APPANAGE

appanage, or apanage (a french word from the late lat. _apanagium_, formed from _apanare, i.e. panem porrigere_, to give bread, i.e. sustenance), in its original sense, the means of subsistence given by parents to their younger children as distinct from the rights secured to the eldest born by the custom of primogeniture. in its modern usage it is practically confined to the money endowment given to the younger children of reigning or mediatized houses in germany and austria, which reverts to the state or to the head of the family on the extinction of the line of the original grantee. in english history the system of appanages never played any great part, and the term is now properly applied only to the appanages of the crown: the duchy of cornwall, assigned to the king's eldest son at birth, or on his father's accession to the crown, and the duchy of lancaster. in the history of france, however, the appanage was a very important factor. the word denotes in very early french law the portion of lands or money given by fathers and mothers to their sons or daughters on marriage, and usually connotes a renunciation by the latter of any future inheritance; or it may denote the portion given by the eldest son to his brothers and sisters when he was sole inheritor. the word _apanage_ is still employed in this sense in french official texts of some _customs_; but it was in old public law that it received its definite meaning and importance. under the kings of the third dynasty, the division of the kingdom among the sons of the dead monarch which had characterized the merovingian and carolingian dynasties, ceased. the eldest son alone succeeded to the crown; but at the same time a custom was established by which the king made territorial provision suitable to their rank for his other children or for his brothers and sisters; custom forbade their being left landless. lands and lordships thus bestowed constituted the appanages, which interfered so greatly with the formation of ancient france. while the persevering policy of the capets, which aimed at reuniting the great fiefs, duchies, countships, baronies, &c., to the domain of the crown, gradually reconstructed for their benefit a territorial sovereignty over france, the institution of the appanage periodically subtracted large portions from it. louis xi., in particular, had to struggle against the appanaged nobles. the old law, however, never abolished this institution. the edict of moulins (1566) maintained it, as one of the exceptions to the inalienability of the crown-lands; only it was then decided that daughters of france should be appanaged in money, or that if, in default of coin, lands were assigned to them, these lands should be redeemable by the crown in perpetuity. the efforts of the kings to minimize this evil, and of the old jurisprudence to deal with the matter, resulted in two expedients: (1) the reversion of the appanage to the crown was secured as far as possible, being declared inalienable and transmissible only to male descendants in the male line of the person appanaged; (2) originally the person appanaged had possessed all the rights of a duke or count--that is to say, in the middle ages nearly all the attributes of sovereignty; the more important of these attributes were now gradually reserved to the monarch, including public authority over the inhabitants of the appanage in all essential matters. however, it is evident from the letters of appanage, dated april 1771, in favour of the count of provence, how many functions of public authority an appanaged person still held. the constituent assembly, by the law dated the 22nd of november 1790, decided that in future there should be no appanages in real estate, and that younger sons of monarchs, married and over twenty-five years of age, should be provided for by yearly grants (_rentes apanageres_) from the public funds. the laws of the 13th of august and the 21st of december 1790 revoked all the existing appanages, except those of the luxembourg palace and the palais royal. to each person hitherto appanaged an annual income of one million _livres_ was assigned, and two millions for the brothers of the king. all this came to an end with the monarchy. napoleon, by the _senatus-consulte_ of the 30th of january 1810, resolved to create appanages for the emperor's princely descendants, such appanages to consist for the most part of lands on french soil. the fall of the empire again annulled this enactment. the last appanage known in france was that enjoyed by the house of orleans. having been re-established, or recognized as still existing, by the restoration, it was formally confirmed by the law of the 15th of january 1825. on the accession of louis philippe it was united to the national property by the law of the 2nd of march 1832. for appanages in ancient law see the _essai sur les apanages ou memoires historiques de leur etablissement_, attributed to du vaucel, about 1780. (j. p. e.) apparel (from o. fr. _aparail_, _aparailler_, mod. _appareil_, from low lat. _adpariculare_, to make fit or equal), equipment, outfit, things furnished for the proper performance of anything, now chiefly used of dress. the word is also applied to the "orphreys," i.e. embroidered strips or borders, on ecclesiastical vestments. apparitions. an apparition, strictly speaking, is merely an appearance (lat. _apparere_, to appear), the result of perception exercised on any stimulus of any of the senses. but in ordinary usage the word apparition denotes a perception (generally through the sense of sight) which cannot, as a rule, be shown to be occasioned by an object in external nature. we say "as a rule" because many so-called apparitions are merely illusions, i.e. misconstructions of the perceptive processes, as when a person in a bad light sees a number of small children leading a horse, and finds, on nearer approach, that he sees two men carrying bee-hives suspended from a pole. again, sir walter scott's vision of byron, then lately dead, proved to be a misconstruction of certain plaids and cloaks hanging in the hall at abbotsford, or so sir walter declared. had he not discovered the physical basis of this illusion (which, while it lasted, was an apparition, technically speaking), he and others might have thought that it was an apparition in the popular sense of the word, a ghost. in popular phraseology a ghost is understood to be a phantasm produced in some way by the spirit of a dead person, the impression being usually visual, though the ghost, or apparition, may also affect the sense of hearing (by words, knocks, whistles, groans and so forth), or the sense