Fatalism

1849

Fatigue

bohydrates, so that in health, should a greater
quantity of any carbon-containing food be
taken than is required for the daily needs of
the body, the excess may be stored up in the
form of fat. (See DIGESTION and OBESITY.)

As a food, fat produces, by rapid oxidation,
both heat and energy, and it can be taken much
more freely in cold than in warm climates. Fat
is useful in the preparation of other foods. As
it can be heated to a temperature of 500°?.
without boiling, it is employed in cooking fish
and meat. See OILS ; FAT.

Fatalism signifies the belief that the issue of
all events is so fixed or predetermined by fate or
divine decree that no effort of man can avail to
alter it. It relation to human life and action
fatalism is thus an extreme and external form of
determinism, which must be clearly distin-
guished from determinism properly so called
(see DETERMINISM) since it not merely regards
the events of man's life as determined, but de-
prives man's active will and effort of any ef-
fective part in their determination.

Fata Morgana, the Italian name for a
striking mirage observed in the Strait of Mes-
sina. The mirage is often duplicated, one
image being inverted.

Fatehgarh, town, United Provinces, India,
capital of the district of Famkhabad. In 1857
during the Indian mutiny, the entire European
population was massacred; p. 13,000.

Fatehpur-Sikri, town, United Provinces,
India, 23 m. w. of Agra. It was the former cap-
ital of the Mogul empire, founded by Akbar in
1570, but is now in ruins, of which the tomb of
Selim Chisti is one of the most magnificent in
India; p. 5,000.

Fates. See Moirae.

Father. See Family.

Fatherhood, The Divine. Fatherhood is
the simple yet sublime metaphor used to ex-
press the distinctively Christian view of God in
His relation to man. Partial anticipations of
the conception are found in ethnic religions,
but these hardly go beyond the idea of God as
the progenitor of all things. The new and
unique feature in the teaching of Jesus on the
subject is that with Him the idea of God's
fatherhood becomes the key to all His deal-
ings with men, and while He vastly enriches
the idea, He excludes none from its embrace.

Fathers, Apostolic. See Apostolic Fath-
ers.

Fathers of the Church, a name under
which are included those authors of the early
Christian centuries who are recognized as high
authorities in matters ot the Church's faith;
in brief, the ancient classics of Christian theolo-

gy. The principal qualifying characteristic of
any particular writer included in. the class
would seem to be that, as an expounder or de-
fender of Christian doctrine, he was in agree-
ment with the essential teaching of the Church.
It is most convenient to bring the age of the
fathers well within the first period of church
history, say from roo to 700 A.D. Excluding
the apostolic fathers, we may enumerate the
fathers proper thus: (i) Ante-Nicene writers—
Irenaeus, Tertullian, Justin, Origen, Clement
of Alexandria, Cyprian, and Gregory Thauma-
turgus, of whom the second and sixth wrote in
Latin, the others in Greek; (2) post-Nicene
writers—Athanasius, Basil, Chrysostom, Greg-
ory Nazianzen, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory
of Nyssa, Epiphanius, Cyril of Alexandria,
pseudo-Dionysius, and Joannes Damascenus
all writing in Greek, and Ambrose, Jerome,
Augustine, Gregory the Great, Hilary, and Leo
the Great, in Latin. The first four named in
each section of the post-Nicene authors are
specially recognized as the doctores ecclesia in
the Greek and Roman Catholic Churches re-
spectively. The study of the fathers is called
patristics or patrology. Collective editions are
J. P. Migne's in 383 vols. (1844 seq.); Nicene
and Post-Nicene Fattiers (ist ser., 14 vols.,
1887-92; 2d. ser., 14 vols., 1890-1900).
Father's Day, the third Sunday in June, is
quite generally observed as a day to do honor
to fatherhood. The idea was conceived about
1910, but it is only within the last few years
that there has been any general observance.
Fathom, a measure of six ft., used for regu-
lating the length of a cable and to divide the
sounding line. In the United States and Brit-
ish charts, soundings are usually marked in
fathoms, though, in the case of shallow water,
feet are employed.
Fatigue, in physiology, the nagging or
fatigue of muscle which largely depends on the
poisoning of the muscle cells by their own waste
products. If the muscle is washed with blood
or with salt solution its energy is in great meas-
ure restored. The unsheathed end-plates of
nerves yield to fatigue even sooner than do
muscle cells and like them are poisoned by
muscular waste-products. In materials, the
term is used to denote the weakening effect
produced, chiefly in metals, by a repeated suc-
cession of severe stresses. It is supposed to be
the result of a molecular change in the metal,
due to vibration or a continually varying
strain.
In military usage the term is applied to a
soldier's work when not connected with the
use of arms—e.g. fatigue duty. Similarly,