Part 17
_Status lymphaticus_ (lymphatism) is a condition found in children and some adults, characterized by an enlargement of the lymphoid tissues throughout the body and more particularly by enlargement of the thymus gland. There is a special lowering of the patient's powers of resistance, and it has been said to account for a number of cases of sudden death. In all cases of status lymphaticus the thymus has been found enlarged. At birth the gland (according to Bovaird and Nicoll) weighs about 6 grammes, and does not increase after birth. In lymphatism it may weigh from 10 to 50 grammes. The clinical features are indefinite, and the condition frequently passes unrecognized during life. In most cases there is no hint of danger until the fatal syncope sets in, which may be after any slight exertion or shock, the patient becoming suddenly faint, gasping and cyanosed, and the heart stopping altogether before the respirations have ceased. The most trifling causes have brought on fatal issues, such as a wet pack (Escherich) or a hypodermic injection, or even a sudden plunge into water though the head is not immersed. The greater number of deaths occur during the administration of anaesthetics, which seem peculiarly dangerous to these subjects. When an attack of syncope takes place no treatment is of any avail.
Virchow, West and Goodhardt have described a form of asthma in adults which they ascribe to a hypertrophied thymus gland and term "thymic asthma."
_Diseases of the Spleen._--Physiological variations and abnormalities and absence of the spleen are so rare as to require no comment. The most usual pathological condition which gives rise to symptoms is that of _wandering spleen_, which may or may not be secondary to a wandering left kidney. It may produce symptoms of dragging and discomfort, dyspepsia, vomiting and abdominal pain, and sometimes jaundice (Treves), or the pedicle may become twisted, producing extremely severe symptoms. The treatment is entirely surgical. Abscess in the spleen occasionally occurs, usually in association with infective endocarditis or with general pyaemia. The spleen may be the seat of primary _new growths_, but these are rare, and only in a small portion of cases does it share in the metastatic reproduction of carcinoma. Infection of the spleen plays a prominent part in many diseases, such as malaria, typhoid fever, lymphadenoma and leucaemia.
Diseases of the thyroid gland (see GOITRE) and _Addison's disease_ (of the suprarenal glands) are treated separately. (H. L. H.)
FOOTNOTES:
[1] It has recently been stated that stomata do not exist in the peritoneum.
[2] For further details of the pelvic glands see "Seventh Report of the Committee of Collective Investigation," _Journ. Anat. and Phys._ xxxii. 164.
LYNCH, PATRICIO (1825-1886) Chilean naval officer, was born in Valparaiso on the 18th of December 1825, his father being a wealthy Irish merchant resident in Chile, and his mother, Carmen Solo de Saldiva, a descendant of one of the best-known families in the country. Entering the navy in 1837, he took part in the operations which led to the fall of the dictator, Santa Cruz. Next, he sought a wider field, and saw active service in the China War on board the British frigate "Calliope." He was mentioned in despatches for bravery, and received the grade of midshipman in the British service. Returning to Chile in 1847 he became lieutenant, and seven years later he received the command of a frigate, but was deprived of his command for refusing to receive on board his ship political suspects under arrest. The Spanish War saw him again employed, and he was successively maritime prefect of Valparaiso, colonel of National Guards, and, finally, captain and minister of marine in 1872. In the Chile-Peruvian War a brilliant and destructive naval raid, led by him, was followed by the final campaign of Chorrillos and Miraflores (1880), in which he led at first a brigade (as colonel) and afterwards a division under Baquedano. His services at the battle of Chorrillos led to his appointment to command the Army of Occupation in Peru. This difficult post he filled with success, but his action in putting the Peruvian president, Garcia Calderon, under arrest excited considerable comment. His last act was to invest Iglesias with supreme power in Peru, and he returned to his own country in 1883. Promoted rear-admiral, he served as Chilean Minister at Madrid for two years, and died at sea in 1886. Lynch is remembered as one of the foremost of Chile's naval heroes.
