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WEISSENBURG-AM-SAND, a town of Germany, in the Bavarian district of Middle Franconia, situated in a pleasant and fertile country at the western foot of the Franconian Jura, 1300 ft. above the sea, and 33 m. by rail S.W. of Nuremberg by the railway to Munich. Pop. (1905) 6709. It is still surrounded by old walls and towers, and has two Gothic churches and a Gothic town-hall. The town has a mineral spring, connected with which is a bathing establishment. A Roman castle has recently been discovered, and there is a collection of antiquities in the modern school. The old fortalice of Wülzburg (2060 ft.) overlooks the town. Gold and silver fringe, bricks, cement wares, beer and cloth are manufactured. Weissenburg dates from the 8th century, and in the 14th was made a free imperial town. It passed to Bavaria in 1806.

WEISSENFELS, a town of Germany, in the Prussian province of Saxony, situated on the Saale 20 m. S.W. of Leipzig and 19 m. S. of Halle by the main line to Bebra and Frankfort-on-Main. Pop. (1905) 30,894. It contains three churches, a spacious market-place and various educational and benevolent institutions. The former palace, called the Augustusburg, built in 1664-1690, lies on an eminence near the town; this spacious edifice is now used as a military school. Weissenfels manufactures machinery, ironware, paper and other goods, and has an electrical power-house. In the neighbourhood are large deposits of sandstone and lignite. Weissenfels is a place of considerable antiquity, and from 1656 till 1746 it was the capital of the small duchy of Saxe-Weissenfels, a branch of the electoral house of Saxony, founded by Augustus, second son of the elector John George I. The body of Gustavus Adolphus was embalmed at Weissenfels after the battle of Lützen.

WEIZSÄCKER, KARL (1822-1899), German Protestant theologian, was born at Oehringen near Heilbronn in Württemberg, on the 11th of December 1822. After studying at Tübingen and Berlin, he became Privatdozent at Tübingen in 1847 and eventually (1861) professor of ecclesiastical and dogmatic history. From 1856 to 1878 he helped to edit the Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie; and his elaborate studies Untersuchungen über die evangelische Geschichte, ihre Quellen und den Gang ihrer Entwicklung (1864) and Das apostolische Zeitalter der christl. Kirche (1886, 2nd ed. 1893; Engl. trans. 1894-1895) made him widely known and respected. He died on the 13th of August 1899. His son, Karl von Weizsäcker (b. 1853), was appointed in 1900 Kultusminister for Württemberg.

WEKERLE, SANTOR [] (1848-), Hungarian statesman, was born on the 14th of November 1848 at Móór, in the comitat of Stuhlweissenburg. After studying law at the university of Budapest he graduated doctor juris. He then entered the government service, and after a period of probation was appointed to a post in the ministry of finance. He still, however, continued an academic career by lecturing on political economy at the university. In 1886 Wekerle was elected to the House of Deputies, became in the same year financial secretary of state, and in 1889 succeeded Tisza as minister of finance. He immediately addressed himself to the task of improving the financial position of the country, carried out the conversion of the State loans, and succeeded, for the first time in the history of the Hungarian budget, in avoiding a deficit. In November 1892 Wekerle succeeded Count Szapáry as premier, though still retaining the portfolio of finance. At the head of a strong government he was enabled, in spite of a powerful opposition of Catholics and Magnates, to carry in 1894 the Civil Marriage Bill. The continued opposition of the clerical party,

however, brought about his resignation on the 22nd of December 1894, when he was succeeded by Banffy. On the 1st of January 1897 he was appointed president of the newly created judicial commission at Budapest, and for the next few years held aloof from politics, even under the ex-lex government of Fejérváry. On the reconciliation of the king-emperor with the coalition he was therefore selected as the most suitable man to lead the new government, and on the 8th of April 1906 was appointed prime minister, taking at the same time the portfolio of finance. He resigned the premiership on the 27th of April 1909, but was not finally relieved of his office until the formation of the Khuen-Hedérváry cabinet on the 17th of January 1910.

WELCKER, FRIEDRICH GOTTLIEB (1784-1868), German philologist and archaeologist, was born at Grünberg in the grand duchy of Hesse. Having studied classical philology at the university of Giessen, he was appointed (1803) master in the high school, an office which he combined with that of lecturer at the university. In 1806 he journeyed to Italy, and was for more than a year private tutor at Rome in the family of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who became his friend and correspondent. Welcker returned to Giessen in 1808, and resuming his school-teaching and university lectures was in the following year appointed the first professor of Greek literature and archaeology at that or any German university. After serving as a volunteer in the campaign of 1814 he went to Copenhagen to edit the posthumous papers of the Danish archaeologist Georg Zoëga (1755-1809), and published his biography, Zoëgas Leben (Stutt. 1819). His liberalism in politics having brought him into conflict with the university authorities of Giessen, he exchanged that university for Göttingen in 1816, and three years later received a chair at the new university of Bonn, where he established the art museum and the library, of which he became the first librarian. In 1841-1843 he travelled in Greece and Italy (cf. his Tagebuch, Berlin, 1865), retired from the librarianship in 1854, and in 1861 from his professorship, but continued to reside at Bonn until his death. Welcker was a pioneer in the field of archaeology, and was one of the first to insist, in opposition to the narrow methods of the older Hellenists, on the necessity of co-ordinating the study of Greek art and religion with philology.

Besides early work on Aristophanes, Pindar, and Sappho, whose character he vindicated, he edited Aleman (1815), Hipponax (1817), Theognis (1826) and the Theogony of Hesiod (1865), and published a Sylloge epigrammatum Graecorum (Bonn, 1828). His Griechische Götterlehre (3 vols., Göttingen, 1857-1862) may be regarded as the first scientific treatise on Greek religion. Among his works on Greek literature the chief are Die Äschyleische Trilogie (1824, 6), Der epische Zyklus oder die Homerischen Gedichte (2 vols. 1835, 49), Die griechischen Tragödien mit Rücksicht auf den epischen Zyklus geordnet (3 vols., 1839-1841). His editions and biography of Zoëga, his Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Auslegung der alten Kunst (Göttingen, 1817, 8) and his Alte Denkmäler (5 vols., 1849-1864) contain his views on ancient art.

WELDING (i.e. the action of the verb "to weld" the same word as "to well," to boil or spring up, the history of the word being to boil, to heat to a high degree, to beat heated iron; according to Skeat, who points out that in Swedish the compound verb uppvalla means to boil, the simple valla is only used in the sense of welding), the process of uniting metallic surfaces by pressure exercised when they are in a semi-fused condition. It differs therefore from brazing and soldering, in which cold surfaces are united by the interposition of a fused metallic cementing material. The conditions in which welding is a suitable process to adopt are stated in the article. The technique of the work will be considered here.

The conditions for successful welding may be summed up as clean metallic surfaces in contact, a suitable temperature and rapid closing of the joint. All the variations in the forms of welds are either due to differences in shapes of material, or to