originally bred in China, and known in Japan as the Nankin mouse. The habit of these mice of spinning round and round after their tails is highly developed, and continually exercised. In Japan, where there were originally two breeds, a grey and white, these mice are kept in cages on account of their dancing propensities. The dancing was at one time supposed to be due to a disease of the labyrinth of the ear; but Dr K. Kishi, in a paper in the Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Zoologie (vol. xxi. pt. 3), concludes that it is the effect of confinement for untold centuries in small cages.
WALWORTH, SIR WILLIAM (d. 1385), lord mayor of London, belonged to a good Durham family. He was apprenticed to John Lovekyn, a member of the Fishmongers' Gild, and succeeded his master as alderman of Bridge ward in 1368, becoming sheriff in 1370 and lord mayor in 1374. He is said to have suppressed usury in the city during his term of office as mayor. His name frequently figures as advancing loans to the king, and he supported John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, in the city, where there was a strong opposition to the king's uncle. His most famous exploit was his encounter with Wat Tyler in 1381, during his second term of office as lord mayor. In June of that year, when Tyler and his followers entered south London, Walworth defended London Bridge against them; he was with Richard II. when he met the insurgents at Smithfield, and assisted in slaying their leader (see Tyler, Wat), afterwards raising the city bodyguard in the king's defence; for which service he was rewarded by knighthood and a pension. He subsequently served on two commissions to restore the peace in the county of Kent. He died in 1385, and was buried in the church of St Michael, Crooked Lane, of which he was a considerable benefactor. Sir William Walworth was the most distinguished member of the Fishmongers' Gild, and he invariably figured in the pageants prepared by them when one of their members attained the mayoralty. He became a favourite hero in popular tales, and appeared in Richard Johnson's Nine Worthies of London in 1592.
See William Herbert, The History … of St Michael, Crooked Lane, London … (1831); W. and R. Woodcock, Lives of Illustrious Lord Mayors (1846); an account of Wat Tyler's rebellion in a fragmentary chronicle printed by G. H. Trevelyan in the English Historical Review (July 1898).
WAMPUM, or Wampum-Peage (Amer. Ind. wampam, “white”, peag, “bead”), the shell-money of the North American Indians. It consisted of beads made from shells, and, unlike the cowry-money of India and Africa (which was the shell in its natural state), required a considerable measure of skill in its manufacture. Wampum was of two colours, dark purple and white, of cylindrical form, averaging a quarter of an inch in length, and about half that in diameter. Its colour determined its value. The term wampum or wampum-peage was apparently applied to the beads only when strung or woven together. They were ground as smooth as glass and were strung together by a hole drilled through the centre. Dark wampum, which was made from a “hard shell” clam (Venus mercenaria), popularly called quahang or quahog, a corruption of the Indian name, was the most valuable. White wampum was made from the shell of whelks, either from the common whelk (Buccinum undatum), or from that of Pyrula canaliculata and Pyrula carica. Wampum was employed most in New England, but it was common elsewhere. By the Dutch settlers of New York it was called seawan, zeewand, and roenoke in Virginia, and perhaps farther south, for shell-money was also known in the Carolinas, but whether the roenoke of the Virginian Indians was made from the same species of shell as wampum is not clear. Cylindrical shell-beads similar to the wampum of the Atlantic coast Indians were made to some extent by the Indians of the west coast. This was manufactured from the Mytilus californianus, a mussel which abounds there.
In the trading between whites and Indians, wampum so completely took the place of ordinary coin that its value was fixed by legal enactment, three to a penny and five shillings a fathom. The fathom was the name for a count, and the number of shells varied according to the accepted value of exchange. Thus where six wampum went to the penny, the fathom consisted of 360 beads; but where four made a penny, as under the Massachusetts standard of 1640, then the fathom counted 240. The beads were at first worth more than five shillings per fathom, the price at which they had passed current in 1643. A few years before the fathom had been worth nine or ten shillings. Connecticut received wampum for taxes in 1637 at four a penny. In 1640 Massachusetts adopted the Connecticut standard, “white to pass at four and bleuse at two a penny.” There was no restriction on the manufacture of wampum, and it was made by the whites as well as the Indians. The market was soon was flooded with carelessly made and inferior wampum, but it continued to be circulated in the remote districts of New England through the 17th century, and even into the beginning of the 18th. It was current with silver in Connecticut in 1704.
Wampum was also used for personal adornment, and belts were made by embroidering wampum upon strips of deerskin. These belts or scarves were symbols of authority or power and were surrendered on defeat in battle. Wampum also served a mnemonic use as a tribal history or record. “The belts that pass from one nation to another in all treaties, declarations and important transactions are very carefully preserved in the chiefs' cabins, and serve not only as a kind of record or history but as a public treasury. According to the Indian conception, these belts could tell by means of an interpreter the exact rule, provision or transaction talked into them at the time and of which they were the exclusive record. A strand of wampum, consisting of purple and white shell-beads or a belt woven with figures formed by beads of different colours, operated on the principle of associating a particular fact with a particular string or figure, thus giving a serial arrangement to the facts as well as fidelity to the memory. These strands and belts were the only visible records of the Iroquois, but they required the trained interpreters who could draw from their strings and figures the acts and intentions locked up in their remembrance” (Major Rogers, Account of North America, London, 1765).
See Holmes, “Art in Shell of the Ancient Americans” in Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, for 1880-1881; W. B. Weedon, Indian Money as a Factor in New England Civilization (Baltimore, 1884); E. Ingersoll, “Wampum and Its History,” in American Naturalist, vol. xvii. (1883); Horatio Hale, “On the Origin and Nature of Wampum,” in American Naturalist, vol. xviii. (1884); C. L. Norton, “The Last Wampum Coinage,” in American Magazine for March 1888.
WANA, a valley and frontier outpost of Waziristan in the North-West Frontier Province of India. It lies to the west of the Mahsud country, and to the north of the Gomal river, and is inhabited by the Waziri tribe. Lying on the border of Afghanistan, it is conveniently placed for dominating Waziristan on the north and the Gomal Pass on the south, and occupies very much the same strategic position as the Zhob valley holds in Baluchistan. It forms the end of the chain of outposts extending from Quetta to Waziristan, and can be supported either from India by the Gomal Pass or from Quetta by the Zhob valley. In 1894, when the Indo-Afghan boundary commission was delimiting the Waziri border, the Mahsud Waziris, thinking their independence to be threatened, made a night attack on the camp of the commission at Wana. The result was the Waziristan Expedition of the same year, and the occupation of Wana by British troops. On the formation of the North-West Frontier Province in 1901 it was decided to replace the troops by militia, and Wana was handed over to them in 1904. It is now the headquarters of the political agency of Southern Waziristan.
WANAMAKER, JOHN (1838-), American merchant, was born, of Palatine-Huguenot stock, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 11th of July 1838. He attended a public school in that city until he was fourteen, then became an errand boy for a book store, and was a retail clothing salesman from 1856 until 1861, when he established with Nathan Brown (who afterward became his brother-in-law) the clothing house of Wanamaker & Brown, in Philadelphia, the partnership continuing until the death of Brown in 1868. In 1869 Wanamaker founded the house of John Wanamaker & Company; and in 1875 bought the
