NOTICE. Ar the commencement of this Encyclopædia, it was announced that it would be completed in twelve volumes; but, owing to the great difficulty of accommodating the length and number of so multifarious a collection of articles to the proposed limits, it was found, on approaching the end of the work, that it would be impossible strictly to adhere to these limits, without so curtailing what remained, as to make this disproportionate to the preceding parts. Under these circumstances, it became indispensable to publish a thirteenth volume; and we have taken the opportunity thus afforded to furnish a number of supplementary articles. In addition to these, the reader will find, in the Appendix, at the end of this volume, many references to articles already given. In the preparation of a work including so great an extent of subjects, it could not always be anticipated what variety of topics would be treated under particular heads; and it was thought, on examination, that the reader would be much assisted, in consulting the work, by our furnishing a considerable number of additional references. In preparing this Encyclopædia, the conductors have endeavored to obtain the best materials and the best assistance within their power. Their labors have been lightened by the kind contributions which they have received from various quarters. To the Hon. Judge Story, and to John Pickering, Esq., of Boston, they are under peculiar obligations, The longest and most elaborate articles in the law department are from the pen of the former gentleman; and it is needless to say how much these add to the value of the work. From Mr. Pickering they have received, in a variety of ways, the most important aid. They are also indebted for valuable contributions, or favors of other kinds, to numerous other gentlemen, among whom they may be permitted to mention Mr. Duponceau, of Philadelphia; Mr. Woodbridge, editor of the Annals of Education; James E. Heath, Esq., of Richmond, Virginia; Gov. Marcy, B. F. Butler, Esq., and Dr. Beck, of Albany; Rev. Professor Palfrey, of Cambridge, Massachusetts; Mr. De Schweinitz, of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Samuel A. Eliot, Esq., of Boston; Gov. Cass, and Mr. Brush, of Michigan; Gen. Dearborn, of Roxbury, Massachusetts; Mr. James K. Paulding, of New York; Hon. Nathan Appleton, and Professor Ticknor, of Boston; Mr. Roberts Vaux, and Mr. Thomas Evans, of Philadelphia; Rev. Frederic A. Farley, of Providence, Rhode Island; Dr. Walter Channing, of Boston; Dr. Dewees, of Philadelphia; and the late Hon. Charles Ewing, chief justice of New Jersey. The friendly aid received from these and other gentlemen is most gratefully acknowledged. Boston, Feb. 1, 1833. ENCYCLOPEDIA AMERICANA. VISIGOTHS. THS. The powerful confederacy of nations under the name of Goths (q. v.), was, at an early period, geographically divided into Ostrogoths, who had their seats on the Pontus, and Visigoths, who inhabited Dacia. About the middle of the fourth century, the two nations separated into distinct political bodies. The Ostrogoths, weakened by this separation, having submitted to the Huns, the Visigoths fled to the mountains, and soon after obtained from the Romans permission to settle in the desolated Thrace. The relation of the nations to each other was by this means essentially changed. Under the name of allies, the Goths formed a chief part of the Roman army; but they became hostile whenever the promises made them were violated; and scarcely was Theodosius dead, and the empire divided, when the Visigoths, under Alaric, broke forth upon Italy, and Rome fell, in 410, into the power of the Visigoths. Alaric, had he not been overtaken by death, when on the point of conquering Africa, would have founded a Germanic empire in Italy. His brother-in-law Athaulf (Ataulphus), who was placed at the head of the nation, abandoned Alaric's projects, and turned towards Gaul, to make new conquests on both sides of the Pyrenees. He reached Barcelona, where he was murdered, in 415; but his successors, in the midst of perpetual conflicts with the previous occupants and with the Romans, founded in the south of France and in Spain the kingdom of the Visigoths. The unnatural extension of this kingdom to the north of the Pyrenees, where even the capital, and the residence of the king, Toulouse, was situated, while the Suevi still maintained their independence on the Peninsula, was one of the causes of its internal weakness. Another cause was the difference in the religious doctrines of the conquerors and the conquered, the former professing the Arian doctrines (see Arians), which were detestable to the Catholic descendants of the Roman settlers. This circumstance gave rise to a strict separation between the Goths and Romans, and caused the Catholic clergy to become more firmly attached to each other and to Rome. Notwithstanding this, and notwithstanding the convulsions produced by frequent changes of government, and by factions, the kingdom of the Visigoths, in the first century of its existence, continued to extend itself even beyond the Pyrenees, and, by political regulations, obtained internal consistency. Euric, the fifth king, who, from 466 to 483, during the total decline of the Roman empire, made great conquests in Spain and Gaul, gave the Visigoths, who