Page:EB1911 - Volume 17.djvu/142

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LUPUS—LURAY CAVERN
127

bases upwards (L. pilosus), or rise and the cone is inverted (L. luteus), or else the shorter leaflets fall and the longer rise, and so together form a vertical star as in many species; the object in every case being to protect the surfaces of the leaflets from radiation and consequent wetting with dew (Darwin, Movements of Plants, p. 340). The flowers are of the usual “papilionaceous” or pea-like form, blue, white, purple or yellow, in long terminal spikes. The stamens are monadelphous and bear dimorphic anthers. The species of which earliest mention is made is probably L. Termis, which was cultivated by the ancient Egyptians. It is wild in some parts of the Mediterranean area and is extensively cultivated in Egypt. Its seeds are eaten by the poor after being steeped in water to remove their bitterness; the stems furnish fuel and charcoal for gunpowder. The lupine of the ancient Greeks and Romans was probably L. albus, which is still extensively cultivated in Italy, Sicily and other Mediterranean countries for forage, for ploughing in to enrich the land, and for its round flat seeds, which form an article of food. Yellow lupine (L. luteus) and blue lupine (L. angustifolius) are also cultivated on the European continent as farm crops for green manuring.

Lupines are easily cultivated in moderately good garden soil; they include annuals which are among the most ornamental and most easily grown of summer flowering plants (sow in open borders in April and May), and perennials, which are grown from seed or propagated by dividing strong plants in March and April. Many of the forms in cultivation are hybrid. One of the best known of the perennial species is L. polyphyllus, a western North American species. It grows from 3 to 6 ft. high, and has numerous varieties, including a charming white-flowered one. The tree lupine (L. arboreus) is a Californian bush, 2 to 4 ft. high, with fragrant yellow flowers. It is only hardy in the most favoured parts of the kingdom.


LUPUS, PUBLIUS RUTILIUS, Roman rhetorician, flourished during the reign of Tiberius. He was the author of a treatise on the figures of speech (Σχήματα λέξεως), abridged from a similar work by the rhetorician Gorgias (of Athens, not the well-known sophist of Leontini), the tutor of Cicero’s son. In its present form it is incomplete, as is clearly shown by the express testimony of Quintilian (Instit. ix. 2, 103, 106) that Lupus also dealt with figures of sense, rhetorical figures (Σχήματα διανοίας). The work is valuable chiefly as containing a number of examples, well translated into Latin, from the lost works of Greek rhetoricians. The author has been identified with the Lupus mentioned in the Ovidian catalogue of poets (Ex Ponto, iv. 16), and was perhaps the son of the Publius Rutilius Lupus, who was a strong supporter of Pompey.

Editions by D. Ruhnken (1768), F. Jacob (1837), C. Halm in Rhetores latini minores (1863); see also monographs by G. Dzialas (1860 and 1869), C. Schmidt (1865), J. Draheim (1874), Thilo Krieg (1896).


LUPUS (Lat. lupus, wolf), a disease characterized by the formation in the skin or mucous membrane of small tubercles or nodules consisting of cell growth which has an inclination to retrograde change, leading to ulceration and destruction of the tissues, and, if it heals, to the subsequent formation of permanent white scars. Lupus vulgaris is most commonly seen in early life, and occurs chiefly on the face, about the nose, cheeks or ears. But it may also affect the body or limbs. It first shows itself as small, slightly prominent, nodules covered with thin crusts or scabs. These may be absorbed and removed at one point whilst spreading at another. Their disappearance is followed by a permanent white cicatrix. The disease may be superficial, in which case both the ulceration and the resulting scar are slight (lupus non-exedens); or the ulcerative process may be deep and extensive, destroying a large portion of the nose or cheek, and leaving much disfigurement (lupus exedens). A milder form, lupus erythematosus, occurs on the nose and adjacent portions of the cheeks in the form of red patches covered with thin scales, underneath which are seen the widened openings of the sebaceous ducts. With a longitudinal patch on the nose and spreading symmetrical patches on each cheek the appearance is usually that of a large butterfly. It is slow in disappearing, but does not leave a scar. Lupus is more frequently seen in women than in men; it is connected with a tuberculous constitution. In the superficial variety the application of soothing ointments when there is much redness, and linear incisions, or scrapings with a sharp spoon, to destroy the increased blood supply, are often serviceable. In the ordinary form the local treatment is to remove the new tissue growth by solid points of caustic thrust into the tubercles to break them up, or by scraping with a sharp spoon. The light-treatment has been successfully applied in recent years. As medicines, cod-liver oil, iron and arsenic are useful.  (E. O.*) 

