Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 10.djvu/186

LEFT VALPARAISO 156 VAMPIRE weekly newspapers. The city has clock factories, machine shops, an iron foun- dry, etc. Pop. (1910) 6,987; (1920) 6,518. VALPARAISO ("the vale of Para- dise"), the chief seaport of Chile; in a province of the same name; (area, 1,775 square miles; pop. about 350,000); 90 miles W. N. W. of Santiago, the capital, with which it is connected by railway. It is built at the base of steep, bare hills about 1,600 feet high, and round the head of a bay which possesses good an- chorage, but is exposed to S. winds, and therefore unsafe in winter. The streets are narrow and often steep, but are well paved, and some of them are traversed by tramways. The houses are substan- tial, and often elegantly decorated. The public buildings include a number _of important educational and charitable in- stitutions, besides churches and theaters. The city has been greatly damaged by earthquakes on various occasions (not- ably in 1822, 1829, 1851, and 1906), as well as by a bombardment by a Spanish fleet on March 31, 1866. The climate is good, but dry, little rain falling except during the three winter months. The annual mean temperature is 58°. The chief items of export are copper and copper ore, gold, silver, cereals, wood, hides, and tallow. Pop. (1918) 212,659. VALTELLINE, the rich and fertile valley of the Upper Adda down to its influx into the Lake of Como. In a wider sense the term covers the whole of that part of Lombardy which includes this valley as well as Chiavenna and Bormio, corresponding to the modern province of Sondrio. The 120,000 in- habitants speak a dialect of Italian akin to the Romansch. In the 16th century the district became subject to the Swiss canton of Grisons; the latter, however, steadily resisted the efforts of the Val- tellines to secure citizenship, which re- sulted in the bloody Valtelline war (1620). The Grisons was victorious, and governed the Valtelline more op- pressively than ever, till at the petition of the inhabitants Napoleon incorporated the country with the Cisalpine republic, and the Valtelline has since shared the fortunes of Lombardy and Italy. VALVE, a kind of movable lid or cover adapted to the orifice of some tube or passage, and so formed as to open communication in one direction and to close it in the other, used to regulate the admission or escape of a fluid, such as water, gas, or steam. Some valves are self-acting, that is, they are so con- trived as to open in the required direction by the pressure of the fluid on their sm-faoe, and immediately to shut and prevent the return of the fluid when the direction of its pressure changes. Others are actuated by independent external agency. Examples of the former kind are presented in the valves of pumps, and in the safety valves of steam boilers, and of the latter in the slide-valves ap- pended to the cylinder of a steam engine for the purpose of regulating the ad- mission and escape of the steam. The construction of valves admits of an almost endless variety. VAMBERY, ARMINIUS, or HER- MANN, a Hungarian traveler and Ori- entalist; born in Szerdahely, Hungary, March 19, 1832. Escaping from the tailor's bench to which his family would have condemned him, he succeeded amid much privation and hardship in laying the foundations of wide linguistic scholarship, first under the Piarists of St. Georgen near Pressburg, and after- ward at Vienna and Pest. He was a strong believer in the regenerative power of Western civilization and was almost as strongly a partisan of English as opposed to Russian influence. Besides the narrative of his great journey, which appeared in German, English, and Hun- garian, in 1865, he published "German- Turkish Dictionary" (1858); "Abusch- ka : Turkish - Hungarian Dictionary (1861) ; "A Study of the Turkish Lan- guage" (1867); "Sketches in Central Asia" (1867) ; "Central Asian and An- glo-Russian Frontier Question" (Lond. 1874); "Ethics of the East" (Berl. 1876) ; "Etymological Dictionary of the Turco-Tartar Tongue" (Leip. 1877). He died in 1913. VAMPIRE, the subject of one of the most gruesome superstitions in the world; that of the dead leaving their graves to destroy and prey on the living. It is characteristically Slavonic, though by no means exclusively so, and it is strongest of all in White Russia and the Ukraine. It still dominates the popular imagination in Russia, Poland, Servia, among the Czechs of Bohemia, and the Slovaks of Hungary, and also in a less degree in Albania and Greece. The modern term for a vampire is identified by Bernhard Schmidt with the Slavonic name of the werewolf (Bohemian, vlkod' lak; in Bulgarian and Slovak, vrkolak), the regular name for a vampire in Servia being vukodlak. The Russian vamjnr (South Russian, upuir, anciently npir; Polish upior) in his earthly life was a wizard, a witch, a werewolf, a suicide, or one cursed by his parents or the Church. Even an innocent man may