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Rh stationary or slightly declining, increased from 8334 (1891) to 9981 (1901), and 12,730 (1906). The city was almost destroyed by fire on the 23rd of June 1908, but it was quickly rebuilt.

 THRENODY, a lament written in verse, a dirge, a funeral ode composed in honour of a dead personage. The word is an adaptation of the Greek, a funeral dirge, from lamentation, wailing,, I cry aloud, and , a song, ode,, to sing.

 THRESHOLD, the door-sill, the piece of stone or wood which is placed at the bottom of a door, gate, or entrance to a house or other building. The word is used in psychology as the equivalent of Ger. Schwelle and of Lat. limen, i.e. the lowest limit of sensation, the point at which the intensity of sensation becomes just noticeable. Etymologically threshold (O. Eng. þerscold, M. Eng. þreswold) has usually been divided "thresh," i.e. thrash, beat, and wold, wald, wood; the word meaning the pieces of wood beaten or trampled by the feet. The termination, as is shown by the Old English form, has probably no connexion with wald, but is merely a suffix, as in O. H. Ger. driscüfli, threshold. The first part is certainly "thrash," beat; some have supposed that in early times the entrance to a house was used as a threshing-floor.

THRIFT, economy in personal or domestic expenditure, the habit and practice of saving, careful or frugal management in money matters. The word, which is borrowed from Scandinavian languages, meant the condition of one who thrives or prospers (M. Eng. thriven, Icel. þrifa, to clutch, seize, Norw. triva, seize). There are several species of plants, such as the sea-pink, Armeria maritima, or March rosemary (Stalice) which from their vigorous growth are often termed "thrift."

THRING, EDWARD (1821–1887), English schoolmaster, was the son of John Gale Dalton Thring, rector of Alford, Somerset, and was born on the 19th of November 1821. His elder brother was Henry, afterwards Lord, Thring (1818–1907) the distinguished Parliamentary counsel (1868–1886), who was made a peer in 1886. Edward was educated first at Ilminster grammar school and afterwards at Eton, where he became head of the school, and Captain of Montem in 1841, the last occasion on which that ancient festival was celebrated. He then entered King’s College, Cambridge, won the Porson Prize for Greek Verse, and was elected fellow. At that time King’s College scholars retained the privilege of proceeding to a degree without examination, but Thring thought the maintenance of this usage inexpedient in the interests of learning and wholly indefensible in principle, and his vigorous protests against it aroused lively academic controversy, and became effective in 1851, when it was abolished. On leaving the university in 1846 he was ordained, and served for a short time as curate in Gloucester. Here he took remarkable interest in the elementary school of the parish, and ever afterwards attributed much of his professional success and his insight into educational principles and methods to the experience he had acquired in imparting the humble rudiments of learning to the children of the poor. After an interval of two or three years, spent partly in private tuition and partly as curate at Cookham Dean, he married in 1853 a daughter of Carl Koch, commissioner of customs at Bonn, and was elected to the mastership of Uppingham School, a post which he retained until his death in 1887. That school had been founded in 1584, was slenderly endowed, poorly housed, and little known. Thring found only twenty-five boys in it, but he succeeded in raising it, both in numbers and repute, to a position in the first rank among English public schools. He had a strong conviction that there should be a limit to the number of pupils entrusted to the care of one head master, and he fixed that limit at 300, although, owing to the increasing popularity of the school, he was under strong temptation to exceed it. Little by little he surrounded himself with a loyal staff of masters, raised money for the building and equipment of a nohle schoolroom and chapel, besides class-rooms and eleven boarding-houses. Among the distinctive features of his plans and achievements were: (1) his strong sense of the need for a closer study of the characteristics of individual boys than is generally found possible in large puhlic schools; (2) his resolute adherence to the discipline of the ancient languages, in connexion with English, as the staple of a liberal education; (3) his careful provision of a great variety of additional employments and interests, in studies and in games, to suit the aptitudes of different pupils; (4) the value he attached to the aesthetic side of school training, as evinced in the encouragement he gave to music and to drawing and to the artistic decoration of the schoolrooms; and above all (5) his rehellion against mere routine, and his constant insistence on the moral purpose of a school as a training-ground for character, rather than as a place solely concerning itself with the acquisition of knowledge. The vigour and intrepidity of his character were conspicuously shown in 1875, when an outbreak of fever made Uppingham for a time untenable, and when, at a few days’ notice, he took a disused hotel and some boarding-houses at Borth, on the Cardiganshire coast, and transported the whole 300 boys, with 30 masters and their households, to it as to a city of refuge. Here the school was carried on with undiminished and even fresh zest and efficiency for fourteen months, during which needful sanitary measures were taken in the town.

Unlike Arnold, with whose moral earnestness and lofty educational aims he was in strong sympathy, he took little or no part in outside controversies, political or ecclesiastical. All the activity of his life centred round the school. His was the first public school to establish a gymnasium, and the first to found a town mission in a district of South London, with a view to interest the boys in an effort to improve the social condition of the poor. He took the first step in 1869 in the formation of the Head Masters’ Conference, an institution which has ever since done much to suggest improvements in method and to cultivate a sense of corporate life and mutual helpfulness among the teachers in the great schools. And in 1887 he took the hold and unprecedented step of inviting the Association of Head Mistresses to Uppingham, and giving to them a sympathetic address. He also formed an association in Uppingham, with lectures, cookery classes, concerts, and other aids to the intellectual and social improvement of the residents of the little town. He gave valuable evidence before the Schools Inquiry Commission of Lord Taunton in 1866, but it was very characteristic of him that he dreaded the! intrusion of public authority, whether that of royal commissioners or of the legislature, into the domain of the school, wherein he thought it indispensable that the liberty and personal inventiveness and enthusiasm of teachers should have full scope and be hindered by no official regulations.

THROAT (O. Eng. þrotu, þrote or þrota, possibly from þreōtan, to press, whence threat, or, with loss of initial s, connected with strut, to swell), the term applied to the front external part of the neck from below the chin to the collar-bone in human and animal anatomy, and to the internal parts, which include the gullet, viz. the fauces, pharynx and oesophagus, and the windpipe, viz. the larynx and trachea (see, , and : Anatomy; and for diseases see , , , and ).