1825, through William Etty, R.A., he was sent to a drawing school in Bloomsbury, and after several years’ study there, and in the sculpture rooms at the British Museum, Frost was in 1829 admitted as a student in the schools of the Royal Academy. He won medals in all the schools, except the antique, in which he was beaten by Maclise. During those years he maintained himself by portrait-painting. He is said to have painted about this time over 300 portraits. In 1839 he obtained the gold medal of the Royal Academy for his picture of “Prometheus bound by Force and Strength.” At the cartoon exhibition at Westminster Hall in 1843 he was awarded a third-class prize of £100 for his cartoon of “Una alarmed by Fauns and Satyrs.” He exhibited at the Academy “Christ crowned with Thorns” (1843), “Nymphs dancing” (1844), “Sabrina” (1845), “Diana and Actaeon” (1846). In 1846 he was elected Associate of the Royal Academy. His “Nymph disarming Cupid” was exhibited in 1847; “Una and the Wood-Nymphs” of the same year was bought by the queen. This was the time of Frost’s highest popularity, which considerably declined after 1850. His later pictures are simply repetitions of earlier motives. Among them may be named “Euphrosyne” (1848), “Wood-Nymphs” (1851), “Chastity” (1854), “Il Penseroso” (1855), “The Graces” (1856), “Narcissus” (1857), “Zephyr with Aurora playing” (1858), “The Graces and Loves” (1863), “Hylas and the Nymphs” (1867). Frost was elected to full membership of the Royal Academy in December 1871. This dignity, however, he soon resigned. Frost had no high power of design, though some of his smaller and apparently less important works are not without grace and charm. Technically, his paintings are, in a sense, very highly finished, but they are entirely without mastery. He died on the 4th of June 1877.
FROST (a common Teutonic word, cf. Dutch, vorst, Ger. Frost, from the common Teutonic verb meaning “to freeze,” Dutch, vriezen, Ger. frieren; the Indo-European root is seen in Lat. pruina, hoar-frost, cf. prurire, to itch, burn, pruna, burning coal, Sansk. plush, to burn), in meteorology, the act, or agent of the process, of freezing; hence the terms “hoar-frost” and “white-frost” applied to visible frozen vapour formed on exposed surfaces. A frost can only occur when the surface temperature falls below 32° F., the freezing-point of water; if the temperature be between 28° and 32° it is a “light frost,” if below 28° it is a “heavy,” “killing” or “black frost”; the term “black frost” is also used when no hoar-frost is present. The number of degrees below freezing-point is termed “degrees of frost.” As soon as a mass of air is cooled to its dew-point, water begins to be precipitated in the form of rain, dew, snow or hail. Hoar-frost is only formed at the immediate surface of the land if the latter be at a temperature below 32°, and this may occur even when the temperature of the air a few feet above the ground is 12°-16° above the freezing-point. The heaviest hoar-frosts are formed under weather conditions similar to those under which the heaviest summer dews occur, namely, clear and calm nights, when there is no cloud to impede the radiation of heat from the surface of the land, which thereby becomes rapidly and completely cooled. The danger of frost is minimized when the soil is very moist, as for example after 10-12 mm. of rain; and it is a practice in America to flood fields on the receipt of a frost warning, radiation being checked by the light fog sheets which develop over moist soils, just as a cloud-layer in the upper atmosphere impedes radiation on a grand scale. A layer of smoke will also impede radiation locally, and to this end smoky fires are sometimes lit in such positions that the smoke may drift over planted ground which it is desirable to preserve from frost. Similarly, frost may occur in open country when a town, protected by its smoke-cloud above, is free of it. In a valley with fairly high and steep flanks frost sometimes occurs locally at the bottom, because the layer of air cooled by contact with the cold surface of the higher ground is heavier than that not so cooled, and therefore tends to flow or settle downwards along the slope of the land. When meteorological considerations point to a frost, an estimate of the night temperature may be obtained by multiplying the difference between the readings of the wet and dry bulb thermometer by 2.5 and subtracting the result from the dry bulb temperature. This rule applies when the evening air is at about 50° and 30.1 in. pressure, the sky being clear. An instrument has been devised in France for the prediction of frost. It consists of a wet bulb and a dry bulb thermometer, mounted on a board on which is also a scale of lines corresponding to degrees of the dry bulb, and a pointer traversing a scale graduated according to degrees of the wet bulb. Observations for the night are taken about half an hour before sunset. By means of the pointer and scale, the point may be found at which the line of the dry-bulb reading meets the pointer set to the reading of the wet bulb. The scale is further divided by colours so that the observed point may fall within one of three zones, indicating certain frost, probable frost or no probability of frost.
