4.4

BITUMEN....BLACK.

ing of a bull, but hollower and louder, and is heard at a mile's distance, as if issuing from some formidable creature at the bottom of the waters. It hides in the hedges, by day, and begins its call in the evening, booming six or eight times, and then discontinuing for ten or twenty minutes to renew the same sound. This bird is thought by the ignorant to be the foreteller of calamity and death; and if it happen to set up a scream near a village, it affects the inhabitants with terror; and if any person in the neighborhood chance to die soon afterwards, it is believed that the night-raven had foretold the event.... Goldsmith.

BITUMEN, a kind of pitch, being an exceedingly strong cement; of which there was, according to Pliny, great plenty in Assyria. This was the slime used in building the tower of Babel: with this, Herodotus says, the walls of Babylon were cemented. It is thought to be the asphaltes, which, as Suidas says, being mixed with bricks and small stones, the whole becomes as hard as iron.... Orton.

BLACK, the colour of the robe of night. Bernardine St. Pierre contends, that white increases the intensity of the rays of the sun, while black weakens it; that white hats in summer, more expose the head than black ones; and that, whitening the inside of apartments, by increasing the reverberation of the rays of light, increases the heat, and injures the eyes. He argues in proof of these principles, that animals whiten in winter, towards the north, in proportion as the sun withdraws from them, and that those of the south assume dark and dusky tints, as the sun approaches them; that negroes, of a jet black, easily bear such an intensely hot sun as is found insupportable by people of a white skin; and that, in the Isle of France, a country extremely hot, they mitigate the heat of their rooms, not by whitewashing, but by using a sable-coloured wood for wainscoting. Doctor Franklin, on the other hand, maintained that, on philosophical principles, black clothes, black hats, &c. are not so proper for a hot sunny climate, or for the summer season, as white ones. This he undertook to prove by several experiments; one of which

BLACK-OAK....BLOOD-HOUND....BOA.

45

was the following. "Try," says the doctor, "to fire paper with a burning glass: if it is white, you will not easily burn it; but if you bring the focus to a black spot, or upon letters, written or printed, the paper will immediately be on fire under the letters." Public opinion is, in this instance, on the side of the latter of these celebrated philosophers.

BLACK-OAK, a large tree of the American forests. Many of the black-oaks in Georgia, measure ten and eleven feet diameter, five feet above the ground; whence they ascend perfectly straight, with a gradual taper, forty or fifty feet to the limbs. The bark of this species of oak is found to afford a valuable yellow dye. This tree is common in Pennsylvania, New-Jersey, New-York, and New-England....Bartram.

BLOOD-HOUND, a dog of great use, and of high esteem among the ancient English. Its employ was to recover any game that had escaped wounded from the hunter, or had been killed, or stolen out of the forests. But it was still more employed in hunting thieves and robbers; with which all parts of Europe were formerly so much infested as to render it dangerous to travel, or even to lodge in any house, except a fortified castle. The Spaniards brought over blood-hounds to Hispaniola, or St. Domingo, to worry and mangle the timid and harmless natives; and hunted them with these dogs in the forests and mountains, as if they had been wild beasts.

BOA, the negro name of a great tree that grows in some of the parched districts of Africa, and in a wonderful manner furnishes supplies of water. The trunk of this tree, which is of a prodigious bulk, is naturally hollow like a cistern. In the rainy season it receives its fill of water, which continues fresh and cool in the greatest heats, by means of the tufted foliage which crowns its summit. Another manner in which Providence has contrived supply for the thirst of man, in sultry places, is no less worthy of admiration. Nature has placed amidst the burning sands of Africa, a plant whose leaf, twisted round like a cruet, is always filled with the

46

BOILING....BONZES....BRAGANZA..

quantity of a large glass full of fresh water: the gullet of this cruet is shut by the extremity of the leaf itself, so as to prevent the water from evaporating....St.Pierre.

BOILING. The following principles are stated by Count Rumford: 1. Water once brought to be boiling hot, however gently it may boil, cannot possibly be made hotter by any increase of the quantity or intensity of the fire under it: hence, boiling water affords a uniform standard of heat, in all circumstances, and in all parts of the globe, being just as hot at the poles as at the equator. 2. More than five times as much heat is required to send off in steam any quantity of water already boiling hot, as would be necessary to heat the same quantity of ice-cold water to the boiling point. Therefore, 3. Causing any thing to boil violently in any culinary process is very ill-judged; for it not only does not expedite, even in the smallest degree, the process of cooking, but it occasions an enormous waste of fuel; and besides, by driving away with the steam, many of the more volatile and more savory particles, it renders the food less nourishing and less palatable.

