MARCH, FRANCIS ANDREW (1825- ), American philologist and educationalist, was born on the 25th of October 1825 in Millbury, Massachusetts. He graduated in 1845 at Amherst, where his attention was turned to the study of Anglo-Saxon by Noah Webster. He was a teacher at Swanzey, New Hampshire, and at the Leicester Academy, Massachusetts, in 1845-1847, and attempted the philological method of teaching English “like Latin and Greek,” later described in his Method of Philological Study of the English Language (1865); at Amherst in 1847-1849; at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1852-1855; and in 1855 became a tutor at Lafayette College, where he became adjunct professor of belles-lettres and English literature in 1856, and professor of English language and comparative philology—the first chair of the kind established—in 1857. He lectured on constitutional and public law and Roman law in 1875-1877, and also taught subjects as diverse as botany and political economy. In 1907 he became professor emeritus. At Lafayette he introduced the first carefully scientific study of English in any American college, and in 1870 published A Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Language, in which its Forms are Illustrated by Those of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Old Saxon, Old Friesic, Old Norse and Old High German, and An Anglo-Saxon Reader; he was editor of the “Douglass Series of Christian Greek and Latin Classics,” to which he contributed Latin Hymns (1874); he was chairman of the Commission of the State of Pennsylvania on Amended Orthography; and was consulting editor of the Standard Dictionary, and in 1879-1882 was director of the American readers for the Philological Society’s (New Oxford) Dictionary. He was president of the American Philological Association in 1873-1874 and in 1895-1896, of the Spelling Reform Association after 1876, and of the Modern Language Association in 1891-1893. Among American linguistic scholars March ranks with Whitney, Child and Gildersleeve; and his studies in English, though practically pioneer work in America, are of undoubted value. His article “On Recent Discussions of Grimm’s Law” in the Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association for 1873 in large part anticipated Verner’s law. With his son, Francis Andrew March, jun. (b. 1863), adjunct-professor of modern languages in 1884-1891 and subsequently professor of English literature at Lafayette, he edited A Thesaurus Dictionary of the English Language (1903).
See Addresses in Honor of Professor Francis A. March, LL.D., L.H.D., delivered at Easton, Pennsylvania, on the 24th of October 1895.
MARCH, a market town in the Wisbech parliamentary division of Cambridgeshire, England, 30 m. N. by W. of Cambridge. Pop. of urban district (1901), 7565. It lies in the midst of the flat fen country, on the old course of the river Nene. It is an important junction on the Great Eastern railway and the starting-point of a line worked by that company jointly with the Great Northern to Lincoln and Doncaster. The church of St Wendreda, in Early English and later styles, is remarkable for a magnificent Perpendicular timber roof, beautifully carved. There are agricultural implement and engineering works, and corn mills.
MARCH, the third month of the modern calendar, containing thirty-one days. It was the Romans’ first month until the adoption of the Julian calendar, 46 B.C., and it continued to be the beginning of the legal year in England until the 18th century. In France it was reckoned the first month of the year until 1564, when, by an edict of Charles IX., January was decreed to be thenceforth the first month. Scotland followed the example of France in 1599; but in England the change did not take place before 1752. The Romans called the month Martius, a name supposed to have been conferred on it by Romulus in honour of his putative father, Mars, the god of war; but Ovid declares the month to have existed before the time of Romulus, though in a different position in the calendar. The Anglo-Saxons called March Hlyd-monath, “loud or stormy month,” or Lencten-monath, “lengthening month,” in allusion to the fact that the days then rapidly become longer. There is an old saying, common to both England and Scotland—which has its equivalent among the Basques and many European peoples—representing March as borrowing three days from April; the last three days of March being called the “borrowing” or the “borrowed days.” As late as the end of the 18th century the first three days of March were known in Devonshire as “Blind Days,” and were deemed so unlucky that no farmer would sow seed then.
The chief festival days of March are the 1st, St David; the 12th, St Gregory; the 17th, St Patrick; and the 25th, Lady Day, one of the quarter days in England.
