Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Bent, James" to "Bibirine" / Volume 3, Slice 6

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BEOWULF. The epic of Beowulf, the most precious relic of Old English, and, indeed, of all early Germanic literature, has come down to us in a single MS., written about A.D. 1000, which contains also the Old English poem of Judith, and is bound up with other MSS. in a volume in the Cottonian collection now at the British Museum. The subject of the poem is the exploits of Beowulf, son of Ecgtheow and nephew of Hygelac, king of the “Gēatas,” i.ethe people, called in Scandinavian records Gautar, from whom a part of southern Sweden has received its present name Götland.

The Story.—The following is a brief outline of the story, which naturally divides itself into five parts.

1.Beowulf, with fourteen companions, sails to Denmark, to offer his help to Hrothgar, king of the Danes, whose hall (called “Heorot”) has for twelve years been rendered uninhabitable by the ravages of a devouring monster (apparently in gigantic human shape) called Grendel, a dweller in the waste, who used nightly to force an entrance and slaughter some of the inmates.Beowulf and his friends are feasted in the long-deserted Heorot.At night the Danes withdraw, leaving the strangers alone.When all but Beowulf are asleep, Grendel enters, the iron-barred doors having yielded in a moment to his hand.One of Beowulf’s friends is killed; but Beowulf, unarmed, wrestles with the monster, and tears his arm from the shoulder.Grendel, though mortally wounded, breaks from the conqueror’s grasp, and escapes from the hall.On the morrow, his bloodstained track is followed until it ends in a distant mere.

2.All fear being now removed, the Danish king and his followers pass the night in Heorot, Beowulf and his comrades being lodged elsewhere.The hall is invaded by Grendel’s mother, who kills and carries off one of the Danish nobles.Beowulf proceeds to the mere, and, armed with sword and corslet, plunges into the water.In a vaulted chamber under the waves, he fights with Grendel’s mother, and kills her.In the vault he finds the corpse of Grendel; he cuts off the head, and brings it back in triumph.

3.Richly rewarded by Hrothgar, Beowulf returns to his native land.He is welcomed by Hygelac.and relates to him the story of his adventures, with some details not contained in the former narrative.The king bestows on him lands and honours, and during the reigns of Hygelac and his son Heardred he is the greatest man in the kingdom.When Heardred is killed in battle with the Swedes, Beowulf becomes king in his stead.

4.After Beowulf has reigned prosperously for fifty years, his country is ravaged by a fiery dragon, which inhabits an ancient burial-mound, full of costly treasure.The royal hall itself is burned to the ground.The aged king resolves to fight, unaided, with the dragon.Accompanied by eleven chosen warriors, he journeys to the barrow.Bidding his companions retire to a distance, he takes up his position near the entrance to the mound—an arched opening whence issues a boiling stream.I The dragon hears Beowulf’s shout of defiance, and rushes forth, breathing flames.The fight begins; Beowulf is all but overpowered, and the sight is so terrible that his men, all but one, seek safety in flight.The young Wiglaf, son of Weohstan, though yet untried in battle, cannot, even in obedience to his lord’s prohibition, refrain from going to his help.With Wiglaf’s aid, Beowulf slays the dragon, but not before he has received his own death-wound.Wiglaf enters the barrow, and returns to show the dying king the treasures that he has found there.With his last breath Beowulf names Wiglaf his successor, and ordains that his ashes shall be enshrined in a great mound, placed on a lofty cliff, so that it may be a mark for sailors far out at sea.

5.The news of Beowulf’s dear-bought victory is carried to the army.Amid great lamentation, the hero’s body is laid on the funeral pile and consumed.The treasures of the dragon’s hoard are buried with his ashes; and when the great mound is finished, twelve of Beowulf’s most famous warriors ride around it, celebrating the praises of the bravest, gentlest and most generous of kings.

The Hero.—Those portions of the poem that are summarized above—that is to say, those which relate the career of the hero in progressive order—contain a lucid and well-constructed story, told with a vividness of imagination and a degree of narrative skill that may with little exaggeration be called Homeric.And yet it is probable that there are few readers of Beowulf who have not felt—and there are many who after repeated perusal continue to feel—that the general impression produced by it is that of a bewildering chaos.This effect is due to the multitude and the character of the episodes.In the first place, a very great part of what the poem tells about Beowulf himself is not presented in regular sequence, but by way of retrospective mention or narration.The extent of the material thus introduced out of course may be seen from the following abstract.

When seven years old the orphaned Beowulf was adopted by his grandfather king Hrethel, the father of Hygelac, and was regarded by him with as much affection as any of his own sons.In youth, although famed for his wonderful strength of grip, he was generally despised as sluggish and unwarlike.Yet even before his encounter with Grendel, he had won renown by his swimming contest with another youth named Breca, when after battling for seven days and nights with the waves, and slaying many sea-monsters, he came to land in the country of the Finns.In the disastrous invasion of the land of the Hetware, in which Hygelac was killed, Beowulf killed many of the enemy, amongst them a chieftain of the Hugas, named Daeghrefn, apparently the slayer of Hygelac.In the retreat he once more displayed his powers as a swimmer, carrying to his ship the armour of thirty slain enemies.When he reached his native land, the widowed queen offered him the kingdom, her son Heardred being too young to rule.Beowulf, out of loyalty, refused to be made king, and acted as the guardian of Heardred during his minority, and as his counsellor after he came to man’s estate.By giving shelter to the fugitive Eadgils, a rebel against his uncle the king of the “Swēon” (the Swedes, dwelling to the north of the Gautar), Heardred brought on himself an invasion, in which he lost his life.When Beowulf became king, he supported the cause of Eadgils by force of arms; the king of the Swedes was killed, and his nephew placed on the throne.

Historical Value.—Now, with one brilliant exception—the story of the swimming-match, which is felicitously introduced and finely told—these retrospective passages are brought in more or less awkwardly, interrupt inconveniently the course of the narrative, and are too condensed and allusive in style to make any strong poetic impression. Still, they do serve to complete the portraiture of the hero’s character. There are, however, many other episodes that have nothing to do with Beowulf himself, but seem to have been inserted with a deliberate intention of making the poem into a sort of cyclopaedia of Germanic tradition. They include many particulars of what purports to be the history of the royal houses, not only of the Gautar and the Danes, but also of the Swedes, the continental Angles, the Ostrogoths, the Frisians and the Heathobeards, besides references to matters of unlocalized heroic story such as the exploits of Sigismund. The Saxons are not named, and the Franks appear only as a dreaded hostile power. Of Britain there is no mention; and though there are some distinctly Christian passages, they are so incongruous in tone with the rest of the poem that they must be regarded as interpolations. In general the extraneous episodes have no great appropriateness to their context, and have the appearance of being abridged versions of stories that had been related at length in poetry. Their confusing effect, for modern readers, is increased by a curiously irrelevant prologue. It begins by celebrating the ancient glories of the Danes, tells in allusive style the story of Scyld, the founder of the “Scylding” dynasty of Denmark, and praises the virtues of his son Beowulf. If this Danish Beowulf had been the hero of the poem, the opening would have been appropriate; but it seems strangely out of place as an introduction to the story of his namesake.

However detrimental these redundancies may be to the poetic beauty of the epic, they add enormously to its interest for students of Germanic history or legend. If the mass of traditions which it purports to contain be genuine, the poem is of unique importance as a source of knowledge respecting the early history of the peoples of northern Germany and Scandinavia. But the value to be assigned to Beowulf in this respect can be determined only by ascertaining its probable date, origin and manner of composition. The criticism of the Old English epic has therefore for nearly a century been justly regarded as indispensable to the investigation of Germanic antiquities.

The starting-point of all Beowulf criticism is the fact (discovered by N. F. S. Grundtvig in 1815) that one of the episodes of the poem belongs to authentic history. Gregory of Tours, who died in 594, relates that in the reign of Theodoric of Metz (511-534) the Danes invaded the kingdom, and carried off many captives and much plunder to their ships. Their king, whose name appears in the best MSS. as Chlochilaicus (other copies read Chrochilaicus, Hrodolaicus, &c.) , remained on shore intending to follow afterwards, but was attacked by the Franks under Theodobert, son of Theodoric, and killed. The Franks then defeated the Danes in a naval battle, and recovered the booty. The date of these events is ascertained to have been between 512 and 520. An anonymous history written early in the eighth century (Liber Hist.Francorum, cap. 19) gives the name of the Danish king as Chochilaicus, and says that he was killed in the land of the Attoarii. Now it is related in Beowulf that Hygelac met his death in fighting against the Franks and the Hetware (the Old English form of Attoarii). The forms of the Danish king’s name given by the Frankish historians are corruptions of the name of which the primitive Germanic form was Hugilaikaz, and which by regular phonetic change became in Old English Hygelāc, and in Old Norse Hugleikr. It is true that the invading king is said in the histories to have been a Dane, whereas the Hygelac of Beowulf belonged to the “Gēatas” or Gautar. But a work called Liber Monstrorum,1 preserved in two MSS. of the 10th century, cites as an example of extraordinary stature a certain “Huiglaucus, king of the Getae,” who was killed by the Franks, and whose bones were preserved on an island at the mouth of the Rhine, and exhibited as a marvel. It is therefore evident that the personality of Hygelac, and the expedition in which, according to Beowulf, he died, belong not to the region of legend or poetic invention, but to that of historic fact.

This noteworthy result suggests the possibility that what the poem tells of Hygelac’s near relatives, and of the events of his reign and that of his successor, is based on historic fact. There is really nothing to forbid the supposition; nor is there any unlikelihood in the view that the persons mentioned as belonging to the royal houses of the Danes and Swedes had a real existence. It can be proved, at any rate, that several of the names are derived from the native traditions of these two peoples. The Danish king Hrothgar and his brother Halga, the sons of Healf-dene, appear in the Historia Danica of Saxo as Roe (the founder of Roskilde) and Helgo, the sons of Haldanus. The Swedish princes Eadgils, son of Ohthere, and Onela, who are mentioned in Beowulf, are in the Icelandic Heimskringla called Adils son of Ōttarr, and Āli; the correspondence of the names, according to the phonetic laws of Old English and Old Norse, being strictly normal. There are other points of contact between Beowulf on the one hand and the Scandinavian records on the other, confirming the conclusion that the Old English poem contains much of the historical tradition of the Gautar, the Danes and the Swedes, in its purest accessible form.

Of the hero of the poem no mention has been found elsewhere. But the name (the Icelandic form of which is Bjōlfr) is genuinely Scandinavian. It was borne by one of the early settlers in Iceland, and a monk named Biuulf is commemorated in the Liber Vitae of the church of Durham. As the historical character of Hygelac has been proved, it is not unreasonable to accept the authority of the poem for the statement that his nephew Beowulf succeeded Heardred on the throne of the Gautar, and interfered in the dynastic quarrels of the Swedes. His swimming exploit among the Hetware, allowance being made for poetic exaggeration, fits remarkably well into the circumstances of the story told by Gregory of Tours; and perhaps his contest with Breca may have been an exaggeration of a real incident in his career; and even if it was originally related of some other hero, its attribution to the historical Beowulf may have been occasioned by his renown as a swimmer.

On the other hand, it would be absurd to imagine that the combats with Grendel and his mother and with the fiery dragon can be exaggerated representations of actual occurrences. These exploits belong to the domain of pure mythology. That they have been attributed to Beowulf in particular might seem to be adequately accounted for by the general tendency to connect mythical achievements with the name of any famous hero. There are, however, some facts that seem to point to a more definite explanation. The Danish king “Scyld Scēfing,” whose story is told in the opening lines of the poem, and his son Beowulf, are plainly identical with Sceldwea, son of Sceaf, and his son Beaw, who appear among the ancestors of Woden in the genealogy of the kings of Wessex given in the Old English Chronicle. The story of Scyld is related, with some details not found in Beowulf, by William of Malmesbury, and, less fully, by the 10th-century English historian Ethelwerd, though it is told not of Scyld himself, but of his father Sceaf. According to William’s version, Sceaf was found, as an infant, alone in a boat without oars, which had drifted to the island of “Scandza.” The child was asleep with his head on a sheaf, and from this circumstance he obtained his name. When he grew up he reigned over the Angles at “Slaswic.” In Beowulf the same story is told of Scyld, with the addition that when he died his body was placed in a ship, laden with rich treasure, which was sent out to sea unguided. It is clear that in the original form of the tradition the name of the foundling was Scyld or Sceldwea, and that his cognomen Scefing (derived from scēaf, a sheaf) was misinterpreted as a patronymic.Sceaf, therefore, is no genuine personage of tradition, but merely an etymological figment.

