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Monument to the Great Fire of London

The Monument to the Great Fire of London, more commonly known simply as the Monument, is a fluted Doric column in London, England, situated near the northern end of London Bridge. Commemorating the Great Fire of London, it stands at the junction of Monument Street and Fish Street Hill, 202 ft in height and 202 feet west of the spot in Pudding Lane where the Great Fire started on 2 September 1666. Constructed between 1671 and 1677, it was built on the site of St Margaret, New Fish Street, the first church to be destroyed by the Great Fire. It is Grade I-listed and is a scheduled monument. Another monument, the Golden Boy of Pye Corner, marks the point near Smithfield where the fire was stopped.

Description
The Monument comprises a Doric column built of Portland stone topped with a gilded urn of fire. It was designed by Robert Hooke. Its height marks its distance from the site of the shop of Thomas Farriner (or Farynor), the king's baker, where the blaze began.

The viewing platform near the top of the Monument is reached by a narrow winding staircase of 311 steps. A mesh cage was added in the mid-19th century to prevent people jumping to the ground, after six people died by suicide there between 1788 and 1842.

Three sides of the base carry inscriptions in Latin. The one on the south side describes actions taken by King Charles II following the fire. The inscription on the east side describes how the Monument was started and brought to perfection, and under which mayors. Inscriptions on the north side describe how the fire started, how much damage it caused, and how it was eventually extinguished. The Latin words "Sed Furor Papisticus Qui Tamdiu Patravit Nondum Restingvitur" were added to the end of the inscription on the orders of the Court of Aldermen in 1681 during the foment of the Popish Plot. Text on the east side originally falsely blamed Roman Catholics for the fire ("burning of this protestant city, begun and carried on by the treachery and malice of the popish faction"), which prompted Alexander Pope (himself a Catholic) to say of the area:

The words blaming Catholics were chiselled out with Catholic Emancipation in 1830. The west side of the base displays a relief sculpture by Caius Gabriel Cibber, representing in allegorical form the destruction and restoration of the City of London. The latter is personified by a languishing woman sustained by Time and Providentia; Charles II, assisted by his brother James, directs the reconstruction works surrounded by female allegories of Architecture, Imagination, Freedom, Justice and Fortitude; Envy lies powerlessly at the bottom of the scene, while Plenty and Peace watch benevolently from above. It gives its name to the nearby London Underground station, Monument.

History
The first Rebuilding Act, passed in 1669, stipulated that "the better to preserve the memory of this dreadful visitation", a column of either brass or stone should be set up on Fish Street Hill, on or near the site of Farynor's bakery, where the fire began. Christopher Wren, as surveyor-general of the King's Works, was asked to submit a design. Robert Hooke, then working as an architect for Wren, developed the design. It is impossible to know the extent of the collaboration between Hooke and Wren, but Hooke's drawings of possible designs for the column still exist, with Wren's signature on them indicating his approval of the drawings rather than their authorship. It was not until 1671 that the City Council approved the design, and it took six years to complete the 202 ft column. It was two more years before the inscription (which had been left to Wren – or to Wren's choice –  to decide upon) was set in place. "Commemorating – with a brazen disregard for the truth –  the fact that 'London rises again ... three short years complete that which was considered the work of ages.

Hooke's surviving drawings show that several versions of the monument were submitted for consideration: a plain obelisk, a column garnished with tongues of fire, and the fluted Doric column that was eventually chosen. The real contention came with the problem of what type of ornament to have at the top. Initially, Wren favoured a statue of a phoenix with outstretched wings rising from the ashes, but as the column neared completion he decided instead on a 15 ft statue either of Charles II, or a sword-wielding female to represent a triumphant London; the cost of either being estimated at £1,050. Charles himself disliked the idea of his statue atop the monument and instead preferred a simple copper-gilded ball "with flames sprouting from the top", costing a little over £325, but ultimately it was the design of a flaming gilt-bronze urn suggested by Robert Hooke that was chosen.

The total cost of the monument was £13,450 11s 9d., of which £11,300 was paid to the mason-contractor Joshua Marshall. (Joshua Marshall was Master of the Masons' Company in 1670.)

The Edinburgh-born writer James Boswell visited the Monument in 1763 to climb the 311 steps to what was then the highest viewpoint in London. Halfway up, he suffered a panic attack, but persevered and made it to the top, where he found it "horrid to be so monstrous a way up in the air, so far above London and all its spires".

The area around the base of the column, Monument Street, was pedestrianised in 2006 in a £790,000 street improvement scheme.

The Monument closed in July 2007 for an 18-month, £4.5 million refurbishment project and re-opened in February 2009.

Between 1 and 2 October 2011, a Live Music Sculpture created especially for the Monument by British composer Samuel Bordoli was performed 18 times during the weekend. This was the first occasion that music had ever been heard inside the structure and effectively transformed Hooke's design into a gigantic reverberating musical instrument.

As a scientific instrument
Wren and Hooke built the monument to double-up as a scientific instrument. It has a central shaft meant for use as a zenith telescope and for use in gravity and pendulum experiments that connects to an underground laboratory for observers to work (accessible through a hatch in the floor of the present-day ticket booth). Vibrations from heavy traffic on Fish Street Hill rendered the experimental conditions unsuitable.

At the top of the monument, a hinged lid in the urn covers the opening to the shaft. The steps in the shaft of the tower are all 6 in high, allowing them to be used for barometric pressure studies.

In a study published in 2020, researchers from Queen Mary University of London used the shaft of the monument stairwell to measure deformation in a hanging wire. By twisting and untwisting a wire hanging down the shaft of the stairwell, they were able to detect deformation at less than 9 parts per billion – equivalent to a one-degree twist over the length of the 50 metre wire.

Panoramic camera system
During the 2007–2009 refurbishment, a 360-degree panoramic camera was installed on top of the Monument. Updated every minute and running 24 hours a day, it provides a record of weather, building and ground activity in the city.

Monument Square

The Monument stands in Monument Square, formerly known as Monument Yard which was merged into Monument Street in 1911, created as part of the pedestrianisation of Monument Street. It sits on the east side of Fish Street Hill, and extends to Pudding Lane. A glass pavilion, designed by Bere Architects, was unveiled on 31 January 2007.

In fiction

 * William Godwin, in his novel Deloraine (1833), suggests that, like "the man we are told of, who climbed over the rails at the top of the Monument of London, and clung to them for a while on the outside, there was not room for repentance", meaning that there was no way for the hero, who has just killed his rival, to go back (147).
 * Charles Dickens, in his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, published in 1844, describes the Monument thus:"if the day were bright, you observed upon the house-tops, stretching far away, a long dark path; the shadow of the Monument; and turning round, the tall original was close beside you, with every hair erect upon his golden head, as if the doings of the city frightened him."
 * The Monument is a prominent setting in The System of the World, the third book in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.
 * George, the hero of Charlie Fletcher's children's book Stoneheart, has a fight at the top of the Monument with a raven and a gargoyle.
 * The Monument's viewing platform features in the 1970 film The Man Who Haunted Himself where Roger Moore's character, Harold Pelham, meets a company rival for a secret meeting prior to a company takeover.

title: Monument to the Great Fire of London


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John R. Rice (pastor)

John R. Rice (December 11, 1895 – December 29, 1980) was a Baptist evangelist and pastor and the founding editor of The Sword of the Lord, an influential fundamentalist newspaper.

Childhood and education
John R. Rice was born in Cooke County, Texas, in 1895, the son of William H. and Sallie Elizabeth La Prade Rice, and the oldest of three brothers. Will Rice was a small businessman, a lay preacher, and a one-term state legislator "well respected in the community." (Will Rice was also a Mason, an Odd Fellow, and "an ardent Klansman"—all of which memberships his son later believed were "mistakes.") The death of John R. Rice's mother when he was six years old left a lasting mark on the man.

At twelve Rice made a profession of faith and joined his parents' Southern Baptist Church. After being educated in public schools, he earned a teaching certificate and taught at a local primary school. In 1916 Rice entered Decatur Baptist College in Decatur, Texas, riding his cow pony 120 miles to get there and borrowing $60 on the horse to make his first tuition payment. In 1918, he was drafted into the Army, but after his discharge the following year, he attended Baylor University, from which he graduated in 1920. Rice was attending graduate school at the University of Chicago and volunteering at the Pacific Garden Mission when he was called to the full-time ministry and returned to Texas. He married Lloys McClure Cooke, whom he had met at Decatur, and shortly thereafter he entered Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Early ministry
Rice did not complete his seminary course but in 1923, took a position as the assistant pastor of a Southern Baptist church in Plainview, Texas. The following year he became senior pastor in Shamrock, Texas, an oil boomtown; but in 1926 he left the pastorate for evangelism. Settling in Fort Worth, he became an unofficial associate of J. Frank Norris, pastor of First Baptist Church, who was preparing to leave the Southern Baptist Convention. Rice himself broke with the Southern Baptists in 1927.

During the next few years, Rice held a series of successful revivals in Texas that were promoted by Norris. Rice made converts during his campaigns and then organized the new Christians into at least a half-dozen churches with the name "Fundamentalist Baptist," a title that had come to be associated with Norris. In July 1932, Rice held an open-air evangelistic campaign in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas and hundreds made professions of faith. There Rice organized the Fundamentalist Baptist Tabernacle of Dallas; but instead of moving on, he pastored the church for more than seven years. The congregation of more than a thousand members built two buildings, the first being destroyed by fire. When Rice refused to bend to Norris's will, the older man threatened him and then viciously attacked him in print. Nevertheless, Rice's sermons continued to include much of his mentor's sensationalism, with titles such as "Wild Oats in Dallas--How Dallas People Sow Them and How They Are Reaped," "The Dance--Child of the Brothel, Sister of Gambling and Drunkenness, Mother of Lust--Road to Hell!" and "Diseased, Decaying Bodies with Undying Maggots and Unquenched Fire in Hell"

Rice believed that the mission of churches was "not to take care of Christians" but to "win souls," a notion his mostly lower-middle-class church members did not wholeheartedly endorse. When Rice spent more time away from his pulpit to hold revivals elsewhere, a supply pastor and his supporters staged a coup. Rice decided to reenter evangelism. Yet before he did so, he encouraged the church to change its name from Fundamentalist Baptist Tabernacle to Galilean Baptist Church, thus distinguishing his ministry and that of the church from J. Frank Norris.

