Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/111

L Y C L Y C 95 order attained to the dimensions of lofty trees. A remark able bed of Scotch coal called the " better bed " was found on microscopical examination to be almost entirely com posed of the spores and sporanges of some "lycopod." There are one hundred species, which occur in all climates, five being British. The leaves of lycopodium are for the most part small, and thickly cover the stem and branches. The "fertile" leaves are arranged in cones, and bear sporanges in their axils, containing spores of one kind only (of two kinds in Selaginella). The prothallium developed from the spore is a subterranean mass of tissue of considerable size, and bears the male and female struc tures (antheridia and archegonia). Bee Micrographic Diet. ; Le Maout and Decaisne s Desc. and Anal. Bot., Eng. ed., p. 911 ; and Sach s Text-book of Bot., Eng. ed., p. 400 sq. Gerard, in 1597, described two kinds of lycopodium (Herball, p. 1373) under the names Muscus denticulatus and Muscus davatus (L. davatum, L.) as " Club Mosse or Woolfes Clawe Mosse," the names being in Low Dutch, " Wolfs Clauwen," from the resemblance of the club-like or claw-shaped shoots to the toes of a wolf, "whereupon we first named it Lycopodion." Gerard also speaks of its emetic and many other supposed virtues. L. Selago, L., and L. catharticum, Hook., of South America, have been said to be, at least when fresh, cathartic ; but, with the exception of the spores (" lyco podium powder "), lycopodium as a drug lias fallen into disuse. The powder is used for rolling pills in, as a dusting powder for infants sores, &c. It is highly in flammable, and is used in pyrotechny and for artificial lightning on the stage. If the hand be covered with the powder it cannot be wetted on being plunged into water. Another use of lycopodium is for dyeing ; woollen cloth boiled with species of lycopodium, as L. davatum, becomes blue when dipped in a bath of Brazil wood. LYCURGUS, a famous Spartan lawgiver. As even the ancients themselves differed so widely in their accounts of Lycurgus that Plutarch could begin his life by saying that he could assert absolutely nothing about him which was not controverted, it is not surprising that modern historical criticism has been disposed to relegate him wholly into the region of pure myth. One tradition would put him as far back as the age of Troy ; another would connect him with Homer; while Herodotus implies that he lived in the 10th century B.C. It is now usual, on the strength of a passage in Thucydides (bk. i. chap. 18), which represents Sparta as having enjoyed a well-established political constitution for as much as four hundred years before the Peloponnesian war, to assign him to the 9th century B.C., and to accept him as a real historical person. But as to the character and result of his legisla tive work there still remain very conflicting opinions, due to the circumstance that such data as we possess are susceptible of exceedingly diverse inferences and inter pretations. Plutarch s life, which is the fullest and most detailed account we have of him, is not merely the com pilation at second hand of a late age (2d century), but also abounds in statements which any one with any knowledge of the early growth of political societies feels to be inherently improbable. Grote prefers on the whole to be guided by what may be fairly inferred from the allusions to his legislation in Aristotle, as being one of our earliest sources of information and certainly the most philosophical estimate of his work. With Thirl wall he takes him to have been a real person, and assumes that he was the instrument of establishing good order among the Spartans, hitherto, according to Herodotus, the most lawless of mankind, and of thus laying the foundations of Spartan strength and greatness. The traditional story was that when acting as guardian to his nephew, Labotas, king of the Spartans, he imported his new institutions from Crete, in which a branch of the Dorian race had for a considerable period settled themselves. It was said that he had travelled widely, and gathered political wisdom and experience in Egypt and even in India. With the support of the Delphic oracle, which was specially reverenced by Dorians, he was able to accom plish his work and to regulate, down to the smallest details, the entire life of Sparta. He lived to see the fruit of his labour, and, having bound his fellow countrymen to change nothing in his laws till his return, he left then for Delphi, and was never seen by them again. The oracle declared that Sparta would prosper as long as she held fast by his legislation, and upon this a temple was built to his honour, and he was worshipped as a god. It was the fashion with writers like Plutarch, from whom our notions of Lycurgus have been mainly derived, to represent the Spartan lawgiver as the author of a wholly new set of laws and institutions. It need hardly be said that any such view has long been abandoned, and that Lycurgus s work, great as it no doubt was, did not go beyond formulating what already existed in germ, and was in fact the peculiar heritage of the Spartans as members of the Dorian race. It has been contended that the laws of Sparta were the typi cal Dorian laws, and that Sparta herself was the special representative, politically and socially, of the D6rian race. It appears, however, to have been the general view of the Greeks themselves that many of her most important institutions, more especially the severity of her military training and of her home- discipline, were peculiar to Sparta, and were by no means shared by such states as Corinth, Argos, Megara, all of Dorian origin. Grote lays great stress on this point (History of Greece, chap, vi.), and maintains that it was the singularity of the .Spartan laws which made such a deep impression on the Greek mind. The truth indeed seems to be that Sparta s political organization in its main lines was of the Dorian type, and resembles the pictures given us in the Homeric poems, but that much in her social life and military arrangements was absolutely unique. It is here that in all probability may be traced the genius and fore sight of Lycurgus, and he may thus well deserve the credit of having started Sparta on a new career. The council of elders (gerousia, or senate), a distinctive feature of the Hellenic states generally, must have existed at Sparta long before Lycurgus, nor is it at all certain that he fixed its number at twenty-eight, the two kings who sat and voted in it making it up to thirty members. It was elected from the people from candidates who had reached the age of sixty, and a senator once elected was a seaator for life. It united the functions of a deliberative assembly and of a court of justice, and it prepared measures which were from time to time submitted to periodical assemblies of the people, which, however, had simply to accept or reject, without any power of amendment or criticism. So far the constitution of Sparta was distinctly oligarchical. The two kings, whose office was hereditary, and whose de scent was from the famous family of the Heraclids, had but very limited political powers, and, with some few excep tions, even little more than ordinary senators. They owed their position and prerogatives to the. religious sentiment of the people, which reverenced their noble and quasi- divine origin, and accepted them as legitimately the high priests of the nation, and as specially qualified in great emergencies to consult the Delphic oracle and receive its answers. An ample royal domain was assigned to them, and some rather delicate legal matters, such as the bestow- ment of the hand of an orphan heiress, were entrusted to their discretion. By far the most important of their

duties was the command of the army on a foreign expedi-