’s works; apart from it, his theoretical philosophy is unintelligible.

During this period Fichte’s academic career had been troubled by various storms, the last so violent as to put a close to his professorate at Jena. The first of them, a complaint against the delivery of his general addresses on Sundays, was easily settled. The second, arising from Fichte’s strong desire to suppress the Landsmannschaften (students’ orders), which were productive of much harm, was more serious. Some misunderstanding caused an outburst of ignorant ill-feeling on the part of the students, who proceeded to such lengths that Fichte was compelled to reside out of Jena. The third storm, however, was the most violent. In 1798 Fichte, who, with F.I. Niethammer (1766-1848), had edited the Philosophical Journal since 1795, received from his friend F.K. Forberg (1770-1848) an essay on the “Development of the Idea of Religion.” With much of the essay he entirely agreed, but he thought the exposition in so many ways defective and calculated to create an erroneous impression, that he prefaced it with a short paper On the Grounds of our Belief in a Divine Government of the Universe, in which God is defined as the moral order of the universe, the eternal law of right which is the foundation of all our being. The cry of atheism was raised, and the electoral government of Saxony, followed by all the German states except Prussia, suppressed the Journal and confiscated the copies found in their universities. Pressure was put by the German powers on Charles Augustus, grand-duke of Saxe-Weimar, in whose dominions Jena university was situated, to reprove and dismiss the offenders. Fichte’s defences (Appellation an das Publicum gegen die Anklage des Atheismus, and Gerichtliche Verantwortung der Herausgeber der phil. Zeitschrift, 1799), though masterly, did not make it easier for the liberal-minded grand-duke to pass the matter over, and an unfortunate letter, in which he threatened to resign in case of reprimand, turned the scale against him. The grand-duke accepted his threat as a request to resign, passed censure, and extended to him permission to withdraw from his chair at Jena; nor would he alter his decision, even though Fichte himself endeavoured to explain away the unfortunate letter.

Berlin was the only town in Germany open to him. His residence there from 1799 to 1806 was unbroken save for a course of lectures during the summer of 1805 at Erlangen, where he had been named professor. Surrounded by friends, including Schlegel and Schleiermacher, he continued his literary work, perfecting the Wissenschaftslehre. The most remarkable of the works from this period are—(1) the Bestimmung des Menschen (Vocation of Man, 1800), a book which, for beauty of style, richness of content, and elevation of thought, may be ranked with the Meditations of Descartes; (2) Der geschlossene Handelsstaat, 1800 (The Exclusive or Isolated Commercial State), a very remarkable treatise, intensely socialist in tone, and inculcating organized protection; (3) Sonnenklarer Bericht an das grössere Publicum über die neueste Philosophie, 1801. In 1801 was also written the Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre, which was not published till after his death. In 1804 a set of lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre was given at Berlin, the notes of which were published in the Nachgelassene Werke, vol. ii. In 1804 were also delivered the noble lectures entitled Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (Characteristics of the Present Age, 1804), containing a most admirable analysis of the Aufklärung, tracing the position of such a movement of thought in the natural evolution of the general human consciousness, pointing out its inherent defects, and indicating as the ultimate goal of progress the life of reason in its highest aspect as a belief in the divine order of the universe. The philosophy of history sketched in this work has something of value with much that is fantastic. In 1805 and 1806 appeared the Wesen des Gelehrten (Nature of the Scholar) and the Anweisung zum seligen Leben oder Religionslehre (Way to a Blessed Life), the latter the most important work of this Berlin period. In it the union between the finite self-consciousness and the infinite ego or God is handled in an almost mystical manner. The knowledge and love of God is the end of life; by this means only can we attain blessedness (Seligkeit), for in God alone have we a permanent, enduring object of desire. The infinite God is the all; the world of independent objects is the result of reflection or self-consciousness, by which the infinite unity is broken up. God is thus over and above the distinction of subject and object; our knowledge is but a reflex or picture of the infinite essence. Being is not thought.

The disasters of Prussia in 1806 drove Fichte from Berlin. He retired first to Stargard, then to Königsberg (where he lectured for a time), then to Copenhagen, whence he returned to the capital in August 1807. From this time his published writings are practical in character; not till after the appearance of the Nachgelassene Werke was it known in what shape his final speculations had been thrown out. We may here note the order of these posthumous writings as being of importance for tracing the development of Fichte’s thought. From the year 1806 we have the remarkable Bericht über die Wissenschaftslehre (Werke, vol. viii.), with its sharp critique of Schelling; from 1810 we have the Thatsachen des Bewusstseyns, published in 1817, of which another treatment is given in lectures of 1813 (Nachgel. Werke, vol. i.). Of the Wissenschaftslehre we have, in 1812-1813, four separate treatments contained in the Nachgel Werke. As these consist mainly of notes for lectures, couched in uncouth phraseology, they cannot be held to throw much light on Fichte’s views. Perhaps the most interesting are the lectures of 1812 on Transcendental Logic (Nach. Werke, i. 106-400).

From 1812 we have notes of two courses on practical philosophy, Rechtslehre (Nach. Werke, vol. ii.) and Sittenlehre (ib. vol. iii.). A finished work in the same department is the Staatslehre, published in 1820. This gives the Fichtean utopia organized on principles of pure reason; in too many cases the proposals are identical with principles of pure despotism.

During these years, however, Fichte was mainly occupied with public affairs. In 1807 he drew up an elaborate and minute plan for the proposed new university of Berlin. In 1507-1808 he delivered at Berlin, amidst danger and discouragement, his noble addresses to the German people (Reden an die deutsche Nation). Even if we think that in these pure reason is sometimes overshadowed by patriotism, we cannot but recognize the immense practical value of what he recommended as the only true foundation for national prosperity.

In 1810 he was elected rector of the new university founded in the previous year. This post he resigned in 1812, mainly on account of the difficulties he experienced in his endeavour to reform the student life of the university.

In 1813 began the great effort of Germany for national independence. Debarred from taking an active part, Fichte made his contribution by way of lectures. The addresses on the idea of a true war (Über den Begriff eines wahrhaften Kriegs, forming part of the Staatslehre) contain a very subtle contrast between the positions of France and Germany in the war.

In the autumn of 1813 the hospitals of Berlin were filled with sick and wounded from the campaign. Among the most devoted in her exertions was Fichte’s wife, who, in January 1814, was attacked with a virulent hospital fever. On the day after she was pronounced out of danger Fichte was struck down. He lingered for some days in an almost unconscious state, and died on the 27th of January 1814.

The philosophy of Fichte, worked out in a series of writings, and falling chronologically into two distinct periods, that of Jena and that of Berlin, seemed in the course of its development to undergo a change so fundamental that many critics have sharply separated and opposed to one another an earlier and a later phase. The ground of the modification, further, has been sought and apparently found in quite external influences, principally that of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, to some extent that of Schleiermacher. But as a rule most of those who have adopted this view have done so without the full and patient examination which the matter demands; they have been misled by the difference in tone and style between the earlier and later writings, and have concluded that underlying this was a fundamental difference of philosophic conception. One only, Erdmann, in his Entwicklung d. deut. Spek. seit Kant, § 29, seems to give full references to justify his opinion, and even he, in his later work, Grundriss der Gesch. der Philos. (ed. 3), § 311, admits that the difference is much less than he had at the first imagined. He certainly retains his former opinion, but mainly on the ground, in itself intelligible and legitimate, that, so far as Fichte’s philosophical reputation and influence are concerned, attention may be limited to the earlier doctrines of the Wissenschaftslehre. This may be so, but it can be admitted neither that Fichte’s views underwent radical change, nor that the Wissenschaftslehre was ever regarded as in itself complete, nor that Fichte was unconscious of the apparent difference between his earlier and later utterances. It is demonstrable by various passages in the works and letters that he never looked upon the Wissenschaftslehre as containing the whole system; it is clear from the chronology of his writings that the modifications supposed to be due to other thinkers were from the first implicit in his theory; and if one fairly traces the course of thought in the early writings, one can see how he was inevitably led on to the statement of the later and, at first sight, divergent views. On only one point, the position assigned in the Wissenschaftslehre to the absolute ego, is there any obscurity; but the relative passages are far from decisive, and from the early work, Neue Darstellung der Wissenchaftslehre, unquestionably to be included in the Jena period, one can see that from the outset the doctrine of the absolute ego was held in a form differing only in statement from the later theory.

Fichte’s system cannot be compressed with intelligibility. We shall here note only three points:—(a) the origin in Kant; (b) the fundamental principle and method of the Wissenschaftslehre; (c) the connexion with the later writings. The most important works for (a) are the “Review of Aenesidemus,” and the Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre; for (b) the great treatises of the Jena period; for (c) the Thatsachen des Bewusstseyns of 1810.