LYNCHBURG, a city of Campbell county, Virginia, U.S.A., on the James river, about 125 m. W. by S. of Richmond. Pop. (1900) 18,891, of whom 8254 were negroes; (1910) 29,494. It is served by the Southern, the Chesapeake & Ohio and the Norfolk & Western railways. Its terraced hills command fine views of mountain, valley and river scenery, extending westward to the noble Peaks of Otter and lesser spurs of the Blue Ridge about 20 m. distant. On an elevation between Rivermont Avenue and the James river are the buildings of Randolph-Macon Woman's college (opened in 1893), which is conducted by a self-perpetuating board under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and is one of the Randolph-Macon system of collèges and academies (see ASHLAND, VA.). In Lynchburg, too, are the Virginia Christian college (co-educational, 1903), and the Virginia collegiate and industrial school for negroes. The city has a public library, well-equipped hospitals, public parks and the Rivermont Viaduct, 1100 ft. long and 140 ft. high. Lynchburg is the see of a Protestant Episcopal bishop. Tobacco of a superior quality and large quantities of coal, iron ore and granite are produced in the neighbourhood. Good water power is furnished by the James river, and Lynchburg is one of the principal manufacturing cities of the state. The boot and shoe industry was established in 1900, and is much the most important. In 1905 the city was the largest southern manufacturer of these articles and one of the largest distributors in the country. The factory products increased in value from $2,993,551 in 1900 to $4,905,435 in 1905, or 65.9%.
Lynchburg, named in honour of John Lynch, who inherited a large tract of land here and in 1757 established a ferry across the James, was established as a village by Act of Assembly in 1786, was incorporated as a town in 1805, and became a city in 1852. During the Civil War it was an important base of supplies for the Confederates; on the 16th of June 1864 it was invested by Major-General David Hunter (1802-1886), but three days later he was driven away by General Jubal A. Early. In 1908 the city's corporate limits were extended.
LYNCH LAW, a term loosely applied to various forms of executing rough popular justice, or what is thought to be justice, for the punishment of offenders by a summary procedure, ignoring, or even contrary to, the strict forms of law. The word _lynching_ "originally signified a whipping for reformatory purposes with more or less disregard for its legality" (Cutler), or the infliction of minor punishments without recourse to law; but during and after the Reconstruction Period in the United States, it came to mean, generally, the summary infliction of capital punishment. Lynch law is frequently prevalent in sparsely settled or frontier districts where government is weak and officers of the law too few and too powerless to enforce law and preserve order. The practice has been common in all countries when unsettled frontier conditions existed, or in periods of threatened anarchy. In what are considered civilized countries it is now found mainly in Russia, south-eastern Europe and in America, but it is essentially and almost peculiarly an American institution. The origin of the name is obscure; different writers have attempted to trace it to Ireland, to England, to South Carolina, to Pennsylvania and to Virginia. It is certain that the name was first used in America, but it is not certain whether it came from Lynch's Creek, South Carolina, where summary justice was administered to outlaws, or from Virginia and Pennsylvania, where men named Lynch were noted for dealing out summary punishment to offenders.[1] In Europe early examples of a similar phenomenon are found in the proceedings of the Vehmgerichte in medieval Germany, and of Lydford law, gibbet law or Halifax law, Cowper justice and Jeddart justice in the thinly settled and border districts of Great Britain; and since the term "lynch law" came into colloquial use, it is loosely employed to cover any case in which a portion of the community takes the execution of its ideas of justice into its own hands, irrespective of the legal authorities.
