It would appear that the purchasing power of the inhabitants
of India has increased of late years, and there is a growing demand
for refined sugar, fostered by the circumstance that modern processes
of manufacture can make a quality of sugar, broadly speaking,
equal to sugar refined by animal charcoal, without using charcoal,
and so the religious objections to the refined sugars of, old days
have been overcome.
(A. Ch.; V. W. Ch.)
SUGAR-BIRD, the English name commonly given in the West
India Islands to the various members of the genus Certhiola
(belonging to the Passerine family Coerebidae[1]) for their habit
of frequenting the curing-houses where sugar is kept, apparently
attracted thither by the swarms of flies. They often come into
dwelling-houses, hopping from one piece of furniture to another
and carefully exploring the surrounding objects with intent to
find a spider or insect. In their figure and motions they remind
a northern naturalist of a nuthatch, while their coloration—black,
yellow, olive, grey and white—recalls to him a titmouse.
They generally keep in pairs and build a domed but untidy nest,
laying therein three eggs, white, blotched with rusty-red.
Many species are recognized, some of them with a very limited
range; three are continental, with a joint range extending from
southern Mexico to Peru, Bolivia and south-eastern Brazil,
while others are peculiar to certain of the Antilles, and several
of them to one island only. Thus C. caboti is limited, so far
as is known, to Cozumel (off Yucatan), C. tricolor to Old Providence,
C. flaveola (the type of the genus) to Jamaica, and so
on, while islands that are in sight of one another are often
inhabited by different “species.” The genus furnishes an excellent
example of the effects of isolation in breaking up an
original form, while there is comparatively little differentiation
among the individuals which inhabit a large and continuous
area. The non-appearance of this genus in Cuba is very
remarkable.
(A. N.)
SUGER (c. 1081–1151), French ecclesiastic, statesman and historian, was born of poor parents either in Flanders, at St Denis near Paris or at Toury in Beauce. About 1091 he entered the abbey of St Denis. Until about 1104 he was educated at the priory of St Denis de l’Estrée, and there first met his pupil King Louis VI. From 1104 to 1106 Suger attended another school, perhaps that attached to the abbey of St Benoît-sur-Loire. In 1106 he became secretary to the abbot of St Denis. In the following year he was made provost of Berneval in Normandy, and in 1109 of Toury. In 1118 he was sent by Louis VI. to the court of Pope Gelasius II. at Maguelonne, and lived from 1121 to 1122 at the court of his successor, Calixtus II. On his return from Italy Suger was appointed abbot of StDenis. Until 1127 he occupied himself at court mainly with the temporal affairs of the kingdom, while during the following decade he devoted himself to the reorganization and reform of St Denis. In 1137 he accompanied the future king, Louis VII., into Aquitaine on the occasion of that prince’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, and during the second crusade was one of the regents of the kingdom (1147–1149). He was bitterly opposed to the king’s divorce, having himself advised the marriage. Although he disapproved of the second crusade, he himself, at the time of his death, on the 31st of January 1151, was preaching a new crusade.
Suger was the friend and counsellor both of Louis VI. and Louis VII. He urged the king to destroy the feudal bandits, was responsible for the royal tactics in dealing with the communal movements, and endeavoured to regularize the administration of justice. He left his abbey, which possessed considerable property, enriched and embellished by the construction of a new church built in the nascent Gothic style.
Suger was the foremost historian of his time. He was the author of a panegyric on Louis VI. (Vita Ludovici regis), and part-author of the perhaps more impartial history of Louis VII. (Historia gloriosi regis Ludovici). In his Liber de rebus in administratione sua gestis, and its supplement Libellus de consecratione ecclesiae S. Dionysii, he treats of the improvements he had made to St Denis, describes the treasure of the church, and gives an account of the rebuilding. Suger’s works served to imbue the monks of St Denis with a taste for history, and called forth a long series of quasi-official chronicles.
See O. Cartellieri, Abt Suger von Saint-Denis (Berlin, 1898); A. Luchaire, Louis le Gros (Paris, 1890); F. A. Gervaise, Histoire de Suger (Paris, 1721).
SUGGESTION. By the older British writers on psychology the words “suggest” and “suggestion” were used in senses very close to those which they have in common speech; one idea was said to suggest another when it recalled that other to mind or (in the modern phrase) reproduced it. Modern studies in mental pathology and hypnotism (q.v.) have led to the use of these words by psychologists in a special and technical sense. The hypnotists of the Nancy school rediscovered and gave general currency to the doctrine that the most essential feature of the hypnotic state is the unquestioning obedience and docility with which the hypnotized subject accepts, believes, and acts in accordance with every command or proposition of the hypnotize. Commands or propositions made to the subject (they may be merely implied by a gesture, a glance, or a chance remark to a third person) and accepted with this peculiarly uncritical and intense belief were called “suggestions”; and the subject that accepted them in this fashion, was said to be “suggestible.” It has also been made abundantly clear, chiefly by the labours of French physicians, that a high degree of “suggestibility” is a leading feature of hysteria, and that this fact is the key to the understanding of very many of its protean manifestations.
It is also becoming widely recognized that the suggestibility of hypnosis and of hysteria is conditioned by a peculiar state of the brain, namely a cerebral or mental dissociation, which in hypnosis is temporarily induced by the operations of the hypnotist, and in hysteria arises from some deficiency of energy in the whole psycho-physical system. In respect to these points there is now a wide consensus of opinion among the leading authorities; but as to the range and scope of suggestion in our mental life great differences of opinion still obtain. We may distinguish three principal views. Firstly, it is maintained by a number of physicians (notably by Professor Pierre Janet, whose profound studies of hysterical patients are justly celebrated) that all hypnotizable persons are hysterical and that suggestibility is a condition peculiar to hysterical subjects. In view of the assertions in recent years of several physicians of high repute to the effect that they find more than 90% of all subjects hypnotizable, it would seem that this view cannot be maintained, and that this restriction of suggestion to hysterical subjects only, and the stigmatization of suggestibility as in every case a morbid symptom, are errors arising from too exclusive occupation with its manifestations in this field. A second group consists of writers who admit that suggestion may operate in normal minds, but who, while recognizing that it is not an essentially pathological process, maintain that it is a process of very peculiar and exceptional nature that has little or no affinity with normal mental operations. They hold that suggestion, whether it occurs in morbid or in healthy subjects, always implies the coming into operation of some obscurely conceived faculty or region of the mind which is present in all men, but which usually lies hidden or submerged beneath the flow of our more commonplace mental activities. This submerged faculty or system of faculties, which is held by these authors to be operative in all processes of suggestion, is variously designated by them the secondary or submerged stratum of consciousness, the subconscious or subliminal self (see Subliminal Self). The writers of this, group insist upon the more startling of the effects producible by suggestion, the more profound changes of bodily and mental processes, such as paralysis,
- ↑ Known in French as Guitguits, a name used for them also by some English writers. The Guitguit of Hernandez (Rer. medic. N. hisp. thesaurus, p. 56), a name said by him to be of native origin, can hardly be determined, though thought by Montbeillard (Hist. nat. oiseaux, v. 529) to be what is now known as Coereba caerulea, but that of later writers is C. cyanea. The name is probably onomatopoetic, and very likely analogous to the “quit” applied in Jamaica to several small birds.
