Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/191

Rh puffy or bloated appearance, and the conﬁguration of the chest is altered, assuming the character known as the barrel-shaped or emphysematous thorax. The main element in the treatment of emphysema consists in attention to the general condition of the health, and in the avoidance of all causes likely to aggravate the disease or induce its complications. The same general plan of treatment as that recommended in asthma and bronchitis is applicable in emphysema. During attacks of urgent breathlessness antispasmodic remedies should be had recourse to, while the employment of dry cupping over the lungs, and even of moderate wet cupping over the precordium, will often afford marked and speedy relief.

Interlobular emphysema, arising from the rupture of air-cells in the immediate neighbourhood of the pleura, may occur as a complication of the vesicular form, or separately as the result of some sudden expulsive effort, such as a ﬁt of coughing, or, as has frequently happened, in parturition. Occasionally the air infiltrates the cellular tissue of the mediastinum, and thence comes to distend the integument of the whole surface of the body. When occurring suddenly and extensively, this has been known to produce death by asphyxia.  EMPIRE, a used to denote either the  by a person bearing the  of  (see ), or, more generally, any extensive. The of a former age were accustomed to enumerate a succession of great empires, and especially the n and n, -n, and the n, which had embraced the greater part of the   before the rise of  power, but that system has now been abandoned. In its strict sense, “the Empire” meant during the, and indeed almost till the, the - or so-called Holy Roman Empire, of which this is therefore the proper place to give a short account. The old, founded by and , was ﬁnally divided in  between  and , the two sons of ,—that is to say, one part of it, the , was ruled from  or  by one , and the other or  half from  by another, although the whole was still held to constitute, in theory, a single   which had been divided merely for  purposes. In the   was overturned by, the leader of an  of   in the imperial service; and the s which had obeyed it, so far as they were not then already occupied by invading  s, reverted to the  reigning at , who thereby became again sole   of the. reconquered in the, and his  retained , though  was their capital, for two centuries. This state of things lasted till, when  of the   was    in  by  All the , except a part of , had long since ceased to obey the , and that part of  had rebelled about seventy  before. The object of the elevation of the  was to make  again the capital of an undivided, rather than to effect a severance by creating a separate Western empire; but as the  continued to subsist, the effect of the step really was to establish two mutually hostile  of , each claiming to be the one rightful  of  and , but neither able to dispossess its rival. The, which had fallen very low under the of , was again revived in the  by ,  of the , in ; and from his time on there was an unbroken  of   who took the  and enjoyed the   and  of  , being acknowledged in the   and by the  as the heads of the whole. Their power was, however, practically conﬁned to and, and after the death of  , it became comparatively weak even in those. In  was taken by the, and the  came to an end. The Western, however, though now so feeble that it could only be kept on foot by choosing as some  powerful by his  s, lasted on till the , when  of ,  of  and  of  and ,  his , and withdrew to the  of his  s and  under the  (assumed the ) of  of. With him the Holy Roman Empire ended. The territorial extent of the - empire varied greatly at different periods of its. In the time of it included the northern half of (except the district about ),, Western and Southern, and  between the  and the. Under and his ﬁrst  it extended over the whole of  (including  and ), as it then stood (modern  stretches further towards the north-east), and the south-east part of modern, being what was then called the  of , and had claims of superiority, more or less deﬁnite in different cases, over the adjacent s of , , and. Its further pretensions over the greater s of, , , and can hardly be said to have been admitted, though in a speculative sense the Holy Empire was held to include these  and indeed the whole. At the all claims over districts outside  had become obsolete, nor were they ever revived. From the onwards it was practically conterminous with modern, except that it did not include. The government of the Holy Roman Empire was never an absolute in the sense in which that of the old had been, or that of the  at  was while it lasted. Down till the end of the time  it was a strong, in which, as in the other  s of , the  enjoyed powers which were considerable but by no means unlimited, as he was obliged to respect the  of his s, and could  and  only with the consent of the , or supreme al assembly. From the time of of  (who came to the  in ), its strength, which had been broken in a long struggle against the  and the  s, was much less; its s had shrunk, and the greater  had become practically independent s,  in their own, and sometimes stronger than the emperor. The struggles which attended and followed the still further weakened the  of the, to which, as , the  s and  became almost of necessity hostile; and after the , when the   had ﬁnally settled the  of the empire, it was really no longer an empire at all, but a  of very numerous , some large, many very small, united under the  of a head who bore the  of emperor, but enjoyed scarcely any actual power, and represented in a  which was now not so much a al  as a standing  of s and officials. The  was always in theory, but