For appanages in ancient law see the _Essai sur les apanages ou mémoires historiques de leur établissement_, attributed to Du Vaucel, about 1780. (J. P. E.)
APPAREL (from O. Fr. _aparail_, _aparailler_, mod. _appareil_, from Low Lat. _adpariculare_, to make fit or equal), equipment, outfit, things furnished for the proper performance of anything, now chiefly used of dress. The word is also applied to the "orphreys," i.e. embroidered strips or borders, on ecclesiastical vestments.
APPARITIONS. An apparition, strictly speaking, is merely an appearance (Lat. _apparere_, to appear), the result of perception exercised on any stimulus of any of the senses. But in ordinary usage the word apparition denotes a perception (generally through the sense of sight) which cannot, as a rule, be shown to be occasioned by an object in external nature. We say "as a rule" because many so-called apparitions are merely illusions, i.e. misconstructions of the perceptive processes, as when a person in a bad light sees a number of small children leading a horse, and finds, on nearer approach, that he sees two men carrying bee-hives suspended from a pole. Again, Sir Walter Scott's vision of Byron, then lately dead, proved to be a misconstruction of certain plaids and cloaks hanging in the hall at Abbotsford, or so Sir Walter declared. Had he not discovered the physical basis of this illusion (which, while it lasted, was an apparition, technically speaking), he and others might have thought that it was an apparition in the popular sense of the word, a ghost. In popular phraseology a ghost is understood to be a phantasm produced in some way by the spirit of a dead person, the impression being usually visual, though the ghost, or apparition, may also affect the sense of hearing (by words, knocks, whistles, groans and so forth), or the sense of touch, or of weight, as in the case of the "incubus." In ordinary speech an apparition of a person not known to the percipient to be dead is called a wraith, in the Highland phrase, a spirit of the living. The terms _ghost_ and _wraith_ involve the hypothesis that the false perceptions are caused by spirits, a survival of the archaic animistic hypothesis (see ANIMISM), an hypothesis as difficult to prove as to disprove. Apparitions, of course, are not confined to anthropomorphic phantasms; we hear of phantom coaches (sometimes seen, but more frequently heard), of phantom dogs, cats, horses, cattle, deer, and even of phantom houses.