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ing on the stake; or to cut or punch upon the cold chissel or cold punch.

STALACTITE, stony-icicles, in natural history, crystalline spars formed into oblong, conical, round, or irregular bodies, composed of various crusts, and usually found hanging in form of icicles from the roofs of grottos, &c. Of this class there are various species, as the hard, white stalactite; the white, shattery stalactite; and the yellow, shattery, crystalline stalactitæ, &c.

STALK, in botany, that part of the plant which rises immediately from the root, and which supports the leaves of the flowers, and the fruit. See BOTANY.

STAMINA, in botany, threads, which, in most flowers, are placed round the seed-bud: they are designed for preparing the pollen, which is the chief agent in the generation of plants. The stamen is divided into the "filamentum," or slender, thread-shaped part, resembling a foot-stalk; the "anthera ;" and the "pol

len."

STAMINA, in the animal body, are defined to be those simple original parts, which existed first in the embryo, or even in the seed; and by whose distinction, augmentation, and accretion, by additional juices, the animal body, at its utmost bulk, is supposed to be formed.

STANDARD, in commerce, the original of a weight, measure or coin, committed to the keeping of a magistrate, or deposited in some public place, to regulate, adjust, and try the weights used by particular persons in traffic. The justness of weights and measures is of that importance to the security and good order of trade, that there is no civilized nation but make it a part of their policy, to preserve the equality thereof by means of standards. The standards of weights and measures in England are appointed, by magna charta, to be kept in the Exchequer, by a special officer, called the clerk or comptroller of the market.

The standard of gold coin is twentytwo carats of fine gold, and two carats of alloy, in the pound weight troy: and the French, Spanish, and Flemish gold are nearly of the same fineness. The pound weight is cut into forty-four parts and a half, each current for twenty-one shillings. The standard of silver is eleven ounces and two penny-weights of silver, and eighteen penny-weights of alloy of copper. Whether gold or silver be above or below standard is found by assaying, and the hydrostatical balance. See the articles ASSAYING and HYDROSTATICS.

STANDING, in the sea language. Standing part of the sheet, is that part of STANCHION, or stanchions, in a ship, ship's quarter. Standing part of a tacit which is made fast to a ring at the those pillars which, being set up pillar-kle, is the end of the rope where the wise, do support and strengthen the waist

trees.

STAND, in commerce, a weight, from two hundred and a half to three hundred of pitch.

STANDARD, in war, a sort of banner, or flag, borne as a signal for the joining together of the several troops belonging to the same body. The standard is usually a piece of silk, a foot and a half square, on which are embroidered the arms, device, or cipher of the prince or of the colonel: it is fixed on a lance, eight or nine feet long, and is carried in the centre of the first rank of a squadron of horse. The standard is used for any martial ensign of horse, but more particularly for that of the general, or the royal standard those borne by the foot are rather called colours.

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block is fastened. Standing ropes, are those which do not run in any block, but are set taught, or let slack, as occasion serves; as the sheet-stays, back-stays, or the like.

STANNARIES, the mines and works where tin is dug and purified, as in Cornwall, Devonshire, &c. There are four courts of the stannaries in Devonshire, and as many in Cornwall, and great liberties were granted them, by several acts of parliament, in the time of Edward I. &c. though somewhat abridged under Edw.

III. and Charles I.

STANNUM. See TIN.

STAPELIA, in botany, so named in memory of Bodeus à Stapel, a physician of Amsterdam, a genus of the Pentandria Digynia class and order. Natural order of Contorta. Apocineæ, Jussieu. Essential character: contorted; nectary a double little star covering the gentials. There are forty-nine species.

STAPHYLEA, in botany, a genus of the Pentandria Trigynia class and order. Natural order of Trihilatæ. Rhamni, Jussieu. Essential character: calyx five

parted: petals five; capsule inflated, connate; seeds two, globular, with a wart. There are three species.