Sword of the Lord
In 1934, Rice founded The Sword of the Lord, a bi-weekly publication that grew into an influential fundamentalist Baptist newspaper. At first it was simply the publication of his Dallas church, handed out on the street and delivered door-to-door by Rice's daughters and other Sunday School children.

When Rice re-entered full-time evangelism in 1940, he moved The Sword of the Lord to Wheaton, Illinois, partially to educate his daughters at Wheaton College, and partially to put distance between himself and Norris. Rice had already begun to publish his sermons, and at his death, The Sword of the Lord had printed more than 200 of his books and pamphlets, with more than 60 million copies in print. His sermon booklet, "What Must I Do to Be Saved?" was distributed in over 32 million copies in English, 8.5 million in Japanese, and nearly 2 million in Spanish. Perhaps his most popular books were Prayer--Asking and Receiving (1942) and The Home: Courtship, Marriage and Children (1945). Rice also wrote commentaries on books of the Bible, and he attacked humanism, worldliness (especially movies and dancing), evolution, fraternal lodges, and the Southern Baptist Convention.

A special target was religious liberalism. Rice recalled that while at the University of Chicago, he had heard a message by William Jennings Bryan and then observed a missionary's son turn to infidelity during the subsequent campus discussion. "It was a time of crisis in my life," recalled Rice. "Standing there on the steps of Mandel Hall that spring afternoon with dusk coming on, I felt burning in me a holy fire. I lifted my hand solemnly to God and said, 'If God gives me grace and I have opportunity to smite this awful unbelief that wrecks the faith of all it can, then smite it I will, so help me God!'" Rice became a fierce opponent of the National Council of Churches, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, and prominent liberal ministers, such as Harry Emerson Fosdick, Nels Ferré, and G. Bromley Oxnam.

The Sword circulation grew dramatically. It was thirty thousand in 1940, fifty thousand in 1946, and ninety thousand in 1953, surpassing the circulation of the venerable Moody Monthly. Rice regularly published reports from evangelistic campaigns that became valuable publicity tools for approved revivalists. In 1946, he and other prominent evangelists adopted a code of ethics and a statement of faith to prevent "evangelists from being unduly criticized for commercialism and unethical practices." The same year Bob Jones College conferred on him an honorary Litt. D. degree.

Evangelism conferences
In 1945 Rice began organizing evangelism conferences, which in 1974 became Sword of the Lord Conferences. These meetings drew influential evangelists, such as Hyman Appelman, Joe Henry Hankins, Jack MacArthur, and especially Bob Jones Sr., whom Rice called "the dean of all the evangelists." The conferences attracted large crowds of clergymen from various denominations, not just Baptists. For instance, the Fort Smith conference of August 1952 had an average attendance of six to eight hundred at the morning sessions and a thousand to two thousand in the evenings. So many fundamentalist churches began to accept Rice's role as a clearing house for approved evangelists that to relieve some of the burden, he established a "Sword Extension Department," headed by his brother Bill. The Sword of the Lord even placed babies born to unwed mothers.

Separation from neo-evangelicals
For a brief period during the late 1940s, Rice and The Sword of the Lord held the allegiance of many orthodox Protestant Christians who would shortly be divided into Neo-Evangelical and Fundamentalist camps. While continuing to support older independent evangelists such as Bob Jones Sr. and Hyman Appelman, Rice now also endorsed the newer ministries of Youth for Christ, the Southern Baptist evangelist R. G. Lee, and especially, the young Billy Graham. By 1948, Rice believed Graham might become another Dwight L. Moody or Billy Sunday, and Graham's evangelistic successes were regularly trumpeted in the pages of The Sword of the Lord.

Meanwhile, Graham was distancing himself from fundamentalism. In 1954, Graham spoke to the faculty and student body of liberal Union Theological Seminary in New York, repeatedly referring to his ministry as "ecumenical". Presbyterian fundamentalist Carl McIntire picked up on this "compromising" speech in his Christian Beacon, but Rice continued to defend Graham in The Sword of the Lord. Graham used his considerable charm to remain in Rice's good graces for as long as possible, even inviting the older man to participate in his 1955 Glasgow campaign. At 59, Rice had never been out of the United States, and his response to Graham's red-carpet treatment in Scotland was more effusive praise.

Nevertheless, by 1956, the religious differences between Rice and Graham could no longer be papered over. Rice decided with some annoyance that Graham had been, at best, disingenuous about his relationship with religious liberals. Graham's 1957 New York City campaign was held in cooperation with the Protestant Council of New York, which was "predominantly nonevangelical and even included out-and-out modernists." Rice began to criticize Graham with increasing severity. When the seventy-five-year-old Bob Jones Sr. decided to draw the line of demarcation between fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism, Rice agreed to chair the resolutions committee at a meeting of fundamentalist leaders in Chicago held on December 26, 1958. Ninety attendees signed a pledge, written by Rice's committee, promising not to participate in evangelistic campaigns sponsored by clergymen who denied such cardinal doctrines of orthodox Christian belief as the inspiration of the Bible, the virgin birth, and the bodily resurrection of Christ. The names of Bob Jones Sr., Bob Jones Jr., and John R. Rice headed the list. Rice had clearly cast his lot with such separatist fundamentalists as Carl McIntire, Robert T. Ketcham, W. O. H. Garman, George Beauchamp Vick, Lee Roberson, Oliver B. Greene, and Archer Weniger, while the majority of Protestant evangelicals opted for a less militant position.

The break with Billy Graham left The Sword reeling. Circulation dropped from over 100,000 in 1956 to 67,000 in 1957. Rice was also refused the use of a conference center in Toccoa, Georgia, where he had held Sword rallies for thirteen years, because its founder, R. G. LeTourneau, had sided with neo-evangelicalism. Even more distressing to Rice was the break with radio preacher Charles E. Fuller, whose namesake seminary quickly moved to the vanguard of the neo-evangelical movement. Only a few years earlier, Fuller, Rice, and Jones had appeared together at a rally.

In 1963, Rice moved The Sword of the Lord from Wheaton to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where his brother Bill had established the Bill Rice Ranch, a ministry to the deaf. The cost of living in Murfreesboro was also cheaper than in the Chicago area. But Rice primarily wished to cut his ties with Wheaton, which had become a center of the neo-evangelical movement that he opposed.

Separation from separationists
In 1959, Rice and Bob Jones Sr. held a series of one-day rallies in different parts of the country in an attempt to explain the separationist position to the wavering, and Jones urged that the Sword be made "the official organ" of separatist fundamentalism. Meanwhile, Rice made new, younger, friends. One was Jack Hyles, who in 1959 had become the pastor of First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana; another was Curtis Hutson, who eventually became Rice's successor. A third was Jerry Falwell, pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia.

In 1971, Rice planned a "great world conference on evangelism" that would bring together the various strands of fundamentalism. But Bob Jones Sr. had died three years earlier, and his son and successor, Bob Jones Jr., objected to the inclusion in the conference program of two Southern Baptists, W. A. Criswell and R. G. Lee, whom Jones considered "compromisers and traitors to the cause of Scriptural evangelism." (It did not help that shortly before Jones Sr.'s death, Criswell had referred to him as "a senile old fool.") Jones also opposed Rice's insistence that there be no criticism of Billy Graham (and presumably, neo-evangelicalism) at the conference. Rice argued that his position on separation was the same as that held by Bob Jones Sr. and that there was "nobody living in this world who was more intimately acquainted" with the late evangelist. Not surprisingly, Jones Jr. disagreed, and he and Rice engaged in an exchange of views about separation—Rice in The Sword of the Lord, Jones in a pamphlet, "Facts John R. Rice Will Not Face." To Rice the importance of soulwinning trumped what he considered minor disagreements among Christians about biblical separation.

The upshot was that Rice's planned conference was postponed and then canceled. In November 1971, Bob Jones Jr. and Bob Jones III were dropped from the cooperating board of The Sword to be replaced by Jerry Falwell and Curtis Hutson. In 1976, Jones, Ian Paisley, and Wayne Van Gelderen organized their own "World Congress of Fundamentalists" in Edinburgh. Unlike the split with Billy Graham, however, Rice's refusal to agree with separationist fundamentalists like Bob Jones Jr. and Ian Paisley only enhanced the growth of The Sword. By the mid-1960s, the paper had more than recovered its losses after Rice's criticism of Billy Graham; in 1974, circulation of The Sword of the Lord was over 300,000. Rice had been a major participant in shaping the two most important divisions of late twentieth-century fundamentalism, the split between fundamentalists and neo-evangelicals and then the creation of two fundamentalist factions: Rice's more sentimental and irenic; Jones's more academic, doctrinal, and confrontational.

Personality
Rice was an exceptionally hard worker who rarely took vacations. He once estimated that he had been away from home for thirty years of his forty-five year ministry. His book Home, Courtship, Marriage and Children was written almost entirely on the road, one chapter dictated on a train between Chicago and Albany, most of another while waiting for a plane at LaGuardia. A daughter who took a semester out of college to play the piano for Rice in two large revivals was there also pressed into service taking his dictation and typing the manuscript of the final chapters of the book. He claimed that woodworking was his hobby, but although he had all the necessary tools, he never had the time to use them. A brick room behind his house intended for woodworking was eventually used for storage.