The position of Sceldwea and Beaw (in Malmesbury’s Latin called Sceldius and Beowius) in the genealogy as anterior to Woden would not of itself prove that they belong to divine mythology and not to heroic legend. But there are independent reasons for believing that they were originally gods or demi-gods. It is a reasonable conjecture that the tales of victories over Grendel and the fiery dragon belong properly to the myth of Beaw. If Beowulf, the champion of the Gautar, had already become a theme of epic song, the resemblance of name might easily suggest the idea of enriching his story by adding to it the achievements of Beaw. At the same time, the tradition that the hero of these adventures was a son of Scyld, who was identified (whether rightly or wrongly) with the eponymus of the Danish dynasty of the Scyldings, may well have prompted the supposition that they took place in Denmark. There is, as we shall see afterwards, some ground for believing that there were circulated in England two rival poetic versions of the story of the encounters with supernatural beings: the one referring them to Beowulf the Dane, while the other (represented by the existing poem) attached them to the legend of the son of Ecgtheow, but ingeniously contrived to do some justice to the alternative tradition by laying the scene of the Grendel incident at the court of a Scylding king.

As the name of Beaw appears in the genealogies of English kings, it seems likely that the traditions of his exploits may have been brought over by the Angles from their continental home. This supposition is confirmed by evidence that seems to show that the Grendel legend was popularly current in this country. In the schedules of boundaries appended to two Old English charters there occurs mention of pools called “Grendel’s mere,” one in Wiltshire and the other in Staffordshire. The charter that mentions the Wiltshire “Grendel’s mere” speaks also of a place called Bēowan hām (“Beowa’s home”), and another Wiltshire charter has a “Scyld’s tree” among the landmarks enumerated. The notion that ancient burial mounds were liable to be inhabited by dragons was common in the Germanic world: there is perhaps a trace of it in the Derbyshire place-name Drakelow, which means “dragon’s barrow.”

While, however, it thus appears that the mythic part of the Beowulf story is a portion of primeval Angle tradition, there is no proof that it was originally peculiar to the Angles; and even if it was so, it may easily have passed from them into the poetic cycles of the related peoples.There are, indeed, some reasons for suspecting that the blending of the stories of the mythic Beaw and the historical Beowulf may have been the work of Scandinavian and not of English poets.Prof. G.Sarrazin has pointed out the striking resemblance between the Scandinavian legend of Bödvarr Biarki and that of the Beowulf of the poem.In each, a hero from Gautland slays a destructive monster at the court of a Danish king, and afterwards is found fighting on the side of Eadgils (Adils) in Sweden.This coincidence cannot well be due to mere chance; but its exact significance is doubtful.On the one hand, it is possible that the English epic, which unquestionably derived its historical elements from Scandinavian song, may be indebted to the same source for its general plan, including the blending of history and myth.On the other hand, considering the late date of the authority for the Scandinavian traditions, we cannot be sure that the latter may not owe some of their material to English minstrels.There are similar alternative possibilities with regard to the explanation of the striking resemblances which certain incidents of the adventures with Grendel and the dragon bear to incidents in the narratives of Saxo and the Icelandic sagas.

Date and Origin.—It is now time to speak of the probable date and origin of the poem. The conjecture that most naturally presents itself to those who have made no special study of the question, is that an English epic treating of the deeds of a Scandinavian hero on Scandinavian ground must have been composed in the days of Norse or Danish dominion in England. This, however, is impossible. The forms under which Scandinavian names appear in the poem show clearly that these names must have entered English tradition not later than the beginning of the 7th century. It does not indeed follow that the extant poem is of so early a date; but its syntax is remarkably archaic in comparision with that of the Old English poetry of the 8th century. The hypothesis that Beowulf is in whole or in part a translation from a Scandinavian original, although still maintained by some scholars, introduces more difficulties than it solves, and must be dismissed as untenable. The limits of this article do not permit us to state and criticize the many elaborate theories that have been proposed respecting the origin of the poem. All that can be done is to set forth the view that appears to us to be most free from objection. It may be premised that although the existing MS. is written in the West-Saxon dialect, the phenomena of the language indicate transcription from an Anglian (i.ea Northumbrian or Mercian) original; and this conclusion is supported by the fact that while the poem contains one important episode relating to the Angles, the name of the Saxons does not occur in it at all.

In its original form, Beowulf was a product of the time when poetry was composed not to be read, but to be recited in the halls of kings and nobles. Of course an entire epic could not be recited on a single occasion; nor can we suppose that it would be thought out from beginning to end before any part of it was presented to an audience. A singer who had pleased his hearers with a tale of adventure would be called on to tell them of earlier or later events in the career of the hero; and so the story would grow, until it included all that the poet knew from tradition, or could invent in harmony with it. That Beowulf is concerned with the deeds of a foreign hero is less surprising than it seems at first sight. The minstrel of early Germanic times was required to be learned not only in the traditions of his own people, but also in those of the other peoples with whom they felt their kinship. He had a double task to perform. It was not enough that his songs should give pleasure; his patrons demanded that he should recount faithfully the history and genealogy both of their own line and of those other royal houses who shared with them the same divine ancestry, and who might be connected with them by ties of marriage or warlike alliance. Probably the singer was always himself an original poet; he might often be content to reproduce the songs that he had learned, but he was doubtless free to improve or expand them as he chose, provided that his inventions did not conflict with what was supposed to be historic truth. For all we know, the intercourse of the Angles with Scandinavia, which enabled their poets to obtain new knowledge of the legends of Danes, Gautar and Swedes, may not have ceased until their conversion to Christianity in the 7th century. And even after this event, whatever may have been the attitude of churchmen towards the old heathen poetry, the kings and warriors would be slow to lose their interest in the heroic tales that had delighted their ancestors. It is probable that down to the end of the 7th century, if not still later, the court poets of Northumbria and Mercia continued to celebrate the deeds of Beowulf and of many another hero of ancient days.

Although the heathen Angles had their own runic alphabet, it is unlikely that any poetry was written down until a generation had grown up trained in the use of the Latin letters learned from Christian missionaries. We cannot determine the date at which some book-learned man, interested in poetry, took down from the lips of a minstrel one of the stories that he had been accustomed to sing. It may have been before 700; much later it can hardly have been, for the old heathen poetry, though its existence might be threatened by the influence of the church, was still in vigorous life. The epic of Beowulf was not the only one that was reduced to writing: a fragment of the song about Finn, king of the Frisians, still survives, and possibly several other heroic poems were written down about the same time. As originally dictated, Beowulf probably contained the story outlined at the beginning of this article, with the addition of one or two of the episodes relating to the hero himself—among them the legend of the swimming-match. This story had doubtless been told at greater length in verse, but its insertion in its present place is the work of a poet, not of a mere redactor. The other episodes were introduced by some later writer, who had heard recited, or perhaps had read, a multitude of the old heathen songs, the substance of which he piously sought to preserve from oblivion by weaving it in an abridged form, into the texture of the one great poem which he was transcribing. The Christian passages, which are poetically of no value, are evidently of literary origin, and may be of any date down to that of the extant MS. The curious passage which says that the subjects of Hrothgar sought deliverance from Grendel in prayer at the temple of the Devil, “because they knew not the true God,” must surely have been substituted for a passage referring sympathetically to the worship of the ancient gods.

An interesting light on the history of the written text seems to be afforded by the phenomena of the existing MS. The poem is divided into numbered sections, the length of which was probably determined by the size of the pieces of parchment of which an earlier exemplar consisted. Now the first fifty-two lines, which are concerned with Scyld and his son Beowulf, stand outside this numbering. It may reasonably be inferred that there once existed a written text of the poem that did not include these lines. Their substance, however, is clearly ancient. Many difficulties will be obviated if we may suppose that this passage is the beginning of a different poem, the hero of which was not Beowulf the son of Ecgtheow, but his Danish namesake. It is true that Beowulf the Scylding is mentioned at the beginning of the first numbered section; but probably the opening lines of this section have undergone alteration in order to bring them into connexion with the prefixed matter.

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BEQUEST (from O. Eng. becwethan, to declare or express in words; cf. “quoth”), the disposition of property by will. Strictly, “bequest” is used of personal, and “devise” of real property. (See Legacy; Will or Testament.)

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BÉRAIN, JEAN (1638-1711), known as “the Elder,” Belgian draughtsman and designer, painter and engraver of ornament, was born in 1638 or 1639 at Saint Mihiel (Meuse) and died in Paris on the 24th of January 1711. In 1674 he was appointed dessinateur de la chambre et du cabinet de Roi, in succession to Gissey, whose pupil he is believed to have been.From 1677 onward he had apartments, near to those of André Charles Boulle (q.v.), for whom he made many designs, in the Louvre, where he died. After the death of Le Brun he was commissioned to compose and supervise the whole of the exterior decoration of the king’s ships. Without possessing great originality he was inventive and industrious, and knew so well how to assimilate the work of those who had preceded him (especially Raffaelle’s arabesques) and to adapt it to the taste of the time that his designs became the rage. He furnished designs for the decorations and costumes used in the opera performances, for court festivals, and for public solemnities such as funeral processions, and inspired the ornamentations of rooms and of furniture to such an extent that a French writer says that nothing was done during his later years which he had not designed, or at least which was not in his manner. He was, in fact, the oracle of taste and the supreme pontiff whose fiat was law in all matters of decoration. His numerous designs were for the most part engraved under his own superintendence, and a collection of them was published in Paris in 1711 by his son-in-law, Thuret, clockmaker to the king. There are three books, Œuvre de J.Bérain, Ornements inventés par J.Bérain and Œvres de J.Bérain contenant des ornements d’architecture. His earliest known works show him as engraver—twelve plates in the collection of Diverses pièces de serrurerie inventées par Hughes Brisville el gravées par Jean Bérain (Paris, 1663), and in 1667 ten plates of designs for the use of gunsmiths. M. Guilmard in Les Maîtres ornemanistes, gives a complete list of his published works.

His son Jean Bérain, “the Younger” (1678-1726), was born in Paris, where he also died. He was his father’s pupil, and exercised the same official functions after his death. Thus he planned the funeral ceremonies at St Denis on the death of the dauphin, and afterwards made the designs for the obsequies of Louis XIV. He is perhaps best known as an engraver. He engraved eleven plates of the collection Ornements de peinture et de sculpture qui sont dans la galerie d’Apollon au chasteau du Louvre, et dans le grand appartement du roy au palais des Tuileries (Paris, 1710), which have been wrongly attributed to his father, the Mausolei du duc de Bourgogne, and that of Marie-Louise Gabrielle de Savoie, reine d’Espagne (1714), &c. His work is exceedingly difficult to distinguish from his father’s, the similarity of style being remarkable.

Claude Bérain, brother of the elder Jean, was still living in 1726.He was engraver to the king, and executed a good number of plates of ornament and arabesque of various kinds, some of which are included in his more distinguished brother’s works.

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BÉRANGER, PIERRE JEAN DE (1780-1857), French song-writer, was born in Paris on the 19th of August 1780. The aristocratic de was a piece of groundless vanity on the part of his father, who had assumed the name of Béranger de Mersix. He was descended in truth from a country innkeeper on the one side, and, on the other, from a tailor in the rue Montorgueil. Of education, in the narrower sense, he had but little. From the roof of his first school he beheld the capture of the Bastille, and this stirring memory was all that he acquired. Later on he passed some time in a school at Péronne, founded by one Bellenglise on the principles of Rousseau, where the boys were formed into clubs and regiments, and taught to play solemnly at politics and war. Béranger was president of the club, made speeches before such members of Convention as passed through Péronne, and drew up addresses to Tallien or Robespierre at Paris. In the meanwhile he learned neither Greek nor Latin—not even French, it would appear; for it was after he left school, from the printer Laisney, that he acquired the elements of grammar. His true education was of another sort. In his childhood, shy, sickly and skilful with his hands, as he sat at home alone to carve cherry stones, he was already forming for himself those habits of retirement and patient elaboration which influenced the whole tenor of his life and the character of all that he wrote. At Péronne he learned of his good aunt to be a stout republican; and from the doorstep of her inn, on quiet evenings, he would listen to the thunder of the guns before Valenciennes, and fortify himself in his passionate love of France and distaste for all things foreign. Although he could never read Horace save in a translation, he had been educated on Télémaque, Racine and the dramas of Voltaire, and taught, from a child, in the tradition of all that is highest and most correct in French.

After serving his aunt for some time in the capacity of waiter, and passing some time also in the printing-office of one Laisney, he was taken to Paris by his father. Here he saw much low speculation, and many low royalist intrigues. In 1802, in consequence of a distressing quarrel, he left his father and began life for himself in the garret of his ever memorable song. For two years he did literary hackwork, when he could get it, and wrote pastorals, epics and all manner of ambitious failures. At the end of that period (1804) he wrote to Lucien Bonaparte, enclosing some of these attempts. He was then in bad health, and in the last state of misery. His watch was pledged. His wardrobe consisted of one pair of boots, one greatcoat, one pair of trousers with a hole in the knee, and “three bad shirts which a friendly hand wearied itself in endeavouring to mend.” The friendly hand was that of Judith Frère, with whom he had been already more or less acquainted since 1796, and who continued to be his faithful companion until her death, three months before his own, in 1857. She must not be confounded with the Lisette of the songs; the pieces addressed to her (La Bonne Vieille, Maudit printemps, &c.) are in a very different vein. Lucien Bonaparte interested himself in the young poet, transferred to him his own pension of 1000 francs from the Institute, and set him to work on a Death of NeroFive years later, through the same patronage, although indirectly, Béranger became a clerk in the university at a salary of another thousand.

