centuries ago, but was comparatively rare in this country until the last century. This malady stands almost alone in this, that all animals seem liable to its attacks.

It is a matter of dispute among some of our best authorities whether rabies be occasionally spontaneous in the carnivora-the only animals in which it is undoubtedly inherent-or communicated solely by inoculation.

Looking simply at the history of the disease, the facts would seem to be against the spontaneity theory. Rabies is not known in some countries, such as the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, Egypt, Syria, the South Sea Islands, Lisbon, where dogs swarm; and in Constantinople, where they go at large, and support themselves on offals of all kinds and qualities, the disease is of very rare occurrence. John Hunter relates that it was not known in Jamaica for forty years previous to 1783, when it was introduced by an affected dog from America; and Dr Hamilton says that curs of the most wretched description abound in the island of Madeira-that they are affected with almost every disease, tormented by flies, by heat, thirst, and famine, yet no rabid dog was ever seen there. There is often, no doubt, great difficulty in tracing the cause of rabies from inoculation. The owner may feel convinced that his diseased dog had almost never been out of his sight, or exposed to an affected animal; but when we consider the predatory habits of the dog, and his love of association, and how easily he can steal away unobserved by night or by day for a longer or shorter time, we can readily account for the most vigilant eye being occasionally off its guard. It has been asked, as an objection to the exclusiveness of contagion or inoculation, How was rabies at first originated? But the same difficulty attends the case of small-pox and other diseases which now arise only from contagion.

There is another important peculiarity in this disease on which medical men are divided-viz., whether the virus of a rabid animal, other than of the carnivorous species, can communicate the disease. Experiments to test this were made by some foreign surgeons of eminence, by Drs Vaughan and Babington of London, and at the Royal Veterinary College; and it is reported that in every instance they failed in producing the disease. It is certain, however, that others have not so failed in their object. MM. Majendie and Brechet in 1823 inoculated two dogs with the saliva of a hydrophobic man, and it resulted in one of the dogs becoming rabid, which in turn communicated the disease to other dogs and some sheep. Mr Earl, the wellknown London surgeon, in administering medicine to a hydrophobic woman, was bitten by her, and he immediately excised the bitten part. Being accused of unnecessary fear and cowardice, he determined to justify his fears, and having inoculated several rabbits with the woman's saliva, some of them became rabid. Mr King of Bath succeeded in producing the disease in a common hen by the virus of a cow. Several other cases could be related, but it may serve our purpose to quote the following remarks of Mr Youatt: 'I can imagine that the disease shall not be readily communicated by the saliva of a graminivorous animal; but I have once produced it in the dog with the saliva of an ox, and twice with that of the horse, but I have failed to do it in very many cases. While on this point, it may be remarked, that the writer once saw a rabid horse bite a young man's hand rather severely, while incautiously giving it a ball of medicine, and he accompanied him to Sir Astley Cooper, who, according to his invariable practice, as he told us, applied nitrous acid to the injured part, and he

assured us that no bad effects would accrue; and neither there did.'

We shall briefly notice some of the leading symptoms of rabies in the dog and horse. These may be exhibited in the dog in a few days, or it may be, and often is, weeks, and even months after he has been bitten. At first he loses his appetite, becomes sullen, fidgety, has a vacant gaze, licks or gnaws the injured part, laps any liquid that comes in his way-for he has, unlike man, no dislike for water, although he has a difficulty in swallowing it-eats wood, straw, hair, and other indigestible substances; and in a day or two he becomes quarrelsome, bent on mischief, bites at anything that comes in his way, and his bark is more like a howl; his lower jaw often becomes pendulous, and general paralysis sometimes precedes death; and as a rule, on the fifth or sixth day he dies. The principal post-mortem appearances are these enlargement and increased vascularity of the salivary glands, inflamed condition of the base of the tongue and fauces, epiglottis, and stomach, which last organ almost invariably contains such indigestible substances as straw, hair, offal, &c. The symptoms in the horse, which become apparent in a few weeks, are those of extreme irritability. He trembles, heaves, and paws, staggers, and falls; and after a severe struggle, he suddenly rises again, and appears settled and collected, when he will again exhibit the usual distressing symptoms. He is sometimes mischievous, bites, foams, and snorts; and generally in three days he dies paralysed and exhausted.