Rice was gracious with praise and commanded the loyalty of his staff. He had a sometimes corny sense of humor—such as asking service station attendants, "Do you know where I could buy some gasoline?" or walking by a table filled with his own books and remarking to potential buyers, "I have read these books and find them to be sound." He liked dogs, horses, and children. Once he was discovered after a service playing hopscotch. He wrote texts and picked out melodic lines for dozens of simple gospel songs, mostly about revival and soulwinning. He was extremely frugal; there was never a hint of scandal about his personal life, and the testimonies of his six daughters were a credit to his ministry. Once on a car trip from Dallas to Chicago, Rice prayed, "Lord, help me to find someone I can win." He then missed a turn in Oklahoma and drove fifty miles out of the way. At a gas station where he stopped to ask directions, he led the attendant to Christ. Still upset about the unplanned detour, his daughters giggled at him, reminding him of his earlier prayer.

At 81, with a hearing aid, suffering from arthritis, and aware that his memory was "not quick as it was years ago," Rice still managed to be at the office most mornings at 6:30. In 1978, he had a heart attack, then a second, more serious one in April 1980. He died of a stroke on December 29. The staff counted 22,923 letters that had come to Rice between the beginning of his writing ministry and his death, each reporting that the writer had found Christ through Rice's books or booklets or through a sermon published in The Sword of the Lord.

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title: John R. Rice (pastor)


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William Jerdan

William Jerdan FSA (16 April 1782 – 11 July 1869), Scottish journalist, was born at Kelso, Scotland. During the years between 1799 and 1806, he spent short periods in a country lawyer's office, a London West India merchant's counting house, an Edinburgh solicitor's chambers, and held the position of surgeon's mate on board H.M. guardship Gladiator in Portsmouth Harbour, under his uncle, who was surgeon.

He went to London in 1806 and became a newspaper reporter. He was in the lobby of the House of Commons on 11 May 1812, when Spencer Perceval was shot, and was the first to seize the assassin. By 1812, he had become editor of The Sun, a semi-official Tory paper started by John Heriot in 1792; he was still there in 1815 and occasionally inserted literary articles, then quite an unusual proceeding; but a quarrel with the chief proprietor brought that engagement to a close in 1817. He passed next to the editor's chair of The Literary Gazette, which he conducted with success for thirty-four years.

Jerdan's position as editor brought him into contact with many distinguished writers. An account of his friends, among whom Canning was a special intimate, is to be found in his Men I have Known (1866); the men featured in the book include William Buckland, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edward Forbes, F.R.S. (with a colourful, eyewitness account of one of Forbes' early oceanographic dredging operations) and William Wordsworth. When Jerdan retired in 1850 from the editorship of The Literary Gazette, his pecuniary affairs were far from satisfactory. A testimonial of over £900 was subscribed by his friends; and in 1853 a government pension of 100 guineas was conferred on him by Lord Aberdeen. He published his Autobiography in four volumes from 1852 to 1853.

His grave in Bushey has a memorial sculpted by Joseph Durham.

title: William Jerdan


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Lexicostatistics

Lexicostatistics is a method of comparative linguistics that involves comparing the percentage of lexical cognates between languages to determine their relationship. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative method but does not reconstruct a proto-language. It is to be distinguished from glottochronology, which attempts to use lexicostatistical methods to estimate the length of time since two or more languages diverged from a common earlier proto-language. This is merely one application of lexicostatistics, however; other applications of it may not share the assumption of a constant rate of change for basic lexical items.

The term "lexicostatistics" is misleading in that mathematical equations are used but not statistics. Other features of a language may be used other than the lexicon, though this is unusual. Whereas the comparative method used shared identified innovations to determine sub-groups, lexicostatistics does not identify these. Lexicostatistics is a distance-based method, whereas the comparative method considers language characters directly. The lexicostatistics method is a simple and fast technique relative to the comparative method but has limitations (discussed below). It can be validated by cross-checking the trees produced by both methods.

History
Lexicostatistics was developed by Morris Swadesh in a series of articles in the 1950s, based on earlier ideas. The concept's first known use was by Dumont d'Urville in 1834 who compared various "Oceanic" languages and proposed a method for calculating a coefficient of relationship. Hymes (1960) and Embleton (1986) both review the history of lexicostatistics.

Create word list
The aim is to generate a list of universally used meanings (hand, mouth, sky, I). Words are then collected for these meaning slots for each language being considered. Swadesh reduced a larger set of meanings down to 200 originally. He later found that it was necessary to reduce it further but that he could include some meanings that were not in his original list, giving his later 100-item list. The Swadesh list in Wiktionary gives the total 207 meanings in a number of languages. Alternative lists that apply more rigorous criteria have been generated, e.g. the Dolgopolsky list and the Leipzig–Jakarta list, as well as lists with a more specific scope; for example, Dyen, Kruskal and Black have 200 meanings for 84 Indo-European languages in digital form.

Determine cognacies
A trained and experienced linguist is needed to make cognacy decisions. However, the decisions may need to be refined as the state of knowledge increases. However, lexicostatistics does not rely on all the decisions being correct. For each pair of words (in different languages) in this list, the cognacy of a form could be positive, negative or indeterminate. Sometimes a language has multiple words for one meaning, e.g. small and little for not big.

Calculate lexicostatistic percentages
This percentage is related to the proportion of meanings for a particular language pair that are cognate, i.e. relative to the total without indeterminacy. This value is entered into an $N×N$ table of distances, where N is the number of languages being compared. When completed, this table is half-filled in triangular form. The higher the proportion of cognacy the closer the languages are related.

Create family tree
Creation of the language tree is based solely on the table found above. Various sub-grouping methods can be used but that adopted by Dyen, Kruskal and Black was:
 * all lists are placed in a pool
 * the two closest members are removed and form a nucleus which is placed in the pool
 * this step is repeated
 * under certain conditions a nucleus becomes a group
 * this is repeated until the pool only contains one group.

Calculations have to be of nucleus and group lexical percentages.

Applications
A leading exponent of lexicostatistics application has been Isidore Dyen. He used lexicostatistics to classify Austronesian languages as well as Indo-European ones. A major study of the latter was reported by Dyen, Kruskal and Black (1992). Studies have also been carried out on Amerindian and African languages.

Pama-Nyungan
The problem of internal branching within the Pama-Nyungan language family has been a long-standing issue for Australianist linguistics, and general consensus held that internal connections between the 25+ different subgroups of Pama-Nyungan were either impossible to reconstruct or that the subgroups were not in fact genetically related at all. In 2012, Claire Bowern and Quentin Atkinson published the results from their application of computational phylogenetic methods on 194 doculects representing all major subgroups and isolates of Pama-Nyungan. Their model "recovered" many of the branches and divisions that had erstwhile been proposed and accepted by many other Australianists, while also providing some insight into the more problematic branches, such as Paman (which is complicated by the lack of data) and Ngumpin-Yapa (where the genetic picture is obscured by very high rates of borrowing between languages). Their dataset forms the largest of its kind for a hunter-gatherer language family, and the second largest overall after Austronesian (Greenhill et al. 2008 ). They conclude that Pama-Nyungan languages are in fact not exceptional to lexicostatistical methods, which have successfully been applied to other language families of the world.

Criticisms
People such as Hoijer (1956) have showed that there were difficulties in finding equivalents to the meaning items while many have found it necessary to modify Swadesh's lists. Gudschinsky (1956) questioned whether it was possible to obtain a universal list.

Factors such as borrowing, tradition and taboo can skew the results, as with other methods. Sometimes lexicostatistics has been used with lexical similarity being used rather than cognacy to find resemblances. This is then equivalent to mass comparison.

The choice of meaning slots is subjective, as is the choice of synonyms.

Improved methods
Some of the modern computational statistical hypothesis testing methods can be regarded as improvements of lexicostatistics in that they use similar word lists and distance measures.

title: Lexicostatistics


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Natural philosophy

Natural philosophy or philosophy of nature (from Latin philosophia naturalis) is the philosophical study of physics, that is, nature and the physical universe. It was dominant before the development of modern science.

From the ancient world (at least since Aristotle) until the 19th century, natural philosophy was the common term for the study of physics (nature), a broad term that included botany, zoology, anthropology, and chemistry as well as what we now call physics. It was in the 19th century that the concept of science received its modern shape, with different subjects within science emerging, such as astronomy, biology, and physics. Institutions and communities devoted to science were founded. Isaac Newton's book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) (English: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) reflects the use of the term natural philosophy in the 17th century. Even in the 19th century, the work that helped define much of modern physics bore the title Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867).

In the German tradition, Naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature) persisted into the 18th and 19th centuries as an attempt to achieve a speculative unity of nature and spirit, after rejecting the scholastic tradition and replacing Aristotelian metaphysics, along with those of the dogmatic churchmen, with Kantian rationalism. Some of the greatest names in German philosophy are associated with this movement, including Goethe, Hegel, and Schelling. Naturphilosophie was associated with Romanticism and a view that regarded the natural world as a kind of giant organism, as opposed to the philosophical approach of figures such as John Locke and others espousing a more mechanical philosophy of the world, regarding it as being like a machine.

Origin and evolution of the term
The term natural philosophy preceded current usage of natural science (i.e. empirical science). Empirical science historically developed out of philosophy or, more specifically, natural philosophy. Natural philosophy was distinguished from the other precursor of modern science, natural history, in that natural philosophy involved reasoning and explanations about nature (and after Galileo, quantitative reasoning), whereas natural history was essentially qualitative and descriptive.

In the 14th and 15th centuries, natural philosophy was one of many branches of philosophy, but was not a specialized field of study. The first person appointed as a specialist in Natural Philosophy per se was Jacopo Zabarella, at the University of Padua in 1577.

Modern meanings of the terms science and scientists date only to the 19th century. Before that, science was a synonym for knowledge or study, in keeping with its Latin origin. The term gained its modern meaning when experimental science and the scientific method became a specialized branch of study apart from natural philosophy, especially since William Whewell, a natural philosopher from the University of Cambridge, proposed the term "scientist" in 1834 to replace such terms as "cultivators of science" and "natural philosopher".