Meanwhile he had written many songs for convivial occasions, and “to console himself under all misfortunes”; some, according to M. Boiteau, had been already published by his father, but he set no great store on them himself; and it was only in 1812, while watching by the sick-bed of a friend, that it occurred to him to write down the best he could remember. Next year he was elected to the Caveau Moderne, and his reputation as a song-writer began to spread. Manuscript copies of Les Gueux, Le Sénateur, above all, of Le Roi d’Yvetot, a satire against Napoleon, whom he was to magnify so much in the sequel, passed from hand to hand with acclamation.It was thus that all his best works went abroad; one man sang them to another over all the land of France.He was the only poet of modern times who could altogether have dispensed with printing.

His first collection escaped censure. “We must pardon many things to the author of Le Roi d’Yvetot,” said Louis XVIII. The second (1821) was more daring. The apathy of the Liberal camp, he says, had convinced him of the need for some bugle call of awakening. This publication lost him his situation in the university, and subjected him to a trial, a fine of 500 francs and an imprisonment of three months. Imprisonment was a small affair for Béranger. At Sainte Pélagie he occupied a room (it had just been quitted by Paul Louis Courier), warm, well furnished, and preferable in every way to his own poor lodging, where the water froze on winter nights. He adds, on the occasion of his second imprisonment, that he found a certain charm in this quiet, claustral existence, with its regular hours and long evenings alone over the fire. This second imprisonment of nine months, together with a fine and expenses amounting to 1100 francs, followed on the appearance of his fourth collection. The government proposed through Laffitte that, if he would submit to judgment without appearing or making defences, he should only be condemned in the smallest penalty. But his public spirit made him refuse the proposal; and he would not even ask permission to pass his term of imprisonment in a Maison de santé, although his health was more than usually feeble at the time.“When you have taken your stand in a contest with government, it seems to me,” he wrote, “ridiculous to complain of the blows it inflicts on you, and impolitic to furnish it with any occasion of generosity.”His first thought in La Force was to alleviate the condition of the other prisoners.

In the revolution of July he took no inconsiderable part. Copies of his song, Le Vieux Drapeau, were served out to the insurgent crowd. He had been for long the intimate friend and adviser of the leading men; and during the decisive week his counsels went a good way towards shaping the ultimate result. “As for the republic, that dream of my whole life,” he wrote in 1831, “I did not wish it should be given to us a second time unripe.” Louis Philippe, hearing how much the song-writer had done towards his elevation, expressed a wish to see and speak with him; but Béranger refused to present himself at court, and used his favour only to ask a place for a friend, and a pension for Rouget de l’Isle, author of the famous Marseillaise, who was now old and poor, and whom he had been already succouring for five years.

In 1848, in spite of every possible expression of his reluctance, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, and that by so large a number of votes (204,471) that he felt himself obliged to accept the seat. Not long afterwards, and with great difficulty, he obtained leave to resign. This was the last public event of Béranger’s life. He continued to polish his songs in retirement, visited by nearly all the famous men of France. He numbered among his friends Chateaubriand, Thiers, Jacques Laffitte, Michelet, Lamennais, Mignet. Nothing could exceed the amiability of his private character; so poor a man has rarely been so rich in good actions; he was always ready to receive help from his friends when he was in need, and always forward to help others. His correspondence is full of wisdom and kindness, with a smack of Montaigne, and now and then a vein of pleasantry that will remind the English reader of Charles Lamb. He occupied some of his leisure in preparing his own memoirs, and a certain treatise on Social and Political Morality, intended for the people, a work he had much at heart, but judged at last to be beyond his strength.He died on the 16th July 1857.It was feared that his funeral would be the signal for some political disturbance; but the government took immediate measures, and all went quietly.The streets of Paris were lined with soldiers and full of townsfolk, silent and uncovered.From time to time cries arose:—“Honneur, honneur à Béranger!”

The songs of Béranger would scarcely be called songs in England.They are elaborate, written in a clear and sparkling style, full of wit and incision.It is not so much for any lyrical flow as for the happy turn of the phrase that they claim superiority.Whether the subject be gay or serious, light or passionate, the medium remains untroubled.The special merits of the songs are merits to be looked for rather in English prose than in English verse.He worked deliberately, never wrote more than fifteen songs a year and often less, and was so fastidious that he has not preserved a quarter of what he finished.“I am a good little bit of a poet,” he says himself, “clever in the craft, and a conscientious worker to whom old airs and a modest choice of subjects (le coin où je me suis confiné) have brought some success.” Nevertheless, he makes a figure of importance in literary history. When he first began to cultivate the chanson, this minor form lay under some contempt, and was restricted to slight subjects and a humorous guise of treatment. Gradually he filled these little chiselled toys of verbal perfection with ever more and more of sentiment. From a date comparatively early he had determined to sing for the people. It was for this reason that he fled, as far as possible, the houses of his influential friends and came back gladly to the garret and the street corner. Thus it was, also, that he came to acknowledge obligations to Emile Debraux, who had often stood between him and the masses as interpreter, and given him the key-note of the popular humour. Now, he had observed in the songs of sailors, and all who labour, a prevailing tone of sadness; and so, as he grew more masterful in this sort of expression, he sought more and more after what is deep, serious and constant in the thoughts of common men. The evolution was slow; and we can see in his own works examples of every stage, from that of witty indifference in fifty pieces of the first collection, to that of grave and even tragic feeling in Les Souvenirs du peuple or Le Vieux Vagabond. And this innovation involved another, which was as a sort of prelude to the great romantic movement. For the chanson, as he says himself, opened up to him a path in which his genius could develop itself at ease; he escaped, by this literary postern, from strict academical requirements, and had at his disposal the whole dictionary, four-fifths of which, according to La Harpe, were forbidden to the use of more regular and pretentious poetry. If he still kept some of the old vocabulary, some of the old imagery, he was yet accustoming people to hear moving subjects treated in a manner more free and simple than heretofore; so that his was a sort of conservative reform, preceding the violent revolution of Victor Hugo and his army of uncompromising romantics. He seems himself to have had glimmerings of some such idea; but he withheld his full approval from the new movement on two grounds:—first, because the romantic school misused somewhat brutally the delicate organism of the French language; and second, as he wrote to Sainte-Beuve in 1832, because they adopted the motto of “Art for art,” and set no object of public usefulness before them as they wrote. For himself (and this is the third point of importance) he had a strong sense of political responsibility. Public interest took a far higher place in his estimation than any private passion or favour. He had little toleration for those erotic poets who sing their own loves and not the common sorrows of mankind, “who forget,” to quote his own words, “forget beside their mistress those who labour before the Lord.” Hence it is that so many of his pieces are political, and so many, in the later times at least, inspired with a socialistic spirit of indignation and revolt. It is by this socialism that he becomes truly modern and touches hands with Burns.

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BERAR, known also as the Hyderabad Assigned Districts, formerly a province administered on behalf of the nizam of Hyderabad by the British government, but since the 1st of October 1903 under the administration of the commissioner-general for the Central Provinces (q.v.).The origin of the name Berar is not known, but may perhaps be a corruption of Vidarbha, the name of a kingdom in the Deccan of which, in the period of the Mahabharata, Berar probably formed part.The history of Berar belongs generally to that of the Deccan, the country falling in turn under the sway of the various dynasties which successively ruled in southern India, the first authentic records showing it to have been part of the Andhra or Satavahana empire.On the final fall of the Chalukyas in the 12th century, Berar came under the sway of the Yadavas of Deogiri, and remained in their possession till the Mussulman invasions at the end of the 13th century.On the establishment of the Bahmani dynasty in the Deccan (1348) Berar was constituted one of the four provinces into which their kingdom was divided, being governed by great nobles, with a separate army.The perils of this system becoming apparent, the province was divided (1478 or 1479) into two separate governments, named after their capitals Gawil and Mahur.The Bahmani dynasty was, however, already tottering to its fall; and in 1490 Imad-ul-Mulk, governor of Gawil, who had formerly held all Berar, proclaimed his independence and proceeded to annex Mahur to his new kingdom.Imad-ul-Mulk was by birth a Kanarese Hindu, but had been captured as a boy in one of the expeditions against Vijayanagar and reared as a Mussulman.He died in 1504 and his direct descendants held the sultanate of Berar until 1561, when Burhan Imad Shah was deposed by his minister Tufal Khan, who assumed the kingship.This gave a pretext for the intervention of Murtaza Nizam Shah of Ahmednagar, who in 1572 invaded Berar, imprisoned and put to death Tufal Khan, his son Shams-ul-Mulk, and the ex-king Burhan, and annexed Berar to his own dominions.In 1595 Sultan Murad, son of the emperor Akbar, besieged Ahmednagar, and was bought off by the formal cession of Berar.

Murad, founding the city of Shahpur, fixed his seat at Berar, and after his death in 1598, and the conquest of the Deccan by Akbar, the province was united with Ahmednagar and Khandesh under the emperor’s fifth son, Daniyal (d.1605), as governor.After Akbar’s death (1605) Berar once more became independent under the Abyssinian Malik Ambar (d.1626), but in the first year of Shah Jahan’s reign it was again brought under the sway of the Mogul empire.Towards the close of the 17th century the province began to be overrun by the Mahrattas, and in 1718 the Delhi government formally recognized their right to levy blackmail (chauth) on the unhappy population. In 1724 the Nizam-ul-Mulk Asaf Jah established the independent line of the nizams of Hyderabad, and thenceforth the latter claimed to be de jure sovereigns of Berar, with exception of certain districts (Mehkar, Umarkhed, &c.) ceded to the peshwa in 1760 and 1795. The claim was contested by the Bhonsla rajas, and for more than half a century the miserable country was ground between the upper and the nether millstone.

This condition of things was ended by Wellesley’s victories at Assaye and Argaon (1803), which forced the Bhonsla raja to cede his territories west of the Wardha, Gawilgarh and Narnala. By the partition treaty of Hyderabad (1804) these ceded territories in Berar were transferred to the nizam, together with some tracts about Sindkhed and Jalna which had been held by Sindhia. By a treaty of 1822, which extinguished the Mahratta right to levy chauth, the Wardha river was fixed as the eastern boundary of Berar, the Melghat and adjoining districts in the plains being assigned to the nizam in exchange for the districts east of the Wardha held by the peshwa.

Though Berar was no longer oppressed by its Mahratta taskmasters nor harried by Pindari and Bhil raiders, it remained long a prey to the turbulent elements let loose by the sudden cessation of the wars.From time to time bands of soldiery, whom the government was powerless to control, scoured the country, and rebellion succeeded rebellion till 1859, when the last fight against open rebels took place at Chichamba near Risod.Meanwhile the misery of the country was increased by the reckless raising of loans by the nizam’s government and the pledging of the revenues to a succession of great farmers-general.At last the British government had to intervene effectively, and in 1853 a new treaty was signed with the nizam, under which the Hyderabad contingent was to be maintained by the British government, while for the pay of this force and in satisfaction of other claims, certain districts were “assigned” to the East India Company.It was these “Hyderabad Assigned Districts” which were popularly supposed to form the province of Berar, though they coincided in extent neither with the Berar of the nizams nor with the old Mogul province.In 1860, by a new treaty which modified in the nizam’s favour that of 1853, it was agreed that Berar should be held in trust by the British government for the purposes specified in the treaty of 1853.

Under British control Berar rapidly recovered its prosperity.Thousands of cultivators who had emigrated across the Wardha to the peshwa’s dominions, in order to escape the ruinous fiscal system of the nizam’s government, now returned; the American Civil War gave an immense stimulus to the cotton trade; the laying of a line of railway across the province provided yet further employment, and the people rapidly became prosperous and contented.

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BÉRARD, JOSEPH FRÉDÉRIC (1789-1828), French physician and philosopher, was born at Montpellier. Educated at the medical school of that town, he afterwards went to Paris, where he was employed in connexion with the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales. He returned in 1816, and published a work, Doctrine médicale de l’école de Montpellier (1819), which is indispensable to a proper understanding of the principles of the Vitalistic school. In 1823 he was called to a chair of medicine at Paris, which he held for three years; he was then nominated professor of hygiene at Montpellier. His health gave way under his labours, and he died in 1828. His most important book is his Doctrines des rapports du physique et du moral (Paris, 1823). He held that consciousness or internal perception reveals to us the existence of an immaterial, thinking, feeling and willing subject, the self or soul. Alongside of this there is the vital force, the nutritive power, which uses the physical frame as its organ. The soul and the principle of life are in constant reciprocal action, and the first owes to the second, not the formation of its faculties, but the conditions under which they are evolved. He showed himself unable to understand the points of view of those whom he criticized, and yet his own theories, midway between vitalism and animism, are entirely destitute of originality.

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BERAT (Slav. Byelgorod; Turk. Arnaut-Beligradi), the capital of a sanjak in the vilayet of Iannina, southern Albania, Turkey; on the river Ergene, Ergeni or Osum, a left-hand tributary of the Semeni.Pop.(1900) about 15,000.Berat is a fortified town, situated in a fertile valley, which produces wine, olive-oil, fruit and grain.It is the see of an Orthodox metropolitan, and the inhabitants, of whom two-thirds are Albanian and the remainder principally Greek, are equally divided in religion between Christianity and Islam.

