155 



THAMMUZ. 



THAW. 



180 



which various kinds of fish were to be taken. It prohibited fishiug in 

 certain parts of the river, and forbade the taking of the white-bait or 

 " bloodbag." The right of the corporation, however, to the conserva- 

 tion of the river about this time was disputed by the lord-high- 

 admiral, and some litigation took place, in which the corporation was 

 uniformly successful. James I. in the third year of his reign granted 

 a charter to the city, in which the immemorial right of the city to the 

 office of bailiff and conservator of the Thames is recited and confirmed. 

 The same rights are also confirmed and settled by various other 

 charters and acts of parliament. The result was to vest in the corpo- 

 ration the conservation of the river, the regulation of the port and 

 harbour of London, and, as is said, the actual property in the soil of 

 the river, subject only to the jus regium of the crown. The com- 

 mencement of the city's jurisdiction was marked by a stone, with an 

 apocryphal date, called London Stone, placed on the north bank of the 

 river, a short distance above the present bridge of Stainea, and its 

 termination on the south shore, by the formerly navigable creek of 

 Yantlet, separating the Isle of Gram from the mainland of Kent, and 

 on the north shore by the village of Leigh, in Essex, placed directly 

 opposite, and close to the lower extremity of Canvey Island, thus 

 extending a distance of eighty miles, over nearly the entire course of 

 that river through the metropolitan valley. 



After much litigation between the City of London and the Crown, 

 the conservancy of the river, which involves the control of the fisheries, 

 the regulation and control of the watermen and of the shipping, 

 the cleansing of the river, the removal of obstructions, erection of 

 stairs, licensing mills, and other such duties, has been vested, by act of 

 parliament, in a Board of Conservancy, to whom the powers of the 

 corporation have been transferred. 



(Griffiths, Cowervancy of the River Thames ; Stow, Survey of London; 

 Pulling, OH the Laics, <ic. of the City and Port of Londun.) 



THAMMUZ, in Hebrew 1VSR, is the tenth month of the Jewish 



civil year, coinciding with our June or July ; it has twenty-nine 

 days, and in the present year (1861), it will begin on the Dth of 

 June and end on the 7th of July. The name does not occur in the 

 Bible, as a month at least ; the passage in Ezekiel viii. 1 4, " women 

 weeping for Tammuz," having no known connection with the month. 

 Benfey, who has a short dissertation on the name in his ' Monatona- 

 men,'p. 164, seq., denies the identity of Thammuz and Adonis, first 

 advanced by St. Jerome in his commentary on Ezekiel. In the copies 

 of the calendar of Heliopolis the name is written 6a/iifa, 8a/t/iouf, and 

 Ba^io. A fast is kept on the 17th day of Thammuz, in memory of the 

 capture of Jerusalem by Titus, according to most authorities, though 

 some say it was instituted to commemorate the breaking of the Tables 

 of the Law by Moses, Exod. xxxiL 19. In some calendars a feast U 

 mentioned on the 14th day, to celebrate the destruction of a pernicious 

 book tending to discredit the traditions of the Rabbins. In the Syrian 

 calendar now in use, Thamuz is the fourth month, as it was among 

 the Hebrews when the year began with Nisan. 



THANE, in Anglo-Saxon thegn, from thegnlan, or thenian, "to 

 serve," the same word with the modern Germen dienen, is frequently, in 

 conformity with this origin, translated minuter in the Latin charters 

 of the Anglo-Saxon period. In other cases its equivalent is milet, or 

 mila. So king Alfred, in his translation of Bede's 'Eccle- 

 siastical History,' renders the king's minister, the king's thane, and 

 uses thane wherever Bede has miles. The exact meaning of the term 

 when employed aa a title of honour is involved in considerable 

 obscurity : the rank or dignity which it denoted was possibly not the 

 same at different times, and there were also thanes of more than one 

 kind. After the Conquest thanes (thaini or taiui) ara frequently 

 classed with barons (barones) : in the laws of Henry I., the two words 

 are apparently used as synonymous ; and where the Saxon Chronicler 

 has thanes (t/ttyenat), the Latin annalists have commonly baronet. The 

 class of common or inferior thanes seems to have answered nearly to 

 that of the barones minores, or landed gentry. One of the few things 

 that are tolerably certain with regard to the rank of a thane is, that it 

 implied the possession of a certain amount of landed property. Such a 

 qualification indeed seems in certain circumstances to have conferred 

 the dignity of thane. One of the laws of Athelstnne declares that if a 

 ir commoner) shall have obtained five hides of land in full 

 rty, with a church, a kitchen, a bell-house, a hurghatc seat (or 

 of magistrate in a burgh), and a station in the king's hall (the 

 ngof which last expression is doubtful), he shall henceforth be a 

 thane by right. Five hides of land was probably the amount demanded 

 even for a thane of the highest order ; although it appears from Domcs- 

 '!.'> Hook that this was also the quantity which made the owner a 

 tnilc -(, or liable to be called out on the king's military service. Many 

 ire mentioned in Domesday-Book as thane-lands (terra) tainorum) ; 

 ;ml it U probable that the dignity, like the oldest of the Norman 

 I .-ironies, was sometimes attached to a particular estate. Thanes were 

 among the members of the Saxon Witenagemot, or parliament. The 

 principal facts connected with, this dignity in England have been 

 collected by Mr. Sharon Turner, in his ' History of the Anglo-Saxons,' 

 8vo., London, 1823, vol. iii. ; by Sir Francis Palgrave, in his ' Kise and 

 Progress of the English Commonwealth,' 4to., 1832, and by Mr. J. M. 

 Ki-iublo in hia ' Saxons in England,' 1849. 

 There is little mention of the thanes in England after the time of 



Henry II. ; but Lord Hailes has shown (' Annals,' i. 28) that in Scot- 

 land thane was a recognised title down to the end of the 1 5th century : 

 the ' Chartulary of Moray' mentions a thane of Cawdor in 1492. It 

 appears from the first to have implied in Scotland a higher dignity 

 than in England, and to have been for the most synonymous with earl, 

 which was a title generally annexed to the territory of a whole 

 county. 



THAW is the reduction of ice or snow to a liquid state in conse- 

 quence of an increase in temperature. In the ordinary succession of 

 the seasons, this efl'ect is produced on the surface of the earth or in 

 the atmosphere during the spring by the return of the sun to the 

 hemisphere of the observer, the solar rays then falling in greater 

 abundance than before on a given extent of ground ; or it is produced 

 by accidental currents of warm air which pass over a frozen mass. 

 The dissolution of particles of ice or snow floating in the atmosphere, 

 and the universal liberation of moisture previously frozen up, are the 

 causes of the humidity which accompanies a thaw. 



As the conversion of a liquid into ice always commences at the 

 surface of the former, and about the sides of the vessel containing it, 

 or about those of a solid body immersed in it, so in ice surrounded by 

 air which has acquired a higher temperature than the ice has, the pro- 

 cess of liquefaction commences at the sides and extends gradually from 

 thence inwards ; ice being a bad conductor of heat, the central parts of 

 it, under ordinary circumstances, are the last which are dissolved. 

 It is observed that when solid bodies, whose temperatures are 

 equal to one another and higher than that of ice, are applied to 

 the latter, the ice is dissolved most rapidly by those which have the 

 greatest power ' of conducting caloric : thus a piece of ice being 

 laid on a plate of polished metal, and a piece of equal magnitude 

 on wood, the ice on the metal will be dissolved before that which 

 is laid on the wood, not only when the temperature of the metal 

 and wood are equal, but even when the temperature of the wood 

 considerably exceeds that of the metal, the latter conveying more 

 abundantly to the ice the caloric which it is continually receiving from 

 the*atmosphere. 



A severe and long-continued frost abstracts so much caloric from 

 terrestrial bodies, as the walls of buildings which are not exposed to 

 the sun, that these are often cooled below the temperature of freezing 

 water ; and while in this state, if a current of warm air pass over their 

 surfaces, the aqueous vapour which the air contains deposits itself on 

 the walls, where it is converted into ice or snow : it remains thus 

 frozen for a time after a thaw has commenced, but at length, the 

 temperature increasing, the ice is melted and the walls are then covered 

 with moisture. 



It is often remarked that, at the time of a thaw taking place, there 

 is felt a degree of coldness greater than that which is experienced 

 during the continuance of the frost ; this has sometimes been ascribed 

 merely to the evaporation of the moisture which is then on the skin, 

 as the thermometer at the same time indicates an elevation of tempe- 

 rature in the atmosphere. But the evaporative power of the skin 

 must depend both upon the temperature of the air and the amount of 

 aqueous vapour which it already contains, and in part also on the local 

 heat of the human body. The sensation alluded to arises, in all probability, 

 from the continual conversion of the sensible heat of the atmosphere 

 and the surface of the earth and bodies resting upon it, into a latent 

 form during the process of thawing, the latent heat of water being 

 greater than that of any other substance. Dr. Faraday has shown 

 that the conversion of a cubic yard of ice simply into water at 32, or 

 ice-cold, would absorb or render latent the whole heat emitted during 

 the combustion of a bushel of coal. [HAIL; ICE; WATEK.] The 

 amount of heat thus required in the liquefaction of ice renders a thaw 

 so gradual. This is an important provision of nature ; but for it, " the 

 ice that had accumulated during a long winter would at the first breeze 

 from the south be instantly converted into water, and sweep before it, 

 not merely the habitations of man and their tenants, but trees, rocks, 

 and hills ; " every thaw, in fact, would occasion a frightful inundation. 

 Conversely, frost is rendered gradual by the evolution of the latent 

 heat of water in a sensible form. 



For a remarkable case of slow thawing, and illustration of the prin- 

 ciple on which the gradual nature of that process depends, wo may 

 refer to some experiments made by Dr. Faraday for the investigation 

 of a different subject, that of regelation. He prepared a bath of water, 

 which could be retained, by appropriate contrivances, at the unchanging 

 temperature of 32 Fahr., or the melting-point of ice, for a week or 

 more ; but a small piece of ice floating in it for that time was not 

 entirely melted away. Yet the temperature was adequate to the 

 liquefaction of ice, for a very slow thawing process was really going on 

 in the bath during the whole time, as was rendered evident by the 

 state of this very piece of ice ; but the glass jar containing the water 

 being surrounded by a system of bad conductors of heat, including dry 

 flannel and broken ice, the heat of the atmosphere and exterior sur- 

 rounding bodies could only very slowly penetrate to the ice in the bath, 

 and there supply the heat required to become latent in the process of 

 thawing it, and hence the rate of thawing was so slow as not to dissolve 

 a cubic inch of ice in six or seven days. (See ' 1'roc. of Koyal Society ' 

 for April 26, 1860, vol. x., pp. 442, 449.) 



A phenomenon observed at Inspruck, in the Tyrol, which has been 

 referred to the contrary operation of local winds, probably admits of 



