FLETA-FLETCHER.

Blow-fly (q. v.). The forehead is rust-coloured, the thorax grayish, the abdomen blue with three black bands. The expanse of wings is nearly one inch. It is abundant throughout Britain and Europe generally, and deposits its eggs on flesh, for which purpose it often enters houses, having a remarkably delicate sense of smelling. The maggots are of very frequent occurrence on meat in summer, notwithstanding all care that can be taken.-A nearly allied species (M. Cæsar) is distinguished by its golden green colour, and is also common in Britain. It is found in houses from the beginning of spring to the end of autumn. Another (M. lardaria), with silky tawny face, a black stripe on the crown, thorax glittering white with four black stripes, and abdomen bluishgray, tesselated with black, is most common in the end of autumn, frequenting bushes of ivy and late flowers, and is also a pest of the larder.

FLE'TA, the title of a valuable treatise on the law of England. It is not known by whom this treatise, which is one of the earliest authorities on English law, was written, and it derives its title from the circumstance that it was written in the Fleet prison. Lord Campbell remarks-Lives of the Chancellors, i. 166 and note: I shall rejoice if I do tardy justice to the memory of Robert Burnel, decidedly the first in this class, and if I attract notice to his successors, who walked in his footsteps. To them, too, we are probably indebted for the treatises entitled Fleta and Britton, which are said to have been written at the request of the king, and which, though inferior in style and arrangement to Bracton, are wonderful performances for such an age. Fleta must have been written after the 13th year of the king (Edward I.), and not much later; for it frequently quotes the statute of Westminster the second, without referring to the later statutes of the reign.

From

within the narrowest limits, if not to abolish it
altogether, he was so far from being an advocate for
a universal participation in political rights, that one
of his favourite schemes for the reformation of the
hosts of vagrants and paupers by whom Scotland
was infested in his day, consisted in the estab-
lishment of slavery in the form in which it had
existed in the classical nations of antiquity. On
the discovery of the Rye House plot, F. returned
to Holland. His next visit to England was as a
volunteer under the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth
in 1685; but he was compelled to leave the
insurgent army, at the beginning of the enterprise,
in consequence of his having shot the mayor of
Lynn, with whom he had had a personal quarrel
about a horse. The next hiding-place which F.
selected was Spain; but he had no sooner arrived,
than he was thrown into prison at the instance
transmitted to England, to share the fate of his
of the English ambassador, and would have been
fellow-patriots, had he not been mysteriously_deli-
vered from prison by an unknown friend.
Spain he proceeded to Hungary, where he entered
the army as a volunteer, and greatly distinguished
himself. He returned to England at the Revolution.
A few years later, he met in London, accidentally,
it should seem, the famous William Paterson, the
founder of the Bank of England, and the projector
of the Darien Expedition in London; and it was at
F.'s solicitation that Paterson came to Scotland,
and offered, to the acceptance of his country-
should be carried out by the far greater resources
men, a project which he had originally intended
either of the trading communities of the Hanse
towns, or of the princes of the German empire.
The bitterness caused by the treatment which the
Darien colonists received at the hands of King
William's government, tended to confirm F. and
his friends in their opposition to the Union with
England, and led to his delivering in parliament
those spirited harangues in favour of an exclusive
Scottish nationality, which still stir the blood of
his countrymen. After the Union, he retired in
disgust from public life, and died in London in
1716. F.'s writings originally appeared in the
form of tracts, and anonymously; they were, how-
ever, collected and reprinted at London in 1737,
under the title of The Political Works of Andrew
Fletcher, Esquire.

FLETCHER, GILES and PHINEAS, were the sons of Dr Giles Fletcher, Queen Elizabeth's ambassador to the court of Russia, and cousins to Fletcher the dramatist.

FLETCHER, ANDREW, of Salton, a celebrated Scottish patriot and politician, was the son of Sir Robert Fletcher and Catherine Bruce, daughter of Sir Henry Bruce of Clackmannan. He was born in 1653. Notwithstanding the strong anti-English feelings which characterised him through life, F. was of English descent by the father's side; his father being the fifth in the direct line from Sir Bernard Fletcher of the county of York. But his mother was of the royal House of Scotland, the first of the Clackmannan family having been the third son of the Lord of Annandale, Robert de Bruce, who was the grandfather of the great King Robert. F.'s father who died in his childhood, consigned him to the care of Gilbert Burnet, then minister of Salton, afterwards the well-known Bishop of Salisbury; by whom he was instructed not only in literature and religion, but in those principles of free government of which he afterwards became so zealous an advocate. So early as 1681, when he sat in parliament for the first time as commissioner for East Lothian, F. offered so determined an opposition to the measures of the Duke of York (afterwards James II.), then acting as the Royal Commissioner in Scotland, that he found it necessary to retire, first into England, and then into Holland. He there entered into close alliance with the English refugees, who had assembled in considerable numbers; and on his return to England in 1683, he shared the counsels of the party of which Russell, Essex, Howard, Algernon Sydney, and John Hampden (the grandson of the still more famous patriot of the same name) were the leaders. Though usually regarded as a republican, F.'s political creed, like that of Algernon Sydney, approached far nearer to aristocracy than to democracy in the modern sense; for though he was disposed to restrict the monarchical element of the constitution' mingled.