In America during the 18th and 19th centuries the population expanded westward faster than well-developed civil institutions could follow, and on the western frontier were always desperadoes who lived by preying on the better classes. To suppress these desperadoes, in the absence of strong legal institutions, resort was continually made to lynch law. There was little necessity for it until the settlement crossed the Alleghany Mountains, but the following instances of lynching in the East may be mentioned: (1) the mistreatment of Indians in New England and the Middle Colonies in disregard of laws protecting them; (2) the custom found in various colonies of administering summary justice to wife-beaters, idlers and other obnoxious persons; (3) the acts of the Regulators of North Carolina, 1767-1771; (4) the popular tribunals of the Revolutionary period, when the disaffection toward Great Britain weakened the authority of the civil governments and the war replaced them by popular governments, at a time when the hostilities between "Patriots" and "Tories" were an incentive to extra-legal violence. In the South, lynching methods were long employed in dealing with agitators, white and black, who were charged with endeavouring to excite the slaves to insurrection or to crime against their masters, and in dealing with anti-slavery agitators generally.
In the West, from the Alleghanies to the Golden Gate, the pioneer settlers resorted to popular justice to get rid of bands of outlaws, and to regulate society during that period when laws were weak or confused, when the laws made in the East did not suit western conditions, and when courts and officials were scarce and distant. The Watauga settlements and the "State" of Franklin furnished examples of lynch law procedure almost reduced to organization. Men trained in the rough school of the wilderness came to have more regard for quick, ready-made, personal justice than for abstract justice and statutes; they were educated to defend themselves, to look to no law for protection or regulation; consequently they became impatient of legal forms and lawyers' technicalities; an appeal to statute law was looked upon with suspicion, and, if some personal matter was involved, was likely to result in deadly private feuds. Thus were formed the habits of thought and action of the western pioneers. Lynch law, not civil law, cleared the western forests, valleys and mountain passes of horse and cattle thieves, and other robbers and outlaws, gamblers and murderers. This was especially true of California and the states of the far West. H. H. Bancroft, the historian of _Popular Tribunals_, wrote in 1887 that "thus far in the history of these Pacific States far more has been done toward righting wrongs and administering justice outside the pale of law than within it." However, the lack of regard for law fostered by the conditions described led to a survival of the lynching habit after the necessity for it passed away. In parts of the Southern states, where the whites are few and greatly outnumbered by the blacks, certain of the conditions of the West have prevailed, and since emancipation released the blacks from restraint many of the latter have been lawless and turbulent. The Reconstruction, by giving to the blacks temporary political supremacy, increased the friction between the races, and greatly deepened prejudice. The numerous protective societies of whites, 1865-1876, culminating in the Ku Klux movement, may be described as an application of lynch law. With the increase of negro crimes came an increase of lynchings, due to prejudice, to the fact that for some time after Reconstruction the governments were relatively weak, especially in the districts where the blacks outnumber the whites, to the fact that negroes nearly always shield criminals of their own race against the whites, and to the frequent occurrence of the crime of rape by negro men upon white women.
Since 1882 the Chicago _Tribune_ has collected statistics of lynching, and some interesting facts may be deduced from these tables.[2] During the twenty-two years from 1882 to 1903 inclusive, the total number of persons lynched in the United States was 3337, the number decreasing during the last decade; of these 2385 were in the South and 752 in the North; of those lynched in the East and West 602 were white and 75 black, and of those in the South 567 were white and 1985 black.[3] Lynchings occur mostly during periods of idleness of the lower classes; in the summer more are lynched for crimes against the person and in the winter (in the West) for crimes against property; the principal causes of lynching in the South are murder and rape, in the North and West, murder and offences against property; more blacks than whites were lynched between 1882 and 1903, the numbers being 2060 negroes, of whom 40 were women, and 1169 whites, of whom 23 were women; of the 707 blacks lynched for rape 675 were in the South; 783 blacks were lynched for murder, and 753 of these were in the South; most of the lynchings of whites were in the West; the lynching of negroes increased somewhat outside of the South and decreased somewhat in the South. Lynching decreases and disappears in a community as the population grows denser and civil institutions grow stronger; as better communications and good police make it harder to commit crime; and as public sentiment is educated to demand legal rather than illegal and irregular infliction of punishment for even the most horrible of crimes.
