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RAPE—RAPHAEL SANZIO

In Hawaii there is no age of consent for rape, which is punishable by $1000 fine and imprisonment at hard labour for life; the carnal knowledge of females under 10 years is punishable with death or imprisonment for life [Rev. L. 1905, §§ 2927, 2928]. In Porto Rico the age of consent is 14 years and the punishment not less than five years [Pen. Code 1902,§255].

Authorities.—Stephen, Digest of Criminal Law; Russell, On Crimes: Archbold, Criminal Pleading; and for American law, May, The Law of Crimes, and Clark and Marshall, Treatise on the Law of Crimes.

RAPE, a territorial division of the county of Sussex, England, formerly used for various administrative purposes. There are now six of these divisions, Hastings, Pevensey, Lewes, Bramber, Arundel and Chichester, but the latter two apparently formed a single rape at the date of the compilation of Domesday Book. The word, which in England is peculiar to Sussex, is usually said to be closely related to the Icelandic hrepp, a small territorial division which in most, but not in all, cases is identical with the parish; but this explanation, which is unsatisfactory on institutional grounds, has also been declared impossible for philological reasons. As an alternative explanation it has been suggested, that “rape” is an early form of the word “rope”; and that the divisions were so called because they were measured and allotted by the rope. Some confirmation of this is to be found in the Words of the Norman chronicler, Dudo of St Quentin, who states that Rollo in distributing Neustria “suis fidelibus terrain funiculo divisit” (J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus completus, tom. cxli. p. 652). It is possible that the rapes represent the shires of the ancient kingdom of Sussex, especially as in the 12th century they had sheriffs of their own. But there is no evidence of the existence of the rape before the Norman Conquest, except such as may be gathered from Domesday Book, and this is far from convincing. After the Conquest each rape had its own lord, and all the land within it, save that which belonged to the king or to ecclesiastical tenants, was held of the lord. Thus the rape as a lordship only differed from other honours and baronies by the fact that the lands of its knights were not scattered over England, but lay together in a continuous tract. In form the rapes were parallel bands of land running north and south, and each of them contained a different number of hundreds. The place in which the lord’s castle was situate ultimately gave its name to the rape; but in Domesday Book the rapes are often described by the names of their lords, and this is always so in that work in the case of Bramber, which belonged to William de Briouze (rapam Willelmi de Braoza).

See the Victoria County History, Sussex, vol. i.; New English Dictionary; and M. A. Lower, History of Sussex (Lewes, 1870).  (G. J. T.) 

RAPE OIL, an important fatty oil, known also as “sweet oil,” either expressed or extracted from the crushed seeds of cultivated varieties of the cruciferous genus Brassica, the parent form of the whole apparently being the wild navew, B. carnpestris. Under the general name “rape oil” is included the produce of several plants having distinct and fairly constant characters, and one of these oils—colza (q.v.)—is a very well known commercial variety. In Germany, Where the production of rape oil centres, two principal oil-seeds—rape and Rübsen—are well recognized. (See Rape.)

The oil yielded by these seeds is, in physical and chemical properties, practically the same, the range of fluctuations not being greater than would be found in the oil of any specific seed under similar varying conditions of production; the winter varieties of all the seeds are more productive than the summer varieties. Newly pressed rape oil has a dark sherry colour with, at first, scarcely any perceptible smell; but after resting a short time the oil deposits an abundant mucilaginous slime, and by taking up oxygen it acquires a peculiar disagreeable odour and an acrid taste. Refined by the ordinary processes (see Oils), the oil assumes a clear golden yellow colour. In specific gravity it ranges between 0.9112 and 0.9117 in the raw state, and from 0.9127 to 0.9136 when refined; the solidifying point is from −4° to −6° C.