GILES, the elder, was born about 1580; he was educated at Cambridge, and died at his living at Alderton in 1623. His chief poetical work is a sacred poem, entitled Christ's Victory and Triumph, which appeared at Cambridge in 1610. This poem, although once admired, is now unknown to general readers, and is chiefly remarkable for having, to some extent, moulded the majestic muse of Milton.

PHINEAS, the younger brother of Giles, was born about 1584, educated at Eton and Cambridge, and became rector of Hilgay, in Norfolk, in 1621, and died there in 1660. His most important poem, the Purple Island, or the Isle of Man, was published in 1633. It contains an elaborate description of the human body and mind-the former being given with great anatomical minuteness. The mind is represented as being beleaguered with the vices, and likely to be subdued, when an angel comes to the rescue-the angel being James I. Although to a large extent formal and pedantic, the Purple Island abounds in fine passages, in which the lusciousness of Spenser and the gravity of Milton are curiously

FLETCHER-FLEXURE

FLIES-FLINT.

in the lower surface are drawn away from each other, and those in the upper are more closely packed together, while between the surfaces there is a line called the line of no disturbance, wherein the particles are neither drawn asunder nor compressed, and from which the mathematical theory of the flexure of beams starts. Experiments show that the flexure of solid beams, supported at their ends, and loaded, varies (1) directly as the load; (2) inversely as the product of their breadths, and the cube of their depths; and (3) directly as the cube of the distance between the supports, while the flexure, if the load be uniformly distributed over the beam, is five-eighths cf the amount produced by the load placed on its cenSee STRENGTH OF MATERIALS..

tre.

rolled F. nodules are also often found in com pound rocks, and in alluvial soils; vast alluvial tracts being sometimes full of them. F. geodes often contain crystals of quartz. F. nodules are usually moist in the interior if broken when newly taken from their beds.

F. is sometimes harder than quartz, sufficiently so to scratch it. The readiness with which it strikes fire with steel is well known, and it would seem that the sparks are not all merely incandescent particles, heated by the friction, but that in some of them a chemical combination of silica and iron takes place, causing great increase of heat. The use of the F. and steel for igniting tinder, once so common, has been almost superseded by that of lucifer-matches, and gun-flints have given place the first who struck fire with flint; or more pro. to percussion-caps. According to Pliny, Clias was bably, he was the first to shew its application to useful purposes; and he therefore received the name Pyrodes. The most ancient use of F. was probably for sharp weapons and cutting instruments; and F. knives, axes, arrow-heads, &c., are among the most interesting relics of rude antiquity.

At present, manufacture of fine earthenware, into the comprincipal use of F. is in the position of which it enters, being for this purpose first calcined, then thrown into cold water, and afterwards powdered.

FLIES, SPANISH or BLISTERING. See CANTHARIS. FLINDERS, MATTHEW, an adventurous English navigator, to whom we are indebted for a correct knowledge of a great portion of the Australian coasts, was born at Donington, in Lincolnshire, 1760. He entered the merchant service at an early age, and subsequently the royal navy. In 1795, the vessel in which he was midshipman conveyed the governor of New Holland to Botany Bay; and while there, F. determined to investigate the coast south of Port Jackson, about 250 leagues of which were laid down in the charts as 'unknown.' With an equally daring and ambitious young surgeon in his ship, called Bass, he departed on the enterprise in a small decked vessel, with a crew of only six difficulty. Silicious deposits are sometimes a purely The origin of F. is a subject of considerable men. Their chief discovery was the straits between chemical operation, as in the case of the silicious Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) and the main-sinter formed round the geysers of Iceland, from land of Australia, which were named after Bass. the evaporation of water largely charged with silex. In 1801, F. obtained from the British government But at the bottom of the sea, as no evaporation the command of a scientific expedition for the could take place, some other agent than springs of investigation of the Australian coasts and their water saturated with silex must have supplied the products. Commencing his examination at Cape materials. It is a fact of considerable importance Leuwin, F., in the course of two years, gradually in this inquiry, that almost all large masses of explored the coast to Bass's Straits, thence north-limestone have thin silicious concretions, or flints. wards-laying down carefully the Great Barrier Thus, chert is found in carboniferous and other Reefs to the Gulf of Carpentaria, which he horoughly surveyed across to Timur, then back to Cape Leuwin, and round the south coast to Port Jackson. In 1810 he was liberated from a six years' imprisonment by the French in the Isle of France, returned to England, and gave the world the result of his researches in a work, entitled A Voyage to Terra Australia. He died in July 1814, the day on which his book was published.