(a) The Kantian system had for the first time opened up a truly fruitful line of philosophic speculation, the transcendental consideration of knowledge, or the analysis of the conditions under which cognition is possible. To Kant the fundamental condition was given in the synthetical unity of consciousness. The primitive fact under which might be gathered the special conditions of that synthesis which we call cognition was this unity. But by Kant there was no attempt made to show that the said special conditions were necessary from the very nature of consciousness itself. Their necessity was discovered and proved in a manner which might be called empirical. Moreover, while Kant in a quite similar manner pointed out that intuition had special conditions, space and time, he did not show any link of connexion between these and the primitive conditions of pure cognition. Closely connected with this remarkable defect in the Kantian view—lying, indeed, at the foundation of it—was the doctrine that the matter of cognition is altogether given, or thrown into the form of cognition from without. So strongly was this doctrine emphasized by Kant, that he seemed to refer the matter of knowledge to the action upon us of a non-ego or Ding-an-sich, absolutely beyond consciousness. While these hints towards a completely intelligible account of cognition were given by Kant, they were not reduced to system, and from the way in which the elements of cognition were related, could not be so reduced. Only in the sphere of practical reason, where the intelligible nature prescribed to itself its own laws, was there the possibility of systematic deduction from a single principle.

The peculiar position in which Kant had left the theory of cognition was assailed from many different sides and by many writers, specially by Schultze (Aenesidemus) and Maimon. To the criticisms of the latter, in particular, Fichte owed much, but his own activity went far beyond what they supplied to him. To complete Kant’s work, to demonstrate that all the necessary conditions of knowledge can be deduced from a single principle, and consequently to expound the complete system of reason, that is the business of the Wissenschaftslehre. By it the theoretical and practical reason shall be shown to coincide; for while the categories of cognition and the whole system of pure thought can be expounded from one principle, the ground of this principle is scientifically, or to cognition, inexplicable, and is made conceivable only in the practical philosophy. The ultimate basis for the activity of cognition is given by the will. Even in the practical sphere, however, Fichte found that the contradiction, insoluble to cognition, was not completely suppressed, and he was thus driven to the higher view, which is explicitly stated in the later writings though not, it must be confessed, with the precision and scientific clearness of the Wissenschaftslehre.

(b) What, then, is this single principle, and how does it work itself out into system? To answer this one must bear in mind what Fichte intended by designating all philosophy Wissenschaftslehre, or theory of science. Philosophy is to him the rethinking of actual cognition, the theory of knowledge, the complete, systematic exposition of the principles which lie at the basis of all reasoned cognition. It traces the necessary acts by which the cognitive consciousness comes to be what it is, both in form and in content. Not that it is a natural history, or even a phenomenology of consciousness; only in the later writings did Fichte adopt even the genetic method of exposition; it is the complete statement of the pure principles of the understanding in their rational or necessary order. But if complete, this Wissenschaftslehre must be able to deduce the whole organism of cognition from certain fundamental axioms, themselves unproved and incapable of proof; only thus can we have a system of reason. From these primary axioms the whole body of necessary thoughts must be developed, and, as Socrates would say, the argument itself will indicate the path of the development.

Of such primitive principles, the absolutely necessary conditions of possible cognition, only three are thinkable—one perfectly unconditioned both in form and matter; a second, unconditioned in form but not in matter; a third, unconditioned in matter but not in form. Of these, evidently the first must be the fundamental; to some extent it conditions the other two, though these cannot be deduced from it or proved by it. The statement of these principles forms the introduction to Wissenschaftslehre.

The method which Fichte first adopted for stating these axioms is not calculated to throw full light upon them, and tends to exaggerate the apparent airiness and unsubstantiality of his deduction. They may be explained thus. The primitive condition of all intelligence is that the ego shall posit, affirm or be aware of itself. The ego is the ego; such is the first pure act of conscious intelligence, that by which alone consciousness can come to be what it is. It is what Fichte called a Deed-act (Thathandlung); we cannot be aware of the process,—the ego is not until it has affirmed itself,—but we are aware of the result, and can see the necessity of the act by which it is brought about. The ego then posits itself, as real. What the ego posits is real. But in consciousness there is equally given a primitive act of op-positing, or contra-positing, formally distinct from the act of position, but materially determined, in so far as what is op-posited must be the negative of that which was posited. The non-ego—not, be it noticed, the world as we know it—is op-posed in consciousness to the ego. The ego is not the non-ego. How this act of op-positing is possible and necessary, only becomes clear in the practical philosophy, and even there the inherent difficulty leads to a higher view. But third, we have now an absolute antithesis to our original thesis. Only the ego is real, but the non-ego is posited in the ego. The contradiction is solved in a higher synthesis, which takes up into itself the two opposites. The ego and non-ego limit one another, or determine one another; and, as limitation is negation of part of a divisible quantum, in this third act, the divisible ego is op-posed to a divisible non-ego.

From this point onwards the course proceeds by the method already made clear. We progress by making explicit the oppositions contained in the fundamental synthesis, by uniting these opposites, analysing the new synthesis, and so on, until we reach an ultimate pair. Now, in the synthesis of the third act two principles may be distinguished:—(1) the non-ego determines the ego; (2) the ego determines the non-ego. As determined the ego is theoretical, as determining it is practical; ultimately the opposed principles must be united by showing how the ego is both determining and determined.

It is impossible to enter here on the steps by which the theoretical ego is shown to develop into the complete system of cognitive categories, or to trace the deduction of the processes (productive imagination, intuition, sensation, understanding, judgment, reason) by which the quite indefinite non-ego comes to assume the appearance of definite objects in the forms of time and space. All this evolution is the necessary consequence of the determination of the ego by the non-ego. But it is clear that the non-ego cannot really determine the ego. There is no reality beyond the ego itself. The contradiction can only be suppressed if the ego itself opposes to itself the non-ego, places it as an Anstoss or plane on which its own activity breaks and from which it is reflected. Now, this op-positing of the Anstoss is the necessary condition of the practical ego, of the will. If the ego be a striving power, then of necessity a limit must be set by which its striving is manifest. But how can the infinitely active ego posit a limit to its own activity? Here we come to the crux of Fichte’s system, which is only partly cleared up in the Rechtslehre and Sittenlehre. If the ego be pure activity, free activity, it can only become aware of itself by positing some limit. We cannot possibly have any cognition of how such an act is possible. But as it is a free act, the ego cannot be determined to it by anything beyond itself; it cannot be aware of its own freedom otherwise than as determined by other free egos. Thus in the Rechtslehre and Sittenlehre, the multiplicity of egos is deduced, and with this deduction the first form of the Wissenschaftslehre appeared to end.

(c) But in fact deeper questions remained. We have spoken of the ego as becoming aware of its own freedom, and have shown how the existence of other egos and of a world in which these egos may act are the necessary conditions of consciousness of freedom. But all this is the work of the ego. All that has been expounded follows if the ego comes to consciousness. We have therefore to consider that the absolute ego, from which spring all the individual egos, is not subject to these conditions, but freely determines itself to them. How is this absolute ego to be conceived? As early as 1797 Fichte had begun to see that the ultimate basis of his system was the absolute ego, in which is no difference of subject and object; in 1800 the Bestimmung des Menschen defined this absolute ego as the infinite moral will of the universe, God, in whom are all the individual egos, from whom they have sprung. It lay in the nature of the thing that more precise utterances should be given on this subject, and these we find in the Thatsachen des Bewusstseyns and in all the later lectures. God in them is the absolute Life, the absolute One, who becomes conscious of himself by self-diremption into the individual egos. The individual ego is only possible as opposed to a non-ego, to a world of the senses; thus God, the infinite will, manifests himself in the individual, and the individual has over against him the non-ego or thing. “The individuals do not make part of the being of the one life, but are a pure form of its absolute freedom.” “The individual is not conscious of himself, but the Life is conscious of itself in individual form and as an individual.” In order that the Life may act, though it is not necessary that it should act, individualization is necessary. “Thus,” says Fichte, “we reach a final conclusion. Knowledge is not mere knowledge of itself, but of being, and of the one being that truly is, viz. God.... This one possible object of knowledge is never known in its purity, but ever broken into the various forms of knowledge which are and can be shown to be necessary. The demonstration of the necessity of these forms is philosophy or Wissenschaftslehre” (Thats. des Bewuss. Werke, ii. 685). This ultimate view is expressed throughout the lectures (in the Nachgel. Werke) in uncouth and mystical language.

It will escape no one (1) how the idea and method of the Wissenschaftslehre prepare the way for the later Hegelian dialectic, and (2) how completely the whole philosophy of Schopenhauer is contained in the later writings of Fichte. It is not to the credit of historians that Schopenhauer’s debt should have been allowed to pass with so little notice.

Bibliography.—Fichte’s complete works were published by his son J.H. Fichte, Sämmtliche Werke (8 vols., Berlin, 1845-1846), with Nachgelassene Werke (3 vols., Bonn, 1834-1835); also Leben und Briefwechsel (2 vols., 1830, ed. 1862). Among translations are those of William Smith, Popular Writings of Fichte, with Memoir (2 vols., London, 1848-1849, 4th ed. 1889); A.E. Kroeger, portions of the Wissenschaftslehre (Science of Knowledge, Philadelphia, 1868; ed. London, 1889), the Naturrecht (Science of Rights, 1870; ed. London, 1889); of the Vorlesungen ü. d. Bestimmung d. Gelehrten (The Vocation of the Scholar, by W. Smith, 1847); Destination of Man, by Mrs P. Sinnett; Discours à la nation allemande, French by Léon Philippe (1895), with preface by F. Picavet, and a biographical memoir.

