For sundry men had placards then
Such child to take.
Tusser, Author’s Life.
Others are of the contrary opinion, and that Christianity gives us a placard to use these sports; and that man’s charter of dominion over the creatures enables him to employ them as well for pleasure as necessity.—Fuller, Holy State, b. iii. c. 13.
Plantation. We still ‘plant’ a colony, but a ‘plantation’ is now of trees only; and not of men. There was a time when ‘The Plantations’ was the standing name by which our transatlantic colonies were known. One of Bacon’s state-papers has this title, ‘Certain Considerations touching the Plantation in Ireland.’
It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people and wicked condemned men to be the people with whom you plant: and not only so, but it spoileth the plantation.—Lord Bacon, Essays, 33.
Plantations make mankind broader, as generation makes it thicker.—Fuller, Holy State, b. iii. c. 16.
Platform. This word has lost much of its meaning, that is in England; for it is very far from having so done in America. The only ‘platforms’ which we know of here are structures of boards erected to serve a temporary need. But a ‘platform’ was once a scheme or pattern on which, as on a ground-plan, other things, moral or material, might be disposed. Statesmen had their ‘platform’ of policy; Churches their ‘platform’ of doctrine and discipline; and so is it still in America, where the word is in constant use.
They, [the courtiers of Dionysius] were every one occupied about drawing the platform of Sicilia, telling the nature of the Sicilian Sea, and reckoning up the havens and places looking towards Africk.—North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 456.
The platform of this Tabernacle was by God delivered to Moses on the Mount, with a strict charge to make all things conformable thereunto.—Fuller, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, b. iv. c. 4.