had previously been governed by customary laws, written statutes, which were extended by his successors, and reduced to a system (see Lindenbrog's Codex Legum Antiquarum, and Canciani's Barbarorum Leges Antique), which is the most complete of all the German codes, and exhibits jurisprudence in a state of great advancement. His successor, Alaric, gave also to his Roman subjects in Gaul a system of laws, which he caused to be compiled, by persons well versed in jurisprudence, from the Theodosian code, from the enactments of the later emperors, and other sources, in order that the provinces might retain their ancient laws, but that the obligatory force of the law might proceed from his own authority. This code was not abolished till about the middle of the seventh century, till which time the laws of the Visigoths and Romans continued different. But the weakness of the Visigoths became manifest as soon as they came in contact with the Franks on the Loire, when the Catholic Clovis (q. v.), on pretence that it was unjust to let the heretic Visigoths possess the fairest portion of Gaul, attacked the peaceful Alaric, and defeated him at Rouglé, in 507. The Franks obtained possession, without resistance, of most of the cities in southern Gaul, and the kingdom of the Visigoths would have been in great danger, had not Theodoric (q. v.), king of the Ostrogoths, undertaken its defence. While guardian of the Visigothic prince, his grandson, he embraced the favorable opportunity to make himself master of a part of the territories still belonging to the Visigoths in southern Gaul; and, after a long separation of the two nations, there existed, for a time, an intimate connexion of the Ostrogoths and Visigoths. After his death, dissensions soon arose among the Visigoths, and the pernicious influence of the difference of religion between the Arian Visigoths and the Catholic provincials, who were sometimes tolerated, and sometimes persecuted, became more and more evident. The kingdom of the Visigoths arose again with new energy, under the bold and intelligent Leovigild (568-586), who totally subdued the Suevi, improved the laws, limited the power of the nobles, made Toledo the royal residence, and tried to render the regal power hereditary. His equally celebrated son, Reccared, became a convert, in 589, to the Catholic faith; upon which the divisions of the people ceased, and Goths and Spaniards became one nation. His conversion had the most important influence on the character of the government. Scarcely had the Catholic faith become the established religion, when the clergy, who had become accustomed, during their former state of oppression, to adhere firmly together, acquired a predominant influence, such as they obtained in no other Germanic nation, and constituted a hierarchy, totally independent of the Roman papal authority. The Arian bishops had lived quietly in their dioceses, and had no influence on the public administration; but the Catholic bishops strove after an active participation in public affairs, in order to render secure the authority which their church had obtained. The grandees of the kingdom, the secular public ministers and officers of the court (called viri illus tres officii palatini), who formed a kind of nobility, and as the constitutional counsellors of the king, usurped the rights of popular representatives, remained no longer the first class in the state: the old mode of choosing the king, which had thrown the election into their hands, was altered in favor of the bishops; and under weak kings, who often attained the crown by artifices of the priests, or solicited absolution and justification from the clergy, on account of the usurpation which they had committed, or the oaths which they had violated, they found it easy to place themselves at the head of the state, and to procure exemption from all public burdens. This prevailing influence was especially visible in the ecclesiastical councils, which, in previous times, had discussed merely matters of doctrine or church discipline, but, immediately after the conversion of the sovereign, began to mingle with spiritual affairs matters of a political character. When the clergy had once established their political influence, they could, without reluctance, allow the secular grandees, who came with the king to the councils, to take part in the deliberations, the more particularly as they could always be sure of outvoting them ; and, as early as 633, the regulation was made, that those secular grandees alone should be admitted, who should be pronounced worthy of the honom by the bishops. The internal disturbances, which the excessive power of the clergy produced or favored, facilitated the conquest of the country by the Saracens, who were settled on the north coast of Africa. As early as the year 675, the Mohammedans began their attempts to settle in Spain, encouraged by the factions which convulsed the Visigoths, and which, during the reign of the weak Roderic, enabled them to execute their project. The Goths were defeated, in 711, at Xeres de la Frontera; the king was slain, and the Saracens spread themselves over the greatest part of the country. (See Spain.) The remainder of the Goths, who, after the downfall of the empire, had fled to the mountains of Asturia and Galicia, founded there new kingdoms, in which the constitutions of the Visigoths were in part retained, and which, when the descendants of the Goths broke forth from their fastnesses, and wrested from the Moorish settlers one tract after another, finally gave rise to the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. The traces of the public institutions of the Visigoths were preserved longest in the laws, as the Christians, on leaving the mountains, brought with them those by which they had been governed. The most ancient collection of Spanish laws, the Fuero juzgo, or Forum Judicum, is drawn from the ancient laws of the Visigoths; and many of them have been retained to the present day in the provincial law of Castile and Catalonia.