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BERAUN (Czech Beroun), a town of Bohemia, Austria, 27 m. S. W. of Prague by rail. Pop. (1900) 9693, mostly Czech. It is situated at the confluence of the Beraun with the Litawa river, and is the seat of important textile industry, sugar-refining, corn-milling and brewing. Lime-kilns and the manufacture of cement, and smelting and iron works are carried on in the environs. Beraun is a place of immemorial antiquity. It was originally called na Brodě (by the ford), and received the name of Bern, Berun or Verona in the 13th century, when it obtained the privileges of a city from the emperor Charles IV. , who was specially attached to the place, calling it “Verona mea.” Under his patronage the town rapidly prospered. In 1421 Zizka stormed the town, which later on was retaken and devastated by the troops of Duke Leopold, bishop of Passau. During the Thirty Years’ War it was sacked by the Imperialists, the Saxons and the Swedes in turn; and in the first Silesian war the same fate befell it at the hands of the French and Bavarians.

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BERBER, a town and mudiria (province) of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The town is on the right bank of the Nile, 1140 ft. above sea-level, in 18° 1’ N. , 33° 59′ E. , and 214 m. by rail N. W. of Khartum. Pop. about 6000. Berber derived its importance from being the starting-point of the caravan route, 242 m. long, across the Nubian desert to the Red Sea at Suakin, a distance covered in seven to twelve days. It was also one of the principal stopping-places between Cairo and Khartum. The caravan route to the Red Sea was superseded in 1906 by a railway, which leaves the Wadi Halfa-Khartum line at the mouth of the Atbara. Berber thus lost the Red Sea trade. It remains the centre and market-place for the produce of the Nile valley for a considerable distance. East of the town is an immense plain, which, if irrigated, would yield abundant crops.

Berber, or El Mekerif, is a town of considerable antiquity.Before its conquest by the Egyptians in 1820 its ruler owed allegiance to the kings of Sennar.It was captured by the Mahdists on the 26th of May 1884, and was re-occupied by the Anglo-Egyptian army on the 6th of September 1897.It was the capital of the mudiria until 1905, in which year the headquarters of the province were transferred to Ed Damer, a town near the confluence of the Nile and Atbara.At the northern end of the mudiria is Abu Hamed (q.v.), important as a railway junction for Dongola mudiria.The best-known of the tribes inhabiting the province are the Hassania, Jaalin, Bisharin and Kimilab.During the Mahdia most of these tribes suffered severely at the hands of the dervishes.In 1904 the total population of the province was estimated at 83,000.It has since considerably increased.The riverain population is largely engaged in agriculture, the chief crops cultivated being durra, barley, wheat and cotton.

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BERBERA, chief town and principal port of the British Somaliland protectorate, North-East Africa, 155 m. S. of Aden, in 10° 26′ N. , 45° 4′ E. Berbera stands at the head of a deep inlet which forms the only completely sheltered haven on the south side of the Gulf of Aden. It is the residence of the commissioner of the protectorate and the headquarters of the Somaliland battalion of the King’s African Rifles. The harbour is eleven to thirteen fathoms deep at the entrance (indicated by a lighthouse), decreasing to five fathoms near the shore. Ocean-going steamers find ample accommodation. There are two piers and numerous warehouses. The town is built in two divisions—the native town to the east, the new town, laid out by the Egyptians (1875-1877), to the west. The majority of the better-class houses are of rubble, one-storeyed and flat-roofed. The public buildings include the fort, hospital and barracks. There are a Roman Catholic mission-house and convent and a government school. The affairs of the town are administered by a municipality. The water-supply is brought to the town by an aqueduct from the hills some 8 m. distant. The bulk of the inhabitants are Somali, who have abandoned a nomadic life and adopted largely the ways of the Arab and Indian traders. The permanent population is under 10,000; but from October to April the population rises to 30,000 or more by the arrival of caravans from Ogaden and Dolbahanta. The traders bring with them tents on the backs of camels and these are pitched near the native town. Their merchandise consists of sheep and goats, gum and resin, skins and ostrich feathers. The trade is almost entirely with Aden, of which Berbera may be considered a commercial dependency. The value of the goods brought in yearly by caravan exceeds on the average £100,000. The total trade of the port for the five years 1901-1902 to 1905-1906 averaged over £200,000 a year. The chief articles of import are cotton goods (European white longcloth and American grey shirting), rice and jowari, flour, dates, sugar and tobacco (the last from Rotterdam). Berbera is said to have been founded by the Ptolemies among the Barbari of the adjacent coast lands. It fell subsequently into the possession of Arabs and was included in the Mahommedan state of Adel. At the time of the visit to the town of R. F. Burton and J. H. Speke (1854) it was governed by its own sheiks. In 1870 it was claimed by the khedive Ismail, but was not permanently occupied by Egypt until 1875. In 1884 it passed into the possession of Great Britain (see Somaliland, § 2, History).

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BERBERINE, C20H17NO4, an alkaloid occurring together with the alkaloids oxyacanthine C18H19NO3, berbamine C18H19NO3, hydrastine C21H21NO6, and canadine C20H21NO4, in Berberis vulgaris; it also occurs in other plants, Berberis aristata, B.aquifolium, Hydrastis canadensis, &c.It is a yellow, crystalline solid, insoluble in ether and chloroform, soluble in 4½ parts of water at 21°, and moderately soluble in alcohol.It is a monacid base; the hydrochloride, C20H17NO4·HCl, is insoluble in cold alcohol, ether and chloroform, and soluble in 500 parts of water; the acid sulphate, C20H17NO4·H2SO4 dissolves in about 100 parts of water. Canadine is a tetrahydroberberine.

Its constitution was worked out by W.H.Perkin (J.C.S., 1889, 55, p.63; 1890, 57, p.991).This followed from a study of the decomposition products, there being obtained hemipinic acid (CH3O)2C6H2(COOH)2, and a substance which proved to be ω-amino-ethyl-piperonyl carboxylic acid, CH2O2 : C6H2·COOH·CH2·CH2NH2His formula was modified by Gadamer (Abs.J.C.S., 1902, 1, p. 555), who made the free base an aldehyde, but the salts of an iso-quinolinium type.This formula, which necessitates the presence of two asymmetric carbon atoms in an alkyl tetrahydroberberine, has been accepted by M.Freund and F.Mayer (Abs.J.C.S., 1907, 1, p.632), who showed that two racemic propyl tetrahydroberberines are produced when propyl dihydroberberine is reduced.

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BERBERS, the name under which are included the various branches of the indigenous “Libyan” race of North Africa. Since the dawn of history the Berbers have occupied the tract between the Mediterranean and the Ethnology. Sahara from Egypt to the Atlantic. The origin of the name is doubtful. Some believe it to be derived from the word βάρβαροι (barbarians), employed first by the Greeks and later by the Romans. Others attribute the first use of the term to the Arab conquerors. However this may be, tribal titles, Barabara and Beraberata, appear in Egyptian inscriptions of 1700 and 1300 B.C., and the Berbers were probably intimately related with the Egyptians in very early times. Thus the true ethnical name may have become confused with Barbari, the designation naturally used by classical conquerors. To the Egyptians they were known as “Lebu,” “Mashuasha,” “Tamahu,” “Tehennu” and “Kahaka”; a long list of names is found in Herodotus, and the Romans called them Numidae, Gaetuli and Mauri, terms which have been derived respectively from the Greek νομάδες (nomads), the name Gued’oula, of a great Berber tribe, and the Hebrew mahur (western). To speak of more modern times there can be enumerated the Zouaoua and Jebalia (Tripoli and Tunisia); the Chauwia, Kabyles and Beni-Mzab (Algeria); the Shlûh (Chlouah), Amazîgh and Berbers (Morocco); the Tuareg, Arnóshagh, Sorgu, &c. (Sahara). These tribes have many sub-tribes, each with a distinctive name. Among the Azgar, an important division of the Tuareg, one of the noble or free tribes, styled Aouraghen, is said to descend from a tribe named Avrigha. The Avrigha, or Afrigha, in ancient times occupied the coast lands near Carthage, and some scholars derive the word Africa from their name (see Africa, Roman).In regard to the ethnic relations of the Berbers there has been much dispute.The antiquity of their type is evidenced by the monuments of Egypt, where their ancestors are pictured with the same comparatively blond features which many of them still display.The aborigines of the Canary Islands, the Guanches, would seem almost certainly, from the remains of their language, to have been Berbers.But the problem of the actual origin of the Berber race has not yet been solved.Perhaps the most satisfactory theory is that of Sergi, who includes the Berbers in the “Mediterranean Race.”General L.L.C.Faidherbe regards them as indigenous Libyans mingled with a fair-skinned people of European origin.Dr Franz Pruner-Bey, Henri Duveyrier and Prof. Flinders Petrie maintain that they are closely related to the ancient Egyptians.Connexion has been traced between the early Libyan race and the Cro-Magnon and other early European races and, later, the Basque peoples, Iberians, Picts, Celts and Gauls.The megalithic monuments of Iberia and Celtic Europe have their counterparts in northern Africa, and it is suggested that these were all erected by the same race, by whatever name they be known, Berbers and Libyans in Africa, Iberians in Spain, Celts, Gauls and Picts in France and Britain.

In spite of a history of foreign conquest—Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Vandal, Arab and French—the Berber physical type and the Berber temperament and nationality have persisted since the stone age. The numerous invasions Characteristics. have naturally introduced a certain amount of foreign blood among the tribes fringing the Mediterranean, but those farther inland have preserved their racial purity to a surprising degree. Though considerable individual differences of type may be found in every village, the Berbers are distinctively a “white” race, and the majority would, if clad in European costume, pass unchallenged as Europeans. Dark hair and brown or hazel eyes are the rule; blue-eyed blonds are found, but their frequency has been considerably overstated. The invaders who have most affected the Berber race are the Arabs, but the two races, with a common religion, often a common government, with the same tribal groupings, have failed to amalgamate to any great extent. This fact has been emphasized by Dr R. G. Latham, who writes: “All that is not Arabic in the kingdom of Morocco, all that is not Arabic in the French provinces of Algeria, and all that is not Arabic in Tunis, Tripoli and Fezzan, is Berber.” The explanation lies in a profound distinction of character. The Arab is a herdsman and a nomad; the Berber is an agriculturist and a townsman. The Arab has built his social structure on the Koran, which inculcates absolutism, aristocracy, theocracy; the Berber, despite his nominal Mahommedanism, is a democrat, with his Jemáa or “Witangemot” and his Kanum or unwritten code, the Magna Carta of the individual’s liberty as opposed to the community’s good. The Kanum forbids no sort of exercise of individual will, so long as it is not inimical to the right or rights of other individuals. The Arabizing of the Berbers is indeed limited to little beyond the conversion of the latter to Islam. The Arab, transported to a soil which does not always suit him, so far from thriving, tends to disappear, whereas the Berber becomes more and more aggressive, and yearly increases in numbers. At present he forms at least three-fifths of the population in Algeria, and in Morocco the proportion is greater. The difference between the Berber and the Arab of the Barbary States is summed up by Dr Randall MacIver in the following words:—“The Berber gives the impression of being, as he is, the descendant of men who have lived in sturdy independence, self-governing and self-reliant. The Arab is the degenerate offspring of a race which only from its history and past records can claim any title to respect. Cringing, venal, avaricious, dishonest, the Arab combines all the faults of a vicious nature with those which a degraded religion inculcates or encourages. The Berber, on the other hand, is straightforward, honest, by no means averse to money-making, but not unscrupulous in the methods which he employs to this end, intelligent in a degree to which the ordinary Arab never approaches, and trustworthy as no Arab can be.”

