Vapours and clouds feed the plants of the earth with the balm of dews and the fatness of showers. Some, lucky, find a flowery spot, Bentley. Burns. I am of small stature, like Alexander the Great; I am somewhat inclinable to fatness, like Dr. Arbuth not and Aristotle; and I drink brandy and water, like Mr. Boyd. Sheridan. FAT, n. s. Sax. sær; Swed. fat; Belg. vatte; generally written VAT, which see. A fermenting or other large vessel to hold liquids. The fats shall overflow with wine and oil. Joel ii. 24. A white stone used for flagging floors, for cisterns, and tanners' fats. Woodward on Fossils. FAT, in medicine. A great number of fats have been kept in the shops, for making ointments, plasters, and other medicinal compositions; as hog's lard, the fat of the boar, the fox, hare, dog, wild cat, Alpine mouse, beaver; that of hens, ducks, geese, storks; of the whale, pike, serpents, viper, &c., as also human fat! These are now, of course, abandoned. To obtain fat pure, it must be cut into pieces, and melted with a gentle heat in a proper vessel with an equal quantity of water. It is afterwards to be put into an earthen pot, where the fat rises to the top, and becomes solid when cold. In this state it is exceedingly white, and sufficiently pure for the purposes of pharmacy or chemical examination. See PHARMACY. Fat thus purified has very little taste, and a weak but peculiar smell. The uses of fat in the animal economy have not been clearly ascertained. One of the chief probably is, to blunt and correct a great part of the acids of the aliments, and which are more than are requisite to the composition of the nutritive juice. This is certain, that animals which are castrated, which are not much exercised, or which are come to an age when the production and loss of the seminal fluid is less, and which at the same time consume much succulent aliment, generally become fatter, and sometimes exceedingly so. Although fat is very different from truly animalised substances, and appears not easily convertible into nutritive juices, it being generally difficult of digestion, and apt to become rancid, yet in certain cases it serves to the nourishment and reparation of the body. Animals certainly become lean, and live upon their fat, when they have too little food, and when they have diseases which prevent digestion and nutrition. In these cases the fatter animals hold out longer than the leaner. The fat appears to be then absorbed, and transformed into nutritive juice. In infancy it is white, insipid, and not very solid; in the adult it is firm and yellowish, and in animals of an advanced age its color is deeper, its consistence various, and its taste in general stronger. FAT, in sea language, signifies the same with broad. Thus a ship is said to have a fat quarter, if the trussing in or tuck of her quarter be deep. FAT likewise denotes an uncertain measure of capacity Thus a fat of isinglass contains from 3 cwt. to 4 cwt.; a fat of unbound books half a maund or four bales; of wire from 20 to 25 cwt.; and of yarn from 220 to 221 bundles. FATA MORGANA, a very remarkable aerial phenomenon, which is sometimes observed from the harbour of Messina, and adjacent places, at a certain height of the atmosphere. The name, which signifies Fairy Morgana, is derived from an opinion of the superstitious Sicilians, that the like visionary invisible beings. The populace whole spectacle is produced by fairies, or such are delighted whenever it appears, and run about the streets shouting for joy, calling every body out to partake of the glorious sight. This singular meteor has been described by various authors; but the first who mentioned it with any degree of precision was Father Angelucci, who gives the following account of it as quoted by Swinburne : 'On the 15th of August, 1643, as I stood at my window, I was surprised with a most wonderful delectable vision. The sea, that washes the Sicilian shore, swelled up, and became, for ten miles in length, like a chain of dark mountains; while the waters near our Calabrian coast grew quite smooth, and in an instant appeared as one clear polished mirror, reclining against the aforesaid ridge. On this glass was depicted, in chiaro scuro, a string of several thousands of pilasters, all equal in altitude, distance, and degree of light and shade. In a moment they lost half their height, and bent into arcades, like Roman aqueducts. A long cornice was next formed on the top, and above it arose castles innumerable, all perfectly alike. These soon split into towers, which were shortly after lost in colonnades, then windows, and at last ended in pines, cypresses, and other trees, even and similar. This is the Fata Morgana, which, for twenty-six years, I had thought a mere fable.' As soon as the sun surmounts the eastern hills behind Reggio, and rises high enough to form an angle of forty-five degrees on the water before the city, every object existing or moving at Reggio is repeated 1000 fold upon this marine looking glass; which, by its tremulous motion, is as it were cut into facets. Each image passes rapidly off in succession as the day advances, and the stream carries down the wave on which it appeared. Thus the parts of this moving picture will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Sometimes the air is, at that moment, so impreg nated with vapors, and undisturbed by winds, as to reflect