See James E. Cutler, _Lynch Law_ (New York, 1905), an admirable and unbiased discussion of the subject; H. H. Bancroft, _Popular Tribunals_ (2 vols., San Francisco, 1887); C. H. Shinn, _Mining Camps: A Study in American Frontier Government_ (New York, 1885); and J. C. Lester and D. L. Wilson, _Ku Klux Klan_ (New York, 1905). (W. L. F.)
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The usual explanation is that the name was derived from Charles Lynch (1736-1796), a justice of the peace in Virginia after 1774, who in 1780, toward the close of the War of Independence, greatly exceeded his powers in the punishment of Tories or Loyalists detected in a conspiracy in the neighbourhood of his home in Bedford county, Va. Lynch was a man of influence in his community, was for many years a member of the Virginia legislature, was a member of the famous Virginia Convention of 1776 and was later (in 1781) an officer in the American army. See an article, "The Real Judge Lynch," in the _Atlantic Monthly_, vol. lxxxviii. (Boston, 1901).
[2] They have been corrected and somewhat modified by Dr. J. E. Cutler, from whose book the figures above have been taken. Lynching as used in this connexion applies exclusively to the illegal infliction of capital punishment.
[3] For present purposes the former slave states (of 1860) constitute the South; the West is composed of the territory west of the Mississippi river, excluding Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma; the East includes those states east of the Mississippi river not included in the Southern group; the East and the West make up the North as here used--that is, the former free states of 1860.
LYNDHURST, JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY, BARON (1772-1863), lord chancellor of England, was born at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1772. He was the son of John Singleton Copley, the painter. He was educated at a private school and Cambridge university, where he was second wrangler and fellow of Trinity. Called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1804, he gained a considerable practice. In 1817 he was one of the counsel for Dr J. Watson, tried for his share in the Spa Fields riot. On this occasion Copley so distinguished himself as to attract the attention of Castlereagh and other Tory leaders, under whose patronage he entered parliament as member for Yarmouth in the Isle of Wight. He afterwards sat for Ashburton, 1818-1826, and for Cambridge university 1826-1827. He was solicitor-general in 1819, attorney-general in 1824, master of the rolls in 1826 and lord chancellor in 1827, with the title of Lord Lyndhurst. Before being taken up by the Tories, Copley was a man of the most advanced views, a republican and Jacobin; and his accession to the Tories excited a good deal of comment, which he bore with the greatest good humour. He gave a brilliant and eloquent but by no means rancorous support to all the reactionary measures of his chief. The same year that he became solicitor-general he married the beautiful and clever widow of Lieut.-Colonel Charles Thomas of the Coldstream Guards, and began to take a conspicuous place in society, in which his noble figure, his ready wit and his never-failing _bonhomie_ made him a distinguished favourite.
As solicitor-general he took a prominent part in the trial of Queen Caroline. To the great Liberal measures which marked the end of the reign of George IV. and the beginning of that of William IV. he gave a vigorous opposition. He was lord chief baron of the exchequer from 1831 to 1834. During the Melbourne administration from 1835 to 1841 he figured conspicuously as an obstructionist in the House of Lords. In these years it was a frequent practice with him, before each prorogation of parliament, to entertain the House with a "review of the session," in which he mercilessly attacked the Whig government. His former adversary Lord Brougham, disgusted at his treatment by the Whig leaders, soon became his most powerful ally in opposition; and the two dominated the House of Lords. Throughout all the Tory governments from 1827 Lyndhurst held the chancellorship (1827-1830 and 1834-1835); and in the Peel administration (1841-1846) he resumed that office for the last time. As Peel never had much confidence in Lyndhurst, the latter did not exert so great an influence in the cabinet as his position and experience entitled him to do. But he continued a loyal member of the party. As in regard to Catholic emancipation, so in the agitation against the corn laws, he opposed reform till his chief gave the signal for concession, and then he cheerfully obeyed. After 1846 and the disintegration of the Tory party consequent on Peel's adoption of free trade, Lord Lyndhurst was not so assiduous in his attendance in parliament. Yet he continued to an extreme old age to take a lively interest in public affairs, and occasionally to astonish the country by the power and brilliancy of his speeches. That which he made in the House of Lords on the 19th of June 1854, on the war with Russia, made a sensation in Europe; and throughout the Crimean War he was a strong advocate of the energetic prosecution of hostilities. In 1859 he denounced with his old energy the restless ambition of Napoleon III. When released from office he came forward somewhat as the advocate of liberal measures. His first wife had died in 1834, and in August 1837 he had married Georgina, daughter of Lewis Goldsmith. She was a Jewess; and it was therefore natural that he strenuously supported the admission of Jews into parliament. He also advocated women's rights in questions of divorce. At the age of eighty-four he passed the autumn at Dieppe, "helping to fly paper kites, and amusing himself by turns with the writings of the Greek and Latin fathers on divorce and the amorous novels of Eugene Sue." His last speech, marked by "his wonted brilliancy and vigour," was delivered in the House of Lords at the age of eighty-nine. He died in London on the 12th of October 1863. He left no male issue and the title became extinct.