The number of critical works is very large. Besides the histories of post-Kantian philosophy by Erdmann, Fortlage (whose account is remarkably good), Michelet, Biedermann and others, see Wm. Busse, Fichte und seine Beziehung zur Gegenwart des deutschen Volkes (Halle, 1848-1849); J.H. Löwe, Die Philosophic Fichtes (Stuttgart, 1862); Kuno Fischer, Geschichte d. neueren Philosophie (1869, 1884, 1890); Ludwig Noack, Fichte nach seinem Leben, Lehren und Wirken (Leipzig, 1862); R. Adamson, Fichte (1881, in Knight’s “Philosophical Classics”); Oscar Benzow, Zu Fichtes Lekre von Nicht-Ich (Bern, 1898); E.O. Burmann, Die Transcendentalphilosophie Fichtes und Schellings (Upsala, 1890-1892); M. Carrière, Fichtes Geistesentwickelung in die Reden über d. Bestimmung des Gelehrten (1894); C.C. Everett, Fichte’s Science of Knowledge (Chicago, 1884); O. Pfleiderer, J.G. Fichtes Lebensbild eines deutschen Denkers und Patrioten (Stuttgart, 1877); T. Wotschke, Fichte und Erigena (1896); W. Kabitz, Studien zur Entwickelungsgeschichte der Fichtehen Wissenschaftslehre aus der Kantischen Philosophie (1902); E. Lask, Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte (1902); X. Léon, La Philos. de Fichte (1902); M. Wiener, J.G. Fichtes Lehre vom Wesen und Inhalt der Geschichte (1906).

On Fichte’s social philosophy see, e.g., F. Schmidt-Warneck, Die Sociologie Fichtes (Berlin, 1884); W. Windelband, Fichtes Idee des deutschen Staates (1890); M. Weber, Fichtes Sozialismus und sein Verhältnis zur Marx’schen Doctrin (1900); S.H. Gutman, J.G. Fichtes Sozialpädogogik (1907); H. Lindau, Johann G. Fichte und der neuere Socialismus (1900).

(R. Ad.; X.)

FICHTELGEBIRGE, a mountain group of Bavaria, forming the centre from which various mountain ranges proceed,—the Elstergebirge, linking it to the Erzgebirge, in a N.E., the Frankenwald in a N.W., and the Böhmerwald in a S.E. direction. The streams to which it gives rise flow towards the four cardinal points,—e.g. the Eger eastward and the Saale northward, both to the Elbe; the Weisser Main westward to the Rhine, and the Naab southward to the Danube. The chief points of the mass are the Schneeberg and the Ochsenkopf, the former having a height of 3448, and the latter of 3356 ft. The whole district is pretty thickly populated, and there is great abundance of wood, as well as of iron, vitriol, sulphur, copper, lead and many kinds of marble. The inhabitants are employed chiefly in the iron mines, at forges and blast furnaces, and in charcoal burning and the manufacture of blacking from firewood. Although surrounded by railways and crossed by the lines Nuremberg-Eger and Regensburg-Oberkotzau, the Fichtelgebirge, owing principally to its raw climate and bleakness, is not much visited by strangers, the only important points of interest being Alexandersbad (a delightfully situated watering-place) and the granite labyrinth of Luisenburg.

See A. Schmidt, Führer durch das Fichtelgebirge (1899); Daniel, Deutschland; and Meyer, Conversations-Lexikon (1904).

FICINO, MARSILIO (1433-1499), Italian philosopher and writer, was born at Figline, in the upper Arno valley, in the year 1433. His father, a physician of some eminence, settled in Florence, and attached himself to the person of Cosimo de’ Medici. Here the young Marsilio received his elementary education in grammar and Latin literature at the high school or studio pubblico. While still a boy, he showed promise of rare literary gifts, and distinguished himself by his facility in the acquisition of knowledge. Not only literature, but the physical sciences, as then taught, had a charm for him; and he is said to have made considerable progress in medicine under the tuition of his father. He was of a tranquil temperament, sensitive to music and poetry, and debarred by weak health from joining in the more active pleasures of his fellow-students. When he had attained the age of eighteen or nineteen years, Cosimo received him into his household, and determined to make use of his rare disposition for scholarship in the development of a long-cherished project. During the session of the council for the union of the Greek and Latin churches at Florence in 1439, Cosimo had made acquaintance with Gemistos Plethon, the Neo-Platonic sage of Mistra, whose discourses upon Plato and the Alexandrian mystics so fascinated the learned society of Florence that they named him the second Plato. It had been the dream of this man’s whole life to supersede both forms of Christianity by a semi-pagan theosophy deduced from the writings of the later Pythagoreans and Platonists. When, therefore, he perceived the impression he had made upon the first citizen of Florence, Gemistos suggested that the capital of modern culture would be a fit place for the resuscitation of the once so famous Academy of Athens. Cosimo took this hint. The second half of the 15th century was destined to be the age of academies in Italy, and the regnant passion for antiquity satisfied itself with any imitation, however grotesque, of Greek or Roman institutions. In order to found his new academy upon a firm basis Cosimo resolved not only to assemble men of letters for the purpose of Platonic disputation at certain regular intervals, but also to appoint a hierophant and official expositor of Platonic doctrine. He hoped by these means to give a certain stability to his projected institution, and to avoid the superficiality of mere enthusiasm. The plan was good; and with the rare instinct for character which distinguished him, he made choice of the right man for his purpose in the young Marsilio.

Before he had begun to learn Greek, Marsilio entered upon the task of studying and elucidating Plato. It is known that at this early period of his life, while he was yet a novice, he wrote voluminous treatises on the great philosopher, which he afterwards, however, gave to the flames. In the year 1459 John Argyropoulos was lecturing on the Greek language and literature at Florence, and Marsilio became his pupil. He was then about twenty-three years of age. Seven years later he felt himself a sufficiently ripe Greek scholar to begin the translation of Plato, by which his name is famous in the history of scholarship, and which is still the best translation of that author Italy can boast. The MSS. on which he worked were supplied by this patron Cosimo de’ Medici and by Amerigo Benci. While the translation was still in progress Ficino from time to time submitted its pages to the scholars, Angelo Poliziano, Cristoforo Landino, Demetrios Chalchondylas and others; and since these men were all members of the Platonic Academy, there can be no doubt that the discussions raised upon the text and Latin version greatly served to promote the purpose of Cosimo’s foundation. At last the book appeared in 1482, the expenses of the press being defrayed by the noble Florentine, Filippo Valori. About the same time Marsilio completed and published his treatise on the Platonic doctrine of immortality (Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animae), the work by which his claims to take rank as a philosopher must be estimated. This was shortly followed by the translation of Plotinus into Latin, and by a voluminous commentary, the former finished in 1486, the latter in 1491, and both published at the cost of Lorenzo de’ Medici just one month after his death. As a supplement to these labours in the field of Platonic and Alexandrian philosophy, Marsilio next devoted his energies to the translation of Dionysius the Areopagite, whose work on the celestial hierarchy, though recognized as spurious by the Neapolitan humanist, Lorenzo Valla, had supreme attraction for the mystic and uncritical intellect of Ficino.

It is not easy to value the services of Marsilio Ficino at their proper worth. As a philosopher, he can advance no claim to originality, his laborious treatise on Platonic theology being little better than a mass of ill-digested erudition. As a scholar, he failed to recognize the distinctions between different periods of antiquity and various schools of thought. As an exponent of Plato he suffered from the fatal error of confounding Plato with the later Platonists. It is true that in this respect he did not differ widely from the mass of his contemporaries. Lorenzo Valla and Angelo Poliziano, almost alone among the scholars of that age, showed a true critical perception. For the rest, it was enough that an author should be ancient to secure their admiration. The whole of antiquity seemed precious in the eyes of its discoverers; and even a thinker so acute as Pico di Mirandola dreamed of the possibility of extracting the essence of philosophical truth by indiscriminate collation of the most divergent doctrines. Ficino was, moreover, a firm believer in planetary influences. He could not separate his philosophical from his astrological studies, and caught eagerly at any fragment of antiquity which seemed to support his cherished delusions. It may here be incidentally mentioned that this superstition brought him into trouble with the Roman Church. In 1489 he was accused of magic before Pope Innocent VIII., and had to secure the good offices of Francesco Soderini, Ermolao Barbaro, and the archbishop Rinaldo Orsini, in order to purge himself of a most perilous imputation. What Ficino achieved of really solid, was his translation. The value of that work cannot be denied; the impulse which it gave to Platonic studies in Italy, and through them to the formation of the new philosophy in Europe, is indisputable. Ficino differed from the majority of his contemporaries in this that, while he felt the influence of antiquity no less strongly than they did, he never lost his faith in Christianity, or contaminated his morals by contact with paganism. For him, as for Petrarch, St Augustine was the model of a Christian student. The cardinal point of his doctrine was the identity of religion and philosophy. He held that philosophy consists in the study of truth and wisdom, and that God alone is truth and wisdom,—so that philosophy is but religion, and true religion is genuine philosophy. Religion, indeed, is common to all men, but its pure form is that revealed through Christ; and the teaching of Christ is sufficient to a man in all circumstances of life. Yet it cannot be expected that every man should accept the faith without reasoning; and here Ficino found a place for Platonism. He maintained that the Platonic doctrine was providentially made to harmonize with Christianity, in order that by its means speculative intellects might be led to Christ. The transition from this point of view to an almost superstitious adoration of Plato was natural; and Ficino, we know, joined in the hymns and celebrations with which the Florentine Academy honoured their great master on the day of his birth and death. Those famous festivals in which Lorenzo de’ Medici delighted had indeed a pagan tone appropriate to the sentiment of the Renaissance; nor were all the worshippers of the Athenian sage so true to Christianity as his devoted student.

