Upas
the Malay word for poison. The name is given by the natives to a number of vegetable poisons and to a tree beneath whose deadly shade man, bird, and beast were supposed to die. The deadly upas tree is a native of Sunda and the Philippines. It is a tall tree with a bare trunk and spreading top, related to the breadfruit. It has a white spongy bark an inch in thickness, which exudes a milky juice. From this, with a mixture of black pepper, ginger, and other roots, the Malays prepare a poison for their arrows that proves fatal both to man and to the larger animals. The victim is seized with severe nausea and dies in convulsions like those of lockjaw. The odor of the tree causes irruptions of the skin, as does the smoke from its burning wood, but its mere presence is not at all dangerous. Birds nest in its branches and animals seek its shade without inconvenience, but it is dreaded by the natives, who avoid its neighborhood. The exaggerated tales which are told of the upas tree are believed to owe their origin to a narrow valley in Java in which neither animal or vegetable life can subsist owing to the prevalence of carbonic acid gas. From all accounts this vale is something like the Death Gulch of our National Yellowstone Park. See Poison
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Upolu
one of the richest and most beautiful of the islands of the Pacific, belongs to the Samoan group, lying about 60 miles W. of Tutuila. It is 140 miles in circumference, and has about 16,000 inhabitants. The island has been a mission station for many years. It was awarded to Great Britain by the Treaty of Versailles. Many of the in- Christians. The chief habitants are harbor is Apia. Coffee and cotton are cultivated. The principal article of export is cocoanut oil.
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Upper Senegal and Niger
a French colonial possession in west Af rica, formed in 1904 from the territories of Senegal and the Niger, acquired in 1893. It extends from the southern boundaries of Algeria to the frontiers of Dahomey, Togoland, the Gold Coast and the Ivory Coast, with the military colony of the Niger to eastward and Mauritania, the Faleme river and French Guinea to the westward. It is over half a million square miles in area, the character of the country being largely rolling plateaus, capable le of being extensively developed agriculturally. It is watered by about two-thirds of the Niger. The population is about 5,600,000, of which 1,300 only are white.
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Upshur
ABEL PARKER, an American statesman; born in Northampton co., Va., June 17, 1790; was admitted to the bar in 1810; practiced at Richmond, Va., till 1824; became a member of the legislature in 1825; judge of the General Court of Virginia in 1826; delegate to the convention to revise the State constitution in 1829; and after the reorganization of the judicial system under that instrument was again elected judge of the same court. This position he continued to hold till 1841, when he was appointed Secretary of the Navy by President Tyler. Two years later, on the resignation of Daniel Webster, he was appointed Secretary of State. Early in 1844 he was on the United States Steamer "Princeton," on the Potomac river, in company with the President and other members of the cabinet, to witness experiments with a large wrought-iron gun which burst, and mortally wounded him together with several others. He died near Washington, D. C., Feb. 28, 1844.
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Ural
a river of Russia; rises on the E. side of the Urals in the province of Orenburg, and runs mainly S. for 1,400 miles, into the Caspian sea, being practically the boundary between Europe and Asia. It gives name to a province, Uralsk, which lies mainly E. of the river and N. of the Caspian, belonging to the Steppe region and to the "Kirghiz provinces" included in Asiatic Russia.
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Uralsk
a province of Russia, lying in the main east of the Ural river. It is one of the border provinces between Europe and Asia and has an area of 139,168 square miles. It is largely made up of dry steppes and deserts inclining to the Caspian, with a number of salt lakes and streams, of which only the Ural and the Emba reach the Caspian. The temperature varies greatly, the land is arid, the leading occupations being fishing and cattle raising. The fish products are valuable and those exported exceed in annual value $1,500,000. Pop. about 880,000, two-thirds being Kirghizes. The capital of the province is Uralsk; pop. about 50,000.
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Uraninite
or PITCHBLENDE, an ore of uranium from which radium is prepared. It is found in small quantities in Cornwall (England), Austria, Colorado, Connecticut, and North Carolina. The name is derived from the German Pechblende, owing to the similarity of the mineral to pitch and zinc-blende. It is black and opaque, with a dull luster, and gives a brownish black streak on paper. It may contain as much as 88 per cent. of uranium oxide, with small percentages of other rare metals, including thorium, cerium, zirconium, lanthanum, yttrium and erbium, the amount of radium amounting to only one part in five million.
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Uranus
u'ra-nus, in Greek mythology, Heaven, the husband of Gaea, and the first ruler of the universe. He was the father of the titans, of the cyclops, and of the giants. He confined his children in Tartarus, lest they should supersede him, but he was dethroned finally by Cronus. See Cronus ; Titans
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Uranus
the outermost but one of the major planets. It moves in an elliptical orbit. Its mean distance from the sun is nineteen times as great as that of the earth. The year of Uranus is eighty-four times as long as ours. The light and heat received from the sun is 1/370 of that received by us. The volume is estimated at from forty-seven to sixty-five times that of the earth; the mass is 14.6 times as great; the density is one-third as great as that of the earth. A body would weigh a trifle more on the surface of Uranus than on the earth. Uranus was the first planet to be "discovered." Others plainly visible were known to the ancients, but it remained for Sir John Herschel, looking through his seven-inch telescope, to discover, 1781, that Uranus was not a star. He thought at first that it was a comet. Uranus has four satellites or moons that have received the fairy names of Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon. They have a diameter of perhaps 250 to 500 miles. They are so small and so distant they were not discovered until 1851.
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