See _Lives of the Lord Chancellors of England_, vol. viii. (Lords Lyndhurst and Brougham), by Lord Campbell (1869). Campbell was a personal friend, but a political opponent. Brougham's _Memoirs_; _Greville Memoirs_; _Life of Lord Lyndhurst_ (1883) by Sir Theodore Martin; J. B. Atlay, _The Victorian Chancellors_ (1906).
LYNDSAY, SIR DAVID (c. 1490-c. 1555), Scottish poet, was the son of David Lyndsay of the Mount, near Cupar-Fife, and of Garmylton, near Haddington. His place of birth and his school are undetermined. It is probable that his college life was spent at St Andrews university, on the books of which appears an entry "Da Lindesay" for the session 1508-1509. He was engaged at court, first as an equerry, then as an "usher" to the young Prince James, afterwards James V. In 1522 he married Janet Douglas, a court seamstress, and seven years later was appointed Lyon King of Arms, and knighted. He was several times engaged in diplomatic business (twice on embassies abroad--to the Netherlands and France), and he was, in virtue of his heraldic office, a general master of ceremonies. After the death of James V., in 1542, he continued to sit in parliament as commissioner for Cupar-Fife; and in 1548 he was member of a mission to Denmark which obtained certain privileges for Scottish merchants. There is reason to believe that he died in or about 1555.
Most of Lyndsay's literary work, by which he secured great reputation in his own day and by which he still lives, was written during the period of prosperity at court. In this respect he is unlike his predecessor Gavin Douglas (q.v.), who forsook literature when he became a politician. The explanation of the difference is partly to be found in the fact that Lyndsay's muse was more occasional and satirical, and that the time was suitable to the exercise of his special gifts. It is more difficult to explain how he enjoyed a freedom of speech which is without parallel even in more secure times. He chastised all classes, from his royal master to the most simple. There is no evidence that he abjured Catholicism; yet his leading purpose was the exposure of its errors and abuses. His aid was readily accepted by the reforming party, and by their use of his work he shared with their leaders throughout many generations a reputation which is almost exclusively political and ecclesiastical.
Lyndsay's longer poems are _The Dreme_ (1134 lines), _The Testament and Complaynt of the Papynago_ (1190 lines), _The Testament of Squyer Meldrum_ (1859 lines), _Ane Dialog betwix Experience and ane Courteour of the Miserabyll Estait of the World_ (6333 lines), and _Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis_ (over 4000 lines). These represent, with reasonable completeness, the range of Lyndsay's literary talent. No single poem can give him a chief place, though here and there, especially in the last, he gives hints of the highest competence. Yet the corporate effect of these pieces is to secure for him the allowance of more than mere intellectual vigour and common sense. There is in his craftsmanship, in his readiness to apply the traditional methods to contemporary requirements, something of that accomplishment which makes even the second-rate man of letters interesting.