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THdG, or THAG 380 THUNDERBOLT whose blood sprang a demon. These demons multiplied, and at last the god- dess created two men to whom she gave handkerchiefs, with which they strangled their infernal beings. When the men had finished their task the goddess gave them the privilege of using the handker- chief against their fellows, and so the class of Thugs is said to have arisen. Though worshipping a Hindu goddess, the majority of the Thugs were Moham- medans. They usually traveled in gangs, the members of which had ostensibly some honest calling in their own com- munity, and in selecting their victims al- ways endeavored to pitch on persons of property in order that while propitiating the goddess they might enrich her wor- shipers. Various steps were taken to suppress the Thugs, both by the native and the English governments, and in 1829 Lord William Bentinck adopted such stringent measures that in six years (1830-1835) 2,000 of them were arrested; and of these, 1,500 were convicted and sentenced to death, transportation, or im- prisonment, according to the gravity of the charges proved against them. In 1836 a law was passed making the fact of belonging to a gang of Thugs punish- able by imprisonment for life with hard labor, and though some gangs continued to operate sporadically for many years, the system is now powerless. THULSTRUP. THURE DE, an Amer- ican artist and illustrator; born in Swe- den in 1848. He graduated from the National Military Academy in Stockholm, and was for a while minister of war in the Swedish Cabinet. He later served as an officer in the French army in Al- geria, then studied art in Paris. Later he went to Canada as topographical en- gineer. Coming to New York, he began his career as illustrator, and for many years was a regular contributor to the "New York Graphic," "Leslie's Weekly," "Harper's Weekly," and a number of other similar publications. THUMB FLINT, in anthropology, a popular name for a short form of scrapers, the long varieties of which are sometimes known as "finger flints." Evans thinks that these names, "though colloquially convenient, are not sufficient- ly definite to be worthy of being re- tained." THUMB-SCRFW, a former instrument of torture for compressing the thumbs. It was employed in various countries, Scotland in particular; called also thum- bikins or thumbkins. canton of Berne, Switzerland. It lies about 1,800 feet above sea-level, in a beautiful region annually visited by great numbers of tourists. On its E. shore is the town of Interlaken, and on its W., Thun, the latter being the starting point of tourists to the Bernese Oberland. There are steamers on the lake and the two towns are joined by a railroad. THUNBERGIA (named after Carl Petter Thunberg, 1743-1828), a Swedish traveler, botanist, and professor of natu- ral history at Upsal, in botany a genus of Gardenidoe, sometimes made a syno- nym of Gardenia. Involucre two-leaved; calyx about 12-toothed; corolla campanu- late; capsule beaked, two-celled. Hand- some and fragrant climbers, cultivated in gardens for the beauty of their flowers. T. fragrans has cordate, acuminate leaves; T. grandifiora angular, cordate leaves, larger flowers with no inner calyx, and the anthers bearded and spurred. Both are natives of the East Indies. THUNDER, the violent report which follows a flash of lightning. It com- mences the same moment as the flash; but, as the sound travels only at the rate of about 1,100 feet a second, while light does so at the rate of 190,000 miles, the flash of the lightning is the first to be perceived, and thus a means is afforded of calculating the distance of the light- ning. The noise of the thunder arises from the disturbance produced in the air by the electric discharge, but why the sound should be so prolonged has been differently explained. The old hypothesis was that the sound was echoed from every precipice, from every building, and from every cloud in the sky. Another is that the lightning itself is a series of discharges, each producing a particular sound according to the distance at which it commences, and the varying densities of the portions of air which it traverses before reaching the ear. A third con- jecture is that the noise arises from the zig-zag movement of the electric fluid, the air at each salient angle being at its maximum compression. THUNDER BIRD, an imaginary bird occurring in the mythology of races of low culture, and personifying thunder or its cause. Among the Caribs, Brazilians, Harvey Islanders, and Karens, Bechua- nas, and Basutos, there are legends of a flapping or flashing thunder bird, which seem to translate into myth the thought of thunder and lightning descending from the upper regions of the air, the home of the eagle and the vulture. THUN, LAKE OF, a body of water THUNDERBOLT, in heraldry, the 11 miles long and 2 miles wide, in the thunderbolt is represented as a twisted