—The liturgy of the Visigoths, which was established by the assembly of Toledo, in 633, for the purpose of introducing into all the churches a uniform mode of worship, long survived the downfall of the kingdom. This off cium Gothicum, as it was termed, which contained many rites and forms that had been used in the Spanish church from the earliest period of Christianity, maintained itself in spite of all the efforts of the popes to introduce the Roman liturgy; and so violent were the disputes to which this gave rise, that an attempt was made to adjust the quarrel by duel and fireordeal. Even after the Roman liturgy had been introduced into Castile, as it had previously been into Arragon, several churches in Toledo nevertheless retained their old usages. The Spanish Christians living under the dominion of the Moors, and styled Mozarabians, adhered still longer to the Gothic liturgy, which was therefore called officium Mozarabicum. Cardinal Ximenes caused the missal and breviary of this liturgy to be printed. The Spanish language also still preserves, in some words, the remains of the Gothic, although the Visigoths, after the conquest of the peninsula of the Pyrenees, adopted the language of the Romans. There is a Geschichte der Westgothen, by John Aschbach (Frankfort, 1827). VISION. (See Optics.) VISIONS. Ghosts, phantoms, apparitions, spectres, spirits, for the vocabulary of superstition is rich in terms,—or, in philosophical language, spectral illusions, have, in some ages, played an important part in the machinery of society; nor can it be said that they have yet been laid by the voice of that great exorciser, knowledge. The guilty conscience still evokes the avenging spirits, and the disordered action of the physical functions is sometimes mistaken for the operation of external objects upon the senses. All appearances of this nature may be classed under the two heads of mental illusions, and optical illusions, the former comprising those cases in which the spectral appearances are produced by the disordered state of the mind, and the latter, those occasioned by the presence of some external ob ject, under such circumstances as to deceive the senses. Thus, in regard to the first, it may be remarked that, in consequence of an extraordinary impression upon the brain, through the medium of the circulation of the blood, sensations are greatly increased in intensity, and ideas in vividness, and that emotions are produced corresponding, in intensity, to the acuteness of the sensations, and the vividness of the ideas. Then, again, the effect of a disordered state of the physical functions is to disturb the order of the succession of ideas, or to influence the velocity of their succession (producing indistinctness of perception, confusion of thought, inaccuracy of judgment, and, of course, a disregard to incongruities), or to increase the vivacity of ideas. The same effects may be produced by a diseased state of the body itself, or by violent mental excitements, influencing the physical functions, which, in turn, react upon the mind. These principles will be found to account for many spectral illusions of which we have authentic accounts. In some instances, it is a transient madness; in others, a permanent mania, under the influence of which the patient labored. In general, it will be observed that the images which constitute the subject of spectral illusions assume the form of figures which have been rendered familiar to the mind, and which have made strong impressions upon it. The sights seen bear a strict relation to the character of the seer, and of the superstitions of the age and country in which he lived. Thus the intelligent and philosophical Nicolai (q. v.) saw nothing but men and women, horses, dogs and birds in their natural form. The illusions of the superstitious consist of demons or angels, and all sorts of fantastic shapes, benign or malignant, according to the peculiar disposition or state of mind of the seer. "Ghosts," says Grose, "commonly appear in the same dress they wore when living, though they are sometimes clothed all in white; but that is chiefly the church-yard ghosts, who have no particular business, but seem to appear pro bono publico, or to scare drunken rustics from tumbling over their graves. Dragging chains is not the fashion of English ghosts, chains and black vestments being chiefly the accoutrements of foreign spectres seen in ardıtrary governments: dead or alive, Eng lish spirits are free." Doctor Abercromi bie (Inquiries concerning the. Intellectual Powers, 2d ed., Edinburgh, 1831), in treat |