FLINDERS LAND, now South Australia (q. v.). FLINDERSIA, a genus of trees of the natural order Cedrelacea, one species of which, F. australis, yields timber little inferior to mahogany. It is much used in Australia, and is there called CALLCEDRA

WOOD.

FLINT, & mineral which may be regarded as a variety of quartz, or as intermediate between quartz and opal, consisting almost entirely of silica, with a very little lime, oxide of iron, water, carbon, and sometimes even traces of organic matter. It has a flat shell-like fracture, is translucent or semi-transparent, and varies in colour from a very dark brown, or almost black, to light brown, red, yellow, and grayish white, and is sometimes veined, clouded, marbled, or spotted. Dark-coloured flints are most common in the chalk, in which principally F. occurs imbedded, forming nodules of various sizes, sometimes large nodular masses, of irregular and often grotesque shape; but gravel formed of light-coloured flints is very common, and it is disputed whether or not a change of colour has taken place by exposure to atmospheric and other chemical agencies. F. is sometimes found in beds or veins. It is very abundant wherever the chalk formation extends, in England and other countries;

limestones, and menilite in the tertiary limestones of the Paris basin. The conditions necessary for the deposition of calcareous strata seem to be those required for the formation of silicious concretions. The materials of both exist in solution in sea-water, and as it needed the foraminifer, the coral, and the mollusc to fix the carbonate of lime which formed the chalk deposits, so the silex was secreted by innumerable diatoms and sponges, and their remains most probably supplied the material of the flint. The discovery by Dr Bowerbank and other microscopists of the spicules of sponges and the frustules of diatoms in almost every specimen of F., has clearly shewn that F. to a large extent, if not entirely, owes its origin to these minute organisms. It is, however, difficult to account for the changes that have taken place in these materials subsequent to their deposition.

FLINT, a parliamentary borough and seaport in the cast of Flintshire, North Wales, formerly the capital of the county, on the left side of the estuary of the Dee, 191 miles north-west of London by rail, and 12 miles north-west of Chester. It forms a rectangle like a Roman camp, and is surrounded by now nearly obliterated ramparts and intrench ments. The Dee estuary is some miles wide here, but is shallow and narrow at low water. Vessels of 300 tons reach the town. The principal exports are coal and lead from mines in the vicinity, which afford the chief employment. Pop. (1871) 4269. It unites with seven other places in sending one member to parliament. Roman relics and traces of Roman lead smelting works have been found here. On a low freestone rock in a tidal marsh are the remains of a castle, built by Hey II., and

FLINT-FLINT IMPLEMENTS AND WEAPONS.

dismantled in 1647. The double tower or keep is 40 feet in diameter, and includes two concentric walls, each 6 feet thick, with an intervening gallery 8 feet broad; within, is a circle 20 feet in diameter, with four entrances. Deterioration of the channel of the Dee has made F. in a great degree a port of Chester, and here larger vessels, especially with timber, are discharged, and the cargoes floated up the Dee in smaller vessels, the timber in rafts.

FLINT, a river of Georgia, one of the United States of America, unites on its right with the Chattahoochee, at the south-west angle of the state, to form the Appalachicola, which, after a course of 100 miles, enters the Gulf of Mexico. The F. itself is about 300 miles long, being practicable for steam-boats up to Albany, about 250 miles

distant from the sea.

FLINT, TIMOTHY, REV., an American clergyman and author, was born, in 1780, at Reading, Massachusetts, and graduated at Harvard College. In 1802 he became minister of the Congregational Church in Lunenburg, county of Worcester in that state, where he remained till 1814. In the following year, he became a missionary for the valley of the Mississippi, where he was engaged in itinerant preaching and teaching a school. In 1825, he returned to the northern states; and in 1826, published his Recollections of Ten Years passed in the Valley of the Mississippi (Boston, Svo). The same year appeared from his pen a novel, entitled Francis Berrian, or the Mexican Patriot, purporting to be the autobiography of a New England adventurer who acted a conspicuous part in the first Mexican revolution, and in the overthrow of Iturbide. In 1828, he issued two works: A Condensed Geography and History of the Western States in the Mississippi Valley (Cincinnati, 2 vols. 8vo); and Arthur Clenning, a novel (Philadelphia, 2 vols. 8vo). Another novel, George Mason, or The Backwoodsman, and a romance in 2 vols., The Shoshonee Valley, appeared at Cincinnati in 1830. In 1833, he edited several numbers of the Knickerbocker Magazine, and was subsequently editor for three years of The Western Monthly Magazine. His other works are: Indian Wars in the West (1833, 12mo); Lectures on Natural History, Geology, Chemistry, and the Arts (Boston, 1833, 12mo); translation of Droy's L'Art d'étre Heureuse, with additions by translator; and Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, the first Settler of Kentucky (Cincinnati, 1834, 18mo). In 1835, he contributed to the London Athenæum a series of Sketches of the Literature of the United States. He died at Salem, August 16, 1840.-His son, MICAH P. FLINT, published a volume of poetry, entitled The Hunter and other Poems.

