consists of the governor and three official and two unofficial nominated members, and the executive of the same, with the exception that there is only one unofficial member. The colony is self-supporting, the revenue being largely derived from the drink duties, and there is no public debt. The Falklands are the seat of a colonial bishop. Education is compulsory. The government maintains schools and travelling teachers; the Falkland Islands Company also maintains a school at Darwin, and there is one for those of the Roman Catholic faith in Stanley. There is also on Keppel Island a Protestant missionary settlement for the training in agriculture of imported Fuegians. Stanley was for some years a naval station, but ceased to be so in 1904.
The Falkland Islands were first seen, by Davis in the year 1592, and Sir Richard Hawkins sailed along their north shore in 1594. The claims of Amerigo Vespucci to a previous discovery are doubtful. In 1598 Sebald de Wert, a Dutchman, visited them, and called them the Sebald Islands, a name which they bear on some Dutch maps. Captain Strong sailed through between the two principal islands in 1690, landed upon one of them, and called the passage Falkland Sound, and from this the group afterwards took its English name. In 1764 the French explorer De Bougainville took possession of the islands on behalf of his country, and established a colony at Port Louis on Berkeley Sound. But in 1767 France ceded the islands to Spain, De Bougainville being employed as intermediary. Meanwhile in 1765 Commodore Byron had taken possession on the part of England on the ground of prior discovery, and had formed a settlement at Port Egmont on the small island of Saunders. The Spanish and English settlers remained in ignorance, real or assumed, of each other’s presence until 1769–1770, when Byron’s action was nearly the cause of a war between England and Spain, both countries having armed fleets to contest the barren sovereignty. In 1771, however, Spain yielded the islands to Great Britain by convention. As they had not been actually colonized by England, the republic of Buenos Aires claimed the group in 1820, and subsequently entered into a dispute with the United States of America concerning the rights to the products of these islands. On the representations of Great Britain the Buenos Aireans withdrew, and the British flag was once more hoisted at Port Louis in 1833, and since that time the Falkland Islands have been a regular British colony.
In 1845 Mr S. Lafone, a wealthy cattle and hide merchant on the river Plate, obtained from government a grant of the southern portion of the island, a peninsula 600,000 acres in extent, and possession of all the wild cattle on the island for a period of six years, for a payment of £10,000 down, and £20,000 in ten years from January 1, 1852. In 1851 Mr Lafone’s interest in Lafonia, as the peninsula came to be called, was purchased for £30,000 by the Falkland Islands Company, which had been incorporated by charter in the same year.
See Pernety, Journal historique d’une voyage faite aux îles Malouines en 1763 et 1764 (Berlin, 1767); S. Johnson, Thoughts on the late Transactions respecting Falkland’s Islands (1771); L. A. de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde (1771); T. Falkner, Description of Patagonia and the Falkland Islands (1774); B. Penrose, Account of the last Expedition to Port Egmont in the Falkland Islands (1775); Observations on the Forcible Occupation of Malvinas by the British Government in 1833 (Buenos Ayres, 1833); Reclamacion del Gobierno de las provincias Unidas de la Plata contra el de S.M. Britanica sobre la soverania y possesion de las Islas Malvinas (London, 1841); Fitzroy, Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. “Adventure” and “Beagle” (1839); Darwin, Voyage of a Naturalist round the World (1845); S. B. Sullivan, Description of the Falkland Islands (1849); W. Hadfield, Brazil, the Falkland Islands, &c. (1854); W. Parker Snow, Two Years’ Cruise off the Tierra del Fuego, the Falkland Islands, &c. (1857); Sir C. Wyville Thomson, Voyage of the “Challenger” (1877); C. P. Lucas, Historical Geography of the British Colonies, vol. ii. “The West Indies” (Oxford, 1890); Colonial Reports Annual; MS. Sloane, 3295.