objects in a kind of aerial screen, rising about thirty feet above the level of the sea. In cloudy heavy weather, they are drawn on the surface of the water, bordered with fine prismatical colors. The following is the account given by M. Houel: In fine summer days, when the weather is calm, there rises above the great current a vapor which acquires a certain density, so as to form in the atmosphere horizontal prisms, whose sides are disposed in such a manner that, when they come to their proper degree of perfection, they reflect and represent successively, for some time (like a moveable mirror), the objects on the coast or in the adjacent country. exhibit by turns the city and suburbs of Messina, trees, animals, men, and mountains. They are They certainly beautiful aerial moving pictures. There are sometimes two or three prisms, equally perfect; and they continue in this state eight or ten minutes. After this, some shining inequalities are observed upon the surface of the prism, which render confused to the eye the objects which had been before so accurately delineated, and the picture vanishes. The vapor forms other combinations, and is dispersed in air. Different accounts have been given of this singular appearance; which, for my part, I attribute to a bitumen that issues from certain rocks at the bottom of the sea, and which is often seen to cover a part of its surface in the canal of Messina. The subtle parts of this bitumen being attenuated, combined, and exhaled with the aqueous globules that are raised by the air, and formed into bodies of vapor, give to this condensed vapor more consistence; and contribute, by their smooth and polished particles, to the formation of a kind of aerial crystal, which receives the light, reflects it to the eye, and transmits to it all the luminous points which color the objects exhibited in this phenomenon, and render them visible.' Francis Antonio Minasi, who observed this curious spectacle three times in 1793, gives the following account of it : 'When,' says Minasi, 'the rising sun shines from that point whence its incident ray forms an angle of about forty-five degrees on the sea of Reggio, and the bright surface of the water in the bay is not disturbed either by the wind or the current, the spectator being placed on an eminence of the city, with his back to the sun, and his face to the sea; on a sudden there appear in the water, as in a catoptric theatre, various multiplied objects, viz. numberless series of pilasters, arches, castles well delineated, regular columns, lofty towers, superb palaces, with balconies and windows, extended alleys of trees, delightful plains with herds and flocks, armies on foot and horseback, and many other strange figures in their natural colors and proper actions, passing rapidly in succession along the surface of the sea, during the whole of the short period of time while the above-mentioned causes remain. of men 'But if, in addition to the circumstances before described, the atmosphere be highly impregnated with vapor, and dense exhalations not previously dispersed by the action of the wind or waves, or rarefied by the sun, it then happens that in this vapor, as in a curtain extended along the channel to the height of about four or five and twenty feet, and nearly down to the sea, the observer will behold the scene of the same objects not only reflected from the surface of the sea, but likewise in the air, though not so distinct or well defined as the former objects from the sea. 'Lastly, if the air be slightly hazy and opaque, and at the same time dewy, and adapted to form the iris, then the above-mentioned objects will appear only at the surface of the sea, as in the first case, but all vividly colored, or fringed with red, green, blue, and other prismatic colors.' FATATENDA, a considerable town on the Gambia, Western Africa, about 500 miles from its mouth. The African Company had once a factory here, situated on a rock, and overlooking a fine country; but the violent conduct of the king of Tomani determined them to break it up in the year 1734. FATE, n. s. FATED, adj. FATAL, adj. FAʼTALISM, N. s. FATALIST, FATALITY, FA'TALLY, adv. FATALNESS, n. s. J Fr. fatalité, fatal; Ital. fata; Pers. fat (death); Lat. fatum, from for, fari (à Gr. paw), to pronounce (the supposed decree of God). Destiny; sometimes meaning a kind of deified chance; sometimes a fixed series of causes; predetermined event; cause of death; death: fated, means decreed by fate or destiny; invested with the powers of fate, or fatal determination; endued with any power or quality by fate. Fatal is decisive; inevitable; deadly; mortal; appointed by destiny; causing sure destruction or death: fatalism, the doctrine of necessitarian philosophers, or of the fatalists, who maintain that all things happen by necessity: fatality is predetermination; predestination; tendency to danger or evil: fatalness, inevitable necessity. Tell me what fates attend the duke of Suffolk? By water shall he die, and take his end? The futed sky Gives us free scope. Shakspeare. Id. If I'm traduced by tongues which neither know My faculties nor person, yet will be The chronicles of my doing, let me say 'Tis but the fate of place, and the rough brake That virtue must go through. Id. Henry VIII. It was fatal to the king to fight for his money; aud though he avoided to fight with enemies abroad, yet he was