From the mid-19th century, when it became increasingly unusual for scientists to contribute to both physics and chemistry, "natural philosophy" came to mean just physics, and the word is still used in that sense in degree titles at the University of Oxford and University of Aberdeen. In general, chairs of Natural Philosophy established long ago at the oldest universities are nowadays occupied mainly by physics professors. Isaac Newton's book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), whose title translates to "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy", reflects the then-current use of the words "natural philosophy", akin to "systematic study of nature". Even in the 19th century, a treatise by Lord Kelvin and Peter Guthrie Tait, which helped define much of modern physics, was titled Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867).

Greek philosophers defined it as the combination of beings living in the universe, ignoring things made by humans. The other definition refers to human nature.

Scope
Plato's earliest known dialogue, Charmides, distinguishes between science or bodies of knowledge that produce a physical result, and those that do not. Natural philosophy has been categorized as a theoretical rather than a practical branch of philosophy (like ethics). Sciences that guide arts and draw on the philosophical knowledge of nature may produce practical results, but these subsidiary sciences (e.g., architecture or medicine) go beyond natural philosophy.

The study of natural philosophy seeks to explore the cosmos by any means necessary to understand the universe. Some ideas presuppose that change is a reality. Although this may seem obvious, there have been some philosophers who have denied the concept of metamorphosis, such as Plato's predecessor Parmenides and later Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus, and perhaps some Eastern philosophers. George Santayana, in his Scepticism and Animal Faith, attempted to show that the reality of change cannot be proven. If his reasoning is sound, it follows that to be a physicist, one must restrain one's skepticism enough to trust one's senses, or else rely on anti-realism.

René Descartes' metaphysical system of mind–body dualism describes two kinds of substance: matter and mind. According to this system, everything that is "matter" is deterministic and natural—and so belongs to natural philosophy—and everything that is "mind" is volitional and non-natural, and falls outside the domain of philosophy of nature.

Branches and subject matter
Major branches of natural philosophy include astronomy and cosmology, the study of nature on the grand scale; etiology, the study of (intrinsic and sometimes extrinsic) causes; the study of chance, probability and randomness; the study of elements; the study of the infinite and the unlimited (virtual or actual); the study of matter; mechanics, the study of translation of motion and change; the study of nature or the various sources of actions; the study of natural qualities; the study of physical quantities; the study of relations between physical entities; and the philosophy of space and time. (Adler, 1993)

History
Humankind's mental engagement with nature certainly predates civilization and the record of history. Philosophical, and specifically non-religious thought about the natural world, goes back to ancient Greece. These lines of thought began before Socrates, who turned from his philosophical studies from speculations about nature to a consideration of man, viz., political philosophy. The thought of early philosophers such as Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Democritus centered on the natural world. In addition, three Presocratic philosophers who lived in the Ionian town of Miletus (hence the Milesian School of philosophy), Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, attempted to explain natural phenomena without recourse to creation myths involving the Greek gods. They were called the physikoi ("natural philosophers") or, as Aristotle referred to them, the physiologoi. Plato followed Socrates in concentrating on man. It was Plato's student, Aristotle, who, in basing his thought on the natural world, returned empiricism to its primary place, while leaving room in the world for man. Martin Heidegger observes that Aristotle was the originator of conception of nature that prevailed in the Middle Ages into the modern era:

"The Physics is a lecture in which he seeks to determine beings that arise on their own, τὰ φύσει ὄντα, with regard to their being. Aristotelian 'physics' is different from what we mean today by this word, not only to the extent that it belongs to antiquity whereas the modern physical sciences belong to modernity, rather above all it is different by virtue of the fact that Aristotle's 'physics' is philosophy, whereas modern physics is a positive science that presupposes a philosophy.... This book determines the warp and woof of the whole of Western thinking, even at that place where it, as modern thinking, appears to think at odds with ancient thinking. But opposition is invariably comprisedof [sic] a decisive, and often even perilous, dependence. Without Aristotle's Physics there would have been no Galileo."

Aristotle surveyed the thought of his predecessors and conceived of nature in a way that charted a middle course between their excesses.

"Plato's world of eternal and unchanging Forms, imperfectly represented in matter by a divine Artisan, contrasts sharply with the various mechanistic Weltanschauungen, of which atomism was, by the fourth century at least, the most prominent... This debate was to persist throughout the ancient world. Atomistic mechanism got a shot in the arm from Epicurus... while the Stoics adopted a divine teleology... The choice seems simple: either show how a structured, regular world could arise out of undirected processes, or inject intelligence into the system. This was how Aristotle... when still a young acolyte of Plato, saw matters. Cicero... preserves Aristotle's own cave-image: if troglodytes were brought on a sudden into the upper world, they would immediately suppose it to have been intelligently arranged. But Aristotle grew to abandon this view; although he believes in a divine being, the Prime Mover is not the efficient cause of action in the Universe, and plays no part in constructing or arranging it... But, although he rejects the divine Artificer, Aristotle does not resort to a pure mechanism of random forces. Instead he seeks to find a middle way between the two positions, one which relies heavily on the notion of Nature, or phusis."

"The world we inhabit is an orderly one, in which things generally behave in predictable ways, Aristotle argued, because every natural object has a "nature"—an attribute (associated primarily with form) that makes the object behave in its customary fashion..." Aristotle recommended four causes as appropriate for the business of the natural philosopher, or physicist, "and if he refers his problems back to all of them, he will assign the 'why' in the way proper to his science—the matter, the form, the mover, [and] 'that for the sake of which. While the vagaries of the material cause are subject to circumstance, the formal, efficient and final cause often coincide because in natural kinds, the mature form and final cause are one and the same. The capacity to mature into a specimen of one's kind is directly acquired from "the primary source of motion", i.e., from one's father, whose seed (sperma) conveys the essential nature (common to the species), as a hypothetical ratio.

 * Material cause : An object's motion will behave in different ways depending on the [substance/essence] from which it is made. (Compare clay, steel, etc.)
 * Formal cause   : An object's motion will behave in different ways depending on its material arrangement. (Compare a clay sphere, clay block, etc.)
 * Efficient cause : That which caused the object to come into being; an "agent of change" or an "agent of movement".
 * Final cause    : The reason that caused the object to be brought into existence.

From the late Middle Ages into the modern era, the tendency has been to narrow "science" to the consideration of efficient or agency-based causes of a particular kind:

"The action of an efficient cause may sometimes, but not always, be described in terms of quantitative force. The action of an artist on a block of clay, for instance, can be described in terms of how many pounds of pressure per square inch is exerted on it. The efficient causality of the teacher in directing the activity of the artist, however, cannot be so described…

The final cause acts on the agent to influence or induce her to act. If the artist works 'to make money,' making money is in some way the cause of her action. But we cannot describe this influence in terms of quantitative force. The final cause acts, but it acts according to the mode of final causality, as an end or good that induces the efficient cause to act. The mode of causality proper to the final cause cannot itself be reduced to efficient causality, much less to the mode of efficient causality we call 'force.'"

In ancient Greece
Early Greek philosophers studied motion and the cosmos. Figures like Hesiod regarded the natural world as offspring of the gods, whereas others like Leucippus and Democritus regarded the world as lifeless atoms in a vortex. Anaximander deduced that eclipses happen because of apertures in rings of celestial fire. Heraclitus believed that the heavenly bodies were made of fire that were contained within bowls. He thought that eclipses happen when the bowl turned away from the earth. Anaximenes is believed to have stated that an underlying element was air, and by manipulating air someone could change its thickness to create fire, water, dirt, and stones. Empedocles identified the elements that make up the world, which he termed the roots of all things, as fire, air, earth, and water. Parmenides argued that all change is a logical impossibility. He gives the example that nothing can go from nonexistence to existence. Plato argues that the world is an imperfect replica of an idea that a divine craftsman once held. He also believed that the only way to truly know something was through reason and logic not the study of the object itself, but that changeable matter is a viable course of study.

Aristotle's philosophy of nature

 * "An acorn is potentially, but not actually, an oak tree. In becoming an oak tree, it becomes actually what it originally was only potentially. This change thus involves passage from potentiality to actuality — not from non-being to being but from one kind or degree to being another"

Aristotle held many important beliefs that started a convergence of thought for natural philosophy. Aristotle believed that attributes of objects belong to the objects themselves, and share traits with other objects that fit them into a category. He uses the example of dogs to press this point. An individual dog may have very specific attributes (ex. one dog can be black and another brown) but also very general ones that classify it as a dog (ex. four-legged). This philosophy can be applied to many other objects as well. This idea is different from that of Plato, with whom Aristotle had a direct association. Aristotle argued that objects have properties "form" and something that is not part of its properties "matter" that defines the object. The form cannot be separated from the matter. Given the example that you can not separate properties and matter since this is impossible, you cannot collect properties in a pile and matter in another.

Aristotle believed that change was a natural occurrence. He used his philosophy of form and matter to argue that when something changes you change its properties without changing its matter. This change occurs by replacing certain properties with other properties. Since this change is always an intentional alteration whether by forced means or by natural ones, change is a controllable order of qualities. He argues that this happens through three categories of being: non-being, potential being, and actual being. Through these three states the process of changing an object never truly destroys an object's forms during this transition state but rather just blurs the reality between the two states. An example of this could be changing an object from red to blue with a transitional purple phase.

Medieval philosophy of motion
Medieval thoughts on motion involved much of Aristotle's works Physics and Metaphysics. The issue that medieval philosophers had with motion was the inconsistency found between book 3 of Physics and book 5 of Metaphysics. Aristotle claimed in book 3 of Physics that motion can be categorized by substance, quantity, quality, and place. where in book 5 of Metaphysics he stated that motion is a magnitude of quantity. This disputation led to some important questions to natural philosophers: Which category/categories does motion fit into? Is motion the same thing as a terminus? Is motion separate from real things? These questions asked by medieval philosophers tried to classify motion.