of touch, or of weight, as in the case of the "incubus." in ordinary speech an apparition of a person not known to the percipient to be dead is called a wraith, in the highland phrase, a spirit of the living. the terms _ghost_ and _wraith_ involve the hypothesis that the false perceptions are caused by spirits, a survival of the archaic animistic hypothesis (see animism), an hypothesis as difficult to prove as to disprove. apparitions, of course, are not confined to anthropomorphic phantasms; we hear of phantom coaches (sometimes seen, but more frequently heard), of phantom dogs, cats, horses, cattle, deer, and even of phantom houses. whatever may be the causes of these and other false perceptions,--most curious when the impression is shared by several witnesses,--they may best be considered under the head of hallucination (q.v.). hallucinations may be pathological, i.e. the result of morbid conditions of brain or nerve, of disease, of fever, of insanity, of alcoholism, of the abuse of drugs. again, they may be the result of dissociation, or may occur in the borderland of sleep or waking, and in this case they partake of the hallucinatory nature of dreams (q.v.). again, hallucinations may, once or twice in a lifetime, come into the experience of the sane, the healthy, and, as far as any tests can be applied, of the wide-awake. in such instances the apparition (whether it take the form of a visual phantasm, of a recognized voice, of a touch, or what not) may be coincidental or non-coincidental. the phantasm is called coincidental if it represents a known and distant person who is later found to have been dying or in some other crisis at the moment of the percipient's experience. when the false perception coincides with nothing of the sort, it is styled non-coincidental. coincidental apparitions have been explained by the theory of telepathy (q.v.), one mind or brain impressing another in some unknown way so as to beget an hallucinatory apparition or phantasm. on the evidence, so far as it has been collected and analysed, it seems that the mind which, on the hypothesis, begets the hallucinations, usually does so without _conscious_ effort (see subliminal self). there are, however, a few cases in which the experiment of begetting, in another, an hallucination from a distance, is said to have been experimentally and consciously made, with success. if the telepathic theory of coincidental hallucinations be accepted, we have still to account for the much more common non-coincidental apparitions of the living who do not happen to be in any particular crisis. in these instances it cannot be demonstrated that telepathy has _not_ been at work, as when a person is seen at a place which he thought of visiting, but did not visit. f.w. myers even upheld a theory of psychorhagy, holding that the spirits of some persons have a way of manifesting themselves at a distance by a psychic invasion. this involves, as he remarked, paleolithic psychology, and the old savage doctrine of animism, rather than telepathy (see myers, _human personality_). of belief in coincidental hallucinations or wraiths among savages, records are scanty; the belief, however, is found among maoris and fuegians (see lang, _making of religions_). the perception of apparitions of distant but actual scenes and occurrences is usually called clairvoyance (q.v.). the belief is also familiar under the name of second sight (see second sight), a term of scots usage, though the belief in it, and the facts if accepted, are of world-wide diffusion. the apparitions may either represent actual persons and places, or may be symbolical, taking the form of phantasmic lights, coffins, skeletons, shrouds and so forth. again, the appearances may either represent things, persons and occurrences of the past (see retrocognition), or of the present (clairvoyance), or of the future (see premonition). when the apparitions produce themselves in given rooms, houses or localities, and are exhibited to various persons at various times, the locality is popularly said to be haunted by spirits, that is, of the dead, on the animistic hypothesis (see hauntings). like the other alleged facts, these are of world-wide diffusion, or the belief in them is world-wide, and peculiar to no race, age, or period of culture. a haunted place is a centre of permanent possibilities of hallucinations, or is believed to be so. a distinct species of hauntings are those in which unexplained sounds and movements of objects, apparently untouched, occur. the german term _poltergeist_ (q.v.) has been given to the supposed cause of these occurrences where the cause is not ascertained to be sportive imposture. in the performances of modern spiritualists the poltergeist appears, as it were, to be domesticated, and to come at the call of the medium. an intermittent kind of ominous haunting attached, not to places, but to families, is that of the banshee (celtic) or family death omen, such as the white bird of the oxenhams, the airlie drummer, the spectral rider of clan gilzean, the rappings of the woodde family. these apparitions, with fairies and _djinns_ (the arab form of fairy), haunt the borderland between folk-lore and psychical research. so far we have been concerned with spontaneous apparitions, or with the belief in them. among induced apparitions may be reckoned the materialized forms of spiritual _seances_, which have a material basis of veils, false moustaches, wigs and the _corpus vile_ of the medium. it is also possible that mere expectancy and suggestion induce hallucinatory perceptions among the members of the circle. that apparitions of a sort can be induced by hypnotic and posthypnotic suggestion is certain enough (see hypnotism). savages produce apparitions in similar ways by suggestion, accompanied by dances, fumigations, darkness, fasting, drugs, and whatever can affect the imaginations of the onlookers (see magic). both in savage and civilized life, some persons can provoke themselves into beholding apparitions usually fantastic, but occasionally coincidental, by sedulously staring into any clear deep water, a fragment of rock crystal, a piece of polished basalt or obsidian, a mirror, a ring, a sword blade, or a glass of sherry (see crystal gazing). indeed any object, a wall, the palm of the hand, the shoulder-blade-bone of a sheep, may be, and has been used to this end (see divination). almost all known apparitions may accommodate themselves to one or other of the categories given, whether they be pathological, coincidental or spontaneous, induced, permanently localized, or sporadic. see generally, spiritualism and psychical research. (a. l.)