BONZES, an inferior order of priests in China, resembling the friars and monks in the popish countries of Christendom. They are often seen in the squares and other public places, exhibiting themselves as frightful spectacles of mortification. Some of them drag, with great pain, along the streets, large chains, thirty feet in length, which are fastened round their necks and legs; and some mangle their bodies, and make them appear all over bloody, by slashing their flesh with a hard flint. In this situation they stop at the doors of people's houses : "You see (say they) what we suffer, that we may expiate your sins; can you be so hard-hearted as to refuse us a small alms ?". .... Winterbotham.

BRAGANZA, a dutchy of Portugal. In the year 1580, Philip II. king of Spain, seized upon Portugal; but in 1640, the Portuguese revolted, shook off the Spanish yoke, and elected for their king the duke of Braganza, who took the name of John IV. and in whose family it has ever since remained, independent of Spain.

BRAIN....BRASS.

47

To this royal family was allied by marriage a descendant of the celebrated Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of America. Isabella, daughter of Diego Columbus, and grand-daughter of Christopher Columbus, was married to Count de Gelves, a Portuguese nobleman of the house of Braganza; and being sole heiress of the Columbus family, she conveyed by her marriage her rights (that is, a right to a tenth of the net profits of the mines of America, and to hold high civil authority in that country) to the house of Braganza; where they continued till the year 1640; and then reverted to the crown of Spain, in consequence of the revolution which placed John duke of Braganza upon the throne....Bryan Edwards.

BRAIN, the soft substance within the skull. Mr. Somering thinks it probable that the soul is seated in the fluid of the ventricles of the brain. He infers this from the fact of the nerves of vision, hearing, taste and smell being all at their origin in contact with and exposed to the action of the fluid in the ventricles; from the same taking place with regard to the nerves of touch, and those belonging to the organs of the voice and the motions of the eyes; from the impossibility of finding a solid part of the brain into which the terminations of all the nerves can be traced; from the nerves of the finest senses, viz. hearing and seeing being most extensively expanded and most directly in contact with this fluid; from the preternatural increase of this fluid in the ventricles of rickety children, which may perhaps be the cause of their uncommon acuteness of mind; and finally, from the fact, that no animal possesses so capacious and so perfectly organized ventricles as man; they being in the other mammalia (or animals that suckle their young) much smaller than in man, still less in birds, least of all in fishes, and absolutely wanting in insects.... Miller.

BRASS, a factitious yellow metal made of copper, melted with lapis caliminaris. The calamine is first calcined and ground to powder, then mixed with charcoal dust, and to seventy pounds of this mixture is added five of copper; which being placed in a wind fur

nace, eleven or twelve hours, the copper imbibes about one-third of the weight of the calamine, and is converted into brass. The ancient Corinthians had the art of manufacturing this metal in the highest degree of excellence; insomuch that the Corinthian brass obtained over the world an immortal fame. When the city of Corinth, which was immensely rich, was taken by the Romans, one hundred and forty-six years before the Christian era, those merciless conquerors first pillaged, and then set fire to it. At this time a famous metalline mixture is said to have been made, which could never afterwards be imitated by art. The gold, silver, and brass, which the Corinthians had concealed, were melted, and ran down the streets in streams; and when the flames were extinguished, a new metal was found, composed of several different ones, and greatly admired in after ages.

n

BRAZIL, a country in South America; stretching on the coasts of the Atlantic, from the equator to the mouth of the river Plata, thirty-five degrees south latitude; extending two thousand and five hundred miles in length, and seven hundred miles in breadth; and comprehending all the Portuguese settlements America. The rivers in this country annually overflow their banks, and like the Nile, leave a sort of slime upon the lands; and the soil is in many places amazingly rich. The Brazilians import as many as forty thousand negroes annually. The exports of Brazil are diamonds, gold, sugar, tobacco, hides, drugs and medicines. The gold and diamond mines were first discovered in 1681; and have since yielded above five millions sterling annually, of which a fifth part belongs to the crown. The Dutch having invaded, and partly subdued Brazil; the Portuguese agreed to pay them eight tons of gold to relinquish their interest in this country; which they accepted. Brazil was planted with the vilest refuse of human society. In process of time, the Portuguese Jews, persecuted by the inquisition, stript of their fortunes in Portugal, and banished to Brazil, introduced by their example some sort of order and industry, among the transported felons, by whom