WICK (8), county-town of Caithness, on Wick River, 161 m.  NE. of Inverness, is the chief seat of the herring fishery in Scotland; Wick proper, with its suburbs Louisburgh and Boathaven, is on the N. of the river, and Pultneytown on the S.; has a few manufactures, with distilleries and breweries.

WICKED BIBLE, an edition of the Bible with the word not omitted from the Seventh Commandment, for issuing which in 1632 the printers were fined and the impression destroyed.

WICKLOW (61), a maritime county, with a capital of the name in Leinster, Ireland; is in great part mountainous and barren; has mines and quarries, and some fertile parts.

WICLIFFE, JOHN, or WYCLIF, the “Morning Star of the Reformation,” born at Hipswell, near Richmond, Yorkshire; studied at Oxford, and became Master of Balliol in 1361, professor of Divinity in 1372, and rector of Lutterworth in 1375; here he laboured and preached with such faithfulness that the Church grew alarmed, and persecution set in, which happily, however, proved scatheless, and only the more emboldened him in the work of reform which he had taken up; and of that work the greatest was his translation of the Bible from the Vulgate into the mother-tongue, at which, with assistance from his disciples, he laboured for some 10 or 15 years, and which was finished in 1380; he may be said to have died in harness, for he was struck with paralysis while standing before the altar at Lutterworth on 29th December 1384, and died the last day of the year; his remains were exhumed and burned afterwards, and the ashes thrown into the river Swift close by the town, “and thence borne,” says Andrew Fuller, “into the main ocean, the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over” (1325-1384).

WIDDIN (14), a town on the right bank of the Danube, Bulgaria; is a centre of industry and trade; was a strong place, but by decree of the Berlin Congress in 1879 the fortress was demolished.

WIELAND, CHRISTOPH MARTIN, eminent German litterateur, born near Biberach, a small village in Swabia, son of a pastor of the pietist school; studied at Tuebingen; became professor of Philosophy at Erfurt, and settled in Weimar in 1772 as tutor to the two sons of the Duchess Amalia, where he by-and-by formed a friendship with Goethe and the other members of the literary coterie who afterwards settled there; he wrote in an easy and graceful style, and his best work is a heroic poem entitled “Oberon” (1733-1813).

WIELICZKA (6), a town in Austrian Galicia, near Cracow, famous for its salt mines, which have been wrought continuously since 1250, the galleries of which extend to more than 50 m. in length, and the annual output of which is over 50,000 tons.

WIER, JOHANN, physician, born in North Brabant; was distinguished as the first to attack the belief in witchcraft, and the barbarous treatment to which suspects were subjected; the attack was treated as profane, and provoked the hostility of the clergy, and it would have cost him his life if he had not been protected by Wilhelm IV., Duke of Juelich and Cleves, whose physician he was (1516-1566).