651 



VOWEL. 



\V. 



683 



these promises of the importance of the engagement they have taken 

 upon them, and brings the religious sentiment to strengthen and 

 confirm the dictates of expediency. But custom-house oaths, masonic 

 vows, and such trivialities and mummeries, degrade the vow to the 

 level of a mere theatrical show, or of the thoughtless habit of inter- 

 jectional swearing in common discourse. The addition of a vow does 

 not render a promise more binding, or alter the reason why it is 

 binding. A promise affords a ground of belief that a man will act in a 

 certain pre-determined manner, instead of being carried away by the 

 whim of the moment. It is of advantage to the individual who makes ' 

 promises that he should, except in extreme cases, contract the habit of 

 adhering to them, because it imparts consistency and power to his 

 character; and it is of advantage to all with whom he may have 

 dealings that he should contract this habit, for it renders their trans- 

 actions with him safe. Hence the universal feeling that, except in 

 very extreme cases, promises ought to be kept, even to the maker's 

 disadvantage. Vows are exactly on the same footing : the superadded 

 appeal to the Divinity by its solemnity renders men more cautious 

 in binding themselves, and more earnest and unwavering in the 

 performance of their promise. The danger of making vows frequently 

 and on trivial occasions has been inferred from the nature of the 

 religious sentiment called into play : a further restriction of their 

 admissibility may be deduced from he nature of the simple promise. 

 It limits man's freedom of action, and so far is a disadvantage. It 

 ought to be confined to actions : for a man to pledge himself to feel 

 and think only in a certain manner is to undertake an impossibility. 

 It pledges him to an unhealthy struggle against the order of nature. 

 The promise ought moreover to be restricted to actions meritorious in 

 themselves, and of some consequence. If to commit a crime ia bad, to 

 promise to commit one, and deliberately to keep the promise when 

 aware of the criminality of the act, is worse. To tie a man's self up 

 by a promise from the commission of an action indifferent in itself is a 

 wilful waste of the power of self-denial, of which man at the best has 

 no more than barely serves his necessities : the mind worn out with 

 struggling against harmless propensities falls an easy prey to temptation 

 in more important matters. The whole history of the monastic orders, 

 a history attractive from the grandeur of its irregular and imaginative 

 struggles, is an illustration of these views. With regard to simple 

 promises, the rule of action is to make as few as possible, and exert 

 every effort to keep them unless convinced that to do so would be 

 a crime. With regard to vows, the same rule holds if possible with 

 more force, because fickleness in regard to them implies a profane 

 trifling with the most sublime emotions of our nature. 



VOWEL. [ALPHABET.] 



VOYAGE. [SHIPS; BOTTOMRY.] 



VULCAN. [HEPHAESTUS.] 



VULCANISED INDIA RUBBER. [CAOUTCHOUC MANUFACTURE.] 



VULGATE. The Vulgate ( Vulgata vertio), or common version, 

 is the name sometimes given by St. Jerome to what he elsewhere calls 

 the Vettui, or ancient version, and what St. Augustine calls the Vetiu 

 Itala, or Old Italian Version, being the most generally received of 

 those early Latin translations of the Scriptures distinguished by bibli- 

 cal critics as the aute-Hieronymian, all which are now lost, with the 

 exception of some parts of this Vetut Itala, and such fragments of the 

 others as> are quoted in the writings of the Fathers. Jerome's first 

 labours as a translator of the Scriptures consisted in a revision and 

 correction of this original Vulgate, which he completed about A.D. 390. 

 Before this date, however, he had commenced an entirely new transla- 



tion from the original Greek and Hebrew ; and it is this to which the 

 name of the Vulgate is now given. The earlier Vulgate, as revised by 

 Jerome, has all perished, except only the Book of Psalms and the Book 

 of Job, and the apocryphal Books of Maccabees, Baruch, Ecclesiasticus, 

 and Wisdom. The use of Jerome's new version appears to have been 

 gradually introduced ; but ever since the 7th century, when it was sanc- 

 tioned by Pope Gregory I., it has been exclusively adopted by the Romish 

 Church. The Council of Trent, in the 16th century, even conferred 

 upon it an authority superior to that of the original text, by ordaining 

 that " the Vulgate alone should be esteemed authentic in the public 

 reading of the .Scriptures, in disputations, in preaching, and in expound- 

 ing, and that no one should dare to reject it under any pretext what- 

 ever." Accordingly, all the Romish translations of the Bible into the 

 modern languages profess to have been made not from the Greek and 

 Hebrew, but from the Vulgate. 



The true text of Jerome's version, however, has been at all times 

 matter of doubt and controversy. It very early got mixed with that 

 of the Vftus ftala ; and the restoration of its purity employed the 

 labours of Alcuin, by direction of Charlemagne, towards the close of 

 the 8th century, of Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury, in the llth, 

 of Cardinal Nicholas and others in the 12th and 13th. After the 

 invention of printing, the Latin Bible was the first considerable work 

 that was sent to the press ; hut the earliest editions exhibited a very 

 corrupt text. The first critical editions were those produced at Paris 

 by Robert Stephens (Etienne), in 1528, 1532, 1534, 1540, 1545, and 

 1546. Of these the edition of 1540 is accounted the best. Other 

 corrected editions are those of John Hentenius, a divine of Louvain, 

 first printed at Louvain, in folio, in 1547, reprinted by the Plantins, at 

 Antwerp, in 5 vols. 8vo, 1565 and 1574 ; and that of Lucas Brugensis, 

 and other divines of Louvain, printed at Louvain, in 3 vols. tivo, in 

 1573 ; and again, both in 8vo and 4to, in 1586. 