still enforced to fight for it with rebels at home. Bacon's Henry VII. By a strange fatality men suffer their dissenting to be drawn into the stream of the present vogue. King Charles. In using the terms fate, decree, or destiny, we speak after the manner of men; for it being customary with us, whenever we resolve upon some distant work, to declare our intentions to persons under our influence, we conceive of God as making the like declared or mental determination. Denham. Search, 1763. Viewing a neighbouring hill, whose top of late A chapel crowned, 'till in the common fute The' adjoining abbey fell. The stream is so transparent, pure, and clear, That had the self-enamoured youth gazed here, So fatally deceived he had not been, While he the bottom, not his face, had seen. Necessity or chance Approach not me; and what I will is fate. Id. Id. Nature's great ancestor! Day's elder-born! so expressed, as to be favorable to fatalism and necessity. Warton. Yes, to deep sadness sullenly resigned, Cowper. FATE denotes an inevitable necessity depending upon a superior cause. The word is formed from fari, fatum, to speak; and primarily implies the same with effatum, viz. a word or decree pronounced by God; or a fixed sentence whereby the Deity has prescribed the order of things, and allotted to every person what shall befal him. The Greeks called it papμevn, as it were a chain or necessary series of things indissolubly linked together. All things, says Plato, are in fate; i.e. within its sphere or scheme, but all things are not fated; and he thus explains the distinction: it is not in fate, says he, that one man shall do so and so, and another suffer so and so, for that would be destructive of our free agency and liberty; but if any one should choose such a life, and do such or such things, then it is in fate that such things and such consequences shall ensue upon it. The soul, therefore, is adeσorov, free and uncontrolled, and it lies within itself to act or not; and there is no compulsion or necessity here; but what follows upon the action shall be accomplished, κaľ εiμappɛvny, according to fate, or the constitution of things. Thus, that Eneas should marry Lavinia was a thing in which he was free and independent, but the consequent war with Turnus was a fated circumstance. To this fate even the gods themselves were subject. FATEMITES, FATHEMITES, or FATHIMITES, the descendants of Mahomet by Fathema, or Fatima, his daughter. They never enjoyed the khalifat of Mecca or Begdad, but reigned in Barbary and Egypt. See KHALIFS. FATES, in mythology. See PARCE FATHERHOOD, FATHER-IN-LAW, FA'THERLESS, adj. FATHERLINESS, n.s. FATHERLY, adj. & adv. Saxon, fæden; Goth. and Swed. fader; Belg. and Isl. vader; Teut. vatter, or vater; Sans. patara; Per. phader, or puedar; Ital. padre; Fr. pere; Lat. the earliest ancestor; the inventor, or first conpater; Gr. warnp. The male parent of a child; honorable persons, generally; to the ecclesiasti triver, of any thing: a title given to aged and cal writers of the first centuries; to a senator of Rome; a jesuit, &c., particularly: and, supremely, to God; and to the first person of the adorable Trinity: to father, is to adopt, or treat, as a child; to supply with a father; to adopt a composition; to acknowledge any one as his child, or production: a fatherhood is the character, or authority, of a father; a father-in-law is the father of one's husband or wife: fatherless, destitute of a father; unprotected: fatherly; tenderly; with paternal care: fatherliness, paternal kindness. In the hous of my fadir, ben manye dwellingis, if ony thing lasse I hadde seid to you: for I go to make redi to you a place. Wiclif. Jon xiv. Jubal was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ. Gen. iv. 21. He hath made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house. Gen. xlv. 8. Ye shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child. Ex. xxii. John. viii. 41. Rom. iv. 16. Sandys. We have one Father, even God. Abraham is the father of us all. The fatherless hath no friend. And lest we seem to father any thing upon them more than is their own, let them read. Hooker. Id. Our fatherless distress was left unmoan'd; Your widow dolours likewise be unwept. Let me but move one question to your daughter, And, by that fatherly and kindly power That you have in her, bid her answer truly. Id. A poor blind man was accounted cunning in prognosticating weather: Epsom, a lawyer, said in scorn, Tell me, father, when doth the sun change? The old man answered, When such a wicked lawyer as Camden. you goeth to heaven. Son of Bensalem, thy father saith it; the man by whom thou hast breath and life speaketh the word. Bacon. Who can abide, that against their own doctors, both of the middle and latest age, six whole books should by their fatherhoods of Trent be, under the pain of a curse, imperiously obtruded upon God and his church? Hall. From hence the race of Alban fathers come, And the long glories of majestick Rome. Dryden. The part which describes the fire, I owe to the piety and fatherly affection of our monarch to his suffering subjects. Id. Father is a notion superinduced to the substance, or man, and refers only to an act of that thing called man, whereby he contributed to the generation of one of his own kind. Locke. God, who knows our frailty, pities our weakness, and requires of us no more than we are