808 



HOTBED 



against Fiden.-e and Veil, aiid conquered them ; and 

 destroyed Alba, and removed the inhabitants to 

 Rome, giving them Mount Caelius to dwell on ; and 

 carried on war against the Sabines. At length the 

 gods grew wrathful with him for his love of war 

 and his neglect to worship them, and Jupiter 

 Elicius consumed him and his house with fire 

 about 638 B.C. According to Niebuhr and Arnold, 

 there are glimpses of a distinct personality in 

 the legend of Hostilius, unlike those of Romulus 

 and Numa, which are merely personifications of 

 the two principal stages of a nation's growth. 



Hotbed, a bed of fermenting vegetable matter, 

 usually surmounted by a glazed frame, employed 

 in gardening for cultivating melons and cucum- 

 bers, the rearing of tender annuals, propagating 

 stove and greenhouse plants by cuttings, seeds, or 

 grafting, forcing flowers, &c. It is an inexpensive 

 means for obtaining a high temperature in a limited 

 atmosphere, accompanied with genial humidity 

 charged with nutritious gases, which is very bene- 

 ficial to plants. Formerly it was an indispensable 

 adjunct to the garden, but the almost universal 

 employment of hot water as a heating agent for 

 horticultural purposes has latterly greatly circum- 

 scribed its use. The materials used in making hot- 

 beds are stable-dung, leaves those of the oak and 

 beech, being especially suitable, are frequently 

 mixed with the dung tanners' bark, spent hops, 

 and the waste of jute, cotton, hemp, and flax, 

 all of which must be allowed to pass through 

 the first violent stages of fermentation in order to 

 eliminate the deleterious gases they contain before 

 being built up into the bed. The size of the bed 

 is regulated by the degree of heat required for the 

 purpose in view. A bed of stable-dung with or 

 without leaves intermixed, four feet thick, will for 

 some tim? after it is built maintain a temperature 

 of from 75 to 90 3 , which is sufficient for most pur- 



Soses. As the fermentation declines the bed cools 

 own, but heat is again readily increased by adding 

 fresh material to the sides of it. The bed should 

 be made a few inches wider and longer than the 

 frame that is to be placed upon it, and from 6 to 9 

 inches higher at the back than the front to secure 

 a better angle for light. See also PLANT-HOUSE. 



Hotchpot ( the same word as Hotch-potch in the 

 culinary sense), a phrase used in English law to 

 denote that, where one child lias already received an 

 advancement out of the father's estate, that child 

 must bring such portion into hotchpot before he 

 will be allowed to share with the other children, 

 under the statute of distributions, after the father's 

 death. In other words, a child who has got money 

 from the father to place him in business, &c., 

 must treat that as a payment to account of his 

 share at the father's death. The eldest son is not 

 required to bring into hotchpot the land which he 

 takes as heir. A similar, but not identical, doc- 

 trine exists in Scotland under the name of colla- 

 tion. 



Hotch-potch, a Scottish dish, may be defined 

 as a kind of mutton-broth in which green peas 

 take the place of barley or rice. Hotch-potch or 

 Hodge-podge is a corruption of Old English hotch- 

 pot ; Fr. hochepot; from Dutch hutspot (hutsen 

 being ' to shake in the pot ' ). 



Hot Cross Buns. See CROSS-BUNS. 



Hotel (Fr. hotel, Old Fr. hostel, Lat. hospitale), 

 a superior kind of inn (see INN), like the old Eng- 

 lish hostel. The often palatial hotels that have 

 sprung up since the introduction of railways are 

 too well known to require notice. One point of 

 difference between the European and the Ameri- 

 can systems is that under the former, except in the 

 case of a table d'hote, the charge is for each dish 

 ordered, while under the American plan a fixed 



price is charged for every meal. The modern 

 French word is still used for the house of a rich 

 or distinguished man, or for a public buildino- 

 such as the Hotel de Ville (see MUNICIPAL ARCHI- 

 TECTURE), as well as for inn or hostelry. 

 Hothouse. See PLANT-HOUSE. 

 Hot Springs, a small city of Arkansas, 5ft 

 miles WSW. of Little Rock, much frequented as a. 

 summer-resort. It has numerous thermal springs, 

 ranging in temperature from 95 to 148 F. Pop. 

 (1880)3554; (1900)9973. 

 Hotspur, HARRY. See PERCY. 

 Hottentots, the people who were in possession 

 of the greater part of what is now Cape Colony when 

 it was first visited and colonised by Europeans. 

 The Hottentots were so called by the earliest 

 Dutch settlers, puzzled at their strange harsh 

 faucal sounds and clicks, Hottentot or Huttentiit 

 signifying a quack in Frisian or Low German. It 

 is a somewhat misleading name, as it is popularly 

 used to include the two distinct families distin- 

 guished by their native names : the Khoikhoi, the 

 so-called Hottentot proper, and the San (Sa) or 

 Bushmen, between whom little charity exists. 

 Again, among the Khoikhoi proper, the terms. 

 Hottentots, Hottentots proper, or Cape Hotten- 

 tots are often applied to the remnants of the tribes 

 who formerly lived around Capetown ; while the 

 inhabitants of Griqualand West, of the South 

 Kalihari, and of Great Namaqualand are distin- 

 guished by their tribal names as Griquas, Nama- 

 quas, Koras or Koranas, as if they were not as 

 much Hottentots as the Khoikhoi of Cape Colony. 

 The Bushmen are hunters ; the Khoikhoi, nomads 

 and sheep-farmers. At the present time the 

 so-called Hottentots proper may number about 

 17,000 ; and the half-breeds, mostly employed in 

 the Cape Colony, may number probably 100,000. 

 The majority of the former and almost all the latter 

 class are now semi-civilised, and copy the habits, 

 customs, dress, and vices of the European colonists. 

 In general they are of medium height, not very 

 robust in build, and have small hands and feet. 

 Their skin is a pale brown colour ; their hair woolly, 

 growing in curly knots ; their cheek-bones very 

 prominent ; and their chin pointed. The women 

 are sometimes distinguished by certain organic 

 peculiarities, and often have an enormous develop- 

 ment of fat, especially in the breasts and hinder- 

 parts. Their principal characteristics in former 

 days were indolence and hospitality. Their 

 favourite amusements were feasting, dancing, 

 smoking, and singing. The men were herdsmen, 

 and not fond of war, though they liked to hunt. 

 The women, although held in high esteem, per- 

 formed all the manual labour. Their dwelling* 

 were huts of wood and mats, or tents, disposed in 

 circles, and easily transportable. Their manner of 

 living was entirely patriarchal : each tribe or 

 division of a tribe had its own chief. Their 

 method of perpetuating family names was that 

 the sons took their mother's family name, whilst 

 the daughters took their father's. 



Their language embraced three principal dialects 

 the Nama, spoken by the Namaquas ; the Kora, 

 spoken by the Koranas ; and the Cape dialect, now 

 almost, if not entirely, extinct. Owing to its use 

 of suffixes for expressing the declensions of nouns 

 and the conjugations of verbs, the Hottentot lan- 

 guage has been classed by Bleek, Lepsius, and other 

 scholars with the Hamitic family of speech. This 

 view is, however, controverted by Fr. Miiller, Hahn, 

 and Von Gabelentz, who maintain that the Hotten- 

 tots and Bushmen are allied peoples, the aboriginal 

 inhabitants of the greater part of South Africa. 

 The association of the Bushmen with the Hotten- 

 tots rests, however, upon little more than the 