William of Ockham gives a good concept of motion for many people in the Middle Ages. There is an issue with the vocabulary behind motion that makes people think that there is a correlation between nouns and the qualities that make nouns. Ockham states that this distinction is what will allow people to understand motion, that motion is a property of mobiles, locations, and forms and that is all that is required to define what motion is. A famous example of this is Occam's razor, which simplifies vague statements by cutting them into more descriptive examples. "Every motion derives from an agent." becomes "each thing that is moved, is moved by an agent" this makes motion a more personal quality referring to individual objects that are moved.

Natural philosophy in the early modern period
The scientific method has ancient precedents, and Galileo exemplifies a mathematical understanding of nature, which is a hallmark of modern natural scientists. Galileo proposed that objects falling regardless of their mass would fall at the same rate, as long as the medium they fall in is identical. The 19th-century distinction of a scientific enterprise apart from traditional natural philosophy has its roots in prior centuries. Proposals for a more "inquisitive" and practical approach to the study of nature are notable in Francis Bacon, whose ardent convictions did much to popularize his insightful Baconian method. The Baconian method is employed throughout Thomas Browne's encyclopaedia Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646–1672), which debunks a wide range of common fallacies through empirical investigation of nature. The late-17th-century natural philosopher Robert Boyle wrote a seminal work on the distinction between physics and metaphysics called, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, as well as The Skeptical Chymist, after which the modern science of chemistry is named, (as distinct from proto-scientific studies of alchemy). These works of natural philosophy are representative of a departure from the medieval scholasticism taught in European universities, and anticipate in many ways, the developments that would lead to science as practiced in the modern sense. As Bacon would say, "vexing nature" to reveal "her" secrets (scientific experimentation), rather than a mere reliance on largely historical, even anecdotal, observations of empirical phenomena, would come to be regarded as a defining characteristic of modern science, if not the very key to its success. Boyle's biographers, in their emphasis that he laid the foundations of modern chemistry, neglect how steadily he clung to the scholastic sciences in theory, practice and doctrine. However, he meticulously recorded observational detail on practical research, and subsequently advocated not only this practice, but its publication, both for successful and unsuccessful experiments, so as to validate individual claims by replication.

"For sometimes we use the word nature for that Author of nature whom the schoolmen, harshly enough, call natura naturans, as when it is said that nature hath made man partly corporeal and partly immaterial. Sometimes we mean by the nature of a thing the essence, or that which the schoolmen scruple not to call the quiddity of a thing, namely, the attribute or attributes on whose score it is what it is, whether the thing be corporeal or not, as when we attempt to define the nature of an angel, or of a triangle, or of a fluid body, as such. Sometimes we take nature for an internal principle of motion, as when we say that a stone let fall in the air is by nature carried towards the centre of the earth, and, on the contrary, that fire or flame does naturally move upwards toward heaven. Sometimes we understand by nature the established course of things, as when we say that nature makes the night succeed the day, nature hath made respiration necessary to the life of men. Sometimes we take nature for an aggregate of powers belonging to a body, especially a living one, as when physicians say that nature is strong or weak or spent, or that in such or such diseases nature left to herself will do the cure. Sometimes we take nature for the universe, or system of the corporeal works of God, as when it is said of a phoenix, or a chimera, that there is no such thing in nature, i.e. in the world. And sometimes too, and that most commonly, we would express by nature a semi-deity or other strange kind of being, such as this discourse examines the notion of."

Natural philosophers of the late 17th or early 18th century were sometimes insultingly described as 'projectors'. A projector was an entrepreneur who invited people to invest in his invention but – as the caricature went – could not be trusted, usually because his device was impractical. Jonathan Swift satirized natural philosophers of the Royal Society as 'the academy of projectors' in his novel Gulliver's Travels. Historians of science have argued that natural philosophers and the so-called projectors sometimes overlapped in their methods and aims.

Current work in the philosophy of science and nature
In the middle of the 20th century, Ernst Mayr's discussions on the teleology of nature brought up issues that were dealt with previously by Aristotle (regarding final cause) and Kant (regarding reflective judgment).

Especially since the mid-20th-century European crisis, some thinkers argued the importance of looking at nature from a broad philosophical perspective, rather than what they considered a narrowly positivist approach relying implicitly on a hidden, unexamined philosophy. One line of thought grows from the Aristotelian tradition, especially as developed by Thomas Aquinas. Another line springs from Edmund Husserl, especially as expressed in The Crisis of European Sciences. Students of his such as Jacob Klein and Hans Jonas more fully developed his themes. Last, but not least, there is the process philosophy inspired by Alfred North Whitehead's works.

Among living scholars, Brian David Ellis, Nancy Cartwright, David Oderberg, and John Dupré are some of the more prominent thinkers who can arguably be classed as generally adopting a more open approach to the natural world. Ellis (2002) observes the rise of a "New Essentialism". David Oderberg (2007) takes issue with other philosophers, including Ellis to a degree, who claim to be essentialists. He revives and defends the Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition from modern attempts to flatten nature to the limp subject of the experimental method. In Praise of Natural Philosophy: A Revolution for Thought and Life (2017), Nicholas Maxwell argues that we need to reform philosophy and put science and philosophy back together again to create a modern version of natural philosophy.

title: Natural philosophy


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Albany Fonblanque

Albany William Fonblanque (1793 – 13 October 1872) was an English journalist, and by his own example a reformer of the journalist's profession.

Family
Fonblanque, descended from a French Huguenot family was born in London. His grandfather, John de Grenier Fonblanque, had been a banker naturalised in England under the name Fonblanque; his son, John Anthony Fonblanque, was Albany's father. Albany's mother, Frances Caroline Fitzgerald, was a granddaughter of Colonel Samuel Martin of Antigua, West Indies and niece of Samuel Martin. Her brother was the poet William Thomas Fitzgerald.

Albany Fonblanque married Caroline Keane. They had a daughter and three sons.

Education
Fonblanque was sent to Tonbridge School and then to the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, to prepare for a career in the Royal Engineers. However, his health fell short and his studies were suspended. On his recovery he studied law, with a view to being called to the bar. At the age of 19 (in 1812), he began writing for newspapers and soon gained attention for the boldness and liberality of his opinions and for the superiority of his style amid what Macaulay, when speaking of him, called the "rant and twaddle" of the daily and weekly press. While he shared in all the political struggles of this eventful period, he also studied classical and political philosophy for at least six hours a day. This regime led to his health breaking down again, but he continued to write regularly for newspapers and reviews and make a reasonable living.

From 1820 to 1830, Fonblanque was employed on the staff of The Times and the Morning Chronicle, whilst contributing to the Examiner to the London Magazine and the Westminster Review.

The Examiner
In 1826, Fonblanque became political commentator for The Examiner, a weekly newspaper founded by Leigh and John Hunt in 1808. In 1828 the paper was purchased by Rev. Dr. Fellowes, author of the Religion of the Universe and other works, and given over to Fonblanque's complete control. For 17 years up to 1847, he sustained the high character for political independence and literary ability that The Examiner had gained under the direction of Leigh Hunt and his brother John, and even compelled his political opponents to acknowledge some delight in the boldness and brightness of the wit he directed against them.

When it was proposed that supporters of the paper should facilitate a reduction in its price by paying their subscriptions ten years in advance, they were joined by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and by Benjamin Disraeli, who was then flirting with radicalism. Fonblanque remained at the Examiner despite many offers of other literary employment, resolving to make it a standard of literary excellence in journalism.

Fonblanque entirely took over The Examiner in 1830, serving as editor until 1847. Among the contributors he found were John Stuart Mill, John Forster, William Makepeace Thackeray, and most notably Charles Dickens. Fonblanque wrote the first notice of Sketches by Boz (on 28 February 1836) and of The Pickwick Papers (on 4 September 1836). Forster became the magazine's literary editor in 1835, and succeeded Fonblanque as editor from 1847 to 1855. Fonblanque retained ownership until 1865. The magazine ceased publication in 1886.

Board of Trade
Fonblanque was offered the governorship of Nova Scotia; but though greatly interested in colonial matters and using every effort to advocate a more generous political system leading to colonial self-government, he again decided not to abandon his beloved Examiner. In 1847, however, domestic reasons induced him to accept the post of statistical secretary of the Board of Trade. This compelled him to resign from The Examiner, although he continued to contribute to it under the control of John Forster. During the later years of his life Fonblanque took no prominent part in public affairs. He died aged 79. By then he was, as his nephew Edward Fonblanque observed, a man who had lived and toiled in an age gone by, in a cause long since established.

Albany Fonblanque's political activity may be judged from his England under Seven Administrations (1837), which compares the course of social and political events in England frnm 1826 to 1837. As a journalist, he must be regarded in the light of a reformer.

Changing attitudes to journalists
Journalism before Fonblanque's day was seen as a somewhat discreditable profession: men of culture were shy of entering it, lest they be confused with the ruder combatants fighting for public notice. Fonblanque, with his strong and earnest political convictions and exceptional literary ability, did not hesitate to choose the field as one where a politician and a man of letters might usefully and honourably put forth his gifts. A good account of him appears in the Life and Labours of Albany Fonblanque, edited by his nephew, Edward Barrington de Fonblanque (London, 1874). It includes a collection of his articles with a brief biographical notice.

title: Albany Fonblanque


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Donativum

The donativum (plural donativa) was a gift of money by the Roman emperors to the soldiers of the Roman legions or to the Praetorian Guard. The English translation is donative.

The purpose of the donativa varied. Some were expressions of gratitude for favors received, and others outright bribery for favours expected in return. Donativa were normally rendered at the beginning of each new emperor's reign. During the 2nd and 3rd centuries, that form of bribery became a crucial part of any successful ruler in Rome. Such was the case with many of the soldier-emperors from 235 to 248.

The Praetorian Guard, intimate to the emperor's person, was an even greater threat to security. The cohorts stationed in Rome were difficult to appease and quick to assassinate. The donativum thus provided a significant way to purchase the Guard's support and loyalty.