The Berber’s village is his state, and the government is vested in an assembly, the Jemáa, formed of all males old enough to observe the fast of Ramadan. By them are determined all matters of peace or war, legislation, taxation Government. and justice. The executive officer is the Amin, a kind of mayor, elected from some influential family in which the dignity is often in practice hereditary. He owes his position to the good-will of his fellows, receives no remuneration, and resigns as soon as he loses the confidence of the people. By him are appointed certain Temman (sing. Tamen) who act as overseers, though without executive powers, in the various quarters of the village. The poorest Berber has as great a voice in affairs as the richest. The undue power of the Jemáa is checked by vendetta and a sort of lynch law, and by the formation of parties (sofs), within or without the assembly, for trade, political and other purposes. The Berbers are a warlike people who have never been completely subjugated. Every boy as soon as he reaches sixteen is brought into the Jemáa and given weapons which he carries till he is sixty. Though each village is absolutely independent as far as its internal affairs are concerned, two or more are often connected by administrative ties to form an Arsh or tribe. A number of these tribes form a Thakebilt or confederation, which is an extremely loose organization. An exception to this form of government is constituted by the Tuareg, whose organization, owing to their peculiar circumstances of life, is monarchical. Wars are declared by special messengers; the exchange of sticks or guns renders an armistice inviolable. In some tribes a tablet, on which is inscribed the name of every man fit to bear arms, is placed in the mosque. The Berbers, though Mahommedans, do not often observe the prescribed ablutions; they break their fast at Ramadan; and eat wild boar’s flesh and drink fig brandy. On the other hand, saints, both male and female, are paid more reverence by Berbers than by Arabs. Around their tombs their descendants settle, and thus sacred villages, often of considerable size, spring up. Almost every village, too, has its saint or prophet, and disputes as to their relative sanctity and powers cause fierce feuds. The hereditary caste known as Marabouts are frequently in open opposition to the absolute authority of the Jemáa. They are possessed of certain privileges, such as exemption from the chief taxes and the duty of bearing arms. They, however, often take a foremost part in tribal administration, and are frequently called upon to perform the office of arbitrators in questions of disputed policy, &c. In the Jemáa, too, the Marabout at times takes the place of honour and keeps order.The Berbers, if irreligious, are very superstitious, never leaving their homes without exorcizing evil spirits, and have a good and evil interpretation for every day of the week.Many Berbers still retain certain Christian and Jewish usages, relics of the pre-Islamitic days in North Africa, but of their primitive religion there is no trace.They are seldom good scholars, but those under French rule take all the advantage they can of the schools instituted by the government.Their social tendencies are distinctly communistic; property is often owned by the family in common, and a man can call upon the services of his fellow villagers for certain purposes, as the building of a house.Provision for the poor is often made by the community.

The dress of the Berbers was formerly made of home-woven cloth, and the manufacture of woollen stuffs has always been one of the chief occupations of their women. The men wear a tunic reaching to the knees, the women a longer Customs. garment. For work the men use a leather apron, and in the cold season and in travelling a burnous, usually a family heirloom, old and ragged; the women, in winter, throw a coloured cloth over their shoulders. The men’s hair is cut short but their beards are allowed to grow. In some districts there are peculiar customs, such as the wearing of small silver nose-rings, seen in El-Jofra. The Berbers’ weapons are those of the Arab: the long straight sword, the slightly curved and highly ornamented dagger, and the long gun. Berbers are not great town-builders. Their villages, however, are often of substantial appearance: with houses of untrimmed stones, occasionally with two storeys, built on hills, and invariably defended by a bank, a stone wall or a hedge. Sometimes their homes are mere huts of turf, or of clay tiles, with mortar made from lime and clay or cow-dung. The sloping roof is covered with reeds, straw or stones. The living room is on the right, the cattle-stall on the left. The dwelling is surrounded by a garden or small field of grain. The second storey is not added till a son marries. In the villages of the western Atlas the greater part of the upper storey consists of a sort of rough verandah. In this mountain district the natives spend the winter in vaults beneath the houses, and, for the sake of warmth, the tenements are built very close. Agriculture, which is carried on even in the mountain districts by means of laboriously constructed terraces, is antiquated in its methods. The plough, often replaced on the steeper slopes by the hoe, is similar to that depicted in ancient Egyptian drawings, and hand irrigation is usual. A sickle, toothed like a saw, is used for reaping. Corn is trodden by oxen, and kept in osier baskets narrowing to the top, or clay granaries. The staple crop is barley, but wheat, lentils, vetches, flax and gourds are also cultivated. Tobacco, maize and potatoes have been introduced; and the aloe and prickly pear, called in Morocco the Christian fig, are also found. The Kabyles understand grafting, have fine orchards and grow vines. The Beni-Abbas tribe in the Algerian Atlas is famed for its walnuts, and many tribes keep bees, chiefly for the commercial value of the wax. The Berber diet largely consists of cucumbers, gourds, water-melons and onions, and a small artichoke (Cynara humilis) which grows wild.At the beginning and end of their meal they drink a strongly sweetened liquid made from green tea and mint.Tea-drinking probably became a habit in Morocco about the beginning of the 19th century; coffee came by way of Algiers.At feasts the food is served on large earthenware dishes with high basket-work covers, like bee-skeps but twice as high.

The Berbers have many industries. They mine and work iron, lead and copper. They have olive presses and flour mills, and their own millstone quarries, even travelling into Arab districts to build mills for the Arabs. They Industries. make lime, tiles, woodwork for the houses, domestic utensils and agricultural implements. They weave and dye several kinds of cloth, tan and dress leather and manufacture oil and soap. Without the assistance of the wheel the women produce a variety of pottery utensils, often of very graceful design, and decorated with patterns in red and black. Whole tribes, such as the Beni-Sliman, are occupied in the iron trade; the Beni-Abbas made firearms before the French conquest, and even cannon are said to have been made by boring. Before it was proscribed by the French, the manufacture of gunpowder was general. The native jewellers make excellent ornaments in silver, coral and enamel. In some places wood-carving has been brought to considerable perfection; and native artists know how to engrave on metal both by etching and the burin. In its collective industry the Berber race is far superior to the Arab. The Berbers are keen traders too, and, after the harvest, hawk small goods, travelling great distances.

A Berber woman has in many ways a better position than her Arab sister. True, her birth is regarded as an event of no moment, while that of a boy is celebrated by great rejoicings, and his mother acquires the right to wear Women. on her forehead the tafzint, a mark which only the women who have borne an heir can assume. Her husband buys and can dismiss her at will. She has most of the hard work to do, and is little better than a servant. When she is old and past work, especially if she has not been the mother of a male child, she is often abandoned. But she has a voice in public affairs; she has laws to protect her, manages the household and goes unveiled; she has a right to the money she earns; she can inherit under wills, and bequeath property, though to avoid the alienation of real property, succession to it is denied her. But most characteristic of her social position is the Berber woman’s right to enter into a sacred bond or agreement, represented by the giving of the anayaThis is some symbolic object, stick or what not, which passes between the parties to a contract, the obligations under which, if not fulfilled by the contracting parties during their lives, become hereditary.Female saints, too, are held in high honour; and the Berber pays his wife the compliment of monogamy.The Kabyle women have stood side by side with their husbands in battle.Among many Berber tribes the law of inheritance is such that the eldest daughter’s son succeeds.South of Morocco proper, Gerhard Rohlfs, who travelled extensively in the region (c. 1861-1867), states that a Berber religious corporation, the Savia Kartas, was ruled over by a woman, the chief’s wife. The Berbers consult their women in many matters, and only one woman is really held in low esteem. She, curiously, is the kuata or “go-between,” even though her services are only employed in the respectable task of arranging marriages. Berber women are intelligent and hard-working, and, when young, very pretty and graceful. The Berbers, unlike the Arabs, do not admire fat women. Among the Kabyles the adulteress is put to death, as are those women who have illegitimate children, the latter suffering with their mothers.

Though Arabic has to a considerable extent displaced the Berber language, the latter is still spoken by millions of people from Egypt to the Atlantic and from the Mediterranean to the Sudan. It is spoken nowhere else, though, as Language. has been said, place-names in the Canary Islands and other remains of the aboriginal language there prove it to have been the native tongue. Although the Berber tongue shows a certain affinity with Semitic in the construction both of its words and sentences Berber is quite distinct from the Semitic languages; and a remarkable fact is that in spite of the enormous space over which the dialects are spread and the thousands of years that some of the Berber peoples have been isolated from the rest, these dialects show but slight differences from the long-extinct Hamitic speech from which all are derived. Whatever these dialects be called, the Kabyle, the Shilha, the Zenati, the Tuareg or Tamashek, the Berber language is still essentially one, and the similarity between the forms current in Morocco, Algeria, the Sahara and the far-distant oasis of Siwa is much more marked than between the Norse and English in the sub-Aryan Teutonic group. The Berbers have, moreover, a writing of their own, peculiar and little used or known, the antiquity of which is proved by monuments and inscriptions ranging over the whole of North Africa.

The various spoken dialects, though apparently very unlike each other, are not more dissimilar than are Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian, and their differences are doubtless attributable to the lack of a literary standard. Even where different words are used, there is evidence of a common stem from which the various branches have sprung. The great difficulty of satisfactory comparison arises from the fact that few of the Beber dialects possess any writings. The Tawahhid (The Unity of God), said to have been written in Moroccan Berber and believed to be the oldest African work in existence, except Egyptian and Ethiopic, was the work of the Muwahhadi leader, Ibn Tumart the Mahdi, at a time when the officials of the Kairawan mosque were dismissed because they could not speak Berber. Most of the writings found, however, have been in the form of inscriptions, chiefly on ornaments. A collection of the various signs of the alphabet has shown thirty-two letters, four more than Arabic. De Slane, in his notes on the Berber historian Ibn Khaldūn, shows the following points of similarity to the Semitic class:—its tri-literal roots, the inflections of the verb, the formation of derived verbs, the genders of the second and third persons, the pronominal affixes, the aoristic style of tense, the whole and broken plurals and the construction of the phrase. Among the peculiar grammatical features of Berber may be mentioned two numbers (no dual), two genders and six cases, and verbs with one, two, three and four radicals, and imperative and aorist tense only. As might be expected the Berber tongue is most common in Morocco and the western Sahara—the regions where Arab dominion was least exercised. When Arabic is mentioned as the language of Morocco it is seldom realized how small a proportion of its inhabitants use it as their mother tongue. Berber is the real language of Morocco, Arabic that of its creed and government.

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BERCEUSE (Fr. for a “lullaby,” from berceau, a cradle), a cradle-song, the German Wiegenlied, a musical composition with a quiet rocking accompaniment.

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BERCHEM (or Berghem), NICOLAAS (1620-1683), Dutch painter, was born at Haarlem. He received instruction from his father (Pieter Claasz van Haarlem) and from the painters Van Goyen, Jan Wils and Weenix. It is not known why he called himself Berchem (or Berighem, and other variants). His pictures, of which he produced an immense number, were in great demand, as were also his etchings and drawings. His landscapes are highly esteemed; and many of them have been finely engraved by John Visscher. His finest pictures are at the Amsterdam Museum and at the Hermitage, St Petersburg.

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BERCHTA (English Bertha), a fairy in South German mythology. She was at first a benevolent spirit, the counterpart of Hulda in North German myth. Later her character changed and she came to be regarded as a witch. In Pagan times Berchta had the rank of a minor deity.

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BERCHTESGADEN, a town of Germany, beautifully situated on the south-eastern confines of the kingdom of Bavaria, 1700 ft. above the sea on the southern declivity of the Untersberg, 6 m. S. S. E. from Reichenhall by rail. Pop. (1900) 10,046. It is celebrated for its extensive mines of rock-salt, which were worked as early as 1174. The town contains three old churches, of which the early Gothic abbey church with its Romanesque cloister is most notable, and some good houses. Apart from the salt-mines, its industries include toys and other small articles of wood, horn and ivory, for which the place has long been famous. The district of Berchtesgaden was formerly an independent spiritual principality, founded in 1100 and secularized in 1803. The abbey is now a royal castle, and in the neighbourhood a hunting-lodge was built by King Maximilian II. in 1852.

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BERCK, a bathing resort of northern France, in the department of Pas-de-Calais, 25 m. S. of Boulogne by rail. Pop. (1906) 7638. It comprises two parts—Berck-Ville, 1½ m. from the shore, and Berck-Plage, the latter with a fine sandy beach. There are two children’s hospitals, the climate proving peculiarly beneficial in the treatment of scrofulous affections. About 150 boats are employed in the fisheries, and herrings form the staple of an active trade. Boat-building and fish-curing are carried on.

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BERDICHEV, a town of W. Russia, in the government of Kiev, 116 m. S. W. of Kiev by rail and not far from the borders of Volhynia. The cathedral of the Assumption, finished in 1832, is the principal place of worship. The fortified Carmelite monastery, founded in 1627, was captured and plundered by Chmielnicki, chief of the Zaporogian Cossacks, in 1647, and disestablished in 1864. An extensive trade is carried on in peltry, silk goods, iron and wooden wares, salt fish, grain, cattle and horses. Four fairs are held yearly, the most important being on the 12th of June and the 15th of August. The numerous minor industries include the manufacture of tobacco, soap, candles, oil, bricks and leather. Pop. (1867) 52,563; (1897) 53,728, Jews forming about 80%. In the treaty of demarcation between the Lithuanians and the Poles in 1546 Berdichev was assigned to the former. In 1768 Pulaski, leader of the confederacy of Bar, fled, after the capture of that city, to Berdichev, and there maintained himself during a siege of twenty-five days. The town belongs to the Radziwill family.

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BERDYANSK, a seaport town of Russia, in the government of Taurida, on the north coast of the Sea of Azov, in 46° 45′ N. lat. and 36° 40′ E. long. The principal industries are in bricks and tiles, tallow and macaroni. The roads are protected from every wind except the south, which occasions a heavy surf; but against this a mole was constructed in 1863. The chief articles of export are cereals, flour, wool, hemp, skins and fish; and the imports include hardwares, fruits, oil and petroleum. In the immediate neighbourhood are salt-lagoons. Pop. (1867) 12,223; (1900) 29,168.