The disease seems primarily to be one of bloodpoisoning, and not, as some have represented it, an affection of the nervous system. We know that some instances of blood-poisoning terminate with coma, or convulsions, but are not, on that account, to be considered as proceeding from nervous disease. Whatever may be the precise nature of the disease, it is certain that no cure has been discovered for it. The writer has seen many dogs, some horses, and an ox in all the different stages of it, and many attempts at a cure tried, without producing even any palliative effects, and every one of the patients died in the ordinary course, whether anything or nothing was done. As the disease is so rare, and contrary to popular belief-is not more prevalent at one period of the year than another, no anticipatory precautionary measures can be taken. Preventive measures, however, when it is known, or even suspected, that the disease has manifested itself, should not for an instant be neglected. All dogs known to have been bitten, or been in the company of the rabid animal, should be immediately destroyed, and every other dog in the town and district confined, or closely muzzled, for several weeks, or even months. As to the measures to be taken when a human being is bitten by a rabid animal, see HYDROPHOBIA.

RA'BINET, a small piece of ordnance formerly in use. It weighed but 300 pounds, and fired a small ball of 13 inch diameter, with a very limited

RACCONI'GI, a town in the west of Northern Italy, pleasantly situated on the Maira, 24 miles south of Turin by railway. Its palace, surrounded by a small but handsomely laid-out park, is one of

of Les Horaces, she first strongly attracted the attention of the public. The admiration excited by her performance rapidly grew into enthusiasm ; and from this time forward, in the great parts supplied by the classic masterpieces of Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire, she shone without a rival. In 1843, her fame may be said to have culminated in her appearance as Phèdre in the tragedy of that name by Racine. In Adrienne Lecouvreur, a piece expressly written for her by MM. Legouvé and Scribe, she had also immense success, though in other more modern parts, her popularity was somewhat less. The furor excited in Paris in 1848 by her public recitation of the Marseillaise Hymn, in the interest of the revolutionary government, will continue to connect her name with the public history of the period. In 1849, she made the tour of the French provinces, and subsequently visited England and Russia, everywhere meeting with success and enthusiastic recognition. Her health, however, had begun to fail: in 1855, in the course of a professional visit to America, it altogether gave way, and she returned utterly prostrated. A residence at Cairo failed to restore her to strength; and on the 3d January 1858, she died at Cannet, near Toulon. As an artist, within the limits prescribed by her genius, she has probably never been quite equalled. Of the burning intensity which characterised her rendering of passion in its fiercer concentrations, no words can give an adequate image. 'She does not act-she suffers,' some one very well said of her. Her Phèdre-by common consent her masterpiece—was an apocalypse of human agony, not to be forgotten by any one who ever witnessed it. In character, R. was neither exemplary nor amiable. Of the details of her private life, it is as well that nothing should be said. In her professional relations, she was notoriously grasping and avaricious. Her immense popularity enabled her, during much of her career, pretty much to dictate her own terms to managers, and of this power, she is said to have availed herself without scruple or generosity. In this way she very rapidly amassed a large fortune. If little else of good is on record of her, she was constant in her home affections, and throughout she frankly made her whole family sharers of her prosperity.

RACINE, JEAN, the most admired of all the French dramatists, was born at Ferté-Milon, 21st December 1639, of a respectable family belonging to the bourgeoisie. At the age of four he lost both his parents, and then went to live with his maternal grandfather, by whom he was sent to the college of Beauvais. Here he remained till he was 16, at which time his grandfather died. He was then taken to Port-Royal (q. v.), where his grandmother and his aunt Agnes were leading a recluse life, and placed at the school which had been opened in that celebrated retreat by the pious scholars assembled there. R. astonished his teachers by the rapidity of his progress in all his studies, especially in Greek; but he won their regards still more by the affectionate seriousness of his character, which gave a delicacy to his ardent sensibilities and vivid imagination. They loved him, yet they trembled for him. When they saw him wander Sophocles or Euripides in his hand-among the shadows of the abbey, anxiety took possession of their hearts; and when they learned that he secretly indulged in the sinful pastime of making