Emperor Augustus bequeathed the Praetorian Guard a substantial sum in his will, but it was not until the reign of Tiberius that gifts of money were thought to be mandatory. The Praetorian Guard received such gifts for turning a blind eye when Sejanus, the praetorian prefect, fell from power. Each Praetorian Guard received 10 gold pieces in return for not defending Sejanus.

In 41, after the assassination of Caligula, the Guard supported Claudius, and the Senate briefly learned that the Guard had installed him on the throne. Claudius gave them 150 gold pieces, or some 3,750 denarii to which the senators' 100 sesterces were added annually to commemorate Claudius's accession. The inevitable result of the custom of the donativum was the Guard's auctioning of the empire to Didius Julianus in 193.

title: Donativum


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Mobile Army Surgical Hospital

Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH) were U.S. Army field hospital units conceptualized in 1946 as replacements for the obsolete World War II-era Auxiliary Surgical Group hospital units. MASH units were in operation from the Korean War to the Gulf War before being phased out in the early 2000s. Each MASH unit had 60 beds, as well as surgical, nursing, and other enlisted and officer staff available at all times. MASH units filled a vital role in military medicine by providing support to army units upwards of 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers. These units had a low mortality rate compared to others, as the transportation time to hospitals was shorter, resulting in fewer patients dying within the "Golden Hour", the first hour after an injury is first sustained, which is referred to in trauma as the "most important hour". The U.S. Army deactivated the last MASH unit on February 16, 2006, and the successors to Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals are combat support hospitals.

World War I
A precursor to MASH units, the American Expeditionary Force Mobile Hospital No. 1 was established, following the example of the French military automobile-chirurgical units shortly after the American entry to the war.

World War II
Principles for a mobile medical unit and their implementation were established through trial and error in the dental field during World War II by Major Vincent P. Marran, a medic in the United States Third Army. The effectiveness of his efforts were widely admired and supported by the command structure, but no formal designation was established. The first trials for what would become MASH units were established by the U.S. Army during World War II. The necessity for the U.S. Army to have more convenient treatment centers was shown by the long logistics of the stretched out supply lines during World War II. These units were known as "Auxiliary Surgical Groups" and would care for the wounded much closer than permanent hospitals, making them hospitals. In the early 1940s, Colonel Michael DeBakey and his colleague were selected to give recommendations on how to provide surgical care for the U.S. Army. The result was the ASG. Although these units were very inexperienced, they were incredibly effective resulting in five ASG units being created in 1943; this resulted in the ASG units being able to move along with the U.S. Army units located in Italy and was the basis in which MASH would directly come from.

Korean War

Formally, the MASH unit was conceived by Michael E. DeBakey and other surgical consultants as the "mobile army surgical hospital". Col. Harry A. Ferguson, the executive officer of the Tokyo Army Hospital, also aided in the establishment of the MASH program. It was an alternative to the random individual systems of portable surgical hospitals, field hospitals, and general hospitals used during World War II. It was designed to get experienced personnel closer to the front, so that the wounded could be treated sooner and with greater success. Casualties were first treated at the point of injury through buddy aid, then routed through Battalion Aid Stations for emergency stabilizing surgery, and finally routed to the MASH for the most extensive treatment. This proved to be highly successful; during the Korean War, a seriously wounded soldier who made it to a MASH unit alive had a greater than 97% chance of survival once he received treatment. MASH units often took 24 hours to set up at new locations once moved with armored units, trucks and airmobile. Airmobile or the early stages, known today as helicopters, were crucial to the war effort as they were fast traveling units that could pickup casualties and deliver them effectively back to MASH units. With mountainous terrain in Korea, this was crucial as ground transport could compromise the patients lives and would take longer to arrive to MASH units.

In 1997, the last MASH unit in South Korea was deactivated. A deactivating ceremony was held in South Korea, which was attended by several members of the cast of the M*A*S*H television series, including Larry Linville (who played Frank Burns), and David Ogden Stiers (who played Charles Winchester).

Vietnam War
The Vietnam War had little action for the MASH units within the U.S Army. The Vietnam War marked the demise of the MASH units as only one unit, known as the "2nd MASH Unit", served actively, and only from October 1966 to July 1967. The Vietnam War was a very different environment from the Korean War which MASH units were created in. The Vietnam War required a change from MASH to MUST, or "Medical Unit, Self-contained, Transportable" units. MUST units had trailers, inflatable sections, and technology focused on a wider range of wounds from war. In MUST units the wounds were greatly different than in the Korean War resulting in many changes needed to the units as a whole with new innovations required. New treatments were also needed for burn victims with MASH units suffering a mortality rate of up to 90% for burn victims. Although this clearly showed progress in the medical field, the type of warfare changed making MASH obsolete in many cases. MUST units had to keep their equipment on standby at all times effectively replacing MASH units and later transferring into more revolutionized units in war-zones. The idea of a MASH unit is to be available at all times to those who have been wounded in combat on the front and required general or trauma surgery but as technology got better, there was a lot more room to improve transportation, technology used to treat soldiers, and the layout of these units resulting in MASH units being converted to MUST units.

Gulf War
During the Gulf War, in September 1990, the main body of the 5th MASH, 44th Medical Brigade, XVIII Airborne Corps, Fort Liberty, North Carolina, deployed to King Abdul-Aziz Air Base, Royal Saudi Air Force, Daharan Saudi Arabia and was the first fully functional Army hospital in the country. Their forward surgical team and Advanced Party had deployed in mid August to Daharan. This unit moved forward six times, always as the first up hospital for the region. In February 1991, the 5th MASH was operationally attached to the 24th Infantry Division to provide forward surgical care (often right on the front battle lines) to the combat units that attacked the western flank of the Iraqi army. In March 1991, the 159th MASH of the Louisiana Army National Guard operated in Iraq in support of the 3rd Armored Division during Operation Desert Storm.

Other MASH units that served in 1990–91 included the 2nd MASH, 1st Medical Group, Benning; the 10th MASH, 1st Medical Group, Carson; the 115th MASH (DCARNG); the 475th MASH (341st Med Group, KY USAR); the 807th MASH (341st Med Group, KY USAR); and the 912th MASH (TN USAR).

Operation Iraqi Freedom
The 212th MASH – based in Miesau Ammo Depot, Germany – was deployed to Iraq in 2003, supporting coalition forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was the most decorated combat hospital in the U.S. Army, with 28 campaign streamers on the organizational colors. The 212th MASH's last deployment was to Pakistan to support the 2005 Kashmir earthquake relief operations. The U.S. State Department bought the MASH's tents and medical equipment, owned by the DoD, and donated the entire hospital to the Pakistani military, a donation worth $4.5 million.

Conversion to Combat Support Hospital
Internationally, the last MASH unit in the U.S. Army was converted to a Combat Support Hospital on October 16, 2006.

The 212th MASH's unit sign now resides at the Army Medical Department's Museum in San Antonio, Texas.

In addition, one of the last MASH units worldwide was located in Pakistan serving as a civilian hospital to aid in recovery efforts following an earthquake in 2006. Known as the 212th MASH unit which was originally in Miesau, Germany, it was re-established for the Iraq War. In addition to treating soldiers, they treated over thirty thousand civilians. With an average survival rate of 97%, this was impressive considering how many victims there were of an earthquake and the longevity of these units from the late 1940s to the early 2000s. Although these hospitals were very effective in being able to provide suitable care to those in the battlefield and civilian populations, the MASH units soon became obsolete as MASH units were made for conventional wars; the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the Iraq War were in different terrains than they were designed for resulting in different needs as they were much harder to traverse than Korea. New transportation vehicles such as the Bell H-13 (known as the first evac helicopter) and later the Sikorsky UH-60 made airmobile and other ground units ineffective in desert and tropical terrain. Lastly, technology made for treating patients in the operating room and elsewhere has gotten much more complex resulting in more space and care needed to treat soldiers along with many fewer troops being deployed.

Field care

The Korean War played a great role in defining MASH units. High casualties in the front line called for onsite paramedic care, such as ambulances and medical tents. Having learned from World War II that transporting wounded soldiers to rear hospitals was highly inefficient in reducing mortality rate, MASH units were established near front lines to supply mobile and flexible military medical care. They contributed to making improvements in resuscitation and trauma care, patient transport, blood storage and distribution, patient triage, and evacuation. The aeromedical evacuation system was developed to transport soldiers by aircraft at a quicker pace. Helicopters were frequently used as "air ambulances" during the Korean War, with the Bell H-13 serving as a predominant medical evacuation aircraft during the war. Military doctors stabilized wounded soldiers midair before getting them to a field hospital. MASH onsite paramedic care and air ambulance system decreased post evacuation mortality from 4% in World War II to 2.5% in the Korean War.

Triage
MASH units played an important role in the development of the triage system, a technique that underscores emergency room (ER) medicine in hospitals today.

The system allows for caregivers to prioritize patient's wounds and injuries in order to get those who are severely injured treated as soon as possible. The patient's status is determined an overview of their respiratory, perfusion, and mental status. The current triage system consists of color-coding; each patient (and at times their different wounds) are tagged with either a black, red, yellow, or green tag.

