114 



♦ KNOWLEDGE - 



[March 1, 1887. 



FiLlBCSTERiSM. An elegant derivative. 



FiLLiPEEN, or Philopeen. It seems pi-obable that this 

 word " Fillipeen," certainly derived from the German Viel- 

 liebchen, reached us in England from Americji, where 

 German words, as well as German ways and customs, are 

 more common in social and family life than in the Old 

 Country. 



Fill the Bin, To. To answer to a description, be the 

 person asked for, or the like. Are you so and so ? says 

 question, " and then comes answer like an Absey book,' 

 " I fill the bin." 



First Swathe. Equivalent to our English slang " first 

 chop." 



Fits. " To give any one fits," sometimes " particular 

 fits," means to make him singularly uncomfortable, or to 

 give him startling evidence of disgust at something or 

 other he has done. The expression is often heard now in 

 England, but I fancy, from the frequency with which it is 

 heard in Ameiica, that it had its origin over the water. 

 Our Enghsh slang equivalent would be " Fll make him look 

 nine ways for Sunday " — that is, I presume, for Sabbath rest. 

 The literary reader will immediately i-ecall here the intro- 

 duction of this expression into a description (in the classical 

 pages of Punch nearly thirty years ago) of a fight between 

 Tom Sayers and Bob Travers, where we were told how Tom 

 gave Bob a straight one which 



Made him liiok nine ways for Sunday and finally fail to per- 

 ceive it. 



Fix. A predicament or condition. To be " in a fix," as 

 equivalent to being in an awkward situation, is about as 

 commonly heard in England as in America. But I think 

 the origin of the expression, regarded as a form of slang, 

 is Transatlantic, 



Fix, To. The use of this word in the sense of arranging, 

 and where the idea of fixity is not at all implied, would seem 

 to have arisen from some confusion between fingency and 

 fixation — as if the word had the meaning of the Latin _/in(/o, 

 fingere, instead of that only of the Latin figo, fgere. At 

 least I know of no use of the word "fix" in America which 

 would not fairly represent the meaning of one or other of the 

 two verbs fingo and figo. It certainly has a strange effect 

 to hear " fix " used in one of the wrong senses — as " Let me 

 fix that feather," when the idea is to make it wave naturally ; 

 " I will fix the table," meaning " I will lay the cloth and 

 set the plates, knives, forks, &c. ; " or still more oddly when, 

 as I heard it used only a day or two since, in reply to a 

 child's cry, '• My dress is caught, I wish you would loosen 

 it," the answer comes, " Wait a moment and I'll fix it," 



PUBLIC SCHOOLS ATLAS.* 



ETTER provision has been made in this 

 work for teaching our public school boys 

 geography than has been made to teach 

 them Latin and Greek in .all the non- 

 sensical grammars written for them from 

 the days of the Tudors until the last most 

 monstrous wrong was done the young folk 

 by the " Public Schools Grammar," pub- 

 lished a few years ago. Why geogi-aphy should be taught 

 sensibly and languages in a blunder-headed manner it were 

 difficult to say ; but certainly it is fortunate that the 

 preparation of books on geography did not fall into the 



* " The Public Schools Atlas of Modern Geography, in 33 Maps." 

 With an introduction by the Rev, Geo, Butler, " New edition. 

 Longmans & Co., London. Price us. 



hands of the wiseacres who discovered that extremely 

 difficult logical questions involved in grammar were fit 

 food for boyish minds, (Puzzle out, reader, the true signi- 

 ficance of a few such words as declination, case, genitive, 

 ablative, adjective, conjiigation, supine, gerund, etc, and 

 the complex nature of the problems you were supposed to 

 deal with at school will be cle.ar to you,) Because, if 

 geogr.aphy had been dealt with in the same way we should 

 have had our boys learning the formula; for the barometrical 

 determination of heights before they were told the heights 

 of the various mountains on the earth, or studying the 

 diflerential equations for fluid motion before they learned 

 the coiu'ses of the principal rivers, (This may seem extra- 

 vagant ; but ask the fifty leading philologists of the world 

 to tell the boys who learn of supines, for example, the 

 logical significance of the word — and why those particular 

 verbal forms might not equally have been regarded as 

 prones or xiprighls — and guess from their replies whether 

 the logic of grammar is not as far from being fit teaching 

 for young folk learning languages as mathematical formula 

 from serving as a proper introduction to geographical 

 matters,) 



In the book before us we have geography illustrated in a 

 very simple and attractive manner. The scale of the maps 

 is adetpiate. They are not so overcrowded with names that 

 the wood cannot be seen for the trees. The rivers are 

 clearly and efl'ectively represented from their sources, and 

 the positions of towns with reference to them and to the 

 sea- coast have been very carefully indicated. There are not 

 too many maps, yet there are enough for the purpose aimed 

 at, and the atlas is cheap. 



As regards details, the following features seem decided 

 improvements on the old plan. The names of countries 

 and of their chief divisions have been engraved more 

 compactly than of old, the initial letter of each chief word 

 being relatively larger than usual ; the names are engraved 

 horizontally wherever this has been possible ; and with one 

 exception (the United States) the maps have not been 

 folded. 



To one featui'e of the maps an exception must be taken. 

 While the outlines of the continents and islands, the courses 

 of rivers, and the jiositions of towns, are printed in blue, the 

 meridians and parallels, the outlines of countries and 

 counties, and the names of places are printed in black. So 

 far as the colours are concerned this arrangement is con- 

 venient enough. But when we I'emember how the two 

 printings are necessarily managed, and that by no possible 

 arrangement can exact " registering " be obtained (simply 

 because the wetted paper expands irregularly, and is 

 irregularly compressed at each printing), we see that the 

 meridians and outlines of countries should be given by the 

 same printing as the rivei'S and the outlines of continents — 

 necessarily, therefore, in the same colours. The names and 

 the map frame might be separately printed (black), and no 

 harm done, but the outlines of countries and counties cannot 

 be safely so printed, and for the meridians and parallels to 

 be separately printed is seriously objectionable. These are, 

 in effect, the measuring marks on maps, and to have them 

 wrong is to have the whole map wrong. When we have 

 mentioned that in our cop}', Greenwich, owing to defective 

 registering, appears to be measurably east of the first 

 meridian, which we know is the meridian of Greenwich, the 

 fundamental character of the defect will be recognised. Of 

 course in another copy Greenwich may appear west of the 

 meridian, and in some copies may chance to be just right. 

 But this does not mend matters. In every copy some maps 

 must have every single town shown in wrong longitude or 

 latitude. 



The maps of this atlas are of course drawn like those of 



