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estates, of certain value, are required by statutes to qualify jurors,elertcs of the knights of the shire in parliament, &c.
FREEMAN, Susannan, afterwards Mrs. Carrol and Mrs.Centlivre, a celebrated comic writer, daughter of Mr. Free-man of Holbeach, in Lincolnshire . She had such an early turnfor poetry, that it is said she w rote a song before she was sevenyears old. Before she was twelve, she could not only' readMoliere in French , but enter into the spirit of all the characters.Her father dying, left her to the care of a step-mother, whosetreatment being harsh, she determined, though almost destitute ofevery necessary, to go up to London to seek a better fortune. Asshe was proceed mg on loot, she was met by the noted libertine,Aqfhonv Hammond, Esq. who was so struck with her beauty, thathe instantly fell in love with her; and inquiring into her story,soon prevailed upon her inexperienced innocence to go with himto Cambridge. After some months’ cohabitation, he persuadedher to come to London ; w here, in a short time, she was marriedto a nephew of Sir Stephen Fox . But he dy ing about a year after,her wit and beauty soon procured her a second husband, one Car-rol, an officer in the army; but he being killed in a duel abouteighteen months cfter, she became a votary of the Muses , and un-der this name of Carrol, some of her earlier pieces were published.Her first attempt was a tragedy, the Perjured Husband; but hernatural vivacity leading her to comedy, we find but one moreattempt in the buskin, among eighteen dramatic, pieces which sheafterwards wrote. In 1700, Mr. Joseph Centlivre, principal cookto queen Anne, married her ; and, after passing several years hap-pily together, she died at his house in Spring Garden, in Dec.1723. She for many years enjoyed the intimacy and esteem ofthe most eminent wits of the times, viz. Sir Richard Steele , Rowe,Budged, Farquhar, Dr. Sewell, See. and few authors received moretokens of esteem and patronage from the great, ller plays do notabound with wit, and the language is sometimes poor; but heiplots are well conducted, and her characters natural.
FREE-STONE, a whitish stone, dug up in many parts ofBritain , that works like alabaster, but is more hard and durable;being of excellent use in building, &c. It is a species of the grit-stone, but finer sanded and smoother. The qualities of the severalhinds of free-stones used in the different pails of Europe vary'Much. They all agree in this general property indeed, that theyar e softer while in the quarry, than when they have been somehme exposed to the air: but even this general property differsgreatly in degree.
FREE I'll INKERS. See Deism, and Deist .
FREEZE, FRIEZE , or FRIZE. See Frieze,freezing, in philosophy, the same with congelation. See~°ld, Congelation, Frost, and Ice . Freezing may he de-ified the lixing of a fluid body into a solid mass, by the action ofcold. Water and some other fluids suddenly dilate and expand in:act of freezing, so as to occupy a greater space in the solid than! n the liquid state: in consequence of which ice is specificallybghter than water and floats upon it. Water also loses of its weight“>’freezing, being found lighter after it is thawed, than before it"ss frozen. And it even evaporates nearly as fast while frozen, as'”»le it is fluid. Water w hicli has been boiled freezes more readilyman that which has not been boiled ; and a slight disturbance ofbe fluid disposes it to freeze more speedily ; having sometimese @n cooled several degrees below the freezing point, without cou-pling when kept quite still, but ,-uddeniy freezing into ice on thee ast motion or disturbance. Water, covered over with a surface0 oil of olives, does not freeze so readily as without it; and nut-oil ab-!johitc ]y preserves it under a strong frost, when olive-oil would not., ‘‘ctitied spirit of wine, nut-oil, and oil of turpentine, seldomri-M ZP . T| l( . surface of water, in freezing, appears all wTmhled;1,1 ■' raffles being sometimes in parallel lines, and sometimes likeI'M* proceeding from a centre to the circumference, hluidsT Riding m a current of air grow much colder than before. 1-ah-■t-idieit bad long ago observed, that a pond, which stands quiteoften acquires a degree of cold much beyond what is sut-j't-tent for freezing, and yet no congelation ensued: but it a slight‘>h of a-.r happens iii such a case to brush over the surface of1 water, it freezes the whole in an instant. It has also been dis-.fl' 1 ' < rp< l, that all substances grow odder bv the evapoiation ol theu s "hich they contain, or with which they are mixed. If both( methods, therefore, be practised upon the same body at theV °L ll.—jjo. u).