FROSTBITE, a form of mortification (q.v.), due to the action
of extreme cold in cutting off the blood-supply from the fingers,
toes, nose, ears, &c. In comparatively trifling forms it occurs
as “chaps” and “chilblains,” but the term frostbite is usually
applied only to more severe cases, where the part affected
becomes in danger of gangrene. An immediate application of
snow, or ice-water, will restore the circulation; the application
of heat would cause inflammation. But if the mortification has
gone too far for the circulation to be restored, the part will be
lost, and surgical treatment may be necessary.
FROSTBURG, a town of Allegany county, Maryland, U.S.A.,
11 m. W. of Cumberland. Pop. (1890) 3804; (1900) 5274
(578 foreign-born and 236 negroes); (1910) 6028. It is served
by the Cumberland & Pennsylvania railway and the Cumberland
& Westernport electric railway. The town is about 2000 ft.
above sea-level on a plateau between the Great Savage and Dans
mountains, and its delightful scenery and air have made it
attractive as a summer resort. It is the seat of the second state
normal school, opened in 1904. Frostburg is in the midst of the
coal region of the state, and is itself almost completely
undermined; it has planing mills and manufactures large quantities
of fire-brick. The municipality owns and operates its water-works.
Natural gas is piped to Frostburg from the West Virginia
fields, 120 m. away. Frostburg was first settled in 1812; was
called Mount Pleasant until about 1830, when the present name
was substituted in honour of Meshech Frost, one of the town’s
founders; and was incorporated in 1870.
FROTHINGHAM, OCTAVIUS BROOKS (1822–1895), American
clergyman and author, was born in Boston on the 26th of
November 1822, son of Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham (1793–1870),
a prominent Unitarian preacher of Boston, and through
his mother’s family related to Phillips Brooks. He graduated
from Harvard College in 1843 and from the Divinity School in
1846. He was pastor of the North Unitarian church of Salem,
Massachusetts, in 1847–1855. From 1855 to 1860 he was pastor
of a new Unitarian society in Jersey City, where he gave up the
Lord’s Supper, thinking that it ministered to self-satisfaction;
and it was as a radical Unitarian that he became pastor of another
young church in New York City in 1860. Indeed in 1864 he was
recognized as leader of the radicals after his reply to Dr Hedge’s
address to the graduating students of the Divinity School on
Anti-Supernaturalism in the Pulpit. In 1865, when he had
practically given up “transcendentalism,” his church building
was sold and his congregation began to worship in Lyric Hall
under the name of the Independent Liberal Church; in 1875
they removed to the Masonic Temple, but four years later
ill-health compelled Frothingham’s resignation, and the church
dissolved. Paralysis threatened him and he never fully recovered
his health; in 1881 he returned to Boston, where he died on the
27th of November 1895. To this later period of his life belongs
his best literary work. While he was in New York he was for a
time art critic of the Tribune. Always himself on the unpopular
side and an able but thoroughly fair critic of the majority, he
habitually under-estimated his own worth; he was not only an
anti-slavery leader when abolition was not popular even in New
England, and a radical and rationalist when it was impossible
for him to stay conveniently in the Unitarian Church, but he