Of Ficino’s personal life there is but little to be said. In order that he might have leisure for uninterrupted study, Cosimo de’ Medici gave him a house near S. Maria Nuova in Florence, and a little farm at Montevecchio, not far from the villa of Careggi. Ficino, like nearly all the scholars of that age in Italy, delighted in country life. At Montevecchio he lived contentedly among his books, in the neighbourhood of his two friends, Pico at Querceto, and Poliziano at Fiesole, cheering his solitude by playing on the lute, and corresponding with the most illustrious men of Italy. His letters, extending over the years 1474-1494, have been published, both separately and in his collected works. From these it may be gathered that nearly every living scholar of note was included in the list of his friends, and that the subjects which interested him were by no means confined to his Platonic studies. As instances of his close intimacy with illustrious Florentine families, it may be mentioned that he held the young Francesco Guicciardini at the font, and that he helped to cast the horoscope of the Casa Strozzi in the Via Tornabuoni.

At the age of forty Ficino took orders, and was honoured with a canonry of S. Lorenzo. He was henceforth assiduous in the performance of his duties, preaching in his cure of Novoli, and also in the cathedral and the church of the Angeli at Florence. He used to say that no man was better than a good priest, and none worse than a bad one. His life corresponded in all points to his principles. It was the life of a sincere Christian and a real sage,—of one who found the best fruits of philosophy in the practice of the Christian virtues. A more amiable and a more harmless man never lived; and this was much in that age of discordant passions and lawless licence. In spite of his weak health, he was indefatigably industrious. His tastes were of the simplest; and while scholars like Filelfo were intent on extracting money from their patrons by flattery and threats, he remained so poor that he owed the publication of all his many works to private munificence. For his old patrons of the house of Medici Ficino always cherished sentiments of the liveliest gratitude. Cosimo he called his second father, saying that Ficino had given him life, but Cosimo new birth,—the one had devoted him to Galen, the other to the divine Plato,—the one was physician of the body, the other of the soul. With Lorenzo he lived on terms of familiar, affectionate, almost parental intimacy. He had seen the young prince grow up in the palace of the Via Larga, and had helped in the development of his rare intellect. In later years he did not shrink from uttering a word of warning and advice, when he thought that the master of the Florentine republic was too much inclined to yield to pleasure. A characteristic proof of his attachment to the house of Medici was furnished by a yearly custom which he practised at his farm at Montevecchio. He used to invite the contadini who had served Cosimo to a banquet on the day of Saints Cosimo and Damiano (the patron saints of the Medici), and entertained them with music and singing. This affection was amply returned. Cosimo employed almost the last hours of his life in listening to Ficino’s reading of a treatise on the highest good; while Lorenzo, in a poem on true happiness, described him as the mirror of the world, the nursling of sacred muses, the harmonizer of wisdom and beauty in complete accord. Ficino died at Florence in 1499.

Besides the works already noticed, Ficino composed a treatise on the Christian religion, which was first given to the world in 1476, a translation into Italian of Dante’s De monarchia, a life of Plato, and numerous essays on ethical and semi-philosophical subjects. Vigour of reasoning and originality of view were not his characteristics as a writer; nor will the student who has raked these dust-heaps of miscellaneous learning and old-fashioned mysticism discover more than a few sentences of genuine enthusiasm and simple-hearted aspiration to repay his trouble and reward his patience. Only in familiar letters, prolegomena, and prefaces do we find the man Ficino, and learn to know his thoughts and sentiments unclouded by a mist of citations; these minor compositions have therefore a certain permanent value, and will continually be studied for the light they throw upon the learned circle gathered round Lorenzo in the golden age of humanism.

The student may be referred for further information to the following works:—Marsilii Ficini opera (Basileae, 1576); Marsilii Ficini vita, auctore Corsio (ed. Bandini, Pisa, 1771); Roscoe’s Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici; Pasquale Villari, La Storia di Girolamo Savonarola (Firenze, Le Monnier, 1859); Von Reumont, Lorenzo de’ Medici (Leipzig, 1874).

(J. A. S.)

FICKSBURG, a town of Orange Free State 110 m. by rail E. by N. of Bloemfontein. Pop. (1904) 1954, of whom 1021 were whites. The town is situated near the north bank of the Caledon river and is the capital of one of the finest agricultural and stock-raising regions of the province. It has direct railway communication with Natal and an extensive trade. In the neighbourhood are petroleum wells and a diamond mine. In the fossilized ooze of the Wonderkop, a table mountain of the adjacent Wittebergen, are quantities of petrified fish.

FICTIONS, or legal fictions, in law, the term used for false averments, the truth of which is not permitted to be called in question. English law as well as Roman law abounds in fictions. Sometimes they are merely the condensed expression of a rule of law,—e.g., the fiction of English law that husband and wife were one person, and the fiction of Roman law that the wife was the daughter of the husband. Sometimes they must be regarded as reasons invented in order to justify a rule of law according to an implied ethical standard. Of this sort seems to be the fiction or presumption that every one knows the law, which reconciles the rule that ignorance is no excuse for crime with the moral commonplace that it is unfair to punish a man for violating a law of whose existence he was unaware. Again, some fictions are deliberate falsehoods, adopted as true for the purpose of establishing a remedy not otherwise attainable. Of this sort are the numerous fictions of English law by which the different courts obtained jurisdiction in private business, removed inconvenient restrictions in the law relating to land, &c.

What to the scientific jurist is a stumbling-block is to the older writers on English law a beautiful device for reconciling the strict letter of the law with common sense and justice. Blackstone, in noticing the well-known fiction by which the court of king’s bench established its jurisdiction in common pleas (viz. that the defendant was in custody of the marshal of the court), says, “These fictions of law, though at first they may startle the student, he will find upon further consideration to be highly beneficial and useful; especially as this maxim is ever invariably observed, that no fiction shall extend to work an injury; its proper operation being to prevent a mischief or remedy an inconvenience that might result from the general rule of law. So true it is that in fictione juris semper subsistit aequitas.” Austin, on the other hand, while correctly assigning as the cause of many fictions the desire to combine the necessary reform with some show of respect for the abrogated law, makes the following harsh criticism as to others:—“Why the plain meanings which I have now stated should be obscured by the fictions to which I have just adverted I cannot conjecture. A wish on the part of the authors of the fictions to render the law as uncognoscible as may be is probably the cause which Mr Bentham would assign. I judge not, I confess, so uncharitably; I rather impute such fictions to the sheer imbecility (or, if you will, to the active and sportive fancies) of their grave and venerable authors, than to any deliberate design, good or evil.” Bentham, of course, saw in fictions the instrument by which the great object of his abhorrence, judiciary law, was produced. It was the means by which judges usurped the functions of legislators. “A fiction of law.” he says, “may be defined as a wilful falsehood, having for its object the stealing legislative powers by and for hands which could not or durst not openly claim it, and but for the delusion thus produced could not exercise it.” A partnership, he says, was formed between the kings and the judges against the interests of the people. “Monarchs found force, lawyers fraud; thus was the capital found” (Historical Preface to the second edition of the Fragment on Government).

Sir H. Maine (Ancient Law) supplies the historical element which is always lacking in the explanations of Austin and Bentham. Fictions form one of the agencies by which, in progressive societies, positive law is brought into harmony with public opinion. The others are equity and statutes. Fictions in this sense include, not merely the obvious falsities of the English and Roman systems, but any assumption which conceals a change of law by retaining the old formula after the change has been made. It thus includes both the case law of the English and the Responsa Prudentum of the Romans. “At a particular stage of social progress they are invaluable expedients for overcoming the rigidity of law; and, indeed, without one of them, the fiction of adoption, which permits the family tie to be artificially created, it is difficult to understand how society would ever have escaped from its swaddling clothes, and taken its first steps towards civilization.”

The bolder remedial fictions of English law have been to a large extent removed by legislation, and one great obstacle to any reconstruction of the legal system has thus been partially removed. Where the real remedy stood in glaring contrast to the nominal rule, it has been openly ratified by statute. In ejectment cases the mysterious sham litigants have disappeared. The bond of entail can be broken without having recourse to the collusive proceedings of fine and recovery. Fictions have been almost entirely banished from the procedure of the courts. The action for damages on account of seduction, which is still nominally an action by the father for loss of his daughter’s services, is perhaps the only fictitious action now remaining.

Fictions which appear in the form of principles are not so easily dealt with by legislation. To expel them formally from the system would require the re-enactment of vast portions of law. A change in legal modes of speech and thought would be more effective. The legal mind instinctively seizes upon concrete aids to abstract reasoning. Many hard and revolting fictions must have begun their career as metaphors. In some cases the history of the change may still almost be traced. The conception that a man-of-war is a floating island, or that an ambassador’s house is beyond the territorial limits of the country in which he resides, was originally a figure of speech designed to set a rule of law in a striking light. It is then gravely accepted as true in fact, and other rules of law are deduced from it. Its beginning is to be compared with such phrases as “an Englishman’s house is his castle,” which have had no legal offshoots and still remain mere figures of speech.

