212 



APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS APPEAL. 



mother's amis granted him divine honours, accom- 

 panied with the infamous remark Sitdirus, dum tion 

 til vit'iis. The first emperors were not adored in their 

 life time ; l)iit, with tlie progress of iasanity, tempi* 1 

 were built to the living tyrant. Caligula was not 

 satisfied with being a god ; he wished to l>e a priest 

 too, and, taking his horse as a companion in the otlice 

 offered sacrifice to himself, and, immediately aficr 

 wards, appeared as Jupiter or as Cythera, &c. Con- 

 stantinus had the double advantage of In in- dcifn . 

 by the religion which he had persecuted, and cano- 

 nized by that which he supported It was quite cus- 

 tomary for the Christian emperors to have altars, and 

 be adored by their pagan subjects. Critics are not 

 wanting, who see, in the canonization of the Catholk 

 church, nothing but a continuance of this Roman 

 fashion of deifying men, with this difference only, 

 that saints were never canonized during their lifetime. 

 This deification of the living, the Romans derived, 

 perhaps, from the Greeks, whose lively and poetical 

 imaginations led them sometimes to build altars to 

 their mistresses, and offer sacrifices to them. The 

 apotheosis never degenerated to such a criminal ex- 

 cess among the Greeks as among the Romans. The 

 ceremonies of the Roman apotheosis were very curi- 

 ous, but are too long to be repeated here. 



APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS. See Alleghany Moun- 

 tains. 



APPALACHICOLA ; a river of the United States, 

 formed by the Chatahoochee and Flint rivers, which 

 unite near the northern border of Florida. The A., 

 after a course of about 70 miles, flows into St George's 

 sound, in the gulf of Mexico, and is navigable through- 

 out for schooners of considerable size. The Chata- 

 hoochee, the western and largest tributary of the A., 

 rises in the Appalachian or Alleghany mountains, on 

 the confines of Georgia and Tennessee, and is navi- 

 gable for boats nearly 400 miles from the gulf of 

 Mi xico. 



APPANAGE. See Apanage. 



APPARENT, among mathematicians and astronomers, 

 denotes things as they appear to the eye, in distinc- 

 tion from what they really are. Thus they speak 

 of apparent motion, magnitude, distance, height, &c. 

 So important is this difference between reality and 

 appearance, particularly in regard to the heavenly 

 bodies, that we find all early astronomers, who were 

 ignorant of this fact, running continuallyinto errors ; 

 and a great advancement in science was required, 

 before mankind were able to establish systems op- 

 posed to appearances. Every one knows that a body 

 may appear to move while it is, in fact, at rest, and 

 the motion is in the spectator, or the place on which he 

 stands, as is the case with the sun, in relation to the 

 inhabitants of this earth. The phrase apparent heir, 

 or heir apparent, signifies one whose right of inheri- 

 tance is indefeasible, provided he survives his ances- 

 tors ; as the eldest son or his issue, who must, by the 

 course of the common law, be heirs to the father. 

 Heirs presiunptive are such who, if the ancestor 

 should die immediately, would, in the present state of 

 things, be his heirs. 



APPARITION ; a spectral illusion, involuntarily ge- 

 nerated, by means of which figures or forms, not 

 present to the actual sense, are nevertheless depic- 

 tured with a vividness and intensitysufficient to create 

 a temporary belief of their reality. It is the result of 

 the re-action of an excited imagination, renovating 

 past feeling or impressions, with an energy propor- 

 tioned to the degree of excitement; arranging them 

 often in new and fantastical groups ; and thus sur- 

 rounding us with a pliantasmagoria of the bodiless 

 creation of the brain , so distinct both in outline and 

 lineameiit, that, while the existing cause continues 

 to operate, the illusion of reality predominates over 



(lie mind with an intensity generally equal to, some- 

 times greater than, that of the impressions produced 

 by actual perceptions. Hut although the illusion 

 thus generated is ueccsxirily co-existent with tin- 

 state of excitement in which it. lias its origin; or, in 

 other words, ci^es to be active when the spectral 

 phenomena vanish ; it does not therefore follow that 

 the mind, when it regains its ordinary condition, hc- 



<" s immediately sensible of the hallucination under 



which it has for a time been labouring, or capable of 

 distinguishing between the perceptions of sense and 

 the phantasms of imagination. On the contrary, ob- 

 servation proves, what theory equally sanctions, that 

 the conviction of reality generally outlasts the im- 

 pressions which originally produced it. ; and that, so 

 far from any suspicion of illusion being entertained, 

 or any power of discriminating the actual from tin; 

 imaginary being evinced, this conviction takes entire. 

 possession of the mind, and, in many instances, 

 maintains its hold with a firmness which all the force 

 of argument and reason is insufficient to overcome. 

 Hence the tenacity, and, we may add, the universa- 

 lity, of the belief in apparitions ; and hence also the 

 prodigious diversity of forms under which these spec- 

 tral illusions are presented in the popular legends 

 and superstitions of different ages and countries ; a 

 diversity, in fact, which seems commensurate with 

 the incredible variety of influences, whether morbific 

 or other, by which the imagination may be excited, 

 and past feelings or impressions vividly renovated in 

 consequence or its re-action on the organs of sense. 

 Dr Brewster has remarked, as a physical fact, that 

 " when the eye is not exposed to the impressions of 

 external objects, or when it is insensible to these ob- 

 jects in consequence of being engrossed with its own 

 operations, any object of mental contemplation, which 

 lias either been called up by the memory or created 

 by the imagination, will be seen as distinctly as if it 

 had been formed from the vision of a real object. In 

 examining these mental impressions," he adds, " I 

 have found that they follow the motions of the eye- 

 ball exactly like the spectral impressions of luminous 

 objects, and that they resemble them also in their 

 apparent immobility when the eye-ball is displaced 

 by an external force. If this result shall be found 

 generally true by others, it will follow that the ob- 

 jects of mental contemplation may be seen as dis- 

 tinctly as external objects, and will occupy the same 

 local position in the axis of vision as if they had been 

 formed by the agency of light." This goes to the 

 very root of the theory of apparitions ; all the phe- 

 nomena of which seem to depend upon the relative 

 intensities of the two classes of impressions, and upon 

 the manner of their accidental combination. In per- 

 fect health, the mind not only possesses a control 

 over its powers, but the impressions of external ob- 

 jects alone occupy its attention, and the play of ima- 

 gination is consequently checked, except in sleep, 

 when its operations are relatively more feeble and 

 faint. But in the unhealthy state of the mind, when 

 its attention is partly withdrawn from the contempla- 

 tion of external objects, the impressions of its own 

 creation, or rather reproduction, will either overpower 

 or combine themselves with the impressions of exter- 

 nal objects, and thus generate illusions which in the 

 one case appear alone, while in the other they are 

 seen projected among those external objects to which 

 the eye-ball is directed, in the manner explained by 

 Dr Brewster. We may add, that the same reasoning 

 which applies to the impressions derived from the 

 sense of sight, is equally applicable to those received 

 through the medium of any other sense, as the ear, 

 for instance, an organ which ministers abundantly to 

 the production of spectral illusions. 

 APPEAL (law) signifies the removal of a cause from 



