Pimbley's Dictionary of Heraldry, Together With an: Illustrated Supplement (Classic Reprint)

Armorial bearings, at first personal and afterward becoming hereditary, were supposed to have lost their usefulness with the fading of the age of chivalry. Their real use and importance, it is true, died with the passing of the armor-incased knight; nevertheless, heraldry remains a live institution, and will so continue as long as civilization and refinement last. If any doubt is felt of its vitality, we have but to view the evidence of it in the New World. For instance, the design of our national emblem, the Stars and Stripes, is taken from the arms of the immortal George Washington, who bore A rgent, two bar gules, in chief three mullets of the second. The arms of the State of Maryland are those of the Calverts. Barons of Baltimore and sometime Lords Proprietary of the Province of Maryland. Other States have adopted armorial bearings peculiar to their location or resources, such as the Indian and cactus of Florida, the badger of Wisconsin, the wheat field of Iowa and the mining implements of Colorado. In America also we have a large number of genealogical and hereditary societies. There is likewise a wide and general desire on the part of Americans to trace their pedigrees to their Old World ancestors, and to assume the arms belonging to them. This ever-increasing interest in heraldry in the New World, as well as the scarcity of modern works on subjects heraldric, have induced the author to publish a work containing all the words, phrases, terms and tinctures belonging to the study of heraldry, together with a proper division or classification of arms, rules of blazonry, illustrations of the principal armorial bearings, different forms of the shield, etc. The A uthor.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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