d30e4684

  • One of the seven liberal arts, grammar, rhetorick, logick, arithmetick, musick, geometry,
    astronomy
  • d30e4682

  • Art attained by precepts, or built on principles
  • d30e4681

  • Certainty grounded on demonstration
  • 484

  • science

    Here a general term for knowledge. Johnson's 1755 Dictionary delineates the contemporary
    range of meanings of the word.

    • Knowledge
    • Certainty grounded on demonstration
    • Art attained by precepts, or built on principles
    • Any art or species of knowledge
    • One of the seven liberal arts, grammar, rhetorick, logick, arithmetick, musick, geometry,
      astronomy
  • 483

  • schiavi ognor frementi

    Slaves forever in a rage. In her revisions Mary Shelley is betrayed into a historical
    anachronism, for it was only with the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15 that Austria,
    already given the northeastern section of Italy in 1797, additionally was ceded Lombardy.
    Its capital, Milan, was thereafter a center of subversive unrest, and many of its
    leading citizens in the 1820s were convicted of sedition and incarcerated in the infamous
    Austrian prison of Spielberg. Silvio Pellico's account, Le mie prigioni (My Prisons)
    was published in 1832, the year after the third edition of Frankenstein, and became
    a European best-seller. In the decade and a half following the Congress of Vienna,
    Britain became a center for exiles from the Milanese intelligentsia, among whom was
    Gabriele Rossetti, father of Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

    As contemporary English readers might be anticipated almost automatically to sympathize
    with the plight of a Milanese exile, so they would respond to the essentially imperialist
    ethos of this description of the blond beauty distinguished as a "rose among dark-leaved
    brambles." Both Elizabeth's aristocratic background and her fair northern beauty play
    to the expectations of the main line of British fiction in the early 1830s, what because
    of its high-bourgeois conventions has come to be called "the Silver Fork School."

  • 482

  • scarlet fever

    A highly contagious disease, usually encountered in childhood, caused by hemolytic
    streptococus. It is spread through the air or through contaminated food, and was virtually
    untreatable before the development of antibiotics, although penicillin and gamma globulin
    have made it much less common in the twentieth century.

    Scarlet fever's onset is sudden (typically two to seven days after exposure), beginning
    with a sore throat, shivering, and a headache. It develops on the second day into
    a rash behind the ears, which spreads to the arms and legs. Thomas Sydenham, a physician
    of the late seventeenth century, describes its symptoms thus: "The skin is marked
    with small, red spots, more frequent, more diffuse, and more red than in measles.
    These last two or three days. They then disappear, leaving the skin covered with brawny
    squamulae [scales], as if powdered with meal." Scarlet fever leaves the glands swollen
    and often sensitive; in some cases, the squamulae on parts of the patient's skin peel
    off.

    The greatest threats arise from complications. Sinus infections, abcesses of the ear,
    and mastoiditis are common. In a few cases, scarlet fever leads to arthritis, rheumatic
    fever, or kidney failure.

  • 481

  • Mrs. SAVILLE

    Positioned in the outer sphere of the numerous nested narratives that make up the
    novel, Mrs. Saville stands in the position of the author. The initials of her full
    name, Margaret Walton Saville, are identical with those of the actual author, Mary
    Wollstonecraft Shelley.

  • 480

  • He was not, as the other traveller seemed to be, a savage inhabitant

    Reverted to for a second time, the Creature's presence once again, as in the second
    paragraph above, forces indeterminacy upon Walton's conclusions: "this apparition
    seemed"; "the traveller seemed."