[10] According to Philo (Opera, i. 504, ed. Mangey), they symbolized respectively water, earth, air and fire.
[11] Other accounts of its composition, drawn from Rabbinical sources, will be found in various works on Jewish antiquities; see, for example, Reland, Antiq. Sacr. vet. Hebr. pp. 39-41 (1712).
[12] This guarded statement still holds good. Compare Duchesne, Christian Worship (Eng. trans., 1904), ch. ii., “The Mass in the East,” v. “The Books of the Latin Rite,” and xii. “The Dedication of Churches.”
INCEST (Lat. incestus, unchaste), sexual intercourse between persons so related by kindred or affinity that legal marriage cannot take place between them (see [Marriage], especially the section Canon Law). In England incest formerly was not generally treated as a crime, although, along with other offences against morals, it was made punishable by death in 1650. Since the Restoration it had, to use Blackstone’s phrase, been left to the “feeble coercion of the spiritual courts,” but bills to make it a criminal offence have at various times been unsuccessfully introduced in Parliament. In 1908 however, an act (The Punishment of Incest Act 1908) was passed, under which sexual intercourse of a male with his grand-daughter, daughter, sister or mother is made punishable with penal servitude for not less than 3 or more than 7 years, or with imprisonment for not more than two years with or without hard labour. It is immaterial that the sexual intercourse was had with the consent of the female; indeed, by s. 2 a female who consents is on conviction liable to the same punishment as the male. The act also makes an attempt to commit the offence of incest a misdemeanour, punishable by imprisonment for not more than two years with or without hard labour. The terms “brother” and “sister” include half-brother and half-sister, whether the relationship is or is not traced through lawful wedlock. All proceedings under the act are held in camera (s. 5). The act does not apply to Scotland, incest being punishable in Scots law. Under the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, s. 27, incestuous adultery is per se sufficient ground to entitle a wife to divorce her husband. The Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act 1907, s. 3, retained wives’ sisters in the class of persons with whom adultery is incestuous. In the law of Scotland, it was, until the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1887, a crime nominally punishable with death, but the penalty usually inflicted was penal servitude for life. This sentence was actually pronounced on a man in 1855. In the United States incest is not an indictable offence at common law, but, generally speaking, it has been made punishable by fine and imprisonment by state legislation. It is also a punishable offence in some European countries, notably Germany, Austria and Italy.
INCH (O. Eng. ynce from Lat. uncia, a twelfth part; cf. “ounce,” and see As), the twelfth part of a linear foot. As a measure of rainfall an “inch of rain” is equivalent to a fall of a gallon of water spread over a surface of about 2 sq. ft., or 100 tons to an acre.
INCHBALD, MRS ELIZABETH (1753-1821), English novelist, playwright and actress, was born on the 15th of October 1753 at Standingfield, Suffolk, the daughter of John Simpson, a farmer. Her father died when she was eight years old. She and her sisters never enjoyed the advantages of school or of any regular supervision in their studies, but they seem to have acquired refined and literary tastes at an early age. Ambitious to become an actress, a career for which an impediment in her speech hardly seemed to qualify her, she applied in vain for an engagement; and finally, in 1772, she abruptly left home to seek her fortune in London. Here she married Joseph Inchbald (d. 1779), an actor, and on the 4th of September made her début in Bristol as Cordelia, to his Lear. For several years she continued to act with him in the provinces. Her rôles included Anne Boleyn, Jane Shore, Calista, Calpurnia, Lady Anne in Richard III., Lady Percy, Lady Elizabeth Grey, Fanny in The Clandestine Marriage, Desdemona, Aspasia in Tamerlane, Juliet and Imogen; but notwithstanding her great beauty and her natural aptitude for acting, her inability to acquire rapid and easy utterance prevented her from attaining to more than very moderate success. After the death of her husband she continued for some time on the stage; making her first London appearance at Covent Garden as Bellario in Philaster on the 3rd of October 1780. Her success, however, as an author led her to retire in 1789. She died at Kensington House on the 1st of August 1821.
Mrs. Inchbald wrote or adapted nineteen plays, and some of them, especially Wives as They Were and Maids as They Are (1797), were for a time very successful. Among the others may be mentioned I’ll tell you What (translated into German, Leipzig, 1798); Such Things Are (1788); The Married Man; The Wedding Day; The Midnight Hour; Everyone has his Fault; and Lover’s Vows. She also edited a collection of the British Theatre, with biographical and critical remarks (25 vols., 1806-1809); a Collection of Farces (7 vols., 1809); and The Modern Theatre (10 vols., 1809). Her fame, however, rests chiefly on her two novels: A Simple Story (1791), and Nature and Art (1796). These works possess many minor faults and inaccuracies, but on the whole their style is easy, natural and graceful; and if they are tainted in some degree by a morbid and exaggerated sentiment, and display none of that faculty of creation possessed by the best writers of fiction, the pathetic situations, and the deep and pure feeling pervading them, secured for them a wide popularity.