grand council and of the British parliament was to be “requisite to the validity of all . . . general acts or statutes,” except that “in time of War, all bills for granting aid to the crown, prepared by the grand council and approved by the president-general, shall be valid and passed into a law, without the assent of the British parliament.” The individual colonies, however, were to retain control over their strictly internal affairs. The measure was debated at length, was advocated by such influential members as John Jay and James Duane of New York and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, and was eventually defeated only by the vote of six colonies to five. Galloway declined a second election to Congress in 1775, joined the British army at New Brunswick, New Jersey (December 1776), advised the British to attack Philadelphia by the Delaware, and during the British occupation of Philadelphia (1777–1778) was superintendent of the port, of prohibited articles, and of police of the city. In October 1778 he went to England, where he remained until his death at Watford, Hertfordshire, on the 29th of August 1803. After he left America his life was attainted, and his property, valued at £40,000, was confiscated by the Pennsylvania Assembly, a loss for which he received a partial recompense in the form of a small parliamentary pension. He was one of the clearest thinkers and ablest political writers among the American Loyalists, and, according to Prof. Tyler, “shared with Thomas Hutchinson the supreme place among American statesmen opposed to the Revolution.”
Among his pamphlets are A Candid Examination of the Mutual Claims of Great Britain and the Colonies (1775); Historical and Political Reflections on the Rise and Progress of the American Rebellion (1780); Cool Thoughts on the Consequences to Great Britain of American Independence (1780); and The Claim of the American Loyalists Reviewed and Maintained upon Incontrovertible Principles of Law and Justice (1788).
See Thomas Balch (Ed.), The Examination of Joseph Galloway by a Committee of the House of Commons (Philadelphia, 1855); Ernest H. Baldwin, Joseph Galloway, the Loyalist Politician (New Haven, 1903); and M. C. Tyler, Literary History of the American Revolution (2 vols., New York, 1897).
GALLOWAY, THOMAS (1796–1851), Scottish mathematician,
was born at Symington, Lanarkshire, on the 26th of February
1796. In 1812 he entered the university of Edinburgh, where he
distinguished himself specially in mathematics. In 1823 he was
appointed one of the teachers of mathematics at the military
college of Sandhurst, and in 1833 he was appointed actuary to the
Amicable Life Assurance Office, the oldest institution of that kind
in London; in which situation he remained till his death on the
1st of November 1851. Galloway was a voluminous, though, for
the most part, an anonymous writer. His most interesting
paper is “On the Proper Motion of the Solar System,” and was
published in the Phil. Trans., 1847. He contributed largely to
the seventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and also
wrote several scientific papers for the Edinburgh Review and
various scientific journals. His Encyclopaedia article, “Probability,”
was published separately.
See Transactions of the Royal Astronomical Society (1852).
GALLOWAY, a district in the south-west of Scotland, comprising the counties of Kirkcudbright and Wigtown. It was the Novantia of the Romans, and till the end of the 12th century included Carrick, now the southern division of Ayrshire. Though the designation has not been adopted civilly, its use historically and locally has been long established. Thus the Bruces were lords of Galloway, and the title of earl of Galloway (created 1623) is now held by a branch of the Stewarts. Galloway also gives its name to a famous indigenous breed of black hornless
cattle. See Kirkcudbrightshire and Wigtownshire.
GALLOWS[1] (a common Teutonic word—cf. Goth. galga, O. H. Ger. galgo, Mod. Ger. Galgen, A.S. galzan, &c.—of uncertain origin), the apparatus for executing the sentence of death by hanging. It usually consists of two upright posts and a cross-beam, but sometimes of a single upright with a beam projecting from the top. The Roman gallows was the cross, and in the older translations of the Bible “gallows” was used for the cross on which Christ suffered (so galga in Ulfilas’s Gothic Testament).[2] Another form of gallows in the middle ages was that of which the famous example at Montfaucon near Paris was the type. This was a square structure formed of columns of masonry connected in each tier with cross-pieces of wood, and with pits beneath, into which the bodies fell after disarticulation by exposure to the weather.