verses, they even thought it necessary to punish their favourite. Their punishment was indeed an odd one, for they obliged him to turn the hymns of the Roman breviary into French verse! Novels were placed under the same ban as poetry. One day the sacristan Lancelot found him reading the Byzantine romance of Bishop Heliodorus (q. v.), entitled The Loves of Theagenes and Charicieus, and threw the book in the fire; but R. says that it was already fixed in his memory, and that he smiled at this futile attempt to rob him of it. We can easily see that R. was not at all ascetically disposed as yet. After a residence of three years at Port-Royal, during which time he had, among other things, read and annotated the best Greek and Latin classics, he went to the Collége d'Harcourt to finish his curriculum with the study of logic. Then he went out to see life,' got into loose company, became irregular himself, and even grew so reckless as to burlesque, in his correspondence, the pious phraseology in vogue at Port-Royal. Deep was the grief and incessant were the remonstrances of his old friends, but they were long without avail He had made some little name as a poet by an Ode on the marriage of the king, and had had the good fortune to get a pension for it, but still his income was small and precarious; and when a maternal uncle, who was a canon-regular of the church of St Genevieve at Uzès, in Languedoc, held out to him the hope of a benefice, R. went to live with him in 1661, and tried to study systematic theology. But the effort was a hopeless one. While he gazed vacantly into the Summa of St Thomas, his thoughts were with Ariosto and Sophocles. In the summer of 1662, he returned to Paris in disgust, and commenced life as a dramatic writes, having meanwhile made the acquaintance of Molière and Boileau. His first piece was the Frères ennemis, played in 1664; but it was not till 1667, when his Andromaque appeared, that the power and peculiar character of his genius excited marked attention. For the next ten years, his career as a dramatist was unsurpassably brilliant, yet, strange to say, we know almost nothing of his private or social life during that time. We have to content ourselves with little more than a few meagre facts relative to his literary performances, the chief of which are and Phèdre. Suddenly, at the early age of 38, in Britannicus, Berenice, Bajazet, Mithridate, Iphigenie, the full sunshine of his fame and vigour of his power, he resolved to abandon both the stage and the world, and become a Carthusian monk. The effect of his Port-Royal training was now seen. the midst of all his literary ambitions and strifes, his little excesses, irregularities, and amours, R. had carried with him a keen and faithful conscience; and partly from disappointment, partly from remorse, he longed to forget all in acts of devotion. With difficulty, he was prevailed upon to modify the rigour of his purpose, and instead of seeking for religious felicity through the privations of solitude, and the severities of penance, to do so through marriage with some pious woman, and the cultivation of domestic virtues. A suitable lady-very devout, but not very intelligent-was found for the poet in the daughter of the city-treasurer of Amiens, and the marriage took place in 1677. Seven children, two sons and five daughters, were the fruit of this union. Shortly after it, R. was appointed historiographer to the king. Henceforth, his course of life was pursued with the utmost regularity-one-third of the day being given to God, another to his family and friends, and the remainder to the king. His Esther (1690) and Athalie (1691) are the only dramas which he produced after his conversion, and they are profoundly imbued with religious

In

feeling. Athalie is reckoned by some his finest effort, and certainly the only one which can at all be placed in comparison with it is the Phèdre. The poet died, after a brief illness, on the 21st of April 1699.

R.'s dramatic genius was essentially French, or pseudo-classical, and therefore it is not easy for Englishmen trained to appreciate the power, magnificence, and variety of the Shakspearian tragedy, to sympathise with it or to criticise it impartially. In the eyes of his countrymen, he is the most perfect, if not the most sublime, of all their dramatists. Corneille may at times exhibit a grander and more rugged energy, but in beauty, grace, and a certain tender majesty of style, R. is held to be without a rival; and it must be remembered that style, and not portraiture of human character, is the thing in which French dramatists aim to shine. The declamations in which the heroes and heroines of R. indulge, are marvellously fine pieces of rhetoric; but, compared with the Eliza bethan drama, they are deficient in deep insight into human nature and in genuine passion, while humour is altogether excluded. See Mémoires of R., edited by his son Louis. The editions of his works are innumerable, and some are of great splendour ; that of Girodet (Paris, 3 vols. 1801-1805) being reckoned one of the finest specimens of typography in the world.

RACI'NE, a city of Wisconsin, U.S., situated on Lake Michigan, at the mouth of Root River, which forms an excellent harbour, and on the line of the Chicago and Milwaukee Railway, 23 miles south of Milwaukee. It has 3 ship-yards, factories, and furnaces. Pop. (in 1860) 7822.

RACK (Sax. wrocan, Ger. recken, to stretch), an instrument of torture, used for extracting confessions from criminals and suspected persons. It consisted of a large oblong frame of wood, with four beams a little raised from the ground, on which the sufferer was stretched and bound. Cords were attached to his extremities, and gradually strained by means of a lever and pulleys, till the operation, if persisted in, caused dislocation of the limbs. The rack was known in the 1st and 2d centuries in the south of Europe, and applied to the early Christians. It was in use in England in the 15th and 16th centuries. According to Coke, it was first introduced into the Tower by the Duke of Exeter, Constable of the Tower, in 1447, whence it came to be called the Duke of Exeter's daughter.' It is mentioned by Holinshed in 1467; but its use first became common in the time of Henry VIII. as an implement of torture for prisoners confined in the Tower. The infliction of the punish ment of the rack took place during the reign of the Tudor sovereigns by warrant of council, or under the sign-manual. In 1628, however, on the murder by Felton of the Duke of Buckingham, it being proposed in the Privy Council to put the assassin to the rack, in order that he might discover his accomplices, the judges resisted the proceeding, as contrary to the law of England. In various countries of Europe, the rack has been much used both by the civil authorities in cases of traitors and conspirators, and by members of the Inquisition to extort a recantation of heresy. It is no longer in use in any part of Europe.