same time, they will increase the cold to almost any degree of in-tenseness we please. Although cold, in general, contracts mostbodies, and heat expands them, yd there are some instance- to thecontrary, especially in the extreme cases or states o: these qualitiesof bodies. Thus, though iron, in common with other bodies, ex-pands with heat, yet, when melted, it is al -avs found to expandin cooling again. Thus also, though water expands- gradually us itis heated, and contracts as it cools, v ct in the act of freezing it sud-denly expands again, and that with an enormous force, capable ofrending rocks, or bursting the very thick shells of metal, &c. Acomputation of the force of freezing water has been made by theFlorentine Academicians, from the bursting of a very strong brassglobe or shell, by freezing water in it; when, from the knownthickness and tenacity of the metal, it was found that the expansivepower of a spherule of water only one inch in diameter was suffi-cient to overcome a resistance of more than 27,000 pounds, or 13tons and a half. See the experiments on bursting thick bomb-shells,by freezing water in them, by Major Edward Williams of theRoyal Artillery, in the Edin. Philos. Trans, vol. 2. Such a pro-digious power of expansion, almost double that of the most power-ful steam-engines, and exerted in so small a mass, seemingly by theforce of cold, was’thought a very material argument in favour ofthose who supposed that cold, lilce heat, is a positive substance.Dr. Black’s discovery of latent heat, however, has afforded a veryeasy and natural explication of this phenomenon. lie has shewn,that, in the act of congelation, water is not cooled more than it wasbefore, but rather grows warmer: that as much heat is discharged,and passes from a latent to a sensible state, as, had it been appliedto water in its fluid state, would have heated it to 135°. In thisprocess, the expansion is occasioned by a great number of minutebubbles suddenly produced. Formerly these were supposed tobe cold in the abstract; and to be so subtile, that, insinuatingthemselves into the substances of the fluid, they augmented its bulk,at the same time that, by impeding the motion of its particles uponeach other, they changed it trom a fluid to a solid. But Dr.Black shews, that these are only air extricated during the conge-lation ; and to the extrication of this air he ascribes the prodigiousexpandve force exerted bv freezing water. The only question,therefore, is, By what means this air comes to be extricated, andto take up more room than it naturally does in the fluid? To thisit may be answered, that perhaps part of the heat, which is dis-charged from the freezing water, combines with the air in its un-elastic state, and, by restoring its elasticity, gives it that extraordi-nary force ; as is seen also in the case of air suddenly extricated inthe explosion of gun-powder. The degree of expansion of water,in the state of ice, is by some authors computed at about T ' c of itsvolume. Oil and quicksilver shrink and contract after freez-ing.
Freezing Mixtures, preparations for the artificial congelationof water, and other fluids. See Cold, and Ice .
Freezing Point denotes the point or degree of cold, by a mer-curial thermometer, at which certain fluids begin to freeze, or,when frozen, at which they begin to thaw again. On Fahrenheit’sthermometer, this point is at -1- 32" for water, and at — 40° forquicksilver, these fluids freezing at those two points respecttively.
Freezing Rain, or Raining Ice , a very uncommon kind ofshower, which fell in the west of England, in Dec. 1072; whereofwe have various accounts in the Philos. 'I runs This rain, as soonas it touched any thing above ground, as a bough or the like, im-mediately settled into ice ; and, by multiplying and enlarging theicicles, broke all down with its weight. The rain that fell on thesnow immediately froze into ice, without sinking into the snow atall. It nude an incredible destruction of trees, beyond any thingin all history. “ Iiad it concluded with some gust of win’d (saysa gentleman who was on the spot,) it might have been of terribleconsequence 1 weighed the sprig of an ash-tree, of just threequarters of a pound, the ice on which weighed Id pounds. Somewere frighted with the noise in the air; till they discerned it was the.clatter of icy boughs, dashed against eacli other.” Dr. Beale ob-serves, that there was no considerable frost observed on the groundduring the whole time; whence he concludes, that a frost maybe very intense and dangerous on the tops of some hills and plains ;while in other places it keeps 2, 3, or 4 feet distant above theground, rivers, lakes, &c. and'may wander about very furiou-lvCM in