Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/401

Rh W A R W A R 377 the peace of Tilsit was made the capital of the independent duchy of &quot;Warsaw ; but the Austrians took it on April 21, 1809, and kept it till June 2, when it once more became independent, but only for a few years. The Russians finally took it on February 8, 1813, since which time they have always retained it. On November 29, 1830, AVarsaw gave the signal of the great but unsuccessful insurrection which lasted nearly one year ; it was taken after great bloodshed by Paskevitch, on September 7, 1831. Deportations on a largo scale, executions, and confiscation of the domains of the nobility followed, and until 1856 AVarsaw remained under severe military rule. In 1862 a series of demonstrations began to be made in AVarsaw in favour of the independence of Poland, and after a bloody repression a general insurrection followed in January 1863, the Russians remaining, however, masters of the situation. The Russian Government now decided to take the most stringent measures to crush the powers of the clergy, the landed nobility, and the turbulent AVarsaw artisans and educated classes. Executions, banishment to the convict prisons of Siberia, and con fiscation of estates followed. Deportation to Siberia and the interior of Russia was carried out on an unheard-of scale. Scientific societies and high schools were closed; monasteries and nunneries were emptied. Hundreds of Russian officials were called in to fill up administrative posts, the schools, and the university; the Russian language was rendered obligatory in official acts, in all legal pro ceedings, and even, to a great extent, in trade. The very name of Poland was expunged from official writings, and, while the old institutions were abolished, the Russian tribunals and administra tive institutions were introduced. The serfs were liberated. See POLAND. Officially, AVarsaw is now simply the chief town of the govern ment of AVarsaw, the residence of the governor-general of the pro vinces on the A r istula and the commander of the AVarsaw military district, and the see of the Roman and Greek archbishops. But it continues to be the heart of the Polish nationality. (P. A. K. ) WART is a papillary excrescence of the surface, most commonly of the skin, but in special circumstances also of the transitional and mucous membranes. The ordinary broad and flat warts of the skin occur mostly upon the hands of children and young persons ; a long pendulous variety occurs about the chin or neck of children who are constitutionally delicate (it used to be thought a mark of scrofula) and on the scalp in adults. Both the broad sessile warts of the fingers or hands and the thin hanging warts of the neck and head are apt to come out in numbers at a time ; a crop of them suddenly appears, to disappear after a time with equal suddenness. Hence the supposed efficacy of charms. A single wart will sometimes remain when the general eruption has vanished. The liability to crops of warts runs in families. In after life a wart on the hands or fingers is usually brought on by some irritation, often repeated, even if it be slight. A special form has been observed on the hands of those much occupied with anatomical dissection. Chimney-sweeps and workers in coal-tar, petroleum, &c., are subject to warts, which often become cancerous. Ordinary innocent warts occur singly in later life on the nose or lips or other parts of the face, sometimes on the tongue. Towards old age there are apt to be broad and flattened patches of warts on the back, of a greasy consistence and brownish colour. A wart consists essentially of a framework or ground- plan of small blood-vessels supported by bands of fibrous tissue, and a more or less thick covering of epidermic scales. When the wart is young, the surface is a rounded and even knob ; as it gets rubbed and worn the surface appears cleft into thread-like projecting points. The blood-vessels, whose outgrowth from the surface really makes the wart, may either be in a cluster of parallel loops, in which case we have the common broad and sessile wart, or the vessels may branch from a single stem, making the dendriform pattern of the long, slim, and pendulous warts of the chin and neck. The same two kinds of pattern occur also in warts of the transitional or mucous surfaces. (For a figure of a dendriform wart, see PATHOLOGY, vol. xviii. fig. 43, p. 379.) A wart of either pattern is a projection of the system of cutaneous blood vessels beyond the surface. It is owing to its vascular ground-plan that a wart is liable to come back after being shaved off ; the vessel or vessels are cut down to the level of the skin, but the current of blood is still forced into the stem, and the branches tend to be thrown out beyond the surface as before. This fact has a bearing on the treatment of warts. If they are shaved or snipped off, the blood-vessels of the stem should be destroyed at the same time by caustic, or made to shrivel by an astringent. The same end is served by a gradually tightening ligature (such as a thread of elastic pulled out from an old brace) round the base or neck of the wart ; an ordinary thread is apt to cut too deep and may cause suppuration. The best treatment is to rub an astringent, or acid, or caustic substance into the surface of the wart. Glacial acetic acid may be applied on the end of a glass rod, or by a camel-hair brush, care being taken not to touch the adjoining skin. A solution of perchloride of iron is also effective in the same way. Nitrate of silver is objectionable, owing to the black stains left by it. A simple domestic remedy, often effectual, is the astringent and acrid juice of the common stonecrop (Sedum acre) rubbed into the wart, time after time, from the freshly gathered herb. The result of these various applications is that the wart loses its turgor or firmness, shrivels up, and eventually falls off. A peculiar form of wart, known as verrugas, occurs endemically in certain valleys of the Peruvian Andes, especially in the region of the Cerro de Pasco. It is believed to have been one of the causes of the excessive mortality from haemorrhages of the skin among the troops of Pizarro. In recent times attention was called to it by Dr Archibald Smith in 1842 ; in 1874, during the making of the Trans-Andean Railway, it caused a considerable loss of life among English navvies and engineers. Strangers of the white race sull er much more severely from it than the acclimatized or the natives. It is sometimes epidemic and peculiarly fatal. Its en demic seats are certain deep and narrow valleys traversed by a mountain stream or torrent and covered with luxuriant vegetation ; where the valley widens the endemic influence is no longer felt. The warts may be few or many, up to several hundreds ; they occur on internal mucous membranes as well as on the skin. Their out break is preceded for some weeks by a feverish state and by pains in the limbs. These symptoms disappear when the warts come out ; they are at first reddish spots about the size of a pea, but grow to be rounded or conical excrescences as large as a raspberry or filbert, or pigeon s egg ; after a time the surface becomes ragged or fissured (as in an ordinary wart), especially when rubbed or chafed, and blood begins to ooze, which may amount to consider able hemorrhage. Death (in about 10 per cent, of cases) is due to loss of blood, or to the protracted ulceration following the fall of the warts. The disease lasts usually several months ; but a feeble state of the system may remain long after the warts are all gone. The excrescences (besides those of the internal membranes) occur in the favourite situations of common warts the fingers and back of the hand (also the toes and back of the foot), the face and neck, and among the hair of the head. See Ilirsch, Geographical and Historical Pathology, vol. ii., Engl. trans., 1885. WARTON. Three authors of this name, a father and two sons, were leaders of reaction against the didactic poetry of Pope s school, and did much to help forward the descriptive and romantic revival. THOMAS WARTON (1688-1745), satirized in Terrx Filius (February 18, 1721) as &quot;squinting Tom of Maudlin,&quot; was vicar of Basingstoke in Hampshire, and professor of poetry at Oxford. He published nothing during his lifetime, but after his death his son Joseph published some of his poetry under the title Poems on Several Occasions, 1748. JOSEPH WARTON (1722-1800), eldest son of the preced ing, was born at Dunsford, in Surrey, in 1722, and sent to Winchester school in 1736. Collins was already there, and the school seems to have been at the time quite a nest of singing birds, quickened into unusual ambition by a visit from Pope. Collins and Warton became close friends, read Milton and Spenser together, and wrote verses which they sent to the Gentleman s Magazine, verses of such promise that Johnson formally criticized them. The two friends XXIY. 48