Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/37

23 V Vis our twenty-second letter ; it represents the voiced labio-dental to which. F corresponds as the voiceless sound. It has been shown under U that these two symbols were originally one, and that their differentia tion took place for convenience of writing only. But it was afterwards put to a good use, although not quite the natural one. It would have been better, while retaining u for the vowel, to have used v for the corresponding labial consonant, which is actually denoted by w. The difference of u and to is simply that of vowel and con sonant : for u there is a sufficient opening of the lips to allow the voice to pass through without friction ; but for w the aperture is so much closed, by bringing together either the inner edges of the lips (as in England) or the outer edges (as in some parts of Germany), that there is an audible amount of friction as the voice passes. The organs employed are the lips only in each case, whereas for v the upper teeth and the lower lip are the factors of the sound. The symbol v does not occur in the oldest of our texts ; it is represented by/ , as in "heofon," "ofer," "hlaford" (lord). The / generally is voiced when medial, but voice less when initial. This absence of two symbols for the corresponding pairs of fricative consonants has been noted already in the use of d (or ]?) for both th and dh (see under T) ; s also did duty, as it often does still, for both s and .?. In Middle English u appears commonly for v. The introduction of v into English writing is due to French scribes ; as a matter of fact almost all the words which begin with v are of French origin. It is tolerably certain that in Latin v represented the labial and not the labio-dental consonant. The arguments in favour of this view are singly not very important, but they are fairly numerous. The interchange of the u and v sounds, as in " genua " and "genva," " solvo" and " soluo," <fcc., is most easily explained on the hypothesis that v = iv ; so are the loss of v, as in "audi(v)i," "ama(ve)ram," &c., and the retention of o after v in words like "cervos" (whereas in other combinations o sank to u), because " cer- woos " would have been a more inconvenient combination than "cervoos." Again, the name of the letter should have been "ev," not "ve," like all other fricative sounds, "ef," "el," "es," &c.; but in explosives "be," "de," "pe," "te," with the vowel folloiviny. There is no reason why this should not have been the case if v were really our v, a labio-dental ; but if it was iv the name "ew" was prac tically impossible, because the 10 would have been inaudible; therefore it went over to the other class of names. To these arguments may be added others drawn from trans literation. Mr A. J. Ellis (E. E. P., ii. p. 513) agrees that Latin v cannot have been our labio-dental, but he thinks it probable that it was the South-German w, which differs from the North-German ID (our v, labio-dental) in the manner described above, with some other points of difference. His chief ground is that it is hard to imagine w producing v except through an intermediate labial of the North -German kind. There is something in this argu ment. In any case the difference between these two zo-sounds is slight compared with the difference between either of them and the labio-dental v. At what time the labial passed into the labio-dental of the Romance lan guages is uncertain. We can fix limits of time before which the change must have taken place : e.f?., it must have been before the time when the Romanized Gauls, trying to pronounce the Teutonic w in "werra," "ward," Arc., produced "guerra," "guard," &,c. If their v had Rela- tions of sma11 grease oi horse. then had the w-sound there would have been no difficulty in producing the same sound in Teutonic words. In the Roman system of numerals V stands for five. The reason is uncertain. The old view that it represents half ten (X), as D (500) represents half a thousand (M, originally <D), has no very high degree of probability. It is perhaps as likely that I., II., III., IIII., denoted the uplifted fingers used in counting, and that V denoted the whole hand with the thumb on one side and the four fingers together on the other. _ VACCINATION (from Lat. vacca, a cow), the name given in France to the Jennerian practice of cowpoxing, shortly after the practice began in England (1799). The procedure was based almost exactly on the earlier practice of inoculating the smallpox, the matter being inserted under the skin of the arm by a lancet point ; also the continuance of the same stock from arm to arm through a series of cases was an idea taken from some of the more adroit variolators. To replace smallpox inoculation by cowpox inoculation under certain specified circumstances was Jenner s tentative project. The history of the intro duction of cowpoxing, given in the article JENNER (vol. xiii. p. 623), is here supplemented from the point of view of historical criticism. It is right to say that the views expressed in the present article diverge in many points from the opinions generally received among medical men, and must be re garded not as the exposition of established and undisputed doctrine, but as the outcome of an independent and laborious research. Jenner s originality consisted in boldly designating cow- Jenner. pox as variolas. vaccines, or smallpox of the cow, and in tracing cowpox itself back to the grease of the horse s hocks. The latter contention was at length set aside by practical men as a crude fancy ; the former designation is just as arbitrary and untenable. It was elaborately shown by Pearson in 1802, and has often been confirmed by subsequent writers, that the vesicle of inoculated cow- pox, even while it remains a vesicle, is quite unlike a single pustule of smallpox. But it is only for the vesicular stage of cowpox that there is even an allegation of likeness to variola ; the vesicle of natural or unmodified cowpox is only the stage of the disease before it becomes an ulcer, either inflammatory or indurated. Inoculated horse grease has the same vesicular stage ; and so also has the venereal pox when it is inoculated experimentally on the skin. 1 These three very different infections have the same kind of vesicle, in every case unlike a smallpox pustule, and the same natural termination in a phagedenic or indurated sore. Jenner s originality in starting vaccination in practice is for the most part misunderstood. When he published his Inquiry in June 1798, he had twice succeeded in raising vaccine vesicles by experiment, the first time in 1796 with matter from a milker s accidental sore, and the second time in March 1798 with matter direct from the cow. The first experiment was not carried beyond one remove from the cow ; the second was carried to the fifth remove, when the succession failed. A third ex periment, in the summer of 1798, failed from the outset; and his fourth and last experiment, in November-December 1798, led to nothing but extensive phagedenic ulceration in two cases out of six vaccinated. 1 See Ricord, Traite Complet, 1851, plate i. figs. 6 and 7 and ii. 7, 8, and 9 ; also H. Lee, Afed. Chir. Trans., xliv. p. 238, 2d plate,

fig. 2.