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BEREA, a town of Madison county, Kentucky, U. S. A. , 131 m. by rail S. of Cincinnati. Pop. (1900) 762. Berea is served by the Louisville & Nashville railway. It is pleasantly situated on the border between the Blue Grass and the Mountain regions. The town is widely known as the seat of Berea College, which has done an important work among the mountaineers of Kentucky and of Tennessee. The college has about 70 acres of ground (and about 4000 acres of mountain land for forestry study), with a large recitation hall, a library, a chapel (seating 1400 persons), a science hall, an industrial hall, a brick-making plant, a woodwork building, a printing building, a tabernacle for commencement exercises and other buildings. In 1908 Berea had 65 instructors and 1150 students; and it paid the tuition of 141 negro students in Fisk University (Nashville, Tennessee) and in other institutions. The school out of which Berea College has developed was founded in the anti-slavery interests in 1855. An attempt was made to procure for it a college charter in 1859, but the slavery interests caused it to be closed before the end of that year and it was not reopened until 1865, the charter having then been obtained, as Berea College. Negroes as well as whites were admitted until 1904, when education of the two races at the same institution was prohibited by an act of the state legislature (upheld by the U. S. Supreme Court in 1908). This act did not, however, prohibit an institution from maintaining separate schools for the two races, provided these schools were at least 25 m. apart, and a separate school for the negroes was at once projected by Berea.

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BEREKHIAH NAQDAN, Jewish fabulist, author of a collection of Fox Fables, written in Hebrew.As his title implies (Naqdan = punctuator of the Biblical text), Berekhiah was also a grammarian.He further wrote an ethical treatise and was the author of various translations.His date is disputed.Most authorities place him in the 13th century, but J.Jacobs has identified him with Benedictus le Puncteur, an English Jew of the 12th century.

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BERENGARIUS [Berengar] (d. 1088), medieval theologian, was born at Tours early in the 11th century; he was educated in the famous school of Fulbert of Chartres, but even in early life seems to have exhibited great independence of judgment. Appointed superintendent of the cathedral school of his native city, he taught with such success as to attract pupils from all parts of France, and powerfully contributed to diffuse an interest in the study of logic and metaphysics, and to introduce that dialectic development of theology which is designated the scholastic. The earliest of his writings of which we have any record is an Exhortatory Discourse to the hermits of his district, written at their own request and for their spiritual edification. It shows a clear discernment of the dangers of the ascetic life, and a deep insight into the significance of the Augustinian doctrine of grace. Sometime before 1040 Berengar was made archdeacon of Angers. It was shortly after this that rumours began to spread of his holding heretical views regarding the sacrament of the eucharist. He had submitted the doctrine of transubstantiation (already generally received both by priests and people, although in the west it had been first unequivocally taught and reduced to a regular theory by Paschasius Radbert in 831) to an independent examination, and had come to the conclusion that it was contrary to reason, unwarranted by Scripture, and inconsistent with the teaching of men like Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine. He did not conceal this conviction from his scholars and friends, and through them the report spread widely that he denied the common doctrine respecting the eucharist. His early friend and school companion, Adelmann, archdeacon of Liége, wrote to him letters of expostulation on the subject of this report in 1046 and 1048; and a bishop, Hugo of Langres, wrote (about 1049) a refutation of the views which he had himself heard Berengar express in conversation. Berengar’s belief was not shaken by their arguments and exhortations, and hearing that Lanfranc, the most celebrated theologian of that age, strongly approved the doctrine of Paschasius and condemned that of “Scotus” (really Ratramnus), he wrote to him a letter expressing his surprise and urging him to reconsider the question. The letter, arriving at Bec when Lanfranc was absent at Rome (1050), was sent after him, but was opened before it reached him, and Lanfranc, fearing the scandal, brought it under the notice of Pope Leo IX. Because of it Berengar was condemned as a heretic without being heard, by a synod at Rome and another at Vercelli, both held in 1050. His enemies in France cast him into prison; but the bishop of Angers and other powerful friends, of whom he had a considerable number, had sufficient influence to procure his release. At the council of Tours (1054) he found a protector in the papal legate, the famous Hildebrand, who, satisfied himself with the fact that Berengar did not deny the real presence of Christ in the sacramental elements, succeeded in persuading the assembly to be content with a general confession from him that the bread and wine, after consecration, were the body and blood of the Lord, without requiring him to define how. Trusting in Hildebrand’s support, and in the justice of his own cause, he presented himself at the synod of Rome in 1059, but found himself surrounded by zealots, who forced him by the fear of death to signify his acceptance of the doctrine “that the bread and wine, after consecration, are not merely a sacrament, but the true body and the true blood of Christ, and that this body is touched and broken by the hands of the priests, and ground by the teeth of the faithful, not merely in a sacramental but in a real manner.” He had no sooner done so than he bitterly repented his weakness; and acting, as he himself says, on the principle that “to take an oath which never ought to have been taken is to estrange one’s self from God, but to retract what one has wrongfully sworn to, is to return back to God,” when he got safe again into France he attacked the transubstantiation theory more vehemently than ever. He continued for about sixteen years to disseminate his views by writing and teaching, without being directly interfered with by either his civil or ecclesiastical superiors, greatly to the scandal of the multitude and of the zealots, in whose eyes Berengar was “ille apostolus Satanae,” and the academy of Tours the “Babylon nostri temporis.” An attempt was made at the council of Poitiers in 1076 to allay the agitation caused by the controversy, but it failed, and Berengar narrowly escaped death in a tumult. Hildebrand, now pope as Gregory VII. , next summoned him to Rome, and, in a synod held there in 1078, tried once more to obtain a declaration of his orthodoxy by means of a confession of faith drawn up in general terms; but even this strong-minded and strong-willed pontiff was at length forced to yield to the demands of the multitude and its leaders; and in another synod at Rome (1079), finding that he was only endangering his own position and reputation, he turned unexpectedly upon Berengar and commanded him to confess that he had erred in not teaching a change as to substantial reality of the sacramental bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. “Then,” says Berengar, “confounded by the sudden madness of the pope, and because God in punishment for my sins did not give me a steadfast heart, I threw myself on the ground, and confessed with impious voice that I had erred, fearing the pope would instantly pronounce against me the sentence of condemnation, and, as a necessary consequence, that the populace would hurry me to the worst of deaths.” He was kindly dismissed by the pope not long after, with a letter recommending him to the protection of the bishops of Tours and Angers, and another pronouncing anathema on all who should do him any injury or call him a heretic. He returned home overwhelmed with shame and bowed down with sorrow for having a second time been guilty of a great impiety. He immediately recalled his forced confession, and besought all Christian men “to pray for him, so that his tears might secure the pity of the Almighty.” He now saw, however, that the spirit of the age was against him, and hopelessly given over to the belief of what he had combated as a delusion. He withdrew, therefore, into solitude, and passed the rest of his life in retirement and prayer on the island of St Côme near Tours. He died there in 1088.

Berengar left behind him a considerable number of followers.All those who in the middle ages denied the substantial presence of the body and blood of Christ in the eucharist were commonly designated Berengarians.They differed, of course, in many respects, even in regard to the nature of the supper.Berengar’s own views on the subject may be thus summed up:—1.That bread and wine should become flesh and blood and yet not lose the properties of bread and wine was, he held, contradictory to reason, and therefore irreconcilable with the truthfulness of God.2.He admitted a change (conversio) of the bread and wine into the body of Christ, in the sense that to those who receive them they are transformed by grace into higher powers and influences—into the true, the intellectual or spiritual body of Christ. The unbelieving receive the external sign or sacramentum; but the believing receive in addition, although invisibly, the reality represented by the sign, the res sacramenti3.He rejected the notion that the sacrament of the altar was a constantly renewed sacrifice, and held it to be merely a commemoration of the one sacrifice of Christ.4.He dwelt strongly on the importance of men looking away from the externals of the sacrament to the spirit of love and piety.The transubstantiation doctrine seemed to him full of evil, from its tendency to lead men to overvalue what was sensuous and transitory.5.He rejected with indignation the miraculous stories told to confirm the doctrine of transubstantiation.6.Reason and Scripture seemed to him the only grounds on which a true doctrine of the Lord’s supper could be rested.He attached little importance to mere ecclesiastical tradition or authority, and none to the voice of majorities, even when sanctioned by the decree of a pope.In this, as in other respects, he was a precursor of Protestantism.

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BÉRENGER, ALPHONSE MARIE MARCELLIN THOMAS (1785-1866), known as Bérenger de la Drôme, French lawyer and politician, son of a deputy of the third estate of Dauphiné to the Constituent Assembly, was born at Valence on the 31st of May 1785. He entered the magistracy and became procureur général at Grenoble, but resigned this office on the restoration of the Bourbons. He now devoted himself mainly to the study of criminal law, and in 1818 published La Justice criminelle en France, in which with great courage he attacked the special tribunals, provosts’ courts or military commissions which were the main instruments of the Reaction, and advocated a return to the old common law and trial by jury.The book had a considerable effect in discrediting the reactionary policy of the government; but it was not until 1828, when Bérenger was elected to the chamber, that he had an opportunity of exercising a personal influence on affairs as a member of the group known as that of constitutional opposition.His courage, as well as his moderation, was again displayed during the revolution of 1830, when, as president of the parliamentary commission for the trial of the ministers of Charles X., he braved the fury of the mob and secured a sentence of imprisonment in place of the death penalty for which they clamoured.

His position in the chamber was now one of much influence, and he had a large share in the modelling of the new constitution, though his effort to secure a hereditary peerage failed.Above all he was instrumental in framing the new criminal code, based on more humanitarian principles, which was issued in 1835.It was due to him that, in 1832, the right, so important in actual French practice, was given to juries to find “extenuating circumstances” in cases when guilt involved the death penalty.In 1831 he had been made a member of the court of appeal (cour de cassation), and the same year was nominated a member of the academy of moral and political sciences. He was raised to the peerage in 1839. This dignity he lost owing to the revolution of 1848; and as a politician his career now ended. As a judge, however, his activity continued. He was president of the high courts of Bourges and Versailles in 1840. Having been appointed president of one of the chambers of the court of cassation, he devoted himself entirely to judicial work until his retirement, under the age limit, on the 31st of May 1860. He now withdrew to his native town, and occupied himself with his favourite work of reform of criminal law. In 1833 he had shared in the foundation of a society for the reclamation of young criminals, in which he continued to be actively interested to the end. In 1851 and 1852, on the commission of the academy of moral sciences, he had travelled in France and England for the purpose of examining and comparing the penal systems in the two countries. The result was published in 1855 under the title La Répression pénale, comparaison du système pénitentiaire en France et en Angleterre. He died on the 15th of May 1866.

His son, René Bérenger (1830-  ), continued the work of his father, and at the outbreak of the revolution of 1870 was avocat général of Lyons. He served as a volunteer in the Franco-German War, being wounded at Nuits on the 28th of December. Returned to the National Assembly by the department of Drõme, he was for a few days in 1873 minister of public works under Thiers. He then entered the senate, of which he was vice-president from 1894 to 1897. He founded in 1871 a society for the reclamation of discharged prisoners, and presided over various bodies formed to secure improvement of the public morals. He succeeded Charles Lucas in 1890 at the Academy of Moral and Political Science.

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BERENICE, or Bernice, the Macedonian forms of the Greek Pherenice, the name of (A) five Egyptian and (B) two Jewish princesses.

(A) 1. Berenice, daughter of Lagus, wife of an obscure Macedonian soldier and subsequently of Ptolemy Soter, with whose bride Eurydice she came to Egypt as a lady-in-waiting. Her son, Ptolemy Philadelphus, was recognized as heir over the heads of Eurydice’s children. So great was her ability and her influence that Pyrrhus of Epirus gave the name Berenicis to a new city. Her son Philadelphus decreed divine honours to her on her death. (See Theocritus, Idylls xv. and xvii.)

2. Berenice, daughter of Ptolemy Philadelphus, wife of Antiochus Theos of Syria, who, according to agreement with Ptolemy (249), had divorced his wife Laodice and transferred the succession to Berenice’s children.On Ptolemy’s death, Antiochus repudiated Berenice and took back Laodice, who, however, at once poisoned him and murdered Berenice and her son.The prophecy in Daniel xi.6 seq.refers to these events.

3. Berenice, the daughter of Magas, king of Cyrene, and the wife of Ptolemy III. Euergetes. During her husband’s absence on an expedition to Syria, she dedicated her hair to Venus for his safe return, and placed it in the temple of the goddess at Zephyrium. The hair having by some unknown means disappeared, Conon of Samos, the mathematician and astronomer, explained the phenomenon in courtly phrase, by saying that it had been carried to the heavens and placed among the stars. The name Coma Berenices, applied to a constellation, commemorates this incident. Callimachus celebrated the transformation in a poem, of which only a few lines remain, but there is a fine translation of it by Catullus. Soon after her husband’s death (221 B.C.) she was murdered at the instigation of her son Ptolemy IV., with whom she was probably associated in the government.

4. Berenice, also called Cleopatra, daughter of Ptolemy X., married as her second husband Alexander II., grandson of Ptolemy VII.He murdered her three weeks afterwards.

