STERNHOLD 



STETTIN 



723 



and, as a rule, it must be admitted, a highly suc- 

 cessful bid for the laughter of the reader, was also 

 to some extent the convenient cloak of a singularly 

 slipshod literary style. His indecencies, if less 

 gross than those of Swift or Rabelais, are by 

 reason of their pruriency far more offensive. His 

 passages of pathos, sometimes genuine and deeply 

 moving, too often take the form of an artificial 

 and overstrained sentimentalist!!, and degenerate 

 from the affecting into the affected. His literary 

 conscience had more than the laxity of his time, 

 and, as a later critic of much learning and acumen, 

 Dr Ferriar, showed, he was unscrupulous in his 

 unacknowledged borrowings from the writings of 

 other men. Nevertheless he is, and deserves to 

 be, a classic of English prose fiction. The extrava- 

 gant Rabelaisian drollery that revels through the 

 pages of Tristram Shandy, the marvellous keenness 

 of eye, the inimitable delicacy of touch to which 

 we owe the exquisite vignettes of the Sentimental 

 Journey, might not of themselves have secured 

 that place for Sterne ; but it is for ever secured to 

 him in right of that combination of subjective and 

 personal with objective and dramatic humour in 

 which perhaps he has never been excelled by any 

 one save the creator of Falstaff. In Mr Shandy 

 and his wife, in Corporal Trim, in Yorick, and 

 above all in that masterpiece of truthful, subtle, 

 tenderly humorous portraiture, ' My Uncle Toby,' 

 Sterne has created imperishable types of character, 

 and made their immortality his own. 



See John Ferriar, Illustrations of Sterne (2 vols. 

 1812); Life, by Percy Fitzgerald (2 vols. 1864; re- 

 written, IX'M ) ; the present writer's Sterne, in the 'Eng- 

 lish Men of Letters' series (1882); AuMrioyraphical 

 fragment ( quoted in Scott's and other memoirs). 



Sternhold, THOMAS, one of the authors of the 

 English version of psalms formerly attached to the 

 Book of Common Prayer, was born alxmt 1500 near 

 Blakeney in Gloucestershire, according to Fuller 

 and Wood, in Hampshire. He was Groom of the 

 Robes to Henry VIII. and Edward VI., and died in 

 August 1549. The first edition (undated) contains 

 only nineteen psalms; the second (1549), thirty- 

 seven. A third edition, by Whitchurch ( 1551 ), 

 contains seven more by J. H. [John Hopkins], 

 probably a native of Awre in Gloucestershire, who 

 died as rector of Great Waldingfield, Suffolk, in 

 1570 ; and the complete psalms appeared in 1562, 

 and for nearly two centuries after formed almost 

 the whole hymnody of the Church of England. 

 When the rival version of Tate and Brady 

 appeared (1696) it came to l>e known distinctively 

 as the 'Old Version.' Of the complete psalter of 

 1562, forty psalms bear the name of Sternhold, 

 and sixty that of Hopkins. The rest were the 

 work of William Whittingham (d. 1579), husband 

 of Calvin's sister and Dean of Durham; Thomas 

 Norton ; William Kethe, most probably author of 

 Psalm c. (not, however, printed here till 1565, 

 though already in Daye's Psalter, 1560-61, and the 

 Anglo-Genevan, 1561 ) ; J. Pullain ; J. Marckant ; 

 ana Archdeacon Wisedome of Ely (d. 1568). Stern- 

 hold and Hopkins' psalms are very faithful, but 

 somewhat coarse ana homely in phraseology. As 

 Fuller well said, its authors' 'piety was better than 

 their poetry, and they had drunk more of Jordan 

 than of Helicon.' See J. Julian's magistral Diet. 

 of/Iymii'ilfiyy (1892). 



Sternum. See SKELETON, RIBS, BIRD. 



Sternutatories. See SNEEZING. 