MARCH (1) (from Fr. marcher, to walk; the earliest sense in French appears to be “to trample,” and the origin has usually been found in the Lat. marcus, hammer; Low Lat. marcare, to hammer; hence to beat the road with the regular tread of a soldier: cf. “beat,” of a policeman’s round), the movement of military troops with regular rhythmical steps, often with the time marked by the beat of drum, the sound of pipes or bugles or the music of a military band; hence the advance or movement of a body of troops from one point to another, and the distance covered in so doing. The word is also naturally applied to the music composed for marching to, and to the steady regular advance or progress of non-military bodies or persons, or of events, &c. In the military sense, “marching” is walking in formed bodies of troops, either during drill evolutions on parade or on the “line of march” from one place to another. In both senses the word is used with mounted troops as well as with dismounted men. Formerly all evolutions were carried out at the so-called “parade-march” pace of about 75-80 paces to the minute, and in one or two armies of the 18th century the parade step cadence was as slow as 60. These cadences are now, however, reserved in all armies for ceremonial occasions, and the usual manœuvre and marching pace (“quick march”) is about 120, the “double” march pace (pas gymnastique) about 180. The “quick” march, translated into miles and hours, is about 31⁄2 or 35⁄8 miles an hour in all armies, though a few special bodies of light troops such as the Italian Bersaglieri are trained to move at a much faster rate for hours together, either by alternate “quick” and “double” marching or by an unvarying “jog-trot.” The paces recognized for cavalry are the walk, the trot, the canter and the gallop; the usual practice on the line of march being to alternate the walk and the trot, which combination gives a speed of about 5 miles an hour for many hours together. A “day’s march,” or more simply a “march,” is usually reckoned to be 15-16 miles for a large body of troops, a “forced” march being one of 20 miles or over, or one in which, from whatever cause, the troops are on foot for more than about seven hours. For large bodies of troops the rate of movement on the line of march rarely exceeds 3 miles an hour. The immense assistance afforded by music to marching troops has been recognized from the earliest times of organized armies, and a great deal of special march-music has been written for military bands, formerly often in 3⁄4 or 6⁄8 time (one bar representing one pace with the foot), but now almost invariably in common or 2⁄4 time, which is more suitable for the “quick march.” The music itself is usually a combination of simple, lively melody and well-marked accents for the drums, with little attempt at contrapuntal writing. The fife or piccolo, the natural bugle (in Italy and elsewhere the chromatic key-bugle is used), and the drum are the principal instruments, the “band,” as distinct from the “drums” and “bugles,” having in addition to drum and fifes clarinets (saxophones in France and Belgium) and saxhorns of all types. In Scottish regiments, and in a few isolated cases elsewhere, bagpipes provide the marching music. The importance of music on the march is attested further by the almost universal practice of singing or whistling marching songs, and even playing them on concertinas, &c., in the absence of the band and drums.
2. From marche, the French form of a common Teutonic word represented in English by “mark” (q.v.), a boundary or frontier region between two countries or districts. The word appears to have been first used in this sense in the 8th century, and the earliest “mark” or “march” districts were tracts of land on the borders of the Carolingian Empire. Wherever Charlemagne pushed forward the frontiers of the Frankish realm he provided for the security of his lands, new and old alike, by establishing mark districts on the borders. The defence and oversight of these were entrusted to special officers, afterwards called margraves, or counts of the mark, who usually enjoyed more extensive powers than fell to the lot of an ordinary count. It is at this time that we hear first of the Spanish mark (marca hispanica) and the Bavarian mark (marca bajoariae). These mark districts were practically obliterated during the reigns of the feeble sovereigns who succeeded Charlemagne, but the system was revived with the accession of Henry the Fowler to the German throne early in the 10th century and with a renewal of the work of conquering and colonizing the regions east of the Elbe, and in eastern Germany generally. Under Henry and his son, Otto the Great, marks were again set upon the borders of Germany, and this time the organization was more lasting. The mark districts increased in size and strength, especially those which fell under the dominion of an able and energetic ruler, and some of them became powerful states, retaining the name mark long after the original significance of the word had been forgotten. It is interesting to note that the two most important of the modern German states, Austria and Prussia, both had their origin in mark districts, the mark of Brandenburg, the nucleus of the kingdom of Prussia, being at first a border district to the east of the duchy of Saxony, and the east mark, or mark of Austria, being a border district of the duchy of Bavaria. In Italy march districts made their appearance about the same time as in other parts of the Frankish Empire. The best known of these is the march of Ancona, which with other marches and adjoining districts, was known later as the Marches, a province lying about the centre of Italy between the Apennines and the Adriatic Sea. After forming part of the states of the Church the Marches were united with the kingdom of Italy in 1860 (see [Marches, The]).