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Rh VENGURLA, a seaport on the west coast of India in Ratnagiri district, Bombay. Pop. (1901) 10,018. It was an early site of both Dutch and English factories, and was formerly the port for communication with the garrisons in the Southern Mahratta country. In the neighbourhood are the "Burnt Islands," with the Vengurla Rock lighthouse.

VENICE (Venezia), a city and seaport of Italy, occupying one of the most remarkable sites in the world. At the head of the Adriatic, between the mountains and the sea, lies that part of the Lombard plain known as the Veneto. The whole of this plain has been formed by the débris swept down from the Alps by the rivers Po, Ticino, Oglio, Adda, Mincio, Adige, Brenta, Piave, Livenza, Tagliamento and Isonzo. The substratum of the plain is a bed of boulders, covered during the lapse of ages by a deposit of rich alluvial soil. The rivers when they debouch from the 'mountains assume an eastern trend in their effort to reach the sea. The result is that the plain is being gradually extended in an easterly direction, and cities like Ravenna, Adria and Aquileia, which were once seaports, lie now many miles inland. The encroachment of land on sea has been calculated at the rate of about three miles in a thousand years. A strong current sets round the head of the Adriatic from east to west. This current catches the silt brought down by the rivers and projects it in long banks, or lidi, parallel with the shore. In process of time some of these banks, as in the case of Venice, raised themselves above the level of the water and became the true shore-line, while behind them lay large surfaces of water, called lagoons, formed partly by the fresh water brought down by the rivers, partly by the salt-water tide which found its way in by the channels of the river mouths. Along the coast-line, roughly speaking between the Apennines at Rimini and the Carnic Alps at Trieste, three main systems of lagoons were thus created, the lagoon of Grado or Marano to the east, the lagoon of Venice in the middle, and the lagoon of Comacchio to the south-west (for plan, see ). All three are dotted with small islands, possibly the remains of some earlier lido. These islands are little else than low mud banks, barely rising above the water-level. On a group of these mud banks about the middle of the lagoon of Venice stands the city of Venice. It would be difficult to imagine a site less adapted for the foundation and growth of a great community. The soil is an oozy mud which can only be made capable of carrying buildings by the artificial means of pile-driving; there is no land fit for agriculture or the rearing of cattle; the sole food supply is fish from the lagoon, and there is no drinking-water save such as could be stored from the rainfall. Yet the group of islands called Rialto, in mid-Venetian lagoon, were first the asylum and then the magnificent and permanent home of a race that took a prominent part in the medieval and Renaissance history of Europe. The local drawbacks and difficulties once surmounted, Venice by her geographical position became the seaport nearest the heart of Europe.

Ethnography and Early History.—As to the ethnography of the race little is known that is certain. It has frequently been said that the lagoon population was originally composed of refugees from the mainland seeking asylum from the incursions of Huns,, Goths and Lombards; but it is more probable that, long before the date of the earliest barbarian inroad, the lagoon islands already had a population of fisherfolk. In any case we may take it that the lagoon-dwellers were racially identical with the inhabitants of the neighbouring mainland, the Heneti or Veneti. That the Heneti themselves were immigrants is generally admitted. The earlier ethnographers, like Strabo, put forward three theories as to the original home of the race. Strabo himself talks of Armoric Heneti, and supposes them to have come from the neighbourhood of Brittany; another theory gives us Sarmatian Heneti, from the Baltic provinces; while the most widely accepted view was that they reached Italy from Paphlagonia. Modern scholarship has rejected these theories. Pauli and Kretschmer, proceeding on the basis of language, have reached conclusions which in the main are identical. Pauli, who has published all the known inscriptions of the Heneti, holds that the language is Illyrian, closely connected with Messapian. Kretschmer goes further and divides the Illyrian language into two sharply defined dialects, the northern dialect being represented by the Heneti. The result is that in the present condition of our knowledge we must conclude that the Heneti were a branch of the Illyrian people. The Eneti of Paphlagonia, the Veneti of Brittany and the Venedi of the Baltic, are probably quite distinct, and the similarity of name is merely a coincidence.

The dwellings of the primitive settlers in the lagoons were, in all probability, rude huts made of long reeds, such as may be seen to this day in the lagoon of Grado. A ditch was cut deep into the mud so as to retain the water at low tide, and there the boats of the fishermen lay. The ground about the hut was made solid and protected from corrosion by a palisade of wattled osiers, thus creating the earliest form of the fondamenta, or quay, which runs along the side of so many Venetian canals and is so prominent a feature in the construction of the city. Gradually, as time went on, and probably with the influx of refugees from the mainland, bricks made of lagoon mud came to take the place of wattle and reeds in the construction of the houses. Groups of dwellings, such as are still to be seen on some of the small canals at Burano, clustered together along the banks of the deeper channels which traverse the lagoon islands and give access to the tide. It is these channels which determined the lines of construction; the dwellings followed their windings, and that accounts for the extraordinarily complex network of calles and canals which characterizes modern Venice. The alleys or calli number 2327, with a total length of 894 m.; the canals number 177 and measure 28 m. The whole site of Venice is dominated by the existence of one great main canal, the Grand Canal, which, winding through the town in the shape of the letter S, divides it into two equal parts. This great canal was probably at one time the bed of a river flowing into the lagoons near Mestre. The smaller canals all serve as arteries to the Grand Canal. One other broad canal, once the bed of the Brenta, divides the island of the Giudecca from the rest of the city and takes its name from that island. The ordinary Venetian house was built round a courtyard, and was one storey high; on the roof was an open loggia for drying clothes; in front, between the house and the water, ran the fondamenta. The earliest churches were built with cemeteries for the dead; and thus we find the nucleus of the city of Venice, little isolated groups of dwellings each on its separate islet, scattered, as Cassiodorus says, like sea-birds' nests over the face of the waters. Some of the islets were still uninhabited; covered with a dense low growth which served as cover for game and even for wolves.

With the destruction of the mainland cities by repeated barbarian invasions, and thanks to the gradual development of Venice as a centre of coasting trade in the northern Adriatic, the aspect of the city changed. Brick and more rarely stone took the place of wood and wattle. The assaults, of the Dalmatian pirates, attracted by the growing wealth of the city, necessitated the building of strong castellated houses, of which no example has come down to our day, but we may gather what they were like from Petrarch's description of his house on the Riva degli Schiavoni, with its two flanking towers, probably retaining the primitive form, and also from the representations of protecting towers which occur in Carpaccio's pictures. The canals too were guarded by chains stretched across their mouths and by towers in some cases, as, for example, in the case of the Torresella Canal, which takes its name from these defence works. These houses clustered round the churches which now began to be built in considerable numbers, and formed the various contrade of the city. The Cronica altinate in the vision of Fra Mauro gives us a picturesque account of the founding of the various parishes, Olivolo or Castello, St Raffaello, St Salvadore, Sta Maria Formosa, S. Giovanni in Bragora, the Apostoli and Sta Giustina. Tradition has it that the earliest church in Venice was S. Giacomo di Rialto, 