FLINT GLASS. See GLASS.

FLINT IMPLEMENTS AND WEAPONS, believed to have been used by the primitive inhabitants, have from time to time, in more or less number, been turned up by the plough and the spade, dug out from ancient graves, fortifications, and dwellingplaces, or fished up from the beds of lakes and rivers, in almost every country of Europe. They do not differ, in any material respect, from the flint implements and weapons still in use among uncivilised tribes in Asia, Africa, America, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean. The weapons of most frequent occurrence are arrow-heads (see ELF-ARROWS), spear-points, dagger-blades, and axe-heads or Celts (q. v.). The more common implements are knives, chisels, rasps, wedges, and thin curved or semicircular plates, to which the name of 'scrapers' has been given. There is great variety, as well in the size as in the shape, even of articles of the same kind. There is equal variety in the amount of skill.

In some

or labour expended in their manufacture.
instances, the flint has been roughly fashioned into
something like the required form by two or three
blows; in others, it has been laboriously chipped
into the wished-for shape, which is often one of
no little elegance. In yet another class of cases,
the flint, after being duly shaped, has been ground
smooth, or has even received as high a polish as
could be given by a modern lapidary. Examples
of all the varieties of flint weapons and implements
will be found in the British Museum, in the Museum
of the Royal Irish Academy at Dublin, in the
Museum of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
at Edinburgh, and above all, in the Museum of the
Royal Society of Antiquaries at Copenhagen, which
is especially rich in this class of remains. Repre
sentations of interesting or characteristic types
Museum at Edinburgh in 1856 (Edin. 1859); in Mr
may be seen in the Catalogue of the Archeological
Wilde's Catalogue of the Antiquities in the Museum
of the Royal Irish Academy (Dubl. 1857—1861);
in Worsaae's Nordiske Oldsager i det Kongelige
Museum i Kjobenhavn (Copen. 1859); and in M.
Frederic Troyon's Habitations Lacustres (Lausanne,
1860).

Geological discoveries have recently invested flint implements with a new interest. At Abbeville, at Amiens, at Paris, and elsewhere on the continent, flint weapons, fashioned by the hand of man, have been found along with remains of extinct species of the elephant, the rhinoceros, and other mam mals, in undisturbed beds of those deposits of sand, gravel, and clay to which geologists have given the name of the drift.' They so far resemble the flint implements and weapons found on the surface of the earth, but are generally of a larger size, of ruder workmanship, and less varied in shape. They have been divided into three classes-roundboth being chipped to a sharp edge, so as to cut or pointed, as in fig. 1; and sharp-pointed, as in fig. 2, pierce only at the pointed end; and oval-shaped, as in fig. 3, with a cutting edge all round. The first and second classes vary in length from about four inches to eight or nine inches; the third class is generally about four or five inches long, but examples have been found of no more than two inches, and of as much as eight or nine inches. In no instance has any flint implement discovered in the drift been found either polished or ground. The French antiquary, M. Boucher de Perthes, was the first to call attention to these very interesting remains, in his Antiquités Celtiques et Antediluviennes (Paris, 1847-1857). But it has since been remembered that implements of the same kind were found in a similar position at Hoxne, in Suffolk, along with remains of some gigantic animal, in 1797, and at Gray's Inn Lane, in London, along with remains of an elephant, in 1715. Both these English examples are still preserved-the first in the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries at London, the second in the British Museum, and they are precisely similar in every respect to the examples more recently found in France.

To what age these remains should be assigned, is a question on which geology seems scarcely yet prepared to speak with authority. But, in the words of Mr John Evans, in his essay on Flint Implements in the Drift,' in the Archeologia, vol. xxxviii. (Lond. 1860), thus much appears to be established beyond a doubt, that in a period of antiquity remote beyond any of which we have hitherto found traces, this portion of the globe was peopled by man; and that mankind has here witnessed some of those geological changes by which the so-called diluvial beds were deposited. Whether these were the result of some violent rush

FLINTSHIRE-FLOATING BATTERY.

of waters, such as may have taken place when the course of our brooks, streams, and rivers, may "the fountains of the great deep were broken be matter of dispute. Under any circumstances, up, and the windows of heaven were opened," this great fact remains indisputable, that at Amiens, or whether of a more gradual action, similar in land which is now 160 feet above the sea, and 90 Character to some of those now in operation along feet above the Somme, has, since the existence of