STAPHYLINUS, in natural history, a genus of insects of the order Coleoptera; antennæ moniliform; feelers four; shells half as long as the body; wings folded up under the shells; tail not armed with a forceps, furnished with two exertile vesicles. There are nearly two hundred species, in three sections. A. All the feelers filiform. B. Hind feelers hatchet-shaped; fore feelers clavate. The wings of the insects of this genus are curiously pleated or convoluted beneath the short and abruptly terminated wing-sheaths. The most remarkable, as well as the largest of the British species, is the S. major, which is more than an inch long, entirely of a deep colour, and when disturbed sets up the hinder part of its body, as if in a posture of defence it is very frequently seen, during the autumnal season, about sunny pathways, fields, and gardens, and is furnished with a large head, and very strong forcipated jaws. The insects of this whole tribe are extremely rapacious, devouring whatever insects they can catch, and frequently each other: many of them, when attempted to be caught, turn up the tail: the jaws are strong and exserted, with which they bite and pinch very hard. Most of them are found in damp places, among putrid substances, and a few upon flowers.

STAPLE primarily signifies a public place or market, whither merchants, &c. are obliged to bring their goods to be bought by the people; as the Greve, or the places along the Seine, for sale of wines and corn, at Paris, whither the merchants of other parts are obliged to bring those commodities. Formerly the merchants of England were obliged to carry their wool, cloth, lead, and other like staple commodities of this realm, in order to utter the same by wholesale; and these staples were appointed to be constantly kept at York, Lincoln, Newcastle upon Tyne, Norwich, Westminster, Canterbury, Chichester, Winches ter, Exeter, and Bristol; in each whereof a public mart was appointed to be kept, and each of them had a court of the mayor of the staple, for deciding differences, held according to the law-merchant, in a summary way. The staple commodities of this kingdom are said by some to be these, viz. wool, leather, wool fells, lead, tin, butter, cheese, cloth, &c. but others allow only the first five to be staple commodities.

STAR, in astronomy, a general name for all the heavenly bodies which are dispersed throughout the whole heavens.

The stars are distinguished from the phenomena of their motion, &c. into fixed and erratic or wandering stars; these last are again distinguished into the greater luminaries, viz. the Sun and Moon; the planets, and the comets; each whereof has been fully considered and explained, under their respective articles. See SUN, Moon, &c.

As to the fixed stars, or simple stars, they are so called, because they seem to be fixed, or perfectly at rest, and consequently appear always at the same dis. tance from each other.

An observer will first divide these stars into several classes, according to the splendour of their light; the brightest he will call stars of the first magnitude; those of the next inferior light, he will call stars of the second magnitude; and so in order to those which can barely be seen by the naked eye, which are called stars of the sixth magnitude; and those which cannot be seen but by the help of magnifying glasses are of the seventh, eighth, &c. magnitudes. Afterwards to avoid confusion, and to be able to point out any one star, without being obliged to give a particular name to each, he will divide them into separate parcels, of which he will make a particular plan; and to each of these constellations, or parcels of stars, he will assign a figure at pleasure, as that of a Ram, a Bull, a Dragon, a Hercules, &c. but so that all the stars in each of the parcels, drawn in the plan, may be enclosed in the designed figures, and correspond to the different parts from whence they take their name; for example, having drawn the figure of a bull about a parcel, or constellation of stars, that star which falls in the eye will be called the star in the Bull's Eye, or simply the Bull's Eye; another, which respects the tip of one horn, will be named the Bull's Horn; and so of others. A parcel of stars thus contained in any assigned figure is called a constellation. By this means, notwithstanding the seeming impossibility of numbering the fixed stars, their relative situations one to another have been so carefully observed by astronomers, that they have not only been able to number them, but even to distinguish the place of each star in the heavens, and that with greater accuracy than any geographer could ever point out the situations of the several cities or towns upon the surface of the

