LIMB. (1) (In O. Eng. lim, cognate with the O. Nor. and Icel. limr, Swed. and Dan. lem; probably the word is to be referred to a root li- seen in an obsolete English word “lith,” a limb, and in the Ger. Glied), originally any portion or member of the body, but now restricted in meaning to the external members of the body of an animal apart from the head and trunk, the legs and arms, or, in a bird, the wings. It is sometimes used of the lower limbs only, and is synonymous with “leg.” The word is also used of the main branches of a tree, of the projecting spurs of a range of mountains, of the arms of a cross, &c. As a translation of the Lat. membrum, and with special reference to the church as the “body of Christ,” “limb” was frequently used by ecclesiastical writers of the 16th and 17th centuries of a person as being a component part of the church; cf. such expressions as “limb of Satan,” “limb of the law,” &c. From the use of membrum in medieval Latin for an estate dependent on another, the name “limb” is given to an outlying portion of another, or to the subordinate members of the Cinque Ports, attached to one of the principal towns; Pevensey was thus a “limb” of Hastings. (2) An edge or border, frequently used in scientific language for the boundary of a surface. It is thus used of the edge of the disk of the sun or moon, of the expanded part of a petal or sepal in botany, &c. This word is a shortened form of “limbo” or “limbus,” Lat. for an edge, for the theological use of which see [Limbus].
LIMBACH, a town in the kingdom of Saxony, in the manufacturing district of Chemnitz, 6 m. N.W. of that city. Pop. (1905) 13,723. It has a public park and a monument to the composer Pache. Its industries include the making of worsteds, cloth, silk and sewing-machines, and dyeing and bleaching.
LIMBER, an homonymous word, having three meanings. (1) A two-wheeled carriage forming a detachable part of the equipment of all guns on travelling carriages and having on it a framework to contain ammunition boxes, and, in most cases, seats for two or three gunners. The French equivalent is avant-train, the Ger. Protz (see [Artillery] and [Ordnance]). (2) An adjective meaning pliant or flexible and so used with reference to a person’s mental or bodily qualities, quick, nimble, adroit. (3) A nautical term for the holes cut in the flooring in a ship above the keelson, to allow water to drain to the pumps.
The etymology of these words is obscure. According to the New English Dictionary the origin of (1) is to be found in the Fr. limonière, a derivative of limon, the shaft of a vehicle, a meaning which appears in English from the 15th century but is now obsolete, except apparently among the miners of the north of England. The earlier English forms of the word are lymor or limmer. Skeat suggests that (2) is connected with “limp,” which he refers to a Teutonic base lap-, meaning to hang down. The New English Dictionary points out that while “limp” does not occur till the beginning of the 18th century, “limber” in this sense is found as early as the 16th. In Thomas Cooper’s (1517?-1594) Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1565), it appears as the English equivalent of the Latin lentus. A possible derivation connects it with “limb.”
LIMBORCH, PHILIPP VAN (1633-1712), Dutch Remonstrant theologian, was born on the 19th of June 1633, at Amsterdam, where his father was a lawyer. He received his education at Utrecht, at Leiden, in his native city, and finally at Utrecht University, which he entered in 1652. In 1657 he became a Remonstrant pastor at Gouda, and in 1667 he was transferred to Amsterdam, where, in the following year, the office of professor of theology in the Remonstrant seminary was added to his pastoral charge. He was a friend of John Locke. He died at Amsterdam on the 30th of April 1712.
His most important work, Institutiones theologiae christianae, ad praxin pietatis et promotionem pacis christianae unice directae (Amsterdam, 1686, 5th ed., 1735), is a full and clear exposition of the system of Simon Episcopius and Stephan Curcellaeus. The fourth edition (1715) included a posthumous “Relatio historica de origine et progressu controversiarum in foederato Belgio de praedestinatione.” Limborch also wrote De veritate religionis Christianae amica collatio cum erudito Judaeo (Gouda, 1687); Historia Inquisitionis (1692), in four books prefixed to the “Liber Sententiarum Inquisitionis Tolosanae” (1307-1323); and Commentarius in Acta Apostolorum et in Epistolas ad Romanos et ad Hebraeos (Rotterdam, 1711). His editorial labours included the publication of various works of his predecessors, and of Epistolae ecclesiasticae praestantium ac eruditorum virorum (Amsterdam, 1684), chiefly by Jakobus Arminius, Joannes Uytenbogardus, Konrad Vorstius (1569-1622), Gerhard Vossius (1577-1649), Hugo Grotius, Simon Episcopius (his grand-uncle) and Gaspar Barlaeus; they are of great value for the history of Arminianism. An English translation of the Theologia was published in 1702 by William Jones (A Complete System or Body of Divinity, both Speculative and Practical, founded on Scripture and Reason, London, 1702); and a translation of the Historia Inquisitionis, by Samuel Chandler, with “a large introduction concerning the rise and progress of persecution and the real and pretended causes of it” prefixed, appeared in 1731. See Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie.