Page:EB1911 - Volume 10.djvu/353

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FILANGIERI, GAETANO—FILE
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service, and retired to Calabria where he had inherited the princely title and estates of Satriano. In 1831 he was recalled by Ferdinand II. and entrusted with various military reforms. On the outbreak of the troubles of 1848 Filangieri advised the king to grant the constitution, which he did in February 1848, but when the Sicilians formally seceded from the Neapolitan kingdom Filangieri was given the command of an armed force with which to reduce the island to obedience. On the 3rd of September he landed near Messina, and after very severe fighting captured the city. He then advanced southwards, besieged and took Catania, where his troops committed many atrocities, and by May 1849 he had conquered the whole of Sicily, though not without much bloodshed. He remained in Sicily as governor until 1855, when he retired into private life, as he could not carry out the reforms he desired owing to the hostility of Giovanni Cassisi, the minister for Sicily. On the death of Ferdinand II. (22nd of May 1859) the new king Francis II. appointed Filangieri premier and minister of war. He promoted good relations with France, then fighting with Piedmont against the Austrians in Lombardy, and strongly urged on the king the necessity of an alliance with Piedmont and a constitution as the only means whereby the dynasty might be saved. These proposals being rejected, Filangieri resigned office. In May 1860, Francis at last promulgated the constitution, but it was too late, for Garibaldi was in Sicily and Naples was seething with rebellion. On the advice of Liborio Romano, the new prefect of police, Filangieri was ordered to leave Naples. He went to Marseilles with his wife and subsequently to Florence, where at the instance of General La Marmora he undertook to write an account of the Italian army. Although he adhered to the new government he refused to accept any dignity at its hands, and died at his villa of San Giorgio a Cremano near Naples on the 9th of October 1867.

Filangieri was a very distinguished soldier, and a man of great ability; although he changed sides several times he became really attached to the Bourbon dynasty, which he hoped to save by freeing it from its reactionary tendencies and infusing a new spirit into it. His conduct in Sicily was severe and harsh, but he was not without feelings of humanity, and he was an honest man and a good administrator.

His biography has been written by his daughter Teresa Filangieri Fieschi-Ravaschieri, Il Generale Carlo Filangieri (Milan, 1902), an interesting, although somewhat too laudatory volume based on the general’s own unpublished memoirs; for the Sicilian expedition see V. Finocchiaro, La Rivoluzione siciliana del 1848–49 (Catania, 1906, with bibliography), in which Filangieri is bitterly attacked; see also under Naples; Ferdinand IV.; Francis I.; Ferdinand II.; Francis II.  (L. V.*) 


FILANGIERI, GAETANO (1752–1788), Italian publicist, was born at Naples on the 18th of August 1752. His father, Caesar, prince of Arianiello, intended him for a military career, which he commenced at the early age of seven, but soon abandoned for the study of the law. At the bar his knowledge and eloquence early secured his success, while his defence of a royal decree reforming abuses in the administration of justice gained him the favour of the king, Charles, afterwards Charles III. of Spain, and led to several honourable appointments at court. The first two books of his great work, La Scienza della legislazione, appeared in 1780. The first book contained an exposition of the rules on which legislation in general ought to proceed, while the second was devoted to economic questions. These two books showed him an ardent reformer, and vehement in denouncing the abuses of his time. He insisted on unlimited free trade, and the abolition of the medieval institutions which impeded production and national well-being. Its success was great and immediate not only in Italy, but throughout Europe at large. In 1783 he married, resigned his appointments at court, and retiring to Cava, devoted himself steadily to the completion of his work. In the same year appeared the third book, relating entirely to the principles of criminal jurisprudence. The suggestion which he made in it as to the need for reform in the Roman Catholic church brought upon him the censure of the ecclesiastical authorities, and it was condemned by the congregation of the Index in 1784. In 1785 he published three additional volumes, making the fourth book of the projected work, and dealing with education and morals. In 1787 he was appointed a member of the supreme treasury council by Ferdinand IV., but his health, impaired by close study and over-work in his new office, compelled his withdrawal to the country at Vico Equense. He died somewhat suddenly on the 21st of July 1788, having just completed the first part of the fifth book of his Scienza. He left an outline of the remainder of the work, which was to have been completed in six books.

La Scienza della legislazione has gone through many editions, and has been translated into most of the languages of Europe. The best Italian edition is in 5 vols. 8vo. (1807). The Milan edition (1822) contains the Opusculi scelti and a life by Donato Tommasi. A French translation appeared in Paris in 7 vols. 8vo. (1786–1798); it was republished in 1822–1824, with the addition of the Opuscles and notes by Benjamin Constant. The Science of Legislation was translated into English by Sir R. Clayton (London, 1806).


FILARIASIS, the name of a disease due to the nematode Filaria sanguinis hominis. A milky appearance of the urine, due to the presence of a substance like chyle, which forms a clot, had been observed from time to time, especially in tropical and subtropical countries; and it was proved by Dr Wucherer of Bahia, and by Dr Timothy Lewis, that this peculiar condition is uniformly associated with the presence in the blood of minute eel-like worms, visible only under the microscope, being the embryo forms of a Filaria (see Nematoda). Sometimes the discharge of lymph takes place at one or more points of the surface of the body, and there is in other cases a condition of naevoid elephantiasis of the scrotum, or lymph-scrotum. More or less of blood may occur along with the chylous fluid in the urine. Both the chyluria and the presence of filariae in the blood are curiously intermittent; it may happen that not a single filaria is to be seen during the daytime, while they swarm in the blood at night, and it has been ingeniously shown by Dr S. Mackenzie that they may be made to disappear if the patient sits up all night, reappearing while he sleeps through the day.

Sir P. Manson proved that mosquitoes imbibe the embryo filariae from the blood of man; and that many of these reach full development within the mosquito, acquiring their freedom when the latter resorts to water, where it dies after depositing its eggs. Mosquitoes would thus be the intermediate host of the filariae, and their introduction into the human body would be through the medium of water (see Parasitic Diseases).


FILDES, SIR LUKE (1844–  ), English painter, was born at Liverpool, and trained in the South Kensington and Royal Academy schools. At first a highly successful illustrator, he took rank later among the ablest English painters, with “The Casual Ward” (1874), “The Widower” (1876), “The Village Wedding” (1883), “An Al-fresco Toilette” (1889); and “The Doctor” (1891), now in the National Gallery of British Art. He also painted a number of pictures of Venetian life and many notable portraits, among them the coronation portraits of King Edward VII. and Queen Alexandra. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1879, and academician in 1887; and was knighted in 1906.

See David Croal Thomson, The Life and Work of Luke Fildes, R.A. (1895).


FILE. 1. A bar of steel having sharp teeth on its surface, and used for abrading or smoothing hard surfaces. (The O. Eng. word is féol, and cognate forms appear in Dutch vijl, Ger. Feile, &c.; the ultimate source is usually taken to be an Indo-European root meaning to mark or scratch, and seen in the Lat. pingere, to paint.) Some uncivilized tribes polish their weapons with such things as rough stones, pieces of shark skin or fishes’ teeth. The operation of filing is recorded in 1 Sam. xiii. 21; and, among other facts, the similarity of the name for the filing instrument among various European peoples points to an early practice of the art. A file differs from a rasp (which is chiefly used for working wood, horn and the like) in having its teeth cut with a chisel whose straight edge extends across its surface, while the teeth of the rasp are formed by solitary indentations of a pointed chisel. According to the form of their teeth, files may be single-cut or double-cut; the former have only one set of parallel ridges