able to do, and sees what was, and what was not, in our power, will judge as a kind and merciful father. Locke. We might have had an entire notion of this father. hood, or fatherly authority. Id. There was a father of a convent, very much renowned for his piety and exemplary life; and, as persons under any great affliction applied themselves to the most eminent confessors, our beautiful votary took the opportunity of confessing herself to this celebrated father. Addison. I must make my father-in-law a visit with a great train and equipage. Id. Spectator. He caught his death the last county sessions, where he would go to see justice done to a poor widow woman and her fatherless children. Father of verse, Id. Pope. FATHER. See CHILDREN, and PARENT. By the laws of Romulus, a father had an unlimited power over his children. Among the Lacedemonians, as we learn from Aristotle's politics, the father of three children was excused from the duty of mounting guard for the security of the city; and a father of four children was exempted from every public burden. The Poppaan law, amongst the Romans, granted many valuable privileges to the fathers of three children; amongst which one was, that he should be excused from civil offices, and that the mother should have liberty, in her father's life-time, to make a will, and manage her estate without the authority of tutors. FATH'OM, n. s. & v. a. Sax. Fadm, Fadem; FATH'OMLESS, adj. Goth. fatm, fadm; Belg. vadem, perhaps from Sax. fettan; Belg. vattan, to contain. The space which the extended arms can contain; six feet: the usual measure of the depth of the sea: reach; penetration; depth or compass generally. Fathomnever be measured or less, that which can bounded. Another of his fathom they have none Will you with counters sum FATHOM, in commerce, &c., is a long measure, comprising six feet, being taken from the utmost extent of both arms, when fully stretched out into a right line. It is made use of in the measurements of mines, quarries, wells, and pits. This measure is chiefly used at sea, or by seafaring people, for expressing depths of the sea, lengths of cables, &c. It is hardly ever used on land, except by miners. FATIGATE, v. a. & adj. Fr. fatiguer, fati FATIGABLE, adj. Lat. fatigo, of FATIGATION, n. s. fatim and ago, to do FATIGUE, n. s. & v. a. or perform (a thing) abundantly. To weary; tire; exhaust with labor: this is also the signification of the more usual verb, fatigue: fatigable is susceptible of fatigue; easily wearied fatigation and fatigue, weariness; lassitude; or the causes of either. gue; nobleman's spring legs as robust as his autumnal calves, you commit a monstrous impropriety, and make no allowances for the fatigues of the winter. Sheridan. FATTECONDA, the capital of the kingdom of Bondou, Western Africa. It lies near the eastern bank of the river Faleme. Long. 10° 20' W., lat. 14° 20′ N. FATTICK, a sea-port of Western Africa, capital of the kingdom of Joal, or Joul. It is about sixty miles north of the Gambia. FATUA, in mythology, the wife of the god Faunus, who was supposed to inspire women with the knowledge of futurity, as Faunus him. self did the men. Fatua had her name from fari, q. d. vaticinari, to prophesy. See FAUNA. FATUITY, n. s. Į Fr. fatuité; Lat. fatuus, FAT'UOUS, adj. insipid. Stupidity; foolishness; feebleness or prostration of mind: fatuous is the corresponding adjective. It had argued a very short sight of things, and extreme fatuity of mind in me, to bind my own hands at their request. King Charles. And when that flame finds combustible earth, Thence fatuous fires and meteors take their birth. Denham. We pity or laugh at those fatuous extravagants, while yet ourselves have a considerable dose of what makes them so. Glanville. These symptoms were so high in some as to produce a sort of fatuity of madness. Arbuthnot on Air. His madness was compounded of rage and fatuity. Johnson. Life of Swift. FAUCHET (Claude), a French antiquarian, born in 1529. He was the author of treatises on Gaulish and French antiquities; on the Liberties of the Gallican church; on the Origin of Knights, Armorial Bearings, and Heralds; Origin of Dignities and Magistrates in France. He died in 1601, and his works were collected and printed at Paris in 4ton 1610. He was a FAUCHET (Claude), a French priest, born at Dorne, in the Nivernois, in 1744. Having taken upon him the ecclesiastical habit, he became vicar-general to the archbishop of Bruges, and preacher to Lewis XVI.; but his excessive vanity disgusted the king, and from this no doubt Fauchet the more eagerly embraced the revolutionary cause. principal instigator to the storming of the bastile, and he preached a thanksgiving sermon on the occasion; and in another sermon he had the audacity to call Jesus Christ the first sans culotte of Judea. He entered among the Illuminati, and in 1791 became what was called constitutional bishop of Bayeux. He was likewise chosen deputy to the national assembly for the department of Calvados, and was afterwards a member of the convention; but was one of the many who met the first fruits of the doctrines they propagated at the guillotine, in 1793. Fauchet wrote a Panegyric on St. Lewis, pronounced before the French Academy; a Funeral Oration for the Duke of Orleans; Eloge on Benjamin Franklin; Discourse on Universal Manners, &c. FA'UCHION, n. s. See FALCHION. A crooked sword. |