Steslehorns, greatest of the old Dorian lyrists, 

 and as snob called the 'lyric Homer,' was born at 

 Himera in Sicily about 630 B.C., and died in Catania 

 in 556. He dealt largely with epic subjects in 

 his lyrical measures, such as the sieges of Troy 

 and of Thebes, and was said to have been struck 



blind for slandering Helen. Only some thirty short 

 fragments of his works remain, to be found in 

 Schneidewiu's Delectus and Bergk's Poetce Lyricl. 



Stethoscope (Gr. stethos, 'the chest,' and 

 skoped, 'I look into'), an instrument invented by 

 Laennec ( q. v. ) for examining the sounds of the chest. 

 Its simplest form will be best understood by the 

 figure, which represents the section reduced to 

 half the natural diameter, or one- 

 eighth of the actual size. The 

 upper part is the chest end, the 

 lower the ear-piece. The latter is 

 often made in a separate piece, for 

 the sake of greater portability. 

 The main object of the stethoscope 

 being to circumscribe and localise 

 the sounds which it transmits, the 

 chest end should be small, in order 

 to determine the exact seat of the 

 greatest intensity of sound. To 

 ascertain this, the instrument 

 should l>e moved right and left, 

 up and down, till its end is on 

 the exact spot from which the 

 abnormal sound for which we are 

 searching or, it may be, the 

 absence of sound proceeds. It 

 may be made of wood, metal, or 



Stethoscope. 



, , 



celluloid ; it is usually made hollow as represented 

 in the figure, but this is not necessary, as the sound 

 is well conducted by the stem itself. But besides 

 these rigid instruments flexible ones are largely 

 used, particularly the binaural stethoscopes, which 

 have an ear- piece for each of the examiner's ears. 

 In these the ear-pieces and chest-piece are united 

 by hollow tubes of india-rubber, felt, &c., whose 

 mobility permits of much more ready adaptation to 

 different parts and different positions of the patient's 

 chest. The various sounds heard through tho 

 stethoscope are very important in the recognition 

 of many diseases of the heart and lungs. 



Stettin, the capital of the Prussian province of 

 Pomerania, and one of the busiest ports on the 

 southern side of the Baltic, stands on both banks 

 of the Oder, 30 miles from the Baltic and 60 miles 

 by rail ( 120 by river and canal ) NE. of Berlin. The 

 more important of the public buildings are the Gothic 

 church of St Peter (founded 1124), the large church 

 of St James ( 14th century ), the royal palace ( 1575 ), 

 two ornamental arches, a hospital, town-house, 

 theatre, 8c. The strong fortifications were only 

 removed in 1874 ; since then the ground on which 

 they stood has been rapidly built over, so that Stettin 

 now forms virtually one large town with Bredow 

 (pop. 13,713), Grabow (15,644), and Ziillchow 

 (6711 ). Excluding these places, Stettin has a pop. 

 of (1871)76,154; (1890) 116,139. It is the seat of 

 considerable industrial activity, chiefly in connec- 

 tion with shipbuilding, cement, sugar, paper, spirits, 

 soap and candles, matches, clothing, oil-retming, 

 chicory, chemicals, flour, sewing-machines, bricks, 

 machinery. The river has a depth of 17 to 21 feet 

 opposite the wharves. The port is entered by an 

 average of 3640 vessels of 1,257,600 tons a year 

 (466 vessels of 356,800 tons British), importing 

 principally petroleum and other oils (annual value 

 1,100,000), rye, coffee, herrings, chemicals, gro- 

 ceries, cotton, seeds, iron, cement, timber, coal, oats, 

 spirits, wool, hides, to the total value of 7,615,000 

 annually. The exports reach an average of 

 7,432,700, and embrace sugar (1,298,000), 

 metals (936,000), cereals, spirits, seeds, timber, 

 cement, and herrings. Great Britain supplies 

 from two to three millions sterling of the imports, 

 and takes about two millions of the exports. Stet- 

 tin was the seat of a princely dynasty, 1 107 to 1637 ; 

 was occupied by Sweden, 1648-1720 ; by the French, 