LUQMĀN, or Lokman, the name of two, if not of three (cf. note to Terminal Essay in Sir Rd. Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights), persons famous in Arabian tradition. The one was of the family of ʽĀd, and is said to have built the great dike of Mārib and to have received the gift of life as long as that of seven vultures, each of which lived eighty years. The name of the seventh vulture—Lubad—occurs in proverbial literature. The name of the second Luqmān, called “Luqmān the Sage,” occurs in the Koran (31, 11). Two accounts of him are current in Arabian literature. According to Masʽūdī (i. 110) he was a Nubian freedman who lived in the time of David in the district of Elah and Midian. According to some commentators on the Koran (e.g., Baidāwī) he was the son of Bāʽūrā, one of the sons of Job’s sister or maternal aunt. Derenbourg in his Fables de Loqmân le sage (1850) identifies Bāʽūrā with Beoi, and believes the name Luqmān to be a translation of Balaam. The grave of Luqmān was shown on the east coast of the lake of Tiberias, also in Yemen (cf. Yāqūt, vol. iii. p. 512).

The so-called Fables of Luqmān are known to have existed in the 13th century, but are not mentioned by any Arabian writer. They were edited by Erpenius (Leiden, 1615) and have been reprinted many times. For the relation of these to similar literature in other lands, see J. Jacobs’s edition of Caxton’s Fables of Aesop, vol. i. (London, 1889). The name of Luqmān also occurs in many old verses, anecdotes and proverbs; cf. G. Freytag’s Arabum Proverbia (Bonn, 1838–1843) and such Arabian writers as Tabarī, Masʽūdī, Damīrī and the Kitāb al-Muʽammarīn (ed. by I. Goldziher, Leiden, 1899).  (G. W. T.) 

LURAY CAVERN, a large cave in Page county, Virginia, U.S.A., 39° 35′ N. and 78° 17′ W., near the village of Luray, on the Norfork & Western railway. The valley, here 10 m. wide, extends from the Blue Ridge to the Massanutton Mountain. The ridges lie in vast folds and wrinkles; and elevations in the valley are often found to be pierced by erosion. Cave Hill, 300 ft. above the water-level, had long been an object of local interest on account of its pits and oval hollows or sink-holes, through one of which, on the 13th of August 1878, Andrew J. Campbell and others entered, thus discovering the cavern now described.

The Luray cavern does not date beyond the Tertiary period, though carved from the Silurian limestone. At some period, long subsequent to its original excavation, and after many large stalactites had grown, it was completely filled with glacial mud charged with acid, whereby the dripstone was eroded into singularly grotesque shapes. After the mud had been mostly removed by flowing water, these eroded forms remained amid the new growths. To this contrast may be ascribed some of the most striking scenes in the cave. The many and extraordinary monuments of aqueous energy include massive columns wrenched from their place in the ceiling and prostrate on the floor; the Hollow Column, 40 ft. high and 30 ft. in diameter, standing erect, but pierced by a tubular passage from top to bottom; the Leaning Column nearly as large, undermined and tilting like the campanile of Pisa; the Organ, a cluster of stalactites in the chamber known as the Cathedral; besides a vast bed of disintegrated carbonates left by the whirling flood in its retreat through the great space called the Elfin Ramble.

The stalactitic display exceeds that of any other cavern known. The old material is yellow, brown or red; and its wavy surface often shows layers like the gnarled grain of costly woods. The new stalactites growing from the old, and made of hard carbonates that had already once been used, are usually white as snow, though often pink, blue or amber-coloured. The Empress Column is a stalagmite 35 ft. high, rose-coloured, and elaborately draped. The double column, named from Professors Henry and Baird, is made of two fluted pillars side by side, the one 25 and