Education. There are 6,674 school-buildings in the state. The elementary schools have 8,782 teachers and an enrollment of 276,258 pupils. The per capita expenditure for their education is $23.92. The state supports a university with 14 different schools and colleges, six normal schools, two preparatory schools for the state's university, a school for the deaf and the blind, a reform school for boys and an industrial school for girls. There are about 30 colleges and academies under church and private control. The most important are Bethany College, founded by Alexander Campbell, organizer of the Disciples of Christ; West Virginia Wesleyan College, a coeducational institution founded by West Virginia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church; Morris-Harvey College, founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church South; and Davis and Elkins College, an institution under the control of Winchester Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church South.
History. The first permanent settlers in West Virginia came from east of the Alleghanies, and one of the first landowners was George Washington, who held 32,000 acres in the Ohio and Kanawha valleys. When Virginia seceded, the western part, separated from the eastern part by the Alleghany Mountains and closely connected with Ohio, refused to join the movement, held conventions at Clarksburg and Wheeling, and formed West Virginia, which was admitted into the Union in 1863. John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry and the battles of Philippi, Beverly, Rich Mountain, Cheat Mountain and Carnifex Ferry were the chief actions on the soil of West Virginia connected with the Civil War. The chief city is Wheeling (population 41,641). The population of the state is 1,221,119.
West Virginia Univer′sity, located at Morgantown, was founded in 1867 as West Virginia Agricultural College. In 1868, by act of legislature, the name was changed to West Virginia University. The organization includes colleges of art and sciences, engineering and mechanic arts, agriculture, school of music and commercial and preparatory schools. The faculty numbers 71, the students 1,422 and the library 25,000 volumes. In 1907 the income was $224,353.
Wet′terhorn, a lofty mountain in Switzerland, about ten miles from Lake Brienz. It rises almost perpendicularly in one great wall of limestone, 12,200 or 14,105 feet, according to different measurements.
Wey′man, Stanley John, English novelist, was born at Ludlow, Shropshire on Aug. 7, 1855, and educated at Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford. Studying law, he was called to the bar and practiced on circuit from 1881 to 1889, when his first work, The House of the Wolf — a romance of French history — appeared. After this his health necessitated travel abroad, and he abandoned law altogether. His more notable novels include The New Rector, The Story of Francis Cludde and A Gentleman of France. The success of the latter, which was published in 1893 and at once translated into many European languages, was immediate, and it has proved one of the most successful of recent historical romances. His later stories are Under the Red Robe, My Lady Rotha, The Red Cockade, The Man in Black, The Castle Inn, The Long Night, Stane Crow Farm, The Abbess of Vlaye, In King's Byways, Shrewsbury and the Memoirs of a Minister of France. He is a vivid and picturesque writer, and has been most successful in his treatment of themes drawn chiefly from the era of medieval France.
Wey′mouth, Mass., a town embracing a number of villages with an early historic interest, in Norfolk County, on Weymouth Fore River and the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, 12 miles southeast of Boston. The town dates from the era of the Plymouth colonists, when it was known by its Indian name of Wessagusset. Its industrial interests are connected with the manufacture of shoes, with wool-scouring and with nail, coal and lumber works. It has two local libraries, the Tuff and the Fogg, besides churches, elementary and high schools, several banks and a weekly newspaper. Population 12,895.
Whale, a marine mammal of fish-like form belonging to the order Cetacea. The dolphins are included with the whales. Few people realize what the term, a marine mammal, means as applied to whales, the fish-like form suggesting an affinity with fishes; but they are warm-blooded animals, breathing by lungs and suckling their young with milk — in short, ranking above reptiles and birds and in the class of Mammalia.
SPERM-WHALE
There are two divisions, those with teeth, as the dolphin and the sperm-whale, and those without teeth in the adult but with plates of whalebone inside the mouth. The latter group, often called the true whales, have teeth in embryonic stages, and the fact that teeth arise and disappear before birth is taken to mean that the whalebone whales are descended from ancestors which had teeth and that the embryonic teeth
