in _National Geographic
Monographs_, vol. i.; and chaps, iii., iv. and v. of Miss E.C.
Semple's _American History and its Geographic Conditions_ (Boston,
1903). (A. C. Sp.)

APPANAGE, or APANAGE (a French word from the late Lat. _apanagium_,
formed from _apanare, i.e. panem porrigere_, to give bread, i.e.
sustenance), in its original sense, the means of subsistence given by
parents to their younger children as distinct from the rights secured
to the eldest born by the custom of primogeniture. In its modern usage
it is practically confined to the money endowment given to the younger
children of reigning or mediatized houses in Germany and Austria, which
reverts to the state or to the head of the family on the extinction of
the line of the original grantee. In English history the system of
appanages never played any great part, and the term is now properly
applied only to the appanages of the crown: the duchy of Cornwall,
assigned to the king's eldest son at birth, or on his father's accession
to the crown, and the duchy of Lancaster. In the history of France,
however, the appanage was a very important factor. The word denotes in
very early French law the portion of lands or money given by fathers and
mothers to their sons or daughters on marriage, and usually connotes a
renunciation by the latter of any future inheritance; or it may denote
the portion given by the eldest son to his brothers and sisters when he
was sole inheritor. The word _apanage_ is still employed in this sense
in French official texts of some _Customs_; but it was in old public law
that it received its definite meaning and importance. Under the kings of
the third dynasty, the division of the kingdom among the sons of the
dead monarch which had characterized the Merovingian and Carolingian
dynasties, ceased. The eldest son alone succeeded to the crown; but at
the same time a custom was established by which the king made
territorial provision suitable to their rank for his other children or
for his brothers and sisters; custom forbade their being left landless.
Lands and lordships thus bestowed constituted the appanages, which
interfered so greatly with the formation of ancient France. While the
persevering policy of the Capets, which aimed at reuniting the great
fiefs, duchies, countships, baronies, &c., to the domain of the crown,
gradually reconstructed for their benefit a territorial sovereignty over
France, the institution of the ap