Constitutional law is of course honeycombed with fictions. Here there is hardly ever anything like direct legislative change, and yet real change is incessant. The rules defining the sovereign power and fixing the authority of its various members are in most points the same as they were at the last revolution,—in many points they have been the same since the beginning of parliamentary government. But they have long ceased to be true in fact; and it would hardly be too much to say that the entire series of formal propositions called the constitution is merely a series of fictions. The legal attributes of the king, and even of the House of Lords, are fictions. If we could suppose that the effects of the Reform Acts had been brought about, not by legislation, but by the decisions of law courts and the practice of House of Commons committees—by such assumptions as that freeholder includes lease-holder and that ten means twenty—we should have in the legal constitution of the House of Commons the same kind of fictions that we find in the legal statement of the attributes of the crown and the House of Lords. Here, too, fictions have been largely resorted to for the purpose of supporting particular theories,—popular or monarchical,—and such have flourished even more vigorously than purely legal fictions.

In the same essay Bentham notices the comparative rarity of fictions in Scots law. As to fiction in particular, compared with the work done by it in English law, the use made of it by the Scottish lawyers is next to nothing. No need have they had of any such clumsy instrument. They have two others “of their own making, by which things of the same sort have been done with much less trouble. Nobile officium gives them the creative power of legislation; this and the word desuetude together the annihilative.” And he notices aptly enough that, while the English lawyers declared that James II. had abdicated the throne (which everybody knew to be false), the Scottish lawyers boldly said he had forfeited it.

FIDDES, RICHARD (1671-1725), English divine and historian, was born at Hunmanby and educated at Oxford. He took orders, and obtained the living of Halsham in Holderness in 1696. Owing to ill-health he applied for leave to reside at Wickham, and in 1712 he removed to London on the plea of poverty, intending to pursue a literary career. In London he met Swift, who procured him a chaplaincy at Hull. He also became chaplain to the earl of Oxford. After losing the Hull chaplaincy through a change of ministry in 1714, he devoted himself to writing. His best book is a Life of Cardinal Wolsey (London, 1724), containing documents which are still valuable for reference; of his other writings the Prefatory Epistle containing some remarks to be published on Homer’s Iliad (London, 1714), was occasioned by Pope’s proposed translation of the Iliad, and his Theologia speculativa (London, 1718), earned him the degree of D.D. at Oxford. In his own day he had a considerable reputation as an author and man of learning.

FIDDLE (O. Eng. fithele, fidel, &c., Fr. vièle, viole, violon; M. H. Ger. videle, mod. Ger. Fiedel), a popular term for the violin, derived from the names of certain of its ancestors. The word fiddle antedates the appearance of the violin by several centuries, and in England did not always represent an instrument of the same type. The word has first been traced in 1205 in Layamon’s Brut (7002), “of harpe, of salteriun, of fithele and of coriun.” In Chaucer’s time the fiddle was evidently a well-known instrument:

“For him was lever have at his beddes hed

A twenty bokes, clothed in black or red.
Of Aristotle and his Philosophie,
Than robes riche or fidel or sautrie.”
(Prologue, v. 298.)

The origin of the fiddle is of the greatest interest; it will be found inseparable from that of the violin both as regards the instruments and the etymology of the words; the remote common ancestor is the ketharah of the Assyrians, the parent of the Greek cithara. The Romans are responsible for the word fiddle, having bestowed upon a kind of cithara—probably then in its first transition—the name of fidiculae (more rarely fidicula), a diminutive form of fides. In Alain de Lille’s De planctu naturae against the word lira stands as equivalent vioel, with the definition “Lira est quoddam genuē citharae vel fitola alioquin de reot. Hoc instrumentum est multum vulgare.” This is a marginal note in writing of the 13th century.

Some of the transitions from fidicula to fiddle are made evident in the accompanying table:

Latin fidiculae

Medieval Latin vitula, fitola.

French vièle, vielle, viole.

Provencal viula.

Spanish viguela, vihuela, vigolo.

Old High German fidula.

Middle High German videle.

German fiedel, violine.

Italian viola, violino.

Dutch vedel.

Danish fiddel.

Anglo-Saxon fithele.

Old English fithele, fythal, fithel, fythylle,

fidel, fidylle, (south) vithele.

For the descent of the guitar-fiddle, the first bowed ancestor of the violin, through many transitions from the cithara, see Cithara, Guitar and Guitar-Fiddle.

From Julius Rühlmann’s Geschichte der Bogeninstrumente.

Minnesinger Fiddle. Germany, 13th Century, from the Manesse MSS.

In the minnesinger and troubadour fiddles, of which evidences abound during the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, are to be observed the structural characteristics of the violin and its ancestors in the course of evolution. The principal of these are first of all the shallow sound-chest, composed of belly and back, almost flat, connected by ribs (also present in the cithara), with incurvations more or less pronounced, an arched bridge, a finger-board and strings (varying in number), vibrated by means of a bow. The central rose sound-holes of stringed instruments whose strings are plucked by fingers, or plectrum have given place to smaller lateral sound-holes placed on each side of the strings. It is in Germany, where contemporary drawings of fiddles of the 13th and 14th centuries furnish an authoritative clue, and in France, that the development may best be followed. The German minnesinger fiddle with sloping shoulders was the prototype of the viols, whereas the guitar-fiddle produced the violin through the intermediary of the Italian bowed Lyra.

The fiddle of the Carolingian epoch,—such, for instance, as that mentioned by Otfrid of Weissenburg in his Harmony of the Gospels (c. 868),

“Sih thar ouch al ruarit

This organo fuarit
Lira joh fidula,” &c.,—

was in all probability still an instrument whose strings were plucked by the fingers, a cithara in transition.

(K. S.)

See C.E.H. de Coussemaker, Mémoire sur Hucbald (Paris, 1841).

See the Manesse MSS. reproduced in part by F.H. von der Hagen, Heldenbilder (Leipzig and Berlin, 1855) and Bildersaal. The fiddles are reproduced in J. Rühlmann’s Geschichte der Bogeninstrumente (Brunswick, 1882), plates.

See Schiller’s Thesaurus antiq. Teut. vol. i. p. 379.

FIDENAE, an ancient town of Latium, situated about 5 m. N. of Rome on the Via Salaria, which ran between it and the Tiber. It was for some while the frontier of the Roman territory and was often in the hands of Veii. It appears to have fallen under the Roman sway after the capture of this town, and is spoken of by classical authors as a place almost deserted in their time. It seems, however, to have had some importance as a post station. The site of the arx of the ancient town is probably to be sought on the hill on which lies the Villa Spada, though no traces of early buildings or defences are to be seen: pre-Roman tombs are to be found in the cliffs to the north. The later village lay at the foot of the hill on the eastern edge of the high-road, and its curia, with a dedicatory inscription to M. Aurelius by the Senatus Fidenatium, was excavated in 1889. Remains of other buildings may also be seen.

See T. Ashby in Papers of the British School at Rome, iii. 17.

FIDUCIARY (Lat. fiduciaries, one in whom trust, fiducia, is reposed), of or belonging to a position of trust, especially of one who stands in a particular relationship of confidence to another. Such relationships are, in law, those of parent and child, guardian and ward, trustee and cestui que trust, legal adviser and client, spiritual adviser, doctor and patient, &c. In many of these the law has attached special obligations in the case of gifts made to the “fiduciary,” on whom is laid the onus of proving that no “undue influence” has been exercised. (See Contract; Children, Law Relating to; Infant; Trust.)

FIEF, a feudal estate in land, land held from a superior (see Feudalism). The word is the French form, which is represented in Medieval Latin as feudum or feodum, and in English as “fee” or “feu” (see Fee). The A. Fr. feoffer, to invest with a fief or fee, has given the English law terms “feoffee” and “feoffment” (q.v.).

FIELD, CYRUS WEST (1819-1892), American capitalist, projector of the first Atlantic cable, was born at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on the 30th of November 1819. He was a brother of David Dudley Field. At fifteen he became a clerk in the store of A.T. Stewart & Co., of New York, and stayed there three years; then worked for two years with his brother, Matthew Dickinson Field, in a paper-mill at Lee, Massachusetts; and in 1840 went into the paper business for himself at Westfield, Massachusetts, but almost immediately became a partner in E. Root & Co., wholesale paper dealers in New York City, who failed in the following year. Field soon afterwards formed with a brother-in-law the firm of Cyrus W. Field & Co., and in 1853 had accumulated $250,000, paid off the debts of the Root company and retired from active business, leaving his name and $100,000 with the concern. In the same year he travelled with Frederick E. Church, the artist, through South America. In 1854 he became interested, through his brother Matthew, a civil engineer, in the project of Frederick Newton Gisborne (1824-1892) for a telegraph across Newfoundland; and he was attracted by the idea of a trans-Atlantic telegraphic cable, as to which he consulted S.F.B. Morse and Matthew F. Maury, head of the National Observatory at Washington. With Peter Cooper, Moses Taylor (1806-1882), Marshall Owen Roberts (1814-1880) and Chandler White, he formed the New York, Newfoundland & London Telegraph Company, which procured a more favourable charter than Gisborne’s, and had a capital of $1,500,000. Having secured all the practicable landing rights on the American side of the ocean, he and John W. Brett, who was now his principal colleague, approached Sir Charles Bright (q.v.) in London, and in December 1556 the Atlantic Telegraph Company was organized by them in Great Britain, a government grant being secured of £14,000 annually for government messages, to be reduced to £10,000 annually when the cable should pay a 6% yearly dividend; similar grants were made by the United States government. Unsuccessful attempts to lay the cable were made in August 1857 and in June 1858, but the complete cable was laid between the 7th of July and the 5th of August 1858; for a time messages were transmitted, but in October the cable became useless, owing to the failure of its electrical insulation. Field, however, did not abandon the enterprise, and finally in July 1866, after a futile attempt in the previous year, a cable was laid and brought successfully into use. From the Congress of the United States he received a gold medal and a vote of thanks, and he received many other honours both at home and abroad. In 1877 he bought a controlling interest in the New York Elevated Railroad Company, controlling the Third and Ninth Avenue lines, of which he was president in 1877-1880. He worked with Jay Gould for the completion of the Wabash railway, and at the time of his greatest stock activity bought The New York Evening Express and The Mail and combined them as The Mail and Express, which he controlled for six years. In 1879 Field suffered financially by Samuel J. Tilden’s heavy sales (during Field’s absence in Europe) of “Elevated” stock, which forced the price down from 200 to 164; but Field lost much more in the great “Manhattan squeeze” of the 24th of June 1887, when Jay Gould and Russell Sage, who had been supposed to be his backers in an attempt to bring the Elevated stock to 200, forsook him, and the price fell from 156½ to 114 in half an hour. Field died in New York on the 12th of July 1892.