earth; and not only the places of those few, if they may be so called, which are to be seen with the naked eye, have been pointed out and registered by them, but even of those which are discovered only by the telescope. The most ancient observations of the stars, which have reached these times, were made by Timocharis and Aristillus, about 300 years before Christ. The next after them, who made a catalogue of the stars visible to the naked eye, and registered their places, was Hipparchus of Rhodes; he flourished about 120 years before Christ, and numbered 1022 stars. After him, Ptolemy enlarged his catalogue to 1026: Ulug Beigh, the grandfather of Tamerlane the Great, about the year 1437, constructed a new catalogue, more exact than that of Ptolemy, containing 1017 stars: Tycho, in the year 1600, determined the places of 777 fixed stars, and reduced them to a catalogue; Kepler's catalogue contained 1163 stars; and that of the Prince of Hesse, 400; Ricciolus enlarged Kepler's catalogue to 1468; and John Bayer, a German, had described the places of 1725 stars; after this, about 1670, Hevelius of Dantzic composed a catalogue of 1888 fixed stars; Dr. Halley also undertook a voyage to the island of St. Helena, in order to take the position of the stars within the antarctic circle, of which he published a catalogue, containing 373 stars; but the largest and most complete catalogue ever yet published, is that of our accurate astronomer, Mr. Flamsteed, in his Celestial History, which contains nearly 3000 stars; all whose places are more exactly determined in the heavens, than the position of cities and other places on the earth.

We ought not, however, to imagine, that all the fixed stars are thus numbered, and reduced to their respective places in the heavens, since their number continually increases, according to the goodness of the telescope, appearing millions beyond millions, till, by their im mense distance, they evade the sight, even though assisted by the best instruments. The telescopical stars, with which Mr. Flamsteed has enriched his catalogue, are only the more remarkable ones, whose longitudes and latitudes, or situations in the heavens, it was thought worth while to register and put down. Dr. Hook, with a telescope of twelve feet, saw 78 stars among the Pleiades; and with a longer telescope still more; and, in the single constellation of Orion, which, in Mr. Famsteed's catalogue, has

but 80 stars, there have been seen 2000. We may therefore venture to pronounce the number of fixed stars, including the telescopic ones as well as those visible to the naked eye, to be infinitely great, far beyond what it is possible for the best astronomers to calculate, much less to reduce to order. But though the stars are certainly innumerable, yet those visible to the naked eye, in one hemisphere, seldom exceed a thousand; which, perhaps, may appear strange, since, at first sight, their number seems immensely great: but this is only a deception of sight, arising from a confused and transient view; for let a person single out a small portion of the heavens, and, after some attention to the situation of the more remarkable stars therein, begin to count, he will soon be surprised to find how few there are therein. However, even the number of stars visible to the naked eye, small as it is in comparison with that of the telescopic ones, is far from being constant; since, besides that the different states of the atmosphere render many of the lesser stars invisible, some stars have been observed to appear and disappear by turns; particularly one in the chair Cussiopeia, in the year 1572, which for some time outshone the biggest of the fixed stars, and in sixteen months time, by degrees vanished quite away, and was never seen since: in the year 1640, the scholars of Kepler saw a star in the right leg of Serpentarius, which likewise gradually disappeared; Fabricius, in the year 1596, gives the first account of the stella mira, or wonderful star, in the neck of the whale; which has been since found to appear and disappear periodically, its period being seven revolutions in six years, but is never quite extinguished. Several other new stars have been observed: as one by Hevelius, in 1670, and another by Mr. Kircher, in 1689. These new stars are generally observed in the galaxy or milky way. See GALAXY.

As to the causes of this appearing and disappearing of the fixed stars, Sir Isaac Newton conjectures, that as it is possible our sun may sometimes receive an addition of fuel by the falling of a comet into it; so the sudden appearance of some stars, which formerly were not visible to us, may be owing to the falling of a comet upon them, and occasioning an uncommon blaze and splendour for some time; but that such as appear and disappear periodically, and increase by very slow degrees, seldom exceeding the stars

of the third magnitude, may be such as, having large portions of their surfaces obscured by spots, may, by revolving round their axis like the sun, expose their lighter and darker parts to us successively.