The first revised edition of the Vulgate promulgated by authority 

 in the Romish Church was issued at Rome from the press of the Vati- 

 can, in three volumes, folio, in 1590, under the title of ' Biblia Sacra 

 Latina, Vulgata; editionis, jussu Sixti V. recognita et edita.' This 

 edition, the preparation of which had been begun under Pius IV., was 

 declared by Pope Sixtus to be the authentic text, and is known as the 

 Sixtine Vulgate, or the Bible of Sixtus V. Yet it had been no sooner 

 published than it was discovered to be full of misprints and other 

 errors, which were very insufficiently corrected by the necessary 

 emendations, printed upon separate strips of paper, being here and 

 there stuck over the original word where the passage had been most 

 grossly disfigured. Gregory XIV., who succeeded Sixtus V., ordered 

 it to be suppressed, and the true Sixtine Vulgate is now of excessive 

 rarity. A new edition of it, in the same form, was brought out in 

 1592, under the authority of Gregory's successor, Clement VIII., and 

 this is called the Clementine Vulgate, or more frequently by Roman 

 Catholic writers the corrected Bible of Sixtus V. It is now the 

 authorised edition in the Romish Church ; the Vulgate as since printed 

 being commonly entitled ' Biblia Sacra Latina, Vulgate editionis Sixti V. 

 et dementis VIII.' Protestant controversialists have, naturally enough, 

 made the most of the variations to be found between the Sixtine and 

 Clementine Vulgates, each published and declared to be the only true 

 edition by an authority professing to be infallible. 



VULPE'CULA ET ANSER (the Fox and the Goose), a constella- 

 tion of Hevelius, situated immediately above Aquila and Sagitta. It 

 does not contain any stars of conspicuous magnitude. 



VULPINIC ACID. [LICHBNS, COLOURING MATTERS OP.] 



w 



Wis a letter which performs the double office of a consonant and a 

 vowel, the natural order of the vowels being t, e, a, o, . The 

 sounds then of t, that is cc, and u, that is on, are the most remote, and 

 the attempt to pass with rapidity from either of these to the others, 

 more particularly to the other extreme, gives an initial breathing 

 which has the character of a consonant, namely, in the one case ee-oo, 

 or yuu ; in the other oo-ee, or we. Hence it is that the letters y and w 

 appear as the representatives, sometimes of a consonant, sometimes of 

 a VDwel. The English character ic is formed by the repetition of a v, 

 which itaelf is only a variety of the symbol u, and that again has in all 

 probability grown out of the letter o. [ALPHABET.] The Anglo-Saxon 

 alphabet employs the symbol \>. In Latin the v or u commons had 

 probably the power of a w, a supposition which at once accounts for 

 the use of a common character for the vowel and consonant. The 

 Greek and Hebrew alphabets had also a single symbol for this con- 

 sonant, which occupied the sixth place, and is called digamma in the 

 former, rau or waf in the latter. But in the Greek alphabet the letter 

 went out of use, and is, therefore, commonly omitted in our gram- 

 mars of that language, although the gap at this point in the alpha- 

 betical designation of numbers still bears evidence to the original 

 .11 of the letter. [UIOAMMA.] Most of the modern languages of 

 Europe are deficient in a symbol for this letter. The French employ 



what is a sufficient though a clumsy equivalent, the diphthong ou, 

 prefixed to a vowel, as in the common particle oui ; the Spaniards 

 prefer hu, as in huevo, hueio. In this way the map of the New World 

 often gives testimony as to the race of Europeans who originally 

 settled in the country. Thus the Indian tribe which has furnished a, 

 name to the territory belonging to the United States now called 

 Wisconsin, in the old maps is written Ouisconsin, that country having 

 been first visited by the French. So again in Mexico, the town 

 Chihuahua (pronounced ChiwaVa) tells us that its name was first 

 written by Spaniards ; and the same may be said in the map of Peru 

 of the river Huallaga; and the numerous towns commencing with 

 the same syllable, as Huanoavelica, Huancayo, Huanuco, Huancabamba, 

 &c. At other times the Spaniards have employed the letters yu, as 

 may be seen in the different rivers of Spain Proper, which have pre- 

 fixed the Arabic word guad, denoting water ; and this mode too of 

 representing a w is to be traced in Spanish America in Guamanga, 

 Guanca, Guancarama, Guatemala, &c. The ancient Greeks again often 

 prefixed a simple o to represent a w, as in oiSo, Ac. [DioAMMA.J We 

 have hitherto spoken of the consonantal power of the letter ; its use as 

 a vowel, so far as our own language is concerned, is confined to the end 

 of syllables ; and there is always another vowel prefixed to it, as in 

 ncu; law, lww; but in the Welsh language it is employed by itself, and 