See the biography by his daughter, Isabella (Field) Judson, Cyrus W. Field, His Life and Work (New York, 1896); H.M. Field, History of the Atlantic Telegraph (New York, 1866); and Charles Bright, The Story of the Atlantic Cable (New York, 1903).

FIELD, DAVID DUDLEY (1805-1894), American lawyer and law reformer, was born in Haddam, Connecticut, on the 13th of February 1805. He was the oldest of the four sons of the Rev. David Dudley Field (1781-1867), a well-known American clergyman and author. He graduated at Williams College in 1825, and settled in New York City, where he studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1828, and rapidly won a high position in his profession. Becoming convinced that the common law in America, and particularly in New York state, needed radical changes in respect to the unification and simplification of its procedure, he visited Europe in 1836 and thoroughly investigated the courts, procedure and codes of England, France and other countries, and then applied himself to the task of bringing about in the United States a codification of the common law procedure. For more than forty years every moment that he could spare from his extensive practice was devoted to this end. He entered upon his great work by a systematic publication of pamphlets and articles in journals and magazines in behalf of his reform, but for some years he met with a discouraging lack of interest. He appeared personally before successive legislative committees, and in 1846 published a pamphlet, “The Reorganization of the Judiciary,” which had its influence in persuading the New York State Constitutional Convention of that year to report in favour of a codification of the laws. Finally in 1847 he was appointed as the head of a state commission to revise the practice and procedure. The first part of the commission’s work, consisting of a code of civil procedure, was reported and enacted in 1848, and by the 1st of January 1850 the complete code of civil and criminal procedure was completed, and was subsequently enacted by the legislature. The basis of the new system, which was almost entirely Field’s work, was the abolition of the existing distinction in forms of procedure between suits in law and equity requiring separate actions, and their unification and simplification in a single action. Eventually the civil code with some changes was adopted in twenty-four states, and the criminal code in eighteen, and the whole formed a basis of the reform in procedure in England and several of her colonies. In 1857 Field became chairman of a state commission for the reduction into a written and systematic code of the whole body of law of the state, excepting those portions already reported upon by the Commissioners of Practice and Pleadings. In this work he personally prepared almost the whole of the political and civil codes. The codification, which was completed in February 1865, was adopted only in small part by the state, but it has served as a model after which most of the law codes of the United States have been constructed. In 1866 he proposed to the British National Association for the Promotion of Social Science a revision and codification of the laws of all nations. For an international commission of lawyers he prepared Draft Outlines of an International Code (1872), the submission of which resulted in the organization of the international Association for the Reform and Codification of the Laws of Nations, of which he became president. In politics Field was originally an anti-slavery Democrat, and he supported Van Buren in the Free Soil campaign of 1848. He gave his support to the Republican party in 1856 and to the Lincoln administration throughout the Civil War. After 1876, however, he returned to the Democratic party, and from January to March 1877 served out in Congress the unexpired term of Smith Ely, elected mayor of New York City. During his brief Congressional career he delivered six speeches, all of which attracted attention, introduced a bill in regard to the presidential succession, and appeared before the Electoral Commission in Tilden’s interest. He died in New York City on the 13th of April 1894.

Part of his numerous pamphlets and addresses were collected in his Speeches, Arguments and Miscellaneous Papers (3 vols., 1884-1890). See also the Life of David Dudley Field (New York, 1898), by Rev. Henry Martyn Field.

FIELD, EUGENE (1850-1895), American poet, was born at St Louis, Missouri, on the 2nd of September 1850. He spent his boyhood in Vermont and Massachusetts; studied for short periods at Williams and Knox Colleges and the University of Missouri, but without taking a degree; and worked as a journalist on various papers, finally becoming connected with the Chicago News. A Little Book of Profitable Tales appeared in Chicago in 1889 and in New York the next year; but Field’s place in later American literature chiefly depends upon his poems of Christmas-time and childhood (of which “Little Boy Blue” and “A Dutch Lullaby” are most widely known), because of their union of obvious sentiment with fluent lyrical form. His principal collections of poems are: A Little Book of Western Verse (1889); A Second Book of Verse (1892); With Trumpet and Drum (1892); and Love Songs of Childhood (1894). Field died at Chicago on the 4th of November 1895.

His works were collected in ten volumes (1896), at New York. His prose Love-affairs of a Bibliomaniac (1896) contains a Memoir by his brother Roswell Martin Field (b. 1851). See also Slason Thompson, Eugene Field: a study in heredity and contradictions (2 vols., New York, 1901).

FIELD, FREDERICK (1801-1885), English divine and biblical scholar, was born in London and educated at Christ’s hospital and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship in 1824. He took orders in 1828, and began a close study of patristic theology. Eventually he published an emended and annotated text of Chrysostom’s Homiliae in Matthaeum (Cambridge, 1839), and some years later he contributed to Pusey’s Bibliotheca Patrum (Oxford, 1838-1870), a similarly treated text of Chrysostom’s homilies on Paul’s epistles. The scholarship displayed in both of these critical editions is of a very high order. In 1839 he had accepted the living of Great Saxham, in Suffolk, and in 1842 he was presented by his college to the rectory of Reepham in Norfolk. He resigned in 1863, and settled at Norwich, in order to devote his whole time to study. Twelve years later he completed the Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt (Oxford, 1867-1875), now well known as Field’s Hexapla, a text reconstructed from the extant fragments of Origen’s work of that name, together with materials drawn from the Syro-hexaplar version and the Septuagint of Holmes and Parsons (Oxford, 1798-1827). Field was appointed a member of the Old Testament revision company in 1870.

FIELD, HENRY MARTYN (1822-1907), American author and clergyman, brother of Cyrus Field, was born at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on the 3rd of April 1822; he graduated at Williams College in 1838, and was pastor of a Presbyterian church in St Louis, Missouri, from 1842 to 1847, and of a Congregational church in West Springfield, Massachusetts, from 1850 to 1854. The interval between his two pastorates he spent in Europe. From 1854 to 1898 he was editor and for many years he was also sole proprietor of The Evangelist, a New York periodical devoted to the interests of the Presbyterian church. He spent the last years of his life in retirement at Stockbridge, Mass., where he died on the 26th of January 1907. He was the author of a series of books of travel, which achieved unusual popularity. His two volumes descriptive of a trip round the world in 1875-1876, entitled From the Lakes of Killarney to the Golden Horn (1876) and From Egypt to Japan (1877), are almost classic in their way, and have passed through more than twenty editions. Among his other publications are The Irish Confederates and the Rebellion of 1798 (1850), The History of the Atlantic Telegraph (1866), Faith or Agnosticism? the Field-Ingersoll Discussion (1888), Old Spain and New Spain (1888), and Life of David Dudley Field (1898).

He is not to be confused with another Henry Martyn Field, the gynaecologist, who was born in 1837 at Brighton, Mass., and graduated at Harvard in 1859 and at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City in 1862; he was professor of Materia Medica and therapeutics at Dartmouth from 1871 to 1887 and of therapeutics from 1887 to 1893.