Nature and Distance of the fixed Stars. From the similitude there appears to be between them and the sun, is generally supposed by philosophers, that they are not placed in the heavens by way of ornament only, or to supply us with a faint light in the absence of the moon; but that each of them is placed in the midst of a system of planetary worlds, and that it directs their motions, and supplies them with light and heat, in the same manner that the sun does the several bodies of which our solar system is composed; in short, that they are so many suns, which no doubt have planets moving regularly round them, though invisible to us. That this is not mere hypothesis, will appear from the following arguments, drawn from the analogy they bear to our sun: The sun shines by its own native light, and so do the fixed stars; the sun, at the distance of the fixed stars, would appear no larger than a star; none of our planets, at that distance, could be seen at all: is it not probable, therefore, that each of the fixed stars is a fixed sun, surrounded by a system of planets and comets, which may be again furnished with different numbers of satellites, or moons, though invisible to us? Besides, as the number of stars is immensely great, dispersed through spaces of the universe far beyond the reach of the best telescopes, and as God has made nothing in vain, it seems highly probable that they severally serve the purposes of light and heat for the planets of their systems; since nothing can be more absurd than to pretend that myriads of unseen stars were made to twinkle in the unknown regions of the universe.

That the fixed stars shine by their own light is thus proved when viewed through a telescope, they appear only as mere lucid points, destitute of all sensible magnitude, and consequently must be at a vast distance; because the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, when viewed through a telescope, appear of very distinguishable magnitudes, and yet are invisible to the naked eye. Since, then, the fixed stars are at such a vast distance, that the best telescope has no power to magnify them, and nevertheless shine with a very bright and sparkling light, it is inferred that they must shine with their

and

own proper and unborrowed light; because, if their light was only borrowed, they would, like the satellites already mentioned, be invisible to the naked eye. The celebrated Huygens found the brightest and largest, and consequently the nearest of the fixed stars, viz. Sirius, or the Dog-star, to be in appearance 27,664 times less than the sun; since the distances of objects are greater as their apparent magnitudes are less, the Dog-star must be distant from our earth, 2,000,000,000,000, or above two millions of millions of English miles; which is so very great, that a cannon-ball, continuing in the same velocity it acquires when immediately discharged at the mouth of the cannon, would spend almost seven hundred thousand years in passing through it; and it is very probable that the fixed stars are equally distant from each other, as the nearest of them is from the sun; since, the better the telescopes we make use of, the more stars are seen. Hence it is very natural to conclude, that all the fixed stars are not placed at equal distances from us ; but that they are every where interspersed at great distances beyond one another, throughout the universe; and that, probably, the different appearances which they make, in point of splendour and magnitude, may be rather owing to their various distances from us, than to any real difference in their magnitudes.

From what has been said concerning the number, nature, and distance of the fixed stars, the hypothesis of a plurality of worlds, wherein each fixed star serves as a sun to a system of planets, seems rational, worthy a philosopher, and greatly displays the wisdom, and redounds to the glory of the great Creator and Governor of the universe. Under the article Sux, will be mentioned some of the speculations of Dr. Herschel.

STAR, in heraldry, a charge frequently borne on the shield, and the honourable ordinaries, in figure of a star.

STAR is also a badge of honour, worn by Knights of the Garter, Bath, and Thistle. See GARTER.

STAR, in pyrotechny, a composition of combustible matters, which, being thrown aloft in the air, exhibits the appearance of a real star. Stars are chiefly used as appendages to rockets, a number of them being usually inclosed in a conical cap or cover, at the head of the rocket, and carried up with it to its utmost altitude, where the stars, taking fire, are spread a round, and exhibit an agreeable spectacle.

