Page:EB1911 - Volume 27.djvu/902

 régulateur was introduced: this first device was not automatic, and was shortly afterwards improved and patented as the automatic regulating pistons.

A later valuable development in the history of valve systems is the enharmonic, invented by Messrs Besson &amp; Co., in which they have perfected and simplified the principle of independent positions tried in the registre of the fifties. In the enharmonic valve system each position has its independent length of tubing theoretically accurate, which conies into play as the valves are depressed, and there is besides a tuning slide for the open notes.

Finally, there is an improvement in a different direction to be chronicled, unconnected with compensation, in Rudall Carte & Co.’s system (Klussmann’s patent) of conical bore throughout, the open tube and the valve slides, which by means of ingeniously combined joints and slides preserve the tone without loss of air. This system has been applied to all valve instruments, and has been found to produce a remarkable improvement in the timbre.

VALYEVO (sometimes written Valjevo or Valievo), a town of western Servia, prettily situated on the river Kolubara, in a well-wooded valley, 627 ft. above the sea. Valyevo gives its name to the department of which it is the capital. It is a garrison town, with streets lighted by electricity, a high-school or gymnasium, a prefecture and a court of first instance. In the neighbouring Medvenik mountains lead-mining and smelting are carried on by an English company; lead and antimony being also worked at Podgora and other places in the same department. Besides being the centre of the plum-growing and distilling industries, Valyevo has a considerable trade in cattle, for which the pastures watered by the Kolubara are celebrated. Pop (1900) about 6800.

VÁMBÉRY, ÁRMIN (1832–&emsp;&emsp;), Hungarian Orientalist and traveller, was born of humble parentage at Duna-Szerdahely, a village on the island of Shütt, in the Danube, on the 19th of March 1832. He was educated at the village school until the age of twelve, and owing to congenital lameness had to walk with crutches. At an early age he showed remarkable aptitude for acquiring languages, but straitened circumstances compelled him to earn his own living. After being for a short time apprentice to a ladies’ tailor, he became tutor to an innkeeper’s son. He next entered the untergymnasium of St Georgen, and proceeded thence to Pressburg. Meanwhile he supported himself by teaching on a very small scale, but his progress was such that at sixteen he had a good knowledge of Hungarian, Latin, French and German, and was rapidly acquiring English and the Scandinavian languages, and also Russian, Servian and other Slavonic tongues. At the age of twenty he had obtained sufficient knowledge of Turkish to lead him to go to Constantinople, where he set up as teacher of European languages, and shortly afterwards became a tutor in the house of Pasha Hussein Daim. Under the influence of his friend and instructor, the Mollah Ahmed Effendi, he became, nominally at least, a full Osmanli, and entering the Turkish service, was afterwards secretary to Fuad Pasha. After spending six years in Constantinople, where he published a Turkish-German Dictionary and various linguistic works, and where he acquired some twenty Oriental languages and dialects, he visited Teheran; and then, disguised as a dervish, joined a band of pilgrims from Mecca, and spent several months with them in rough and squalid travel through the deserts of Asia. He succeeded in maintaining his disguise, and on arriving at Khiva went safely through two audiences of the khan. Passing Bokhara, they reached Samarkand, where the emir, whose suspicions were aroused, kept him in audience for a full half-hour; but he stood the test so well that the emir was not only pleased with “Resid Effendi” (Vámbéry’s assumed name), but gave him handsome presents. He then reluctantly turned back by way of Herat, where he took leave of the dervishes, and returned with a caravan to Teheran, and subsequently, in March 1864, through Trebizond and Erzerúm to Constantinople. By the advice of Prokesch-Osten and Eötvös, he paid a visit in the following June to London; there his daring adventures and linguistic triumphs made him the lion of the day. In the same year he published his Travels in Central Asia. In connexion with this work it must be remembered that Vámbéry could write down but a few furtive notes while with the dervishes, and dared

not take a single sketch; but the weird scenes, with their misery and suffering, were so strongly impressed on his memory that his book is convincing by its simplicity, directness and evidence of heroic endurance. Vámbéry also called the attention of politicians to the movements of Russia in Central Asia, and aroused much general interest in that question. From London he went to Paris, and he notes in his Autobiography that the Parisians were much more interested in his strange manner of travelling than in the travels themselves. He had an interview with Napoleon III., who failed to impress him “as the great man which the world in general considers him.” Returning to Hungary, he was appointed professor of Oriental languages in the university of Budapest: there he settled down, contributing largely to periodicals, and publishing a number of books, chiefly in German and Hungarian. His travels have been translated into many languages, and his Autobiography was written in English. Amongst the best known of his works, besides those alluded to, are Wanderings and Adventures in Persia (1867); Sketches of Central Asia (1868); History of Bokhara (1873); Manners in Oriental Countries (1876); Primitive Civilization of the Turko-Tatar People (1879); Origin of the Magyars (1882); The Turkish People (1885); and Western Culture in Eastern Lands (1906).

VAMPIRE, a term, apparently of Servian origin (wampir), originally applied in eastern Europe to blood-sucking ghosts. but in modern usage transferred to one or more species of bloodsucking bats inhabiting South America.

In the first-mentioned meaning a vampire is usually supposed to be the soul of a dead man which quits the buried body by night to suck the blood of living persons. Hence, when the vampire’s grave is opened, his corpse is found to be fresh and rosy from the blood which he has thus absorbed. To put a stop to his ravages, a stake is driven through the -corpse, or the head cut off, or the heart torn out and the body burned, or boiling water and vinegar are poured on the grave. The persons who turn vampires are generally wizards, witches, suicides and those who have come to a violent end or have been cursed by their parents or by the church. But any one may become a vampire if an animal (especially a cat) leaps over his corpse or a bird flies over it. Sometimes the vampire is thought to be the soul of a living man which leaves his body in sleep, to go in the form of a straw or fluff of down and suck the blood of other sleepers. The belief in vampires chiefly prevails in Slavonic lands, as in Russia (especially White Russia and the Ukraine), Poland and Servia, and among the Czechs of Bohemia and the other Slavonic races of Austria. It became specially prevalent in Hungary between the years 1730 and 1735, whence all Europe was filled with reports of the exploits of vampires. Several treatises were written on the subject, among which may be mentioned Ranft’s De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (1734) and Calmet’s Dissertation on the Vampires of Hungary, translated into English in 1750. It is probable that this superstition gained much ground from the reports of those who had examined the bodies of persons buried alive though believed to be dead, and was based on the twisted position of the corpse, the marks of blood on the shroud and on the face and hands—results of the frenzied struggle in the coffin before life became extinct. The belief in vampirism has also taken root among the Albanians and modern Greeks, but here it may be due to Slavonic influence.

Two species of blood-sucking bats (the only species known)—Desmodus rufus and Diphylla ecaudata—representing two genera (see ), inhabit the tropical. and part of the subtropical regions of the New World, and are restricted to South and Central America. They appear to be confined chiefly to the forest-clad parts, and their attacks on men and other warm-blooded animals were noticed by some of the earliest writers. Thus Peter Martyr (Anghiera), who wrote soon after the conquest of South America, says that in the Isthmus of Darien there were bats which sucked the blood of men and cattle when asleep to such a degree as to even kill them. Condamine, a writer of the 18th century, remarks that at Borja (Ecuador)