FIELD, JOHN (1782-1837), English musical composer and pianist, was born at Dublin in 1782. He came of a musical family, his father being a violinist, and his grandfather the organist in one of the churches of Dublin. From the latter the boy received his first musical education. When a few years later the family settled in London, Field became the favourite pupil of the celebrated Clementi, whom he accompanied to Paris, and later, in 1802, on his great concert tour through France, Germany and Russia. Under the auspices of his master Field appeared in public in most of the great European capitals, especially in St Petersburg, and in that city he remained when Clementi returned to England. During his stay with the great pianist Field had to suffer many privations owing to Clementi’s all but unexampled parsimony; but when the latter left Russia his splendid connexion amongst the highest circles of the capital became Field’s inheritance. His marriage with a French lady of the name of Charpentier was anything but happy, and had soon to be dissolved. Field made frequent concert tours to the chief cities of Russia, and in 1820 settled permanently in Moscow. In 1831 he came to England for a short time, and for the next four years led a migratory life in France, Germany and Italy, exciting the admiration of amateurs wherever he appeared in public. In Naples he fell seriously ill, and lay several months in the hospital, till a Russian family discovered him and brought him back to Moscow. There he lingered for several years till his death on the 11th of January 1837. Field’s training and the cast of his genius were not of a kind to enable him to excel in the larger forms of instrumental music, and his seven concerti for the pianoforte are now forgotten. Neither do his quartets for strings and pianoforte hold their own by the side of those of the great masters. But his “nocturnes,” a form of music highly developed if not actually created by him, remain all but unrivalled for their tenderness and dreaminess of conception, combined with a continuous flow of beautiful melody. They were indeed Chopin’s models. Field’s execution on the pianoforte was nearly allied to the nature of his compositions, beauty and poetical charm of touch being one of the chief characteristics of his style. Moscheles, who heard Field in 1831, speaks of his “enchanting legato, his tenderness and elegance and his beautiful touch.”

FIELD, MARSHALL (1835-1906), American merchant, was born at Conway, Massachusetts, on the 18th of August 1835. Reared on a farm, he obtained a common school and academy education, and at the age of seventeen became a clerk in a dry goods store at Pittsfield, Mass. In 1856 he removed to Chicago, where he became a clerk in the large mercantile establishment of Cooley, Wadsworth & Company. In 1860 the firm was reorganized as Cooley, Farwell & Company, and he was admitted to a junior partnership. In 1865, with Potter Palmer (1826-1902) and Levi Z. Leiter (1834-1904), he organized the firm of Field, Palmer & Leiter, which subsequently became Field, Leiter & Company, and in 1881 on the retirement of Leiter became Marshall Field & Company. Under Field’s management the annual business of the firm increased from $12,000,000 in 1871 to more than $40,000,000 in 1895, when it ranked as one of the two or three largest mercantile establishments in the world. He died in New York city on the 16th of January 1906. He had married, for the second time, in the previous year. Field’s public benefactions were numerous; notable among them being his gift of land valued at $300,000 and of $100,000 in cash to the University of Chicago, an endowment fund of $1,000,000 to support the Field Columbian Museum at Chicago, and a bequest of $8,000,000 to this museum.

FIELD, NATHAN (1587-1633), English dramatist and actor, was baptized on the 17th of October 1587. His father, the rector of Cripplegate, was a Puritan divine, author of a Godly Exhortation directed against play-acting, and his brother Theophilus became bishop of Hereford. Nat. Field early became one of the children of Queen Elizabeth’s chapel, and in that capacity he played leading parts in Ben Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels (in 1600), in the Poetaster (in 1601), and in Epicoene (in 1608), and the title rôle in Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois (in 1606). Ben Jonson was his dramatic model, and may have helped his career. The two plays of which he was author were probably both written before 1611. They are boisterous, but well-constructed comedies of contemporary London life; the earlier one, A Woman is a Weathercock (printed 1612), dealing with the inconstancy of woman, while the second, Amends for Ladies (printed 1618), was written with the intention, as the title indicates, of retracting the charge. From Henslowe’s papers it appears that Field collaborated with Robert Daborne and with Philip Massinger, one letter from all three authors being a joint appeal for money to free them from prison. In 1614 Field received £10 for playing before the king in Bartholomew Fair, a play in which Jonson records his reputation as an actor in the words “which is your Burbadge now?... Your best actor, your Field?” He joined the King’s Players some time before 1619, and his name comes seventeenth on the list prefixed to the Shakespeare folio of 1623 of the “principal actors in all these plays.” He retired from the stage before 1625, and died on the 20th of February 1633. Field was part author with Massinger in the Fatal Dowry (printed 1632), and he prefixed commendatory verses to Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess.

His two plays were reprinted in J.P. Collier’s Five Old Plays (1833), in Hazlitt’s edition of Dodsley’s Old Plays, and in Nero and other Plays (Mermaid series, 1888), with an introduction by Mr A.W. Verity.

FIELD, STEPHEN JOHNSON (1816-1899), American jurist, was born at Haddam, Connecticut, on the 4th of November 1816. He was the brother of David Dudley Field, Cyrus W. Field and Henry M. Field. At the age of thirteen he accompanied his sister Emilia and her husband the Rev. Josiah Brewer (the parents of the distinguished judge of the Supreme Court, David J. Brewer) to Smyrna, Turkey, for the purpose of studying Oriental languages, but after three years he returned to the United States, and in 1837 graduated at Williams College at the head of his class. He then studied law in his elder brother’s office, and in 1841 he was admitted to the New York bar. He was associated in practice there with his brother until 1848, and early in 1849 removed to California, settling soon afterward at Marysville, of which place, in 1850, he became the first alcalde or mayor. In the same year he was chosen a member of the first state legislature of California, in which he drew up and secured the enactment of two bodies of law known as the Civil and Criminal Practices Acts, based on the similar codes prepared by his brother David Dudley for New York. In the former act he embodied a provision regulating and giving authority to the peculiar customs, usages, and regulations voluntarily adopted by the miners in various districts of the state for the adjudication of disputed mining claims. This, as Judge Field truly says, “was the foundation of the jurisprudence respecting mines in the country,” having greatly influenced legislation upon this subject in other states and in the Congress of the United States. He was elected, in 1857, a justice of the California Supreme Court, of which he became chief justice in 1859, on the resignation of Judge David S. Terry to fight the duel with the United States senator David C. Broderick which ended fatally for the latter. Field held this position until 1863, when he was appointed by President Lincoln a justice of the United States Supreme Court. In this capacity he was conspicuous for fearless independence of thought and action in his opinion in the test oath case, and in his dissenting opinions in the legal tender, conscription and “slaughter house” cases, which displayed unusual legal learning, and gave powerful expression to his strict constructionist theory of the implied powers of the Federal constitution. Originally a Democrat, and always a believer in states’ rights, his strong Union sentiments caused him nevertheless to accept Lincoln’s doctrine of coercion, and that, together with his anti-slavery sympathies, led him to act with the Republican party during the period of the Civil War. He was a member of the commission which revised the California code in 1873 and of the Electoral Commission in 1877, voting in favour of Tilden. In 1880 he received sixty-five votes on the first ballot for the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention at Cincinnati. In August 1889, as a result of a ruling in the course of the Sharon-Hill litigation, a notorious conspiracy case, he was assaulted in a California railway station by Judge David S. Terry, who in turn was shot and killed by a United States deputy marshall appointed to defend Justice Field against the carrying out of Terry’s often-expressed threats. He retired from the Supreme Court on the 1st of December 1897 after a service of thirty-four years and six months, the longest in the court’s history, and died in Washington on the 9th of April 1899.

His Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California, originally privately printed in 1878, was republished in 1893 with George C. Gorham’s Story of the Attempted Assassination of Justice Field.

FIELD, WILLIAM VENTRIS FIELD, Baron (1813-1907), English judge, second son of Thomas Flint Field, of Fielden, Bedfordshire, was born on the 21st of August 1813. He was educated at King’s school, Bruton, Somersetshire, and entered the legal profession as a solicitor. In 1843, however, he ceased to practise as such, and entered at the Inner Temple, being called to the bar in 1850, after having practised for some time as a special pleader. He joined the Western circuit, but soon exchanged it for the Midland. He obtained a large business as a junior, and became a queen’s counsel and bencher of his inn in 1864. As a Q.C. he had a very extensive common law practice, and had for some time been the leader of the Midland circuit, when in February 1875, on the retirement of Mr Justice Keating, he was raised to the bench as a justice of the queen’s bench. Mr Justice Field was an excellent puisne judge of the type that attracts but little public attention. He was a first-rate lawyer, had a good knowledge of commercial matters, great shrewdness and a quick intellect, while he was also painstaking and scrupulously fair. When the rules of the Supreme Court 1883 came into force in the autumn of that year, Mr Justice Field was so well recognized an authority upon all questions of practice that the lord chancellor selected him to sit continuously at Judges’ Chambers, in order that a consistent practice under the new rules might as far as possible be established. This he did for nearly a year, and his name will always, to a large extent, be associated with the settling of the details of the new procedure, which finally did away with the former elaborate system of “special pleading.” In 1890 he retired from the bench and was raised to the peerage as Baron Field of Bakeham, becoming at the same time a member of the privy council. In the House of Lords he at first took part, not infrequently, in the hearing of appeals, and notably delivered a carefully-reasoned judgment in the case of the Bank of England v. Vagliano Brothers (5th of March 1891), in which, with Lord Bramwell, he differed from the majority of his brother peers. Before long, however, deafness and advancing years rendered his attendances less frequent. Lord Field died at Bognor on the 23rd of January 1907, and as he left no issue the peerage became extinct.

