L A M L A M 243
4 sq.) do not bear out this conclusion, and our scanty historical knowledge of the period points to the eastern captivity as the more probable seat of the spiritual movement to which the book belongs.
Literature. – The older literature is fully given by Nägelsbach, p. xvii. Among recent commentaries may be noticed those of Kalkar (in Latin), 1836; Ewald in his Dichter, vol. i. pt. ii. (2d ed., 1866); Thenius in Kurzgef. Handb., 1855, who ascribes chaps, ii. and iv. to Jeremiah (comp. Budde in Z. f. ATliche Wiss., 1882, p. 45); Vaihinger, 1857; Neumann, 1858; Engelhardt, 1867; Nägelsbach, 1868 (English translation, 1871); Keil, 1872 (English translation, 1874); Payne Smith in the Speaker's Commentary; and Reuss, La Bible: Poésie Lyrique, 1879. (W. R. S.)
LAMETTRIE, Julien Offray de (1709-1751), one of the creators of the French illumination, and the earliest exponent of that system of materialism which was afterwards elaborated by Holbach and Cabanis, was born at St Malo on December 25, 1709. After for some years studying theology in the Jansenist schools with the intention of entering the church, he suddenly changed his career and threw himself with characteristic energy into the profession of medicine. In 1733 he went to Leyden to study under Boerhaave, then in the zenith of his fame, and in 1742 returned to Paris, where he obtained the appointment of surgeon to the guards. During an attack of fever he made some observations on himself with reference to the action of quickened circulation upon thought, which led him to the conclusion that psychical phenomena were to be accounted for as the effects of organic changes in the brain and nervous system. This conclusion he worked out in his, earliest philosophical work, the Histoire Naturelle de l'Âme, which appeared about 1745. So great was the outcry caused by its publication that Lamettrie was forced to betake himself to Leyden, where he developed his doctrines still more boldly and completely, and with great originality, in his books Homme Machine and Homme Plante, treatises based upon principles of the most consistently materialistic character. The ethics of these principles were worked out in the subsequent volumes, Discours sur le Bonheur, La Volupté, and L'Art de Jouir, in which the end of life is found in the pleasures of the senses, and virtue is reduced to self-love. So strong was the feeling against Lamettrie that in 1748 he was compelled to quit Holland for Berlin, where Frederick the Great not only allowed him to practise as a physician, but appointed him court reader. He died in 1751, when his position as a philosopher was publicly recognized in an address written by the king himself, and read before the Berlin Academy. His collected Œuvres Philosophiques appeared after his death in several editions, published in London, Berlin, and Amsterdam respectively. The best account of his system is that given in A. Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus.
LAMIA was a female demon, whose name was used by Greek mothers to frighten their children; from the Greek she passed into Roman demonology. She was also known as a sort of fiend, the prototype of the modern vampire, who in the form of a beautiful woman enticed young men to her embraces, in order that she might feed on their life and heart's blood. In this form the tale has been used by Goethe as the subject of one of his most powerful poems, Die Braut von Corinth. The name Lamia is clearly the feminine form of Lamus, king of the Læstrygones (q.v.). Both are called in some forms of the legends children of Poseidon; and the analogy of other myths makes it probable that they are ultimately a pair of deities, male and female. At some early period, or in some districts, Lamus and Lamia were worshipped as gods; but the names did not attain general currency. Their worship disappeared, and they preserved an existence only in legend. They have gained a worse character than any other of the old divine forms which persist in Greek legend; but their history is remarkably like that of the malignant class of demons in Germanic and Celtic folklore. Both names occur in the geographical nomenclature of Greece and Asia Minor; and this makes it probable that the deities belong to that religion which spread from Asia Minor over Thrace into Greece.
LÄMMERGEYER (i.e., Lamb-Vulture), or Bearded Vulture, the Falco barbatus of Linnæus and the Gypaetus barbatus of modern ornithologists, one of the grandest birds-of-prey of the Palæarctic Region – inhabiting lofty mountain chains from Portugal to the borders of China, though within historic times, if not within living memory, it has been exterminated in several of its ancient haunts. Its northern range in Europe does not seem to have extended further than the southern frontier of Bavaria, or the neighbourhood of Salzburg;[1] but in Asia it formerly re ached a higher latitude, having been found even so lately as 1830 in Dauuria (see BIRDS, vol. iii, p. 736, note 3), where according to Herr Radde (Beitr. Kenntn. Russ. Reichs, xxiii. p. 467) it has now left but its name. It is not uncommon on many parts of the Himalayas, where it breeds, and on the mountains of Kumaon and the Punjab, and is the "Golden Eagle" of most Anglo-Indians. Returning westward, it is found also in Persia, Palestine, Crete and Greece, the Italian Alps, Sicily, Sardinia, and Mauritania.
In some external characters the Lämmergeyer is obviously intermediate between the Families Vulturidæ, and Falconidæ, and the opinion of systematists has from time to time varied as to its proper position; but as this ought to depend on the decision of anatomists, who have not yet delivered their verdict, it must be still left in doubt; and there would be little advantage in recounting how one author has referred it to the former group and another to the latter, since nobody seems to have applied the only sure test – that afforded by characters which are not superficial.[2] It will suffice to say that most writers have deemed its Vulturine affinity the strongest (relying apparently on the form of the beak, which can scarcely be said to be either Aquiline or Falconine), in spite of its well-feathered head and tarsi. The whole length of the bird is from 43 to 46 inches, of which, however, about 20 are due to the long cuneiform tail, while the pointed wings measure more than 30 inches from the carpal joint to the tip. The coloration of the plumage is very peculiar: the top of the head is white, bounded by black, which, beginning in stiff bristly feathers turned forwards over the base of the beak, proceeds on either side of the face in a well-defined band to the eye, where it bifurcates into two narrow stripes, of which the upper one passes above and beyond that feature till just in front of the scalp it suddenly turns upwards across the head and meets the corresponding stripe from the opposite side, enclosing the white forehead already mentioned, while the lower stripe extends beneath the eye about as far backwards and then suddenly stops. A tuft of black, bristly feathers projects beardlike from the base of the mandible, and gives the bird one of its commonest epithets in many languages, as well as an appearance almost unique among the whole Class Aves. The rest of the head, the neck, throat, and lower parts generally are clothed with lanceolate feathers of a pale tawny colour – sometimes so pale as to be nearly white beneath;[3] while the scapulars,
- ↑ Dr Girtanner has a valuable paper on this bird in Switzerland (Verhandl. St.-Gall, naturw. Gesellschaft, 1869-70, pp. 147-244).
- ↑ Professor Huxley's labours have unfortunately not been directed to this particular point, and therefore throw little or no light on it. He puts the Vulturidæ, and Falconidæ together under the name of Gypaetidæ, very properly separating from them the American Vultures as Cathartidæ.
- ↑ Herr Meves (Öfvers. Vet. Akad. Förhandlingar, 1860, p. 487) asserts that in some cases, as proved by chemical tests, the red colouring is due to a superficial deposit of oxide of iron on the feathers, and