 * {| cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0"

 * style="background:black; color:white;" |Black
 * Deceased or so severely wounded that there is no hope for survival.
 * style="background:red; color:white;" |Red
 * Requires immediate treatment in order to survive.
 * style="background:yellow; color:black;" |Yellow
 * Not in immediate danger but requires medical care. Requires observation.
 * style="background:green; color:white;" |Green
 * Wounds or injuries that aren't completely disabling. Referred to as "walking wounded."
 * }
 * style="background:green; color:white;" |Green
 * Wounds or injuries that aren't completely disabling. Referred to as "walking wounded."
 * }

While the concept of triage had been used years before the Korean War, it wasn't until MASH units put it into real practice that the idea was fully developed. World War I and World War II saw the introduction of chemical weapons, such as mustard gas, which created a large influx of casualties and the need for more organization. Triage was first performed on the soldiers at battalion aid stations. Those who worked in the stations, be they nurses or medical officers, used the system to determine which soldiers needed further care or treatment and which soldiers could go back onto the battlefield. The soldiers that needed further treatment were then transferred to the MASH units to undergo triage once more. This time, nurses and doctors would work to prioritize who needed to be taken into surgery first; if it appeared that the soldier wouldn't survive much longer without surgery they were prioritized. MASH units typically followed the saying, "life takes precedence over limb, function over anatomical defects", a phrase which essentially means that they had to repair the most serious defect first. This thought process has since rolled over to the modern technique of triage in ERs nationwide.

In popular culture
The MASH unit made its way into popular culture through the 1968 novel MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors by Richard Hooker, the 1970 feature film based on the novel, and the long-running television sitcom (1972–1983) also based on the novel. A 1953 film, Battle Circus, also took place at a MASH.

For narrative simplicity, the "4077th MASH" unit depicted in the novel, movie, and television series was smaller than real MASH units. The fictional 4077th consisted of four general surgeons and one neurosurgeon, around 10 nurses, and 50–70 enlisted men. In an average 24-hour period, they could go through 300 wounded soldiers. By comparison, the 8076th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital had personnel including 10 medical officers, 12 nursing officers, and 89 enlisted soldiers of assorted medical and non-medical specialties. On one occasion, the unit handled over 600 casualties in a 24-hour period.

title: Mobile Army Surgical Hospital


text:
Assemblies of God

The World Assemblies of God (AG), officially the World Assemblies of God Fellowship, is an international Pentecostal denomination.

As an international fellowship, the member denominations are entirely independent and autonomous, but they are united by shared beliefs and history. Pentecostalism originated from the Azusa Street Revival of the early 20th century.

This revival led to the founding of the Apostolic Faith Mission in 1911, later named the Assemblies of God in Brazil in 1918, in 1914, of the Assemblies of God in the United States, the first Finished Work Pentecostal denomination after white ministers separated from the historically African American Church of God in Christ through which many had licenses and ordination credentialing. Since its founding, in the initial years AG was strongly influenced by Aimee Semple McPherson, who was ordained evangelist in 1919 by the Assemblies of God US until she branched away from AG in 1922 and went on to found the Foursquare Church in 1923.

The denomination was formed from several Finished Work Pentecostal groups who held to the doctrine of progressive sanctification that left the Church of God in Christ (a Holiness Pentecostal denomination), Christian and Missionary Alliance (a Charismatic but non-Pentecostal denomination), and various other denominations, including those of Reformed and Baptist origins.

Through foreign missionary work and establishing relationships with other Pentecostal churches, the Assemblies of God expanded into a worldwide movement. It was not until 1988 that the world fellowship was formed. As a Pentecostal fellowship, the Assemblies of God believes in the Pentecostal distinctive of baptism with the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues.

Origins
Beginning in 1911, many white ministers affiliated with the Church of God in Christ expressed dissatisfaction with African-American leadership. In 1913, 353 white ministers formed a new church, which gave its own credentials, although still using the same name (Church of God in Christ). In April 1914, after separating from the black-founded Church of God in Christ over disagreements with governance and credentials, about 300 preachers and laymen from 20 states and several foreign countries met for a general council in Hot Springs, Arkansas, United States. A new fellowship emerged from the meeting and was incorporated under the name General Council of the Assemblies of God in the United States of America.

In time, self-governing and self-supporting general councils broke off from the original fellowship or formed independently in several nations throughout the world, originating either from indigenous Pentecostal movements or as a direct result of the indigenous missions strategy of the General Council. In 1919, Pentecostals in Canada united to form the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, which formally affiliated with the Assemblies of God USA the following year. The Assemblies of God in Great Britain formed in 1924 and would have an early influence on the Assemblies of God in Australia, now known as Australian Christian Churches. The Australian Assemblies of God formed in 1937 through a merger of the Pentecostal Church of Australia and the Assemblies of God Queensland. The Queensland AG had formed in 1929; though, it was never formally affiliated with the AG in America. The Assemblies of God of South Africa, founded in 1925, like the AG Queensland was also not initially aligned with the US fellowship.

Before 1967, the Assemblies of God, along with the majority of other Pentecostal denominations, officially opposed Christian participation in war and considered itself a peace church. The US Assemblies of God continues to give full doctrinal support to members who are led by religious conscience to pacifism.

International fellowship

In 1988, the various Assemblies of God national fellowships united to form the World Pentecostal Assemblies of God Fellowship at the initiative of Dr. J. Philip Hogan, then executive director of the Division of Foreign Missions of the Assemblies of God in the United States. The initial purpose was to coordinate evangelism, but soon developed into a more permanent organism of inter-relation.

Dr. Hogan was elected the first chairman of the Fellowship and served until 1992 when Rev. David Yonggi Cho was elected chairman. In 1993, the name of the Fellowship was changed to the World Assemblies of God Fellowship. In 2000, Thomas E. Trask was elected to succeed Cho. At the 2008 World Congress in Lisbon, Portugal, George O. Wood, General Superintendent of the Assemblies of God in the United States, was elected chairman. At the 2011 World AG Congress in Chennai, India, D. Mohan, General Superintendent of the All India Assemblies of God, was elected vice chairman.

Statistics
According to a census published by the association in 2022, it has 367,398 churches and 68,500,000 members worldwide.

Beliefs

The doctrinal position of the Assemblies of God is framed in a classical Pentecostal and evangelical context. The AG is Trinitarian. It believes that the Bible is divinely inspired and the infallible authoritative rule of faith and conduct. Baptism by immersion is practiced as an ordinance instituted by Christ for those who have been saved. Baptism is understood as an outward sign of an inward change from being dead in sin to being alive in Christ. As an ordinance, Communion is also practiced. The AG believes that the elements that are partaken are symbols of the sharing of Jesus of Nazareth's divine nature; a memorial of His suffering and death; and a prophecy of His second coming. The Assemblies of God also strongly emphasizes the fulfillment of the Great Commission and believes this is the church's calling.

As classical Pentecostals, the Assemblies of God believes all Christians are entitled to and should seek baptism in the Holy Spirit. The AG teaches that this experience is distinct from and subsequent to the experience of salvation. Baptism in the Holy Spirit empowers the believer for Christian life and service. The initial evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit is speaking in tongues "as the Spirit gives utterance" (Acts 2:4), It also believes in the present-day use of other spiritual gifts such as divine healing.

The Assemblies of God ordains women as pastors, which many Christians, especially from evangelical denominations, but also from traditional churches such as Orthodox and Catholic denominations, consider liberal and progressive, putting them in complete disagreement with the other Pentecostal denominations.

While the World AG Fellowship has a statement of faith that outlines the basic beliefs that unify the various branches of the movement, each national AG denomination formulates its own doctrinal statements. The Assemblies of God USA, for example, adheres to the Statement of Fundamental Truths.

Politics
The most prominent politician within the Assemblies of God is the ex-Australian prime minister Scott Morrison. He has said, "the Bible is not a policy handbook, and I get very worried when people try to treat it like one". In late 2017, Morrison said he would become a stronger advocate for protections for religious freedom.

In Brazil, the local branch Assembleias de Deus has had an increasing influence on politics throughout the early 21st century. The Christian fundamentalist party Patriota is in a parliamental coalition with the Bolsonaro government as well as the centre-right Partido Social Cristão, which is led by two AG pastors, Everaldo Pereira and Marco Feliciano, who were accused in various cases of crime and sexual misconduct. Everaldo was arrested for his participation in a corruption scheme in the state-owned company of water treatment of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Companhia Estadual de Águas e Esgotos do Rio de Janeiro; Feliciano proved his innocence and that he was a victim of a conspiracy planned by former PSC member Patricia Lelis, who was charged with false reporting and extortion before fleeing to the United States, where she was again charged and arrested for the same crime.

Another Brazilian politician and AG member, Marina Silva, pursues ecologist ideas and supports the rights of the indigenous tribes of her country. The church leadership has criticized Silva's leftist stances on many issues, such as drug reform.

In the United States, most of its membership votes or leans Republican. During Donald Trump's presidency, General Superintendent George O. Wood attended the National Day of Prayer and praised an executive order allowing ministers and religious organizations to support and advocate for political candidates.

Organization
The World Fellowship unites Assemblies of God national councils from around the world together for cooperation. Each national council is fully self-governing and independent and involvement with the World Fellowship does not limit this independence. The work of the World Fellowship is carried out by the Executive Council. Executive Council members represent different regions of the world and serve three-year terms. Africa, Asia Pacific, Latin America/Caribbean, and North America each have four representatives, Europe has three, and the Middle East and Southern Asia each have one. They are elected by the General Assembly. Each World Fellowship member is entitled to send one or more delegates to the General Assembly with one vote. The General Assembly also elects the Chairman, Vice Chairman, and Secretary of the World Fellowship. At both the national and lower level, the Assemblies of God are generally structured around a form of presbyterian polity, combining the independence of the local church with oversight by district and national councils.

The World Assemblies of God Relief Agency (WAGRA) directs its humanitarian work.

Controversies
In 1916, American pastor F. F. Bosworth, a founding member of the organization, criticized the Assemblies of God Statement of Fundamental Truths for its excessive stance on glossolalia as a mandatory "initial sign" of baptism of the Holy Spirit and left it in 1918. In revising the 1918 declaration, leaders qualified the statement of belief to be understood as the "initial physical sign" of baptism of the Holy Spirit.

There have been reports of leaders and lay members of the Assemblies of God in Brazil who hold to Reformed Theology in some of its local congregations.

title: Assemblies of God


text:
London River Services

London River Services Limited is a division of Transport for London (TfL), which manages passenger transport—leisure-oriented tourist services and commuter services—on the River Thames in London. It does not own or operate any boats itself, except those of the Woolwich Ferry, but licenses the services of operators.