RACK, or RACK-WORK, is a straight bar, with cogs or teeth placed along it, so as to correspond with similar cogs or teeth placed on a wheel, thus: If the bar is not movable, the wheel is attached to a traversing frame, and as it revolves, is moved along by the resistance of its teeth to those on the bar. It was in this way that the formation of a

RACOO'NDA, or NUTRIA, the fur of the Coypu (q. v.).

RACZ, or O BECZE, a town of Hungary, in the Servian Wojwodschaft, on the right bank of the Theiss, 26 miles north-east of Peterwardein. It carries on an extensive trade in corn. Pop. 11,000. RADACK AND RALICK, two parallel chains of islands in the group called Marshall's Islands. See POLYNESIA.

RADCLIFFE, DR JOHN, a celebrated physician, and the founder of the Radcliffe Library at Oxford, was born at Wakefield in Yorkshire, in the year 1650. He was instructed in Greek and Latin at the grammar-school of his native town; and at the early age of 15, was sent to University College, Oxford. In 1672, he took his degree of M.A., applied himself of M.B. in 1675, began to practise as a licentiate at to the study of medicine, and having taken his degree by the originality of some of his ideas, treating the Oxford. He immediately made himself conspicuous of the usually received rules of the profession, cases in which he was engaged with a total disregard and even holding up these to censure and ridicule. At the very commencement of his practice he made some remarkable cures; and in less than two years, the degree of M.D., and remained still two years was on the high road to celebrity. In 1682, he took longer at Oxford in the practice of a lucrative profession.

In 1684, Dr R. removed to London. He established himself in Bow Street, Covent Garden, where, in less than a year, he became the most popular physician of his time. It is said that his conversational powers, ready wit, and pleasantry contributed to this result, quite as much as his professional skill. In 1686, the Princess Anne of Denmark made him her physician. After the Revolution, he was sent for by King William, who frequently had recourse to his advice, and the example of the sovereign was followed by most of the nobility and influential persons about the court. Dr R., however, was himself no courtier; he had no occasion to become one. Dr Mead, who knew him well, pronounced of him, that he was 'deservedly at the head of his tration and experience.' Blunt and independent in profession, on account of his great medical penehis manners-some indeed say even brutal, people nevertheless recognised under his rough exterior that quick perception and keen observation of symptoms which are so important in a master of the healing art; and thus his advice was asked by persons of all ranks, in return for which he received fees of an unprecedented amount.

In 1694, he was called upon to attend Queen Mary, when attacked by the small-pox. It proved to be her last illness, as Dr R. predicted, even before seeing her-merely upon reading the prescriptions

of the other physicians in attendance before he was sent for. He did what he could, however, to save her, but in vain; and some attributed her death either to his want of skill or negligence. About this time he offended the Princess Anne, who, having sent for him on some occasion to St James's, had the mortification to hear that he swore all her Royal Highness's ailments were nothing else than 'the vapours.' This, combined with her knowledge of Dr R.'s too great fondness for the bottle, made her appoint Dr Gibbons as her physician in his place. Still, the king continued to employ him. On one occasion, he sent for him to the Netherlands to attend upon his favourite, the Earl of Albemarle, for which he received £1200 from the king, and.£400 from the patient himself, besides a diamond ring. To the king himself, he frequently spoke with much honesty and plainness concerning his ailments; once, however, he took too great a liberty, for upon his Majesty shewing him his swollen ankles, and asking him what he thought of them, Dr R. replied: 'Why, truly, I would not have your Majesty's two legs for your three kingdoms.' This was towards the end of 1699. He was not again consulted by that sovereign, who soon afterwards died; nor was he ever again completely reinstated in the good graces of Queen Anne, although she occasionally consulted him, and rewarded him handsomely for his services.