FIELD (a word common to many West German languages, cf. Ger. Feld, Dutch veld, possibly cognate with O.E. folde, the earth, and ultimately with root of the Gr. πλατός, broad), open country as opposed to woodland or to the town, and particularly land for cultivation divided up into separate portions by hedges, banks, stone walls, &c.; also used in combination with words denoting the crop grown on such a portion of land, such as corn-field, turnip-field, &c. The word is similarly applied to a region with particular reference to its products, as oil-field, gold-field, &c. For the “open” or “common field” system of agriculture in village communities see Commons. Generally with a reference to their “wild” as opposed to their “domestic” nature “field” is applied to many animals, such as the “field-mouse.” There are many applications of the word; thus from the use of the term for the place where a battle is fought, and widely of the whole theatre of war, come such phrases as to “take the field” for the opening of a campaign, “in the field” of troops that are engaged in the operations of a campaign. It is frequently used figuratively in this sense, of the subject matter of a controversy, and also appears in military usage, in field-fortification, field-day and the like. A “field-officer” is one who ranks above a captain and below a general (see Officers); a field marshal is the highest rank of general officer in the British and many European armies (see Marshal). “Field” is used in many games, partly with the idea of an enclosed space, partly with the idea of the ground of military operations, for the ground in which such games as cricket, football, baseball and the like are played. Hence it is applied to those players in cricket and baseball who are not “in,” and “to field” is to perform the functions of such a player—to stop or catch the ball played by the “in” side. “The field” is used in hunting, &c., for those taking part in the sport, and in racing for all the horses entered for a race, and, in such expressions as “to back the field,” is confined to all the horses with the exception of the “favourite.” A common application of the word is to a surface, more or less wide, as of the sky or sea, or of such physical phenomena as ice or snow, and particularly of the ground, of a special “tincture,” on which armorial bearings are displayed (see Heraldry); it is thus used also of the “ground” of a flag, thus the white ensign of the British navy has a red St George’s cross on a white “field.” In scientific usage the word is also used of the sphere of observation or of operations, and has come to be almost equivalent to a department of knowledge. In physics, a particular application is that to the area which is influenced by some agent, as in the magnetic or electric field. The field of observation or view is the area within which objects can be seen through any optical instrument at any one position. A “field-glass” is the name given to a binocular glass used in the field (see Binocular Instrument); the older form of field-glass was a small achromatic telescope with joints. This terms is also applied, in an astronomical telescope or compound microscope, to that one of the two lenses of the “eye-piece” which is next to the object-glass; the other is called the “eye-glass.”

FIELDFARE (O.E. fealo-for = fallow-farer), a large species of thrush, the Turdus pilaris of Linnaeus—well known as a regular and common autumnal visitor throughout the British Islands and a great part of Europe, besides western Asia, and even reaching northern Africa. It is the Veldjakker and Veld-lyster of the Dutch, the Wachholderdrossel and Kramtsvogel of Germans, the Litorne of the French, and the Cesena of Italians. This bird is of all thrushes the most gregarious in. habit, not only migrating in large bands and keeping in flocks during the winter, but even commonly breeding in society—200 nests or more having been seen within a very small space. The birch-forests of Norway, Sweden and Russia are its chief resorts in summer, but it is known also to breed sparingly in some districts of Germany. Though its nest has been many times reported to have been found in Scotland, there is perhaps no record of such an incident that is not open to doubt; and unquestionably the missel-thrush (T. viscivorus) has been often mistaken for the fieldfare by indifferent observers. The head, neck, upper part of the back and the rump are grey; the wings, wing-coverts and middle of the back are rich hazel-brown; the throat is ochraceous; and the breast reddish-brown—both being streaked or spotted with black, while the belly and lower wing-coverts are white, and the legs and toes very dark-brown. The nest and eggs resemble those of the blackbird (T. merula), but the former is usually built high up in a tree. The fieldfare’s call-note is harsh and loud, sounding like t’chatt’chat: its song is low, twittering and poor. It usually arrives in Britain about the middle or end of October, but sometimes earlier, and often remains till the middle of May before departing for its northern breeding-places. In hard weather it throngs to the berry-bearing bushes which then afford it sustenance, but in open winters the flocks spread over the fields in search of animal food—worms, slugs and the larvae of insects. In very severe seasons it will altogether leave the country, and then return for a shorter or longer time as spring approaches. From William of Palerne (translated from the French c. 1350) to the writers of our own day the fieldfare has occasionally been noticed by British poets with varying propriety. Thus Chaucer’s association Of its name with frost is as happy as true, while Scott was more than unlucky in his well-known reference to its “lowly nest” in the Highlands.

Structurally very like the fieldfare, but differing greatly in many other respects, is the bird known in North America as the “robin”—its ruddy breast and familiar habits reminding the early British settlers in the New World of the household favourite of their former homes. This bird, the Turdus migratorius of Linnaeus, has a wide geographical range, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from Greenland to Guatemala, and, except at its extreme limits, is almost everywhere a very abundant species. As its scientific name imports, it is essentially a migrant, and gathers in flocks to pass the winter in the south, though a few remain in New England throughout the year. Yet its social instincts point rather in the direction of man than of its own kind, and it is not known to breed in companies, while it affects the homesteads, villages and even the parks and gardens of the large cities, where its fine song, its attractive plumage, and its great services as a destroyer of noxious insects, combine to make it justly popular.

(A. N.)

FIELDING, ANTHONY VANDYKE COPLEY (1787-1855), commonly called Copley Fielding, English landscape painter (son of a portrait painter), became at an early age a pupil of John Varley. He took to water-colour painting, and to this he confined himself almost exclusively. In 1810 he became an associate exhibitor in the Water-colour Society, in 1813 a full member, and in 1831 president of that body. He also engaged largely in teaching the art, and made ample profits. His death took place at Worthing in March 1855. Copley Fielding was a painter of much elegance, taste and accomplishment, and has always been highly popular with purchasers, without reaching very high in originality of purpose or of style: he painted in vast number all sorts of views (occasionally in oil-colour) including marine subjects in large proportion. Specimens of his work are to be seen in the water-colour gallery of the Victoria and Albert Museum, of dates ranging from 1829 to 1850. Among the engraved specimens of his art is the Annual of British Landscape Scenery, published in 1839.

(W. M. R.)

FIELDING, HENRY (1707-1754), English novelist and playwright, was born at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, Somerset, on the 22nd of April 1707. His father was Lieutenant Edmund Fielding, third son of John Fielding, who was canon of Salisbury and fifth son of the earl of Desmond. The earl of Desmond belonged to the younger branch of the Denbigh family, who, until lately, were supposed to be connected with the Habsburgs. To this claim, now discredited by the researches of Mr J. Horace Round (Studies in Peerage, 1901, pp. 216-249), is to be attributed the famous passage in Gibbon’s Autobiography which predicts for Tom Jones—“that exquisite picture of human manners”—a diuturnity exceeding that of the house of Austria. Henry Fielding’s mother was Sarah Gould, daughter of Sir Henry Gould, a judge of the king’s bench. It is probable that the marriage was not approved by her father, since, though she remained at Sharpham Park for some time after that event, his will provided that her husband should have nothing to do with a legacy of £3000 left her in 1710. About this date the Fieldings moved to East Stour in Dorset. Two girls, Catherine and Ursula, had apparently been born at Sharpham Park; and three more, together with a son, Edmund, followed at East Stour. Sarah, the third of the daughters, born November 1710, and afterwards the author of David Simple and other works, survived her brother.

Fielding’s education up to his mother’s death, which took place in April 1718 at East Stour, seems to have been entrusted to a neighbouring clergyman, Mr Oliver of Motcombe, in whom tradition traces the uncouth lineaments of “Parson Trulliber” in Joseph Andrews. But he must have contrived, nevertheless, to prepare his pupil for Eton, to which place Fielding went about this date, probably as an oppidan. Little is known of his schooldays. There is no record of his name in the college lists; but, if we may believe his first biographer, Arthur Murphy, by no means an unimpeachable authority, he left “uncommonly versed in the Greek authors, and an early master of the Latin classics,”—a statement which should perhaps be qualified by his own words to Sir Robert Walpole in 1730:—

“Tuscan and French are in my head;

Latin I write, and Greek—I read.”

But he certainly made friends among his class-fellows—some of whom continued friends for life. Winnington and Hanbury-Williams were among these. The chief, however, and the most faithful, was George, afterwards Sir George, and later Baron Lyttelton of Frankley.

When Fielding left Eton is unknown. But in November 1725 we hear of him definitely in what seems like a characteristic escapade. He was staying at Lyme (in company with a trusty retainer, ready to “beat, maim or kill” in his young master’s behalf), and apparently bent on carrying off, if necessary by force, a local heiress, Miss Sarah Andrew, whose fluttered guardians promptly hurried her away, and married her to some one else (Athenaeum, 2nd June 1883). Her baffled admirer consoled himself by translating part of Juvenal’s sixth satire into verse as “all the Revenge taken by an injured Lover.” After this he must have lived the usual life of a young man about town, and probably at this date improved the acquaintance of his second cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to whom he inscribed his first comedy, Love in Several Masques, produced at Drury Lane in February 1728. The moment was not particularly favourable, since it succeeded Cibber’s Provok’d Husband, and was contemporary with Gay’s popular Beggar’s Opera. Almost immediately afterwards (March 16th) Fielding entered himself as “Stud. Lit.” at Leiden University. He was still there in February 1729. But he had apparently left before the annual registration of February 1730, when his name is absent from the books (Macmillan’s Magazine, April 1907); and in January 1730 he brought out a second comedy at the newly-opened theatre in Goodman’s Fields. Like its predecessor, the Temple Beau was an essay in the vein of Congreve and Wycherley, though, in a measure, an advance on Love in Several Masques.