Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/67

Rh V A N V A N 53 Fia. l. of Desmodus rufus, Weid. biting the horses on their withers. The injury is generally not so much owing to the loss of blood as to the in flammation which the pressure of the saddle afterwards produces. The whole circumstance has lately been doubted in England ; I was therefore fortunate in being present when one was actually caught on a horse s back. We were bivouacking late one evening near Coquimbo, in Chili, when my servant, noticing that one of the horses was very restive, went to see what was the matter, and, fancying he could detect something, suddenly put his hand on the beast s withers, and secured the vampire&quot; (Naturalist s Voyage Round the World, p. 22). Dcsmodus rufus, Weid, the common blood-sucking bat, is widely spread over the tropical and subtropical parts of Central and South America from Oaxaca to southern Brazil and Chili. It is a comparatively small bat, a little larger than the common noctulo, the head and body about 3 inches in length, the forearm 2, with a remarkably long and strong thumb ; it is destitute of a tail, and has a very peculiar physiognomy, well re presented in fig. 1. The body is covered with rather short fur of a reddish brown colour but varying in shade, the extremities of the hairs sometimes ashy. The teeth are peculiar and characteristic, admirably adapted for the purposes for which they are employed. The upper front teeth (incisors), of which there are only two, are enor mously enlarged (see fig. 2), and in shape obliquely triangular like small guillotines. The canines, though smaller than the incisors, are large and sharp ; but the back teeth, so , well developed in all other bats, are very small and reduced in number to two above and three below, on each side, with later ally compressed crowns rising but slightly FIG. 2.-Teeth of D. ru/iw. above the level of the gum, their longitudinally disposed cutting edges (in the upper jaw) being continuous with the base of the canine and with each other. The lower front teeth (incisors) are small, bifid, in pairs, and are separated from the canines, with a space in front. The lower back teeth are narrow, like those in the upper jaw, but the anterior tooth is slightly larger than the others, and separated by a small space from the canines. Behind the lower incisors the jaw is deeply hollowed out to receive the extremities of the large upper incisors. With this peculiar dentition there is associated as remarkable a departure from the general type in the form of the digestive ap paratus. The exceedingly narrow oesophagus opens at right angles into a narrow, intestine-like stomach, which almost immediately terminates on the right, without a distinct pylorus, in the duodenum, but on the left forms a greatly elongated c;ecum, bent and folded upon itself, which appears at first sight like part of the intestines. This, the cardiac extremity of the stomach, is, for a short distance to the left of the entrance of the oesophagus, still very narrow, but soon increases in size, till near its termination it attains a diameter quite three times that of the short pyloric portion. The length of this cardiac diverticulnm of the stomach appears to vary from 2 to 6 inches, the size in each specimen probably depending on the amount of food obtained by the animal before it was captured. The only other known species of blood-sucking bat, Diphylla faudata, Spix, inhabits Brazil, and appears to be much less abun dant than Dcsmodus rufus, from which it is distinguished by its slightly smaller size, by the absence of a groove in the front of the lower lip, by the non-development of the interfemoral membrane in the centre, and by the presence of a short calcaneum (absent in D. rufus), but more particularly by the presence of an additional rudimentary back tooth (? molar) above and below, and by the very peculiar form of the lower incisors, which are much expanded in the direction of the jaws and pectinated, forming a semicircular row touching each other, the outer incisors being wider than the inner ones, with six notches, the inner incisors with three each. Thus constituted, these bats present, in this extraordinary differ entiation of the manducatory and digestive apparatus, a departure from the type of other species of the family (Phyllosf.omidas) to which they belong unparalleled in any of the other orders of Mammalia, standing apart from all other mammals as being fitted only for a diet of blood, and capable of sustaining life upon that alone. Travellers describe the wounds inflicted by the large sharp-edged in cisors as being similar to those caused by a razor when shaving : a portion of the skin is shaved off and, a large number of severed capillary vessels being thus exposed, a constant flow of blood is maintained. From this source the blood is drawn through the ex ceedingly narrow gullet too narrow for anything solid to pass into the intestine-like stomach, whence it is, probably, gradually drawn off during the slow process of digestion, while the animal, sated with food, is hanging in a state of torpidity from the roof of its cave or from the inner sides of a hollow tree. (G. E. D.) VAN, a city of Asiatic Turkey, capital of a vilayet, is situated two miles to the east of the lake to which it gives its name, in 38 30 N. lat. and 43 18 E. long. It lies on the ill-defined borderland between Armenia and Kurd istan, in an extremely fertile plain some 40 miles in circuit, which is described as one of the gardens of the East, whence the local saying: &quot;Van in this world, heaven in the next.&quot; Its low flat-roofed houses are grouped irregularly at the southern base of a nummulitic limestone eminence, somewhat resembling a camel s back, which rises 100 feet sheer above the plain and is crowned by the so-called citadel, the fortifications of which are mostly in a dilapidated state. But it is naturally a position of great strength and of considerable strategic importance, standing at the junction of two military routes, which here diverge westwards through Mush and Kharpiit to Asia Minor and southwards to Mosul and Mesopotamia, besides commanding the approaches to the Persian frontier at Kotur and Bayezid. The town itself, which contains four mosques, two large churches, an Armenian bazaar, baths, and caravanserais, is enclosed within a double line of crenellated walls and ditches on the three sides not protected by the rock ; and beyond these enclosures lies the suburban district of Baghlar, or the &quot; Gardens.&quot; The population, estimated at from 30,000 to 35,000, are Turks, except about 2000 Armenians and a few hundred Mo hammedan and Nestorian Kurds. Besides trade and agriculture, the inhabitants are engaged in a few indus tries, such as the making of coarse cotton chintzes, a highly prized goat-hair waterproof moire antique, a thick woollen cloth called shayak, and an excellent soap, pre pared from the saline efflorescences of Lakes Van and Erchek, which consist in about equal proportions of the carbonate and sulphate of soda. Armenian tradition derives the name of Van from an Armenian king who reigned a little before Alexander the Great, and speaks of an older city founded by Semiramis (Shemiramagerd). This is of course fable ; but the Vannic inscriptions (vol. xiii. p. 116) show that the region was the seat of an Armenian kingdom, whose native name was Biaina, as early as the 9th century n. c. In the isolated rock towering above the plain there are numerous galleries, flights of steps, crypts, and cuneiform rock inscriptions, one of which is trilingual, like that of Behistun, and like it relates the deeds of Xerxes, son of Darius. Others are in the Haikan or Old Armenian language ; while for others scattered over the district a solution has been sought by Prof. Sayce with doubtful success in the present language of Georgia. The vilayet of Van, one of the finest but also one of the least developed regions of Asiatic Turkey, lies on the Persian frontier between Erzerum (north) and Baghdad (south). It has an area of 15,000 square miles, with a population of over 1,000,000. Lake Fan. Lake Van, called Arsissa Palus by the ancients, and also TJios- pilis, from its Armenian name Tosp, is 80 miles long and 30 broad, with a total area of 1500 square miles. Although of smaller extent than Lake Urmia, it contains a much larger volume of water owing to its much greater depth, which is at least 80 feet near Van and still more along the south side. The lake stands about 5400 feet above sea-level on the south Armenian plateau, which is en circled by the lofty ranges that bifurcate west and south from Ararat and culminate in the Sipan-Dagh (12,000 feet) on the north side of the lake. These mountains are clad with dense forests of beech, chestnut, ash, and walnut, while the broad fertile belt be tween their base and the lake is planted with melon gardens and orchards of plums, peaches, apricots, figs, and pomegranates, festooned with a vine which yields a palatable wine.