River service had been a common means of transport in London for centuries, but died off in the early 1900s, as transportation was enhanced (and river traffic somewhat blocked) with a proliferation of bridges and tunnels. With these numerous north–south crossings of the Thames, which is generally no more than 300m wide as it runs through central London, the revival of river boat services in London therefore mostly travel east or west along the Thames rather than across it; the only major cross-river ferry services are to be found further downstream where the river is wider, and there are far fewer bridge/tunnel crossings.

The decision to revive London's river service network moved forward in 1997 with the launch of "Thames", a £21-million project (£ million today) to regenerate the River Thames and create new passenger transport services on the Thames. While the service is not as extensive as those of Hong Kong or Sydney, it has been growing: in 2007, more than 700,000 commuters travelled by river on Thames Clippers services, one of the operators on the system; in 2013 the Thames Clippers service had grown to 3.3 million, as it had become more integrated into the tube and bus ticketing network; in 2014 their figure was 3.8 million; in 2015 it was forecasted that their ridership would increase to 4.3 million by 2016, supported by the addition of new Clipper boats. By 2018, there were 21 different operators carrying daily commuter, leisure, charter, or sightseeing passengers to various combinations of the 33 piers on the system.

History
Before the construction of London's bridges and the Underground, the River Thames had served as a major thoroughfare for centuries. Attempts to regulate the transport of passengers and goods began in 1197, when King Richard I sold the Crown's rights over the Thames to the City of London Corporation, which then attempted to license boats on the river. In 1510 Henry VIII granted a licence to watermen that gave exclusive rights to carry passengers on the river, and in 1555 an Act of Parliament set up the Company of Watermen and Lightermen to control traffic on the Thames.

For centuries the only bridge across the Thames was London Bridge. Crossing the river by wherry (small wooden rowing boat) was a common mode of transport.

19th century
Passenger steamboats were introduced in 1815 and the use of the river as a means of public transport increased greatly. River services ran from Gravesend, Margate and Ramsgate via Greenwich and Woolwich into central London. By the mid-1850s about 15,000 people per day travelled to work on steamboat services – twice the number of passengers on the newly emerging railways. With increased congestion on the river, collisions and other accidents became correspondingly more frequent, most notably with the Princess Alice disaster at Woolwich in 1878.

While the introduction of large steamboats and bridge construction had taken business from the Thames watermen, the growth of the railways took passengers away from the steamboat services and the use of the river for public transport began a steady decline. River service companies struggled financially, and in 1876 the five main boat companies merged to form the London Steamboat Company. The company ran a half-hourly service from Chelsea to Greenwich for eight years until it went bankrupt in 1884. Nevertheless, river services continued under different management into the next century. Many of the Thames paddle steamers around this time were built by the Thames Ironworks at Bow Creek.

20th century
In 1905 the London County Council (LCC) launched its own public river transport service to complement its new tram network, acquiring piers and investing in a large fleet of 30 paddle-steamers. Frequent services operated from Hammersmith to Greenwich. The LCC river service was not a success; in the first year it ran up debts of £30,000. It was shut down in 1907 after only two years' service.

Numerous proposals for "river bus" services were considered throughout the 20th century, although the few that were realised were cancelled after a short time in service. During World War II, from 13 September 1940 to 2 November 1940, a temporary wartime river bus service was introduced, running every 20 minutes, between Westminster and Woolwich using converted pleasure cruisers provided by the Port of London Authority to replace train, tram and trolleybus services which were disrupted by the bombing of the Blitz. London Transport bus inspectors and conductors issued and checked the tickets on board the boats.

With the move of the Port of London downstream in the 1960s, regular river transport was limited to a few sightseeing boats.

Revival of passenger services
In 1997 Secretary of State for Transport John Prescott launched Thames 2000, a £21-million project to regenerate the River Thames in time for the Millennium Celebrations and boost new passenger transport services on the Thames. The centrepiece of these celebrations was to be the Millennium Dome, but there was also a plan to provide a longer-term legacy of public transport boat services and piers on the river.

The Cross-River Partnership, a consortium of local authorities, private sector organisations and voluntary bodies, recommended the creation of a public body to co-ordinate and promote river services. This agency, provisionally titled the Thames Piers Agency, would integrate boat services into other modes of public transport, take control of Thames piers from the Port of London Authority, and commission the construction of new piers.

The result was the formation in 1999 of London River Services (LRS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Transport for London.

Mayor Ken Livingstone's Transport Strategy for London 2005 stated that: "The safe use of the Thames for passenger and freight services should be developed. Passenger services will be encouraged, particularly services that relate to its cultural and architectural excellence and tourism. Use of London's other navigable waterways for freight, consistent with their roles for leisure use and as ecosystems, will be encouraged."

21st century
Today, LRS is responsible for integrating river transport with the rest of the public transport network, such as the Tube and buses. It promotes boat services under the London River Services brand, issuing timetables and river maps.

LRS is also responsible for directly managing eight piers on the river, and invested in LRS-branded signage and passenger information.

LRS supports the Thames Clipper commuter service financially and increased the peak service frequency to a boat every 15 minutes. In April 2009 the signing of a "River Concordat" by London's pier owners, boat operators, borough councils and Transport for London was announced, committing the various parties to improving ticketing, piers and passenger information, and to closer integration into the transport network.

London River Services is not responsible for maintaining the river itself; the Port of London Authority takes care of river traffic control, security, navigational safety (including buoys, beacons, bridge lights and channel surveys), and the RNLI operates Thames lifeboat services.

Branding
The public presentation of London River Services is visually associated with existing TfL design standards, using identical graphic design elements to those used on London Underground publicity, signage and other elements, drawing on the design heritage of Frank Pick.

The London River Services brand is a sub-brand of TfL which uses the familiar Tube roundel, originally devised for London Underground and now established as the corporate branding for all TfL services. The River Services roundel is a dark blue (Pantone 072) bar on pale blue (Pantone 299) circle.

The corporate signage, stationery and literature of TfL services, including LRS, use the New Johnston typeface.

LRS publishes diagrammatic river maps in the style of Harry Beck's iconic Tube map. Tube maps published by TfL since 2000 denote river interchange stations with a boat symbol.

Services
The service patterns advertised by TfL can vary according to season. They are divided into three main types:

River Bus commuter services
Numbered River Bus services (abbreviated to RB) run to a timetable through the day with more frequent services during peak rush hour times. Most services run seven days a week, although some do not operate at weekends. Many operators offer discounted fares to Travelcard holders. The main lines of operation are: The catamaran-hulled vessels have on-board coffee bars, airline-style seating, are wheelchair-accessible and have bicycle racks.

Ferry services
In central London, the River Thames is narrow enough to allow it to be crossed by many bridges; further downstream however, the river widens and there are fewer bridge crossings. Two ferry services are still in operation: Two other ferry services operate upstream in west London: Hammerton's Ferry and the Hampton Ferry. These services are independent of London River Services as they do not serve LRS-managed piers.

Leisure services
Leisure boats are aimed mainly at the tourist market; as they do not usually provide rush hour services, they are not normally suitable for commuting. Some boat companies run regular scheduled services, others may run twice daily, only on certain days of the week, or only during certain months of the year. Boats may also be chartered for private hire. Destinations are often tourist attractions such as the Tate Galleries or Hampton Court Palace.
 * Bankside – Waterloo – Millbank (Tate to Tate)
 * Festival Pier – High Speed RIB Tours (Operated By Rib Tours London)
 * London Eye River Cruise
 * Multilingual Circular Cruise
 * Greenwich Pier Sunday Evening Thames Sightseeing Cruise (Campion Launches)
 * MV Balmoral and Paddle Steamer Waverley Cruises from Tower Pier
 * Richmond – Kingston – Hampton Court
 * Tilbury/Gravesend – Greenwich
 * Westminster – Kew – Richmond – Hampton Court
 * Westminster – St Katharine's Hop-on, Hop-off circular service
 * Westminster – Waterloo – Tower – Greenwich
 * Westminster Pier – High Speed RIB Tours (Operated By Thames Jet)
 * Westminster Pier – Tower Bridge Quay – Greenwich Pier – Thames Flood Barrier (Barrier Gardens Pier) (Operated by Thames River Services)

Operators
Scheduled tourist and commuter services on the river are operated by a number of private companies, including:

Charter services, usually catering for large parties, are also available from these and other operators.

Piers
London River Services lists 24 piers on the River Thames in its publications, of which 8 are managed directly by LRS.

Millennium Piers
In 2000, five new piers were opened with funding from the Millennium Commission under its Thames 2000 project, with a grant of £7,177,000:
 * Tower Millennium Pier
 * Blackfriars Millennium Pier
 * London Eye Pier
 * Westminster Millennium Pier
 * Millbank Millennium Pier

The new piers were provided to improve previously neglected travel connections on the Thames and promote the river as an alternative means of public transport.

List of piers
Scheduled tourist and commuter services use the following piers, although no single service serves all the piers listed. The piers are listed in order going downstream:

Fares and ticketing
Unlike the underground and bus networks, boat operators have their own separate ticketing arrangements and charge separate fares which are generally higher than corresponding journeys by tube or bus. The only exception is the Woolwich Ferry, which is free of charge.

Oyster card is valid on most Thames Clipper services for single fares, offering a ten percent discount. Most boat operators offer discounts to Travelcard holders, as well as to Freedom Pass holders and students.

Ticket sales at piers are managed independently by the operators, and tickets are sold at separate kiosks with no facility for cross-ticketing. Many piers have a line of several sales desks, each owned by a different boat firm. Single tickets can often be bought on board the boat, but this is down to individual operator arrangements.

Some operators offer their own season tickets and carnets of single tickets. Thames Clipper, for example, offer a one-day Roamer ticket which allows multiple journeys within off-peak hours.

title: London River Services