In 1713, he was elected M.P. for Buckingham. He had a country-house at Carshalton, to which he used occasionally to retire; and here he was living in 1714, when Queen Anne was attacked with what proved to be her last illness. Dr R. was summoned to attend her; but he either would not or could not come. He had taken physic, he said, and it was impossible for him to attend. The queen died in August; and the populace were so enraged against Dr R., that he dared not again shew his face in London. This much chagrined him, as it kept him a prisoner in a country village. His own end, however, was fast approaching. He must have been really ill when sent for to the queen, as he himself survived her for only two or three months. Dr R. died of gout at Carshalton on the 1st November 1714, and was buried at Oxford in St Mary's Church with much ceremony. He died possessed of considerable property, the whole of which he bequeathed to public uses. Thus, to University College he left his estate in Yorkshire, in trust, for the endowment of two travelling fellowships, and the purchase of perpetual advowsons, together with £5000 for the enlargement of the college buildings. He left £40,000 for the erection of a public library in Oxford, since known as the Radcliffe Library (q. v.), which he endowed with £150 per annum for a librarian, and £100 per annum for the purchase of books. To St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, he bequeathed the yearly sum of £500 towards mending the diet, and £100 per annum for the purchase of linen. The rest of his property he gave to his executors in trust for such charitable purposes as they might best approve. The Radcliffe Infirmary and Radcliffe Observatory, at Oxford, were both erected out of this fund; and from the same source, in 1823, the Radcliffe Trustees contributed the sum of £2000 towards the erection of the College of Physicians in Pall Mall.

RADCLIFFE, ANN, the most popular English novelist at the close of the last century, was born in London, July 9, 1764. She was of respectable parents named Ward. In her 23d year, she married Mr William Radcliffe, a student of law, but who became proprietor and editor of a weekly newspaper, the English Chronicle. Mrs R. lived much in

retirement, known only to a few friends by whom she was warmly esteemed. Her works are- The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), A Journey through Holland, &c. (1794), and The Italian (1797). Mrs R.'s popularity was constantly increasing down to the date of her latest work, when, in her 33d year, like an actress in full possession of her applauded powers,' as Scott has remarked, 'she chose to retreat from the stage in the full blaze of her fame.' She lived 26 years afterwards, dying in 1823. For the copyright of her Mysteries of Udolpho, her best work, she received £500; and for that of The Italian, £800. These sums were at the time considered excessive, and were perhaps the largest ever given in this country for works of fiction until the great era of the Waverley Novels. A sixth romance, entitled Gaston_de Blondeville, and a collection of Poems by Mrs R., were published after her death. As a novelist, Mrs R., is pre-eminent for vivid poetical imagination, and for great power of romantic narrative and description. Her paintings of external nature, and of scenes of feudal pomp, gloom, terror, or mystery, are quite unrivalled in modern romance. In the art of awakening curiosity and enchaining attention, she is no less skilful. She keeps her readers in a state of breathless awe and suspense; but in the end, when she resolves all the seemingly supernatural agencies and horrors of her tales into simple natural causes, she unquestionably fails, for her explanations are inadequate to account for the effects produced. She has also little variety of character or striking individual portraits, and no wit or humour. Hence her works, with all their gorgeous pictures and potent spells, seldom interest beyond the period of youth.

RADCLIFFE LIBRARY, Oxford. This insti tution, founded by Dr John Radcliffe (q. v.), stands in the central area of Radcliffe Square. The building is in the form of a rotunda, standing upon arcades, from the centre of which rises a spacious and wellproportioned dome. This dome is 84 feet in height from the pavement, and is beautifully wrought in stucco. The architect was James Gibbs, who commenced the building in 1737, and completed it in 1747. The library is approached by a handsome stone staircase, and over the entrance-door hangs the portrait of the founder by Sir G. Kneller. The books composing the library are for the most part works on natural history, physical science, and medicine. Besides these, Gibbs, the architect, bequeathed to it a collection of works, chiefly architectural; Wise, the first librarian, a collection of coins; Kennicott, a theological collection; Frewen, a miscellaneous library; Viner, some law-books while from the Frazer and Sale collections, the trustees purchased 355 Oriental MSS. in the years 1758 and 1760. In 1856, the number of volumes comprising the scientific and medical collection was estimated by Dr Acland, the librarian, as not less than 14,000, and not more than 15,000. From the year 1834 to the year 1840, the trustees expended £500 annually on the purchase of books. The grant, however, was reduced to £200 in 1841, and continued at that low figure until 1863, when it was again raised to the sum of £500. In 1861, by an agreement between the Radcliffe Trustees and the university, the scientific books of the Radcliffe Library were removed to the University Museum, then recently erected, for public use under prescribed regulations, and the spacious room in the Radcliffe Library was opened as a reading-room in connection with the Bodleian Library. This reading-room is now open daily until 10 o'clock at night, to the great comfort and convenience of numerous readers.