to teach. Others connect with an O. Ital. pedare, to tramp about (Lat. pes, foot), of an usher tramping about with his pupils.
PEDEN, ALEXANDER (c. 1626-1686), Scottish divine, one of the leading forces in the Covenant movement, was born at Auchincloich, Ayrshire, about 1626, and was educated at Glasgow University. He was ordained minister of New Luce in Galloway in 1660, but had to leave his parish under Middleton's Ejectment Act in 1663. For 23 years he wandered far and wide, bringing comfort and succour to his co-religionists, and often very narrowly escaping capture. He was indeed taken in June 1673 while holding a conventicle at Knockdow, and condemned by the privy council to 4 years and 3 months' imprisonment on the Bass Rock and a further 15 months in the Tolbooth at Edinburgh. In December 1678 he was, with sixty others, sentenced to banishment to the American plantations, but the party was liberated in London, and Peden made his way north again to divide the remaining years of his life between his own country and the north of Ireland. His last days were spent in a cave in the parish of Sorn, near his birthplace, and there he died in 1686, worn out by hardship and privation.
See A. Smellie, Men of the Covenant, ch. xxxiv.
PEDERSEN, CHRISTIERN (c. 1480-1554), Danish writer, known as the “father of Danish literature,” was a canon of the cathedral of Lund, and in 1510 went to Paris, where he took his master's degree in 1515. In Paris he edited the proverbs of Peder Laale and (1514) the Historia danica of Saxo Grammaticus. He showed signs of the spirit of reform, asserting that the gospels should be translated into the vernacular so that the common people might understand. He worked at a continuation of the history of Saxo Grammaticus, and became secretary to Christian II., whom he followed into exile in 1525. In Holland he translated the New Testament (1529) and the Psalms (1531) from the Vulgate, and, becoming a convert to the reformed opinion, he issued several Lutheran tracts. After his return to Denmark in 1532 he set up a printing press at Malmö. He published a Danish version (Kronike om Holger Danske) of the French romance of Ogier the Dane, and another of the Charlemagne legends, which is probably derived immediately from the Norwegian Karlamagnus saga. His greatest work, the Danish version of the Holy Scriptures, which is known generally as “Christian III.'s Bible,” is an important landmark in Danish literature. It was founded on Luther's version, and was edited by Peder Palladius, bishop of Zealand, and others.
See C. Pedersen's Danske Skrifter, edited by C. J. Brandt and B. T. Fenger (5 vols., Copenhagen, 1850-1856).
PEDESTAL (Fr. piedestal, Ital. piedestallo, foot of a stall), a term generally applied to a support, square, octagonal or circular on plan, provided to carry a statue or a vase. Although in Syria, Asia Minor and Tunisia the Romans occasionally raised the columns of their temples or propylaea on square pedestals, in Rome itself they were employed only to give greater importance to isolated columns, such as those of Trajan and Antoninus, or as a podium to the columns employed decoratively in the Roman triumphal arches. The architects of the Italian revival, however, conceived the idea that no order was complete without a pedestal, and as the orders were by them employed to divide up and decorate a building in several storeys, the cornice of the pedestal was carried through and formed the sills of their windows, or, in open arcades, round a court, the balustrade of the arcade. They also would seem to have considered that the height of the pedestal should correspond in its proportion with that of the column of pilaster it supported, thus in the church of St John Lateran, where the applied order is of considerable dimensions, the pedestal is 13 ft. high instead of the ordinary height of 3 to 5 ft.
PEDICULOSIS, or Phthiriasis, the medical term for the pathological symptoms in man due to the presence of lice (pediculi), either on the head (pediculus capitis), body (pediculus corporis, or vestimentorum), or pubes (pediculus pubis).
PEDIGREE, a genealogical tree, a tabular statement of descent (see Genealogy). The word first appears at the beginning of the 15th century and takes an extraordinary variety of forms, e.g. pedicree, pe de gre, petiegrew, petygru, &c. It is generally accepted that these point to a corruption of Fr. pied de grue, foot of a crane, and that the probable reference is to the marks resembling the claw of a bird found in old genealogies showing the lines of descent. Such etymologies as Minshea's par degrés, by degrees, or père degrés, descent by the father, are mere guesses.
PEDIMENT (equivalents, Gr. ἀετός, Lat. fastigium, Fr. ponton), in classic architecture the triangular-shaped portion of the wali above the cornice which formed the termination of the roof behind it. The projecting mouldings of the cornice which surround it enclose the tympanum, which is sometimes decorated with sculpture. The pediment in classic architecture corresponds to the gable in Gothic architecture, where the roof is of loftier pitch. It was employed by the Greeks only as the front of the roof which covered the main building; the Romans, however, adopted it as a decorative termination to a doorway, niche or window, and occasionally, in a row of windows or niches, alternated the triangular with a segmental pediment. It was reserved for the Italian architects of the decadence to break the pediment in the centre, thus destroying its original purpose. The earliest English form of the word is periment or peremint, probably a workman's corruption of “pyramid.”
PEDIPALPI, Arachnida (q.v.) related to the spiders, and serving in a measure to bridge over the structural interval between the latter and the scorpions. The appendages of the second pair are large and prehensile, as in scorpions, but are armed with spines, to impale and hold prey. The appendages of the third pair, representing the first pair of walking legs in spiders and scorpions, are, on the contrary, long, attenuated and many jointed at the end. Like the antennae of insects, they act as feelers. It is from this structural feature that the term “pedipalpi” has been derived. In the tailless division of the Pedipalpi, namely the Amblypygi of which Phrynus is a commonly cited type, these tactile appendages are exceedingly long and lashlike, whereas in the tailed division, the Uropygi, of which Thelyphonus is best known, the limb is much shorter and less modified. Thelyphonus and its allies, however, have a long tactile caudal flagellum, the homologue of the scorpion's sting; but its exact use is unknown. A third division, the Tartarides, a subordinate group of the Uropygi, contains minute Arachnida differing principally from the typical Uropygi in having the caudal process unjointed and short. Apart from the Tartarides, the Pedipalpi
Mexican tailed Pedipalp (Mastigoproetus giganteus).