5. Berenice, daughter of Ptolemy Auletes, eldest sister of the great Cleopatra. The Alexandrines placed her on the throne in succession to her father (58 B.C.). She married Seleucus Cybiosactes, but soon caused him to be slain, and married Archelaus, who had been made king of Comana in Pontus (or in Cappadocia) by Pompey. Auletes was restored and put both Berenice and Archelaus to death in 55 B.C.

(B) 1. Berenice, daughter of Salome, sister of Herod I. , and wife of her cousin Aristobulus, who was assassinated in 6 B.C. Their relations had been unhappy and she was accused of complicity in his murder. By Aristobulus she was the mother of Herod Agrippa I. Her second husband, Theudion, uncle on the mother’s side of Antipater, son of Herod I. , having been put to death for conspiring against Herod, she married Archelaus. Subsequently she went to Rome and enjoyed the favour of the imperial household.

2. Berenice, daughter of Agrippa I. , king of Judaea, and born probably about A.D. 28. She was first married to Marcus, son of the alabarch1 Alexander of Alexandria. On his early death she was married to her father’s brother, Herod of Chalcis, after whose death (A.D. 48) she lived for some years with her brother, Agrippa II. Her third husband was Polemon, king of Cilicia, but she soon deserted him, and returned to Agrippa, with whom she was living in 60 when Paul appeared before him at Caesarea (Acts xxvi.) . During the devastation of Judaea by the Romans, she fascinated Titus, whom along with Agrippa she followed to Rome as his promised wife (A.D. 75). When he became emperor (A.D. 79) he dismissed her finally, though reluctantly, to her own country. Her influence had been exercised vainly on behalf of the Jews in A.D. 66, but the burning of her palace alienated her sympathies. For her influence see Juvenal, Satires, vi. , and Tacitus, Hist. ii. 2.

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BERENICE, an ancient seaport of Egypt, on the west coast of the Red Sea, in 23° 56′ N. , 35° 34′ E. Built at the head of a gulf, the Sinus Immundus, or Foul Bay, of Strabo, it was sheltered on the north by Ras Benas (Lepte Extrema). The port is now nearly filled up, has a sand-bar at its entrance and can be reached only by small craft. Most important of the ruins is a temple; the remnants of its sculptures and inscriptions preserve the name of Tiberius and the figures of many deities, including a goddess of the emerald mines. Berenice was founded by Ptolemy II. (285-247 B.C.) in order to shorten the dangerous Red Sea voyages, and was named in honour of his mother.For four or five centuries it became the entrepot of trade between India, Arabia and Upper Egypt.From it a road, provided with watering stations, leads north-west across the desert to the Nile at Coptos.In the neighbourhood of Berenice are the emerald mines of Zabara and Saket.

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BERESFORD, LORD CHARLES WILLIAM DE LA POER (1846-  ), British admiral, second son of the 4th marquess of Waterford, was born in Ireland, and entered the “Britannia” as a naval cadet in 1859. He became lieutenant in 1868, and commander in 1875. In 1874 he was returned to parliament as Conservative M. P. for Waterford, retaining his seat till 1880, and he was already known in this period as a gallant officer, with a special interest in naval administration. In 1875-1876 he accompanied the then prince of Wales on his visit to India as naval A. D. C. ; from 1878 to 1881 he was commander of the royal yacht “Osborne.” He was in command of the gunboat “Condor” in the Mediterranean when the Egyptian crisis of 1882 occurred; and he became a popular hero in England in connexion with the bombardment of Alexandria (July 11), when he took his ship close in to the forts and engaged them with such conspicuous gallantry that the admiral ordered a special signal “Well done, Condor!” He was promoted captain for his services, and, after taking an active part in the re-establishment of order in Alexandria, he served again in Egypt on Lord Wolseley’s staff in the expedition of 1884-85, commanding the naval brigade at Abu Klea, Abu Kru and Metemmeh, and, with the river steamer “Safieh,” rescuing Sir C. Wilson and his party, who had been wrecked on returning from Khartum (Feb. 4, 1885). In November 1885 he was again returned to parliament as member for East Marylebone (re-elected 1886), and in Lord Salisbury’s ministry of 1886 he was appointed a lord of the admiralty. The press agitation in favour of a stronger navy was now in full swing, and it was well known that in Lord Charles Beresford it had an active supporter; but very little impression was made on the government, and in 1888 he resigned his office on this question, a dramatic step which had considerable effect. In the House of Commons he advocated an expenditure of twenty millions sterling on the fleet, and the passing of the Naval Defence Act in 1889 was largely due to his action. At the end of 1889 he became captain of the cruiser “Undaunted” in the Mediterranean, and when this ship was paid off in 1893 he was appointed in command of the steam reserve at Chatham, a post he held for three years. In 1897 he became rear-admiral, and again entered parliament, winning a by-election at York; he retained his seat till 1900, but was mainly occupied during these years by a mission to China on behalf of the Associated Chambers of Commerce; he published his book The Break-up of China in 1899. In 1902 he was returned to parliament for Woolwich, but resigned on his appointment to command the Channel squadron (1903-1905); in 1905 he was given the command of the Mediterranean fleet, and from 1906 to 1909 was commander-in-chief of the Channel fleet; in 1906 he became a full admiral. At sea he had always shown himself a remarkable disciplinarian, possessed of great influence over his men, and his reputation as one who would, if necessary, prove a great fighting commander was second to none; and, even when serving afloat and therefore unable to speak direct to the public, he was in the forefront of the campaign for increased naval efficiency. During the administration (1903-1910) of Sir John Fisher (see Fisher, Baron) as first sea lord of the admiralty it was notorious that considerable friction existed between them, and both in the navy and in public a great deal of party-spirit was engendered in the discussion of their opposing views.When Lord Charles Beresford’s term expired as commander-in-chief in March 1909 he was finally “unmuzzled,” and the attack which for some years his supporters had made against Sir J.Fisher’s administration came to a head at a moment coinciding with the new shipbuilding crisis occasioned by the revelations as to the increase of the German fleet.He himself came forward with proposals for a large increase in the navy and a reorganization of the administrative system, his first step being a demand for an inquiry, to which the government promptly assented (May) in the shape of a small Committee under the prime minister.Its report (August), however, gave him no satisfaction, and he proceeded with his public campaign, bitterly attacking the ministerial policy.In January 1910, at the general election, he was returned as Conservative M.P.for Portsmouth; but meanwhile Sir John Fisher’s term of office came to an end, and in his successor, Admiral Sir Arthur Knyvet Wilson (b.1842), the navy obtained a first sea lord who commanded universal confidence.

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BERESFORD, JOHN (1738-1805), Irish statesman, was a younger son of Sir Marcus Beresford, who, having married Catherine, sole heiress of James Power, 3rd earl of Tyrone, was created earl of Tyrone in 1746. After the death of the earl in 1763, Beresford’s mother successfully asserted her claim suo jure to the barony of La Poer. John Beresford, born on the 14th of March 1738, thus inherited powerful family connexions. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, was called to the Irish bar, and entered the Irish parliament as member for Waterford in 1760. His industry, added to the influence of his family, procured his admission to the privy council in 1768, and his appointment as one of the commissioners of revenue two years later. In 1780 he became first commissioner of revenue, a position which gave him powerful influence in the Irish administration. He introduced some useful reforms in the machinery of taxation; and he was the author of many improvements in the architecture of the public buildings and streets of Dublin. He was first brought into conflict with Grattan and the popular party, in 1784, by his support of the proposal that the Irish parliament in return for the removal of restrictions on Irish trade should be bound to adopt the English navigation laws. In 1786 he was sworn a member of the English privy council, and the power which he wielded in Ireland through his numerous dependants and connexions grew to be so extensive that a few years later he was spoken of as the “king of Ireland.” He was a vehement opponent of the increasing demand for relief of the Roman Catholics; and when it became known that Lord Fitzwilliam was to succeed Lord Westmorland as lord lieutenant in 1795 for the purpose of carrying out a conciliatory policy, Beresford expressed strong hostility to the appointment. One of Fitzwilliam’s first acts was to dismiss Beresford from his employment but with permission to retain his entire official salary for life, and with the assurance that no other member of his family would be removed. Beresford immediately exerted all his influence with his friends in England, to whom he described himself as an injured and persecuted man; he appealed to Pitt, and went in person to London to lay his complaint before the English ministers. There is little doubt that the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam (q.v.), which was followed by such momentous consequences in the history of Ireland, was, as the viceroy himself believed, mainly due to Beresford’s dismissal.There had been a misunderstanding on the point between Pitt and Fitzwilliam.The latter, whose veracity was unimpeachable, asserted that previous to his coming to Ireland he had informed the prime minister of his intention to dismiss Beresford, and that Pitt had raised no objection.Pitt denied all recollection of any such communication, and on the contrary described the dismissal as “an open breach of the most solemn promise.”1 In a letter to Lord Carlisle, justifying his action, Fitzwilliam mentioned that malversation had been imputed to Beresford. Beresford sent a challenge to Fitzwilliam, but the combatants were interrupted on the field and Fitzwilliam then made an apology.

When Lord Camden replaced Fitzwilliam in the viceroyalty in March 1795, Beresford resumed his former position. On the eve of the rebellion in 1798 his letters to Lord Auckland gave an alarming description of the condition of Ireland, and he counselled strong measures of repression. When first consulted by Pitt on the question of the union Beresford appears to have disliked the idea; but he soon became reconciled to the policy and warmly supported it. After the union Beresford continued to represent Waterford in the imperial parliament, and he remained in office till 1802, taking an active part in settling the financial relations between Ireland and Great Britain. He died near Londonderry on the 5th of November 1805. John Beresford was twice married: in 1760 to a foreign lady, Constantia Ligondes, who died in 1772; and, secondly, in 1774 to Barbara Montgomery, a celebrated beauty who figures in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s picture of “The Graces.” He had large families by both marriages. His son, John Claudius, kept a riding school in Dublin, which acquired an evil reputation as the chief scene of the floggings by which evidence was extorted of the conspiracy which came to a head in 1798. He took a prominent part in the Irish House of Commons, where he unsuccessfully moved the reduction of the proposed Irish contribution to the imperial exchequer in the debates on the Act of Union, of which, unlike his father, he was to the last an ardent opponent.

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BERESFORD, WILLIAM CARR BERESFORD, Viscount (1768-1854), British general and Portuguese marshal, illegitimate son of the first marquess of Waterford, was born on the 2nd of October 1768. He entered the British army in 1785, and while in Nova Scotia with his regiment in the following year lost the sight of one eye by a shooting accident. He first distinguished himself at Toulon in 1793, receiving two years later the command of the 88th regiment (Connaught Rangers). In 1799 his regiment was ordered to India, and a few months later Beresford left with Sir David Baird’s expedition for Egypt, and was placed in command of the first brigade which led the march from Kosseir across the desert. When, on the evacuation of Egypt in 1803, he returned home, his reputation was established. In 1805 he accompanied Sir David Baird to South Africa, and was present at the capture of Cape Town and the surrender of the colony. From South Africa he was despatched to South America. He had little difficulty in capturing Buenos Aires with only a couple of regiments. But this force was wholly insufficient to hold the colony. Under the leadership of a French émigré, the chevalier de Timers, the colonists attacked Beresford, and at the end of three days’ hard fighting he was compelled to capitulate. After six months’ imprisonment he escaped, and reached England in 1807, and at the end of that year he was sent to Madeira, occupying the island in the name of the king of Portugal. After six months in Madeira as governor and commander-in-chief, during which he learnt Portuguese and obtained an insight into the Portuguese character, he was ordered to join Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army in Portugal. He was first employed as commandant in Lisbon, but accompanied Sir John Moore on the advance into Spain, and took a conspicuous part in the battle of Corunna (see Peninsular War). In February 1809 Beresford was given the task of reorganizing the Portuguese army. In this task, by systematic weeding-out of inefficient officers and men, he succeeded beyond expectation. By the summer of 1810 he had so far improved the moral and discipline of the force that Wellington brigaded some of the Portuguese regiments with English ones, and at Busaco Portuguese and English fought side by side. Beresford’s services in this battle were rewarded by the British government with a knighthood of the Bath and by the Portuguese with a peerage.

In the spring of 1811 Wellington was compelled to detach Beresford from the Portuguese service.The latter was next in seniority to General (Lord) Hill who had gone home on sick leave, and on him, therefore, the command of Hill’s corps now devolved.Unfortunately Beresford never really gained the confidence of his new troops.At Campo Mayor his light cavalry brigade got out of hand, and a regiment of dragoons was practically annihilated.He invested Badajoz with insufficient forces, and on the advance of Soult he was compelled to raise the siege and offer battle at Albuera.His personal courage was even more than usually conspicuous, but to the initiative of a junior staff officer, Colonel (afterwards Viscount) Hardinge, rather than to Beresford’s own generalship, was the hardly-won victory to be attributed.Beresford then went back to his work of reorganizing the Portuguese army.He was present at the siege of Badajoz and at the battle of Salamanca, where he was severely wounded (1812).In 1813 he was present at the battle of Vittoria, and at the battles of the Pyrenees, while at the battle of the Nivelle, the Nive and Orthez he commanded the British centre, and later he led a corps at the battle of Toulouse.At the close of the Peninsular War he was created Baron Beresford of Albuera and Cappoquin, with a pension of £2000 a year, to be continued to his two successors.