STAR-board denotes the right hand side of a ship, when a person on board stands with the face looking forward to. wards the head or fore part of the ship; in contradistinction from larboard, which denotes the left hand side of the ship in the same circumstances. They say, "starboard the helm," or "helm a starboard," when the man at the helm should put the helm to the right hand side of the ship.

STAR falling, or Shooting Star, a luminous meteor darting rapidly through the air, and resembling a star falling. The explication of this phenomenon has puzzled all philosophers, till the modern discoveries in electricity have led to the most probable account of it. Signior Beccaria makes it pretty evident that it is an electrical appearance, and recites the following fact in proof of it. About an hour after sunset, he and some friends that were with him observed a falling star directing its course towards them, and apparently growing larger and larger, but it disappeared not far from them, when it left their faces, hands, and clothes, with the earth, and all the neighbouring objects, suddenly illuminated with a diffused and lambent light, not attended with any noise at all. During their surprise at this appearance, a servant informed them that he had seen a light shine suddenly in the garden, and especially upon the streams which he was throwing to water it. All these appearances were evidently electrical; and Beccaria was confirmed in his conjecture, that electricity was the cause of them, by the quantity of electric matter which he had seen gradually advancing towards his kite, which had very much the appearance of a falling star. Sometimes also he saw a kind of glory round the kite, which followed it when it changed its place, but left some light, for a small space of time, in the place it had quitted.

STAR-CHAMBER was a very ancient court, but new modelled afterwards by divers statutes. It consisted of several of the lords, spiritual and temporal, being privy councillors, together with two judges of the courts of common law, without the intervention of any jury. The legal jurisdiction extended over riots, perjury, misbehaviour of public officers, and other notorious misdemeanors. But afterwards they stretched their power beyond the utmost bounds of legality, vindicating all the encroachments of the crown in granting monopolies, in issuing proclamnations which should have the force of laws, in VOL. XI.

punishing small offences, or no offences at all but of their own creating, by exorbitant fines, imprisonment, and corporeal severities; until at last this court became so odious, that it was finally abolished by the 16 Charles I. c. 10. Most of the an. cient authorities respecting the law of li bels come from this court.

STAR Fish. See ASTERIAS.

STARCH. This term is appropriated to a substance existing in vegetables, similar in many of its properties to gum. It is a dry, white powder, which forms the principal part of the nutritive grains and roots. If a paste be formed of wheaten flour and water, and this be washed with additional quantities of water, till it is no longer turbid, but comes off pure and colourless, the mass which remains becomes tenacious and ductile. This is called GLUTEN, which see. If the water with which the paste was washed be allowed to remain at rest, it deposits a white powder, which is distinguished by the name of fecula or starch. Starch is of a fine white colour, and is usually in the state of concrete columnar masses. It has no pergeptible smell, and scarcely any taste. It is little altered by exposure to the air; when it is exposed to heat on a hot iron, it melts, swells up, becomes black, and burns with a bright flame. The charcoal which remains contains a little potash. When it is distilled it gives out water mixed with acetic acid, which is contaminated with oil. It gives out also carbonic acid, and carbonated hydrogen gas. Starch is not soluble in cold, but forms a thick paste with boiling water; and when this paste is allowed to cool, it becomes semitransparent and gelatinous; it is brittle when dry, somewhat resembling gum. If this paste be exposed to moist air, it is decomposed, for it acquires an acid taste. Sulphuric acid dissolves starch slowly; sulphurous acid is disengaged, and a great quantity of charcoal is formed. Muriatic acid also dissolves starch, and the solution resembles mucilage of gum Arabic. When left at rest, a thick, oily, mucilaginous liquid appears above, and a transparent straw coloured fluid below. The odour of muriatic acid remains, but when water is added, it is destroyed, and a strong peculiar smell is emitted. Starch is also soluble in nitric acid, with the evolution of nitrous gas. The solution assumes a green colour, and when heat is applied, the starch is converted into oxalic and malic acids. Some part of the starch, however, is insoluble in nitric acid, and, when this is separated by filtration, and Hh

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