The principal uses of rape oil are for lubrication and lighting; but since the introduction of mineral oils for both these purposes the importance of rape has considerably decreased. It is but little employed in soap-making, as it saponifies with difficulty and yields only an indifferent product. In Germany it is very considerably used as a salad oil under the name of Schmalzöl, being for that purpose freed from its biting taste by being mixed with starch, heated till the starch is carbonized, and filtered after the oil has cooled. The offensive taste of rape oil may also be removed by treatment with a small proportion of sweet spirit of nitre (nitrous ether). In the East Indies rape oil and its equivalents, known under various names, are the most important of oils for native use. They are largely consumed as food instead of ghi under the name of “metah” or sweet oil, but for all other purposes the same substance is known as “kurwah” or bitter oil. Most natives prefer it for the preparation of their curries and other hot dishes. Rape oil is the subject of extensive adulteration, principally with the cheaper hemp oil, rosin oil and mineral oils. These sophistication’s can be most conveniently detected, first by taste and next by saponification, rosin oil and mineral oil remaining unsaponified, hemp oil giving a greenish soap, while rape oil yields a soap with a yellow tinge. 'With concentrated sulphuric acid, fuming nitric acid, nitrous acid, and other reagents rape oil gives also characteristic col orations; but these are modified according to the degree of purity of the oil itself. The presence of sulphur in rape and other cruciferous oils also affords a ready means for their identification. Lead plaster (emplastrum lithargyri) boiled in rape oil dissolves, and, sulphide of lead being formed, the oil becomes brown or black. Other lead compounds give the same black coloration from the formation of sulphide.

RAPHAEL (Hebrew Sem, “God heals”), an angel who in human disguise and under the name of Azarias (“Yahweh helps”) accompanies Tobias in his adventurous journey and conquers the demon Asmodaeus (Book of Tobit). He is said (Tob. xii. 15) to be “one of the seven holy angels [archangels] which present the prayers of the saints and go in before the glory of the Holy One.” In the Book of Enoch (c. xx.) Raphael is “the angel of the spirits of men,” and it is his business to “heal the earth which the angels have denied.” In later Midrash Raphael appears as the angel commissioned to put down the evil spirits that vexed the sons of Noah with plagues and sicknesses after the Flood, and he it 'was who taught men the use of simples and furnished materials for the “Book of Noah,” the earliest treatise on materia medica.


RAPHAEL SANZIO (1483–1520), the great Italian painter, was the son of Giovanni Sanzio or Santi, a painter of some repute in the ducal city of Urbino, situated among the Apennines on the borders of Tuscany and Umbria.[1] For many years both before and after the birth of Raphael (6th of April 1483) the city of Urbino was one of the chief centres in Italy of intellectual and artistic activity, thanks to its highly cultured rulers, Duke Federigo II. of Montefeltro and his son Guidobaldo, who succeeded him in 1482,[2] the year before Raphael was born. Giovanni Santi was a welcome guest at this miniature but splendid court, and the rich treasures which the palace contained, familiar to Raphael from his earliest years, were a very important item among the various influences which formed and fostered his early love for art. It may not perhaps be purely fanciful to trace Raphael’s boyish admiration of the oil-paintings of Jan Van Eyck and Justus of Ghent in the miniature-like care and delicacy with which some of his earliest works, such as the “Apollo and Marsyas,” were executed.

Though Raphael lost his father at the age of eleven, yet to him he certainly owed a great part of that early training which enabled him to produce paintings of apparently mature beauty when he was scarcely twenty years of age. The altarpiece painted by Giovanni for the church of Gradara, and a fresco, now preserved in the Santi house[3] at Urbino, are clearly prototypes of some of Raphael’s most graceful

  1. See Pungileoni, Elogio Storico di Raffaello (Urbino, 1829); for a valuable account of Raphael’s family and his early life, see also, Id., Vita di Giov. Santi (Urbino, 1822), and Campori, Notizie e Documenti per la Vita di Giov. Santi e di Raffaello (Modena, 1870).
  2. See an interesting account of the court of Urbino by Delaborde, Etudes sur les B. Arts . . . en Italie (Paris, 1864), Vol. i. p. 145.
  3. The house of Giovanni Santi, where Raphael was born, still exists at Urbino in the Contrada del Monte, and, being the property of the municipality, is now safe from destruction.