According to actual usage the condemned man stands on a platform or drop (introduced in England in 1760), the rope hangs from the cross-beam, and the noose at its end is placed round his neck. He is hanged by the falling of the drop, the knot in the noose being so adjusted that the spinal cord is broken by the fall and death instantaneous. In old times the process was far less merciful; sometimes the condemned man stood in a cart, which was drawn away from under him; sometimes he had to mount a ladder, from which he was thrust by the hangman. Until 1832 malefactors in England were sometimes hanged by being drawn up from the platform by a heavy weight at the other end of the rope. Death in these cases was by strangulation. At the present time executions in the United Kingdom are private, the gallows being erected in a chamber or enclosed space set apart for the purpose inside the gaol.
The word “gibbet,” the Fr. gibet, gallows, which appears in the first instance to have meant a crooked stick,[3] was originally used in English synonymously with gallows, as it sometimes still is. Its later and more special application, however, was to the upright posts with a projecting arm on which the bodies of criminals were suspended after their execution. These gibbets were erected in conspicuous spots, on the tops of hills (Gallows Hill is still a common name) or near frequented roads. The bodies, smeared with pitch to prevent too rapid decomposition, hung in chains as a warning to evildoers. From the gruesome custom comes the common use of the word “to gibbet” for any holding up to public infamy or contempt.
GALLS. In animals galls occur mostly on or under the skin of living mammals and birds, and are produced by Acaridea, and by dipterous insects of the genus Oestrus. Signor Moriggia[4] has described and figured a horny excrescence, nearly 8 in. in length, from the back of the human hand, which was caused by Acarus domesticus. What are commonly known as galls are vegetable excrescences, and, according to the definition of Lacaze-Duthiers, comprise “all abnormal vegetable productions developed on plants by the action of animals, more particularly by insects, whatever may be their form, bulk or situation.” For the larvae of their makers the galls provide shelter and sustenance. The exciting cause of the hypertrophy, in the case of the typical galls, appears to be a minute quantity of some irritating fluid, or virus, secreted by the female insect, and deposited with her egg in the puncture made by her ovipositor in the cortical or foliaceous parts of plants. This virus causes the rapid enlargement and subdivision of the cells affected by it, so as to form the tissues of the gall. Oval or larval irritation also, without doubt, plays an important part in the formation of many galls. Though, as Lacaze-Duthiers remarks, a certain relation is necessary between the “stimulus” and the “supporter of the stimulus,” as evidenced by the limitation in the majority of cases of each species of gall-insect to some one vegetable structure, still it must be the quality of the irritant
- ↑ The word “gallows” is the plural of a word (galwe, galowe, gallow) which, according to the New English Dictionary, was occasionally used as late as the 17th century, though from the 13th century onwards the plural form was more usual. Caxton speaks both of “a gallows,” and, in the older form, of “a pair of gallows,” this referring probably to the two upright posts. From the 16th century onwards “gallows” has been consistently treated as a singular form, a new plural, “gallowses,” having come into use. “The latter, though not strictly obsolete, is now seldom used; the formation is felt to be somewhat uncouth, so that the use of the word in the plural in commonly evaded” (New Eng. Dict. s.v. “Gallows”).
- ↑ In Med. Lat. “gallows” was translated by furia and patibulum, both words applied in classical Latin to a fork-shaped instrument of punishment fastened on the neck of slaves and criminals. Furia, in feudal law, was the right granted to tenants having major jurisdiction to erect a gallows within the limits of their fief.
- ↑ Cf. Wace, Roman de Rou, iii. 8349:
“Et il a le gibet saisi
Qui a son destre braz pendi.” - ↑ Quoted in Zoological Record, iv. (1867), p. 192.
