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 AMENDMENT (through the O. Fr. amender, to correct, from Lat. mendum, a fault), an improvement, correction or alteration (nominally at least) for the better. The word is used either of moral character or, more especially, in connexion with “amending” a bill or motion in parliament or resolution at a meeting; and in law it signifies the correction of any defect or error in the record of a civil action or on a criminal indictment. All written constitutions also usually contain a clause providing for the method by which they may be amended. Another noun, in the plural form of “amends,” is restricted in its meaning to that of the penalty paid for a fault or wrong committed. In its French form the amende, or amende honorable, once a public confession and apology when the offender passed to the seat of justice barefoot and bareheaded, now signifies in the English phrase a spontaneous and satisfactory rectification of an error.

AMENTIFERAE, or, a name which has been used to include in one class several natural orders of plants which bear their flowers in catkins (amenta). They are trees and shrubs chiefly of temperate climates, and include many common British trees. It comprised the following orders:—Salicaceae, willows and poplars; Corylaceae, hazel, hornbeam; Betulaceae, birch, alder; Fagaceae, oak, beech, chestnut; Casuarinaceae, Casuarina (beefwood); Platanaceae, plane; Juglandaceae, walnut; Myricaceae, bog myrtle. This class is not retained in the most modern systems of classification.

AMERCEMENT, or (derived, through the Fr. à merci, from Lat. merces, pay), in English law, an arbitrary pecuniary penalty, inflicted in old days on an offender by the peers or equals of the party amerced. The word has in modern times become practically a poetical synonym for fine or deprivation. But an amercement differed from a fixed fine, prescribed by statute, by reason of its arbitrary nature; it represented a commutation of a sentence of forfeiture of goods, while a fine was originally a composition agreed upon between the judge and the prisoner to avoid imprisonment. The fixing or assessment of an amercement was termed an affeerment. In the lower courts the amercement was offered by a jury of the offender’s neighbours (affeerors); in the superior courts by the coroner, except in the case of officers of the court, when the amount was affeered by the judges themselves. All judgments were entered on the court roll as “in mercy” (sit in misericordia), and the word misericordia, or some contracted form of it, was written on the margin. Articles twenty to twenty-two of Magna Carta regulated the assessment of amercements.

 AMERIA (mod. Amelia), a city of Umbria, situated about 65 m. N. of Rome on the Via Amerina (which approached it from the S. starting from Falerii and passing through Castellum Amerinum, probably mod. Orte, where it crossed the Tiber). It has a fine position, 1332 ft. above sea-level, and still retains considerable remains of the city wall, built in polygonal masonry of carefully jointed blocks of limestone, some 12 ft. in total thickness, and showing traces of reconstruction at different periods. Various remains of the Roman period exist between the walls, including a large water reservoir divided into ten chambers. The lofty campanile of the cathedral was erected in 1050 with fragments of Roman buildings. Ameria is not mentioned in the history of the Roman conquest of Umbria, but is alluded to as a flourishing place, with a fertile territory extending to the Tiber, by Cicero in his speech in defence of Sextus Roscius Amerinus, and its fruit is often extolled by Roman writers. Augustus divided its lands among his veterans, but did not plant a colony here. The bishopric of Ameria was founded in the middle of the 4th century.

 AMERICA.—I. Physical Geography.—The accidental use of a single name, America, for the pair of continents that has a greater extension from north to south than any other continuous land area of the globe, has had some recent justification, since the small body of geological opinion has turned in favour of the theory of the tetrahedral deformation of the earth’s crust as affording explanation of the grouping of continents and oceans. America, broadening in the north as if to span the oceans by reaching to its neighbours on the east and west, tapering between vast oceans far to the south where the nearest land is in the little-known Antarctic regions, roughly presents the triangular outline that is to be expected from tetrahedral warping; and although greatly broken in the middle, and standing with the northern and southern parts out of a meridian line, America is nevertheless the best witness among the continents of to-day to the tetrahedral theory. There seems to be, however, not a unity but a duality in its plan of construction, for the two parts, North and South America, resemble each other not only in outline but, roughly speaking, in geological evolution also; and the resemblances thus discovered are the more remarkable when it is considered how extremely small is the probability that among all the possible combinations of ancient mountain systems, modern mountain systems and plains, two continents out of five should present so many points of correspondence. Thus regarded, it becomes reasonable to suppose that North and South America have in a broad way been developed under a succession of somewhat similar strains in the earth’s crust, and that they are, in so far, favourable witnesses to the theory that there is something individual in the plan of continental growth. The chief points of correspondence between these two great land masses, besides the southward tapering, are as follows:—(1) The areas of ancient fundamental rocks of the north-east (Laurentian highlands of North America, uplands of Guiana in South America), which have remained without significant deformation, although suffering various oscillations of level, since ancient geological times; (2) the highlands of the south-east (Appalachians and Brazilian highlands) with a north-east south-west crystalline axis near the ocean, followed by a belt of deformed and metamorphosed early Palaeozoic strata, and adjoined farther inland by a dissected plateau of nearly horizontal later Palaeozoic formations—all greatly denuded since the ancient deformation of the mountain axis, and seeming to owe their present altitude to broad uplifts of comparatively modern geological date; (3) the complex of younger mountains along the western side of the continents (Western highlands, or Cordilleras, of North America; Andean Cordilleras of South America) of geologically modern deformation and upheaval, with enclosed basins and abundant volcanic action, but each a system in itself, disconnected and not standing in alignment; (4) confluent lower lands between the highlands, giving river drainage to the north (Mackenzie, Orinoco), east (St Lawrence, Amazon), and south (Mississippi, La Plata). Differences of dimension and detail are numerous, but they do not suffice to mask what seems to be a resemblance in general plan. Indeed, some of the chief contrasts of the two continents arise not so much from geological unlikeness as from their unsymmetrical situation with respect to the equator, whereby the northern one lies mostly in the temperate zone, while the southern one lies mostly in the torrid zone. North America is bathed in frigid waters around its broad northern shores; its mountains bear huge glaciers in the north-west; the outlying area of Greenland in the north-east is shrouded with ice; and in geologically recent times a vast ice-sheet has spread over its north-eastern third; while warm waters bring corals to its southern shores. South America has warm waters and corals on the north-east, and cold waters and glaciers only on its narrowing southern end. If the symmetry that is so noticeable in geological history had extended to climate as well, many geographical features might now present likenesses instead of contrasts.

The relation of the Americas to each other and to the rest of the world, as the home of plants and animals, is greatly affected by the breadth of the adjacent oceans, and also by the geologically recent changes of altitude whereby the breadth of the narrower parts of the lands and the oceans has been significantly altered. Between the parallels of 60° and 70° N. the east and west widening of North America forms more than a third of the almost continuous land ring around a zone of sub-Arctic climate, through the middle of which runs the Arctic circle. As a result there is a remarkable community of resemblance of plant and animal life in the high northern latitudes of North America and Eurasia. In strong contrast with this relation of close fellowship is the exceptional