Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 20.djvu/200

* VIPER. 156 VIKCHOW. "VIPER, Dr. a character in Samuel Foote's play of The Capuchin. It depicted, under a thin disguise, an Irish clergrman named Jackson, who replied by fierce attacks in a paper which he edited and by suborning a servant to prefer in- famous charges, of which Foote was acquitted in the Court of King's Bench. VIPER-FISH. See Lantern-Fish. VIPER'ID.ffi (Xeo-Lat. nom. pi., from Lat. vipeni. viper, adder, serpent ) . The most spe- cialized and venomous family of snakes, ranked as the highest of ophidians. ' It is characterized by a wide, angular, depressed head, causing the neck to appear small in comparison; a short thick body; and a tail tapering suddenly to a point. The head is mostly covered with scales, rarely plates (or only a few about the eyes and lips), or with extremely fine plates. The scales are carinated, often rough, even spinous. The ventral shields are broad, and the sub-caudal plates in two rows. The nostrils are large, and in some species they close with a valve. The highly venomous serpents of this family are furnished with a pair of long, curved proteroglyph fangs at- tached on each side to the upper maxillary, which is movably articulated, and by special muscles swings or rocks to and fro, carrying the fang with it. When at rest, the fang, protected by a membranous sheath, lies supine along the jaw. The fang has a canal in its interior, con- nected with a poison-gland, the contents of which are ejected into the wound made by the fang in the act of l>iting. (See illustrations under S>-.ke.) Behind the pair of functional fangs, others, in a rudimentary stage, are found, and come forward to take their place when one or both of them are broken or shed. The lower jaw has numerous solid teeth of the ordinary form. All vipers except the African genus Atractaspis are viviparous, and produce comparatively few young. The family includes terrestrial, ar- boreal, semi-aquatic, and burrowing types, and is almost world-wide in its distribution, but rnost numerous and highly developed in the tropics; Australia, Madagascar, and cold northern regions are free from these baneful serpents. The family includes two well-marked groups — the Viperinw, or typical vipers (q.v.), which have no external pit between the eyes and the nose, and the maxillary not hollowed out above, and which belong wholly to the Old World; and the Ameri- can and Asiatic Crolaliiuc, or pit-vipers, which have a deep cavity between the eye and the nose lodged in the holiowed-out maxillary bone. The last-named are frequently ranked as a separate family. See Crotalid.e ; Rattlesnake. VIPER'S BUGLOSS, also called Blue TnisTi.K (Erhiiim). A genus of large, hairy herbs or shrubs of the natural order Boragina- eeit. The flowers are often very beautiful. The common viper bugloss {Echium vuUiare) . a large biennial plant, is a native of most parts of Eu- rope, and introduced and spreading in most parts of the I'nited States. It grows in dry places, not infrequently in grain fields. Its flowers are at first reddish, and afterwards blue. It derives its name, viper's bugloss, from spots on its stem, which somewhat resemble the spots on a viper; and the property of healing viper's bites was, therefore, ascribed to it. VIQ0E, veTift. A town in Spain. See Vicii. VIRACOCHA, ve'rak.Vcha (foam of the sea, in allusion to his white beard). The supreme gud of the ancient Quichua (q.v.) of Peru. He is represented as the creator and ruler of the sun, moon, and all other objects in nature, in- cluding the human race. In his incarnate form he is said to have issued from Lake Titicaca as a venerable man, with a fair skin and a flowing white beard. He proceeded northward, teaching those who would listen, and visiting swift mi- raculous destruction upon those who refused to hear. To the chief of Pacari-tampu or Paucar- tambo, "The House of the Dawn,' who received him with special hospitality, he gave his staff, which afterwards turned to pure gold on the birth of the chiefs next son, the famous Manco- Capac, founder of the Inca dynasty. Having ac- complished his mission of organizing the Quichua tribes into a civilized community, he departed by way of the western ocean. In his principal at- tributes Viracocha appears as the universal Light God, as indicated by his fair complexion, white beard, his appearance in the east, and his jour- neying to the west. The god Pachacamac (q.v.) appears to be only Viracocha under another form. As the Aztec Emperor saw in Cort6s the messenger of the lost Quetzalcoatl ( q.v. ), so the Peruvians, expecting the return of their great incarnate god, hailed the Spaniards, with their fair-skinned and bearded faces, as the children of Viracocha, and the name continues in com- mon use among the natives to designate those of the white race. VIRCHOW, ver'KS, Rudolf (1821-1902). An eminent German pathologist, anthropologist, and scholar, born at Sehivelbein. Prussia. He was graduated in medicine in Berlin and became pro- sector of anatomy in the faculty, sharing the companionship of Henle, Schwann, Briicke, Helm- holtz, Du Bois-Reymond, and other scholars who were destined to become distinguished discoverers of important medical facts. He became, in 1847, lecturer at the University of Berlin. Soon after- wards he was commissioned by the Government to investigate the cause and cure of typhus in Silesia. He founded, at this time, the Archiv fiir patho- logische Anatomic und Physiologic, of which he remained editor till his death, and which is celebrated the world over as "Virchow's Ar- chives." The political conunotions of 1848 dragged him, in conunon with many other vo- taries of science, into the revolutionary vortex. He established a journal entitled the Medical Reformer, and also a democratic club, where he soon distinguished himself as an orator. On ac- count of his political opinions. Virchow lost his post in 1840, and, though reinstated afterwards, he aece])ted in the same year a call to the chair of pathological anatomy in Wurzburg. His lectures at that university Were widely popular for the novel views which he advanced, particularly in cellular pathology. His reputa- tion grew so great that he was recalled in 1850 to Berlin, where he re-occupied the chair of pathological anatomy, and rendered it the most famous of its kind in Kurope. In 18.')!) he became a member of the Municipal Coun- cil of Berlin, where he distinguished himself as a reformer of the arbitrary ])oliee system then rampant. In 1802 he was chosen Deputy to the Prussian Diet, and soon rose to the leadership of the ojjposilion, and proved a most effective antag-