FALLACY (Lat. fall-ax, apt to mislead), the term given
generally to any mistaken statement used in argument; in
Logic, technically, an argument which violates the laws of
correct demonstration. An argument may be fallacious in
matter (i.e. misstatement of facts), in wording (i.e. wrong use of
words), or in the process of inference. Fallacies have, therefore,
been classified as: I. Material, II. Verbal, III. Logical or
Formal; II. and III. are often included under the general
description Logical, and in scholastic phraseology, following
Aristotle, are called fallacies in dictione or in voce, as opposed
to material fallacies in re or extra dictionem.
I. Material.—The classification widely adopted by modern logicians and based on that of Aristotle, Organon (Sophistici elenchi), is as follows:—(1) Fallacy of Accident, i.e. arguing erroneously from a general rule to a particular case, without proper regard to particular conditions which vitiate the application of the general rule; e.g. if manhood suffrage be the law, arguing that a criminal or a lunatic must, therefore, have a vote; (2) Converse Fallacy of Accident, i.e. arguing from a special case to a general rule; (3) Irrelevant Conclusion, or Ignoratio Elenchi, wherein, instead of proving the fact in dispute, the arguer seeks to gain his point by diverting attention to some extraneous fact (as in the legal story of “No case. Abuse the plaintiff’s attorney”). Under this head come the so-called argumentum (a) ad hominem, (b) ad populum, (c) ad baculum, (d) ad verecundiam, common in platform oratory, in which the speaker obscures the real issue by appealing to his audience on the grounds of (a) purely personal considerations, (b) popular sentiment, (c) fear, (d) conventional propriety. This fallacy has been illustrated by ethical or theological arguments wherein the fear of punishment is subtly substituted for abstract right as the sanction of moral obligation. (4) Petitio principii (begging the question) or Circulus in probando (arguing in a circle), which consists in demonstrating a conclusion by means of premises which presuppose that conclusion. Jeremy Bentham points out that this fallacy may lurk in a single word, especially in an epithet, e.g. if a measure were condemned simply on the ground that it is alleged to be “un-English”; (5) Fallacy of the Consequent, really a species of (3), wherein a conclusion is drawn from premises which do not really support it; (6) Fallacy of False Cause, or Non Sequitur (“it does not follow”), wherein one thing is incorrectly assumed as the cause of another, as when the ancients attributed a public calamity to a meteorological phenomenon; (7) Fallacy of Many Questions (Plurium Interrogationum), wherein several questions are improperly grouped in the form of one, and a direct categorical answer is demanded, e.g. if a prosecuting counsel asked the prisoner “What time was it when you met this man?” with the intention of eliciting the tacit admission that such a meeting had taken place.
II. Verbal Fallacies are those in which a false conclusion is obtained by improper or ambiguous use of words. They are generally classified as follows. (1) Equivocation consists in employing the same word in two or more senses, e.g. in a syllogism, the middle term being used in one sense in the major and another in the minor premise, so that in fact there are four not three terms (“All fair things are honourable; This woman is fair; therefore this woman is honourable,” the second “fair” being in reference to complexion). (2) Amphibology is the result of ambiguity of grammatical structure, e.g. of the position of the adverb “only” in careless writers (“He only said that,” in which sentence, as experience shows, the adverb has been intended to qualify any one of the other three words). (3) Composition, a species of (1), which results from the confused use of collective terms (“The angles of a triangle are less than two right angles” might refer to the angles separately or added together). (4) Division, the converse of the preceding, which consists in employing the middle term distributively in the minor and collectively in the major premise. (5) Accent, which occurs only in speaking and consists of emphasizing the wrong word in a sentence (“He is a fairly good pianist,” according to the emphasis on the words, may imply praise of a beginner’s progress, or an expert’s depreciation of a popular hero, or it may imply that the person in question is a deplorable violinist). (6) Figure of Speech, the confusion between the metaphorical and ordinary uses of a word or phrase.
III. The purely Logical or Formal fallacies consist in the violation of the formal rules of the Syllogism (q.v.). They are