In 1819 the revolution in Portugal led to the dismissal of the British officers in the Portuguese service.Beresford therefore left Portugal and placed the question of the arrears of pay of his army before the king at Rio Janeiro.On his return the new Portuguese government refused to allow him to land, and he accordingly left for home.On arriving in England he turned his attention to politics, and strongly supported the duke of Wellington in the House of Lords.In 1823 his barony was made a viscounty, and when the duke of Wellington formed his first cabinet in 1828 he gave Beresford the office of master-general of the ordnance.In 1830 Beresford retired from politics, and for some time subsequently he was occupied in a heated controversy with William Napier, the historian of the Peninsular War, who had severely criticised his tactics at Albuera.On this subject Wellington’s opinion of Beresford is to the point.The duke had no illusions as to his being a great general, but he thought very highly of his powers of organization, and he went so far as to declare, during the Peninsular War, that, in the event of his own death, he would on this ground recommend Beresford to succeed him.The last years of Beresford’s life were spent at Bedgebury, Kent, where he had purchased a country estate.He died on the 8th of January 1854.

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BEREZINA, a river of Russia, in the government of Minsk, forming a tributary of the Dnieper. It rises in the marshes of Borizov and flows south, inclining to east, for 350 m. (250 m. navigable), for the most part through low-lying but well-wooded country. As a navigable river, and forming a portion of the canal system which unites the Black Sea with the Baltic, it is of importance for commerce, but is subject to severe floods. It was just above Borizov that Napoleon’s army forced the passage of the Berezina, with enormous losses, on the 26th-28th of November 1812, during the retreat from Moscow.

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BEREZOVa town of Asiatic Russia, in the government of Tobolsk, 700 m.N.of the city of that name, situated on three hills on the left bank of the Sosva, 26 m.above its mouth in the Ob, in 63° 55′ N.lat.and 65° 7′ E.long.It has more than once suffered from conflagrations—for example, in 1710 and 1808.Prince Menshikov, the favourite of Peter the Great and Catherine I., died here an exile, in 1729.In 1730 his enemy and rival, Prince Dolgoruki, was interned here with his family; and in 1742 General Ostermann was sent to Berezov with his wife and died there in 1747.The yearly mean temperature is 25° Fahr., the maximum cold being 4.7°.It has a cathedral, near which lie buried Mary Menshikov, once betrothed to the tsar Peter II., and some of the Dolgorukis.There is some trade in furs, mammoth bones, dried and salted fish.Pop.(1897) 1073.

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BEREZOVSK, a village of east Russia, in the government of Perm, on the eastern slope of the Urals, 8 m. N. E. of Ekaterinburg. It is the centre of an important gold-mining region (5 m. by 2½) of the same name. The mines have been known since 1747. The inhabitants also manufacture boots, cut stone and carry on cabinet-making.

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BERG (Ducatus Montensis), a former duchy of Germany, on the right bank of the Rhine, bounded N. by the duchy of Cleves, E. by the countship of La Marck and the duchy of Westphalia, and S. and W. by the bishopric of Cologne. Its area was about 1120 sq. m. The district was raised in 1108 to the rank of a countship, but did not become a duchy till 1380, after it had passed into the possession of the Jülich family. In 1423 the duchy of Jülich fell to Adolf of Berg, and in 1437 the countship of Ravensberg was united to the duchies. The male line of the dukes of Jülich-Berg-Ravensberg became extinct in 1511, and the duchy passed by marriage to John III. (d. 1539), duke of Cleves and count of La Marck, whose male line became extinct with the death of John William, bishop of Münster, in 1609. Of the latter’s four sisters, the eldest (Marie Eleonore) was married to Albert Frederick, duke of Prussia, the second (Anna) to Philip Louis, count palatine of Neuburg, the third (Magdalena) to John, count palatine of Zweibrücken, and the fourth (Sybille) to Charles of Habsburg, margrave of Burgau. The question of the succession led to a prolonged contest, which was one of the causes of the Thirty Years’ War. It was settled in 1614 by a partition, under which Berg, with Jülich, was assigned to the count palatine of Neuburg, in whose line it remained till 1742, when it passed to the Sultzbach branch of the house of Wittelsbach. On the death of Charles Theodore, the last of this line, in 1799, Jülich and Berg fell to Maximilian Joseph of Zweibrücken (Maximilian I. of Bavaria), who ceded the duchies in 1806 to Napoleon. Berg was bestowed by Napoleon, along with the duchy of Cleves and other possessions, on Joachim Murat, who bore the title of grand-duke of Berg; and after Murat’s elevation to the throne of Naples, it was transferred to Louis, the son of the king of Holland. By the congress of Vienna in 1815 it was made over to Prussia.

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BERGAMASK, or Bergomask (from the town of Bergamo in North Italy), a clumsy rustic dance (cf. Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, v.360) copied from the natives of Bergamo, reputed to be very awkward in their manners.

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BERGAMO (anc. Bergomum), a city and episcopal see of Lombardy, Italy, capital of the province of Bergamo, situated at the foot of the Alps, at the junction of the Brembo and Serio, 33½ m.N.E.of Milan by rail, and 26 m.direct.Pop.(1901) town, 25,425; commune, 46,861.The town consists of two distinct parts, the older Città Alta, upon a hill 1200 ft.above sea-level, strongly fortified by the Venetians, and the new town (Città Bassa) below, the two being connected by a funicular railway.The most interesting building of the former is the fine Romanesque church of S.Maria Maggiore, founded in 1137 and completed in 1355, with a baroque interior and some interesting works of art.Adjoining it to the north is the Cappella Colleoni, with a richly sculptured polychrome façade, and a modernized interior, containing the fine tombs of Bartolommeo Colleoni (c. 1400-1475), a native of Bergamo, and his daughter Medea. The work was executed in 1470-1476 by Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, who was also employed at the Certosa di Pavia. The market-place (now Piazza Garibaldi) contains the Gothic Palazzo Vecchio or Broletto; close by are the cathedral (1614) and a small baptistery of 1340, rebuilt in 1898. The lower town contains an important picture-gallery, consisting of three collections of works of north Italian masters, one of which was bequeathed in 1891 by the art critic Giovanni Morelli. Bergamo has fine modern buildings and numerous silk and cotton factories. It also has a considerable cattle market, though its yearly Fiera di S. Alessandro (the patron saint) has lost some of its importance. Railways radiate from it to Lecco, Ponte della Selva, Usmate (for Monza or Seregno), Treviglio (on the main line from Milan to Verona and Venice) and (via Rovato) to Brescia, and steam tramways to Treviglio, Sarnico and Soncino.

The ancient Bergomum was the centre of the tribe of the Orobii; it became, after their subjection to Rome, a Roman municipality with a considerable territory, and after its destruction by Attila, became the capital of a Lombard duchy. From 1264 to 1428 it was under Milan, but then became Venetian, and remained so until 1797. Remains of the Roman city are not visible above ground, but various discoveries made are recorded by G. Mantovani in Not.Scav, 1890, 25.

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BERGAMOT, OIL OF, an essential oil obtained from the rind of the fruit of the Citrus bergamia. The bergamot is a small tree with leaves and flowers like the bitter orange, and a round fruit nearly 3 in. in diameter, having a thin lemon-yellow smooth rind. The tree is cultivated in southern Calabria, whence the entire supply of bergamot oil is drawn. Machinery is mostly used to express the oil from the fruit, which is gathered in November and December. The oil, which on standing deposits a stearoptene, bergamot camphor or bergaptene, is a limpid greenish-yellow fluid of a specific gravity of 0.882 to 0.886, and its powerful but pleasant odour is mainly due to the presence of linalyl acetate, or bergamiol, which can be artificially prepared by heating linalol with acetic anhydride. The chief use of bergamot oil is in perfumery. The word apparently is derived from the Italian town Bergamo. The name Bergamot, for a variety of pear, is an entirely different word, supposed to be a corruption of the Turkish beg-armudi (= prince’s pear; cf. Ger. Fürstenbirn).

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BERGEDORF, a town of Germany, in the territory of Hamburg, on the river Bille, 10 m. by rail E. by S. from the city. Pop. (1900) 23,728. It produces vegetables and fruit for the Hamburg markets, and carries on tanning, glass manufacture, brewing and brick-making. It received civic rights in 1275, belonged to Lübeck and Hamburg conjointly from 1420 to 1868, and in the latter year was purchased by Hamburg. The surrounding district, exceptionally fertile marshland, is known as Die Vierlande, being divided into four parishes, whence the name is derived.

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BERGEN, a city and seaport of Norway, forming a separate county (amt), on the west coast, in lat. 60° 23′ N. (about that of the Shetland Islands). Pop. (1900) 72,179. It lies at the head of the broad Byfjord, and partly on a rocky promontory (Nordnaes) between the fine harbour (Vaagen) and the Puddefjord. Its situation is very beautiful, the moist climate (mean annual rainfall, 74 in.) fostering on the steep surrounding hills a vegetation unusually luxuriant for the latitude. Behind the town lie the greater and lesser Lungegaard Lakes, so that the site is in effect a peninsula. The harbour is crowded with picturesque timber-ships and fishing-smacks, and is bordered by quays. The principal street is Strandgaden, on the Nordnaes, parallel with the harbour, communicating inland with the torv or marketplace, which fronts the harbour and contains the fish and fruit market. The portion of the city on the mainland rises in an amphitheatre. The houses, of wood or stucco, are painted in warm reds and yellows. On the banks of the lesser Lungegaard Lake is the small town park, and above the greater lake the pleasant Nygaards park, with an aquarium adjoining. Among the principal buildings are the cathedral (rebuilt in the 16th century), and several other churches, among which the Mariae Kirke with its Romanesque nave is the earliest; a hospital, diocesan college, naval academy, school of design and a theatre. An observatory and biological station are maintained. The museums are of great interest. The Vestlandske fishery and industrial museum also contains a picture gallery, and exhibition of the Bergen Art Union (Kunstforening). The Bergen museum contains antiquities and a natural history collection. The Hanseatic museum is housed in a carefully-preserved gaard, or store-house and offices of the Hanseatic League of German merchants, who inhabited the German quarter (Tydskenbryggen) and were established here in great strength from 1445 to 1558 (when the Norwegians began to find their presence irksome), and brought much prosperity to the city in that period.The Bergenhus and Fredriksberg forts defend the north and south entries of the harbour respectively.The first was originally built in the 13th century by King Haakon Haakonsson, and subsequently enlarged; and still bears marks of an English attack when a Dutch fleet was driven to shelter here in 1665.Near it are remains of another old fort, the Sverresborg.Electric trams ply in the principal streets.

Bergen is the birthplace of the poets Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754) and Johan Welhaven (1807-1873), of Johan Dahl the painter (1788-1857), of Ole Bull (1810-1880) and Edvard Grieg the musicians.There are statues to Holberg and Bull, and also to Christie, president of the Storthing (parliament) in 1815 and 1818.

Bergen ranks first of the Norwegian ship-owning centres, having risen to this position from fifth in 1879. The trade, however, is exceeded by that of Christiania. The staple export trade is in fish and their products: other exports are butter, copper ore and hides. The principal imports are coal, machinery, salt, grain and provisions. The manufactures are not extensive, but the preparation of fish products, shipbuilding, weaving and distillery, with manufactures of paper, pottery, tobacco and ropes are carried on. Bergen is an important centre of the extensive tourist traffic of Norway. Regular steamers serve the port from Hull and Newcastle (about 40 hours), from Hamburg, and from all the Norwegian coast towns. Many local steamers penetrate the fjords, touching at every village and gaardBergen is the nearest port to the famous Hardanger Fjord, and is the starting-point of a remarkable railway which runs through many tunnels and fine scenery towards Vossevangen or Voss.In 1896 a beginning was made with the continuation of this line through the mountains to connect with Christiania.In the first 50 m.from Voss the line ascends 4080 ft., passing through a tunnel 5796 yds.long.

Bergen (formerly Björgvin) was founded by King Olaf Kyrre in 1070-1075, and rapidly grew to importance, the Byfjord becoming the scene of several important engagements in the civil wars of subsequent centuries.The famous Hansa merchants maintained a failing position here till 1764.The town suffered frequently from fire, as in 1702 and 1855, and the broad open spaces (Almenninge) which interrupt the streets are intended as a safeguard against the spread of flames.

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BERGEN-OP-ZOOM, a town in the province of North Brabant, Holland, situated on both sides of the small river Zoom, near its confluence with the East Scheldt, 38½ m. by rail E. by N. of Flushing. It is connected by steam tramway with Antwerp (20 m. S.) and with the islands of Tholen and Duiveland to the north-west. Pop. (1900) 13,663. The houses are well built, the market-places and squares handsome and spacious. It possesses a port and an arsenal, and contains a fine town hall, with portraits of the ancient margraves of Bergen-op-Zoom, a Latin school, and an academy of design and architecture. The remains of the old castle of the margraves have been converted into barracks. The tower is still standing and is remarkable for its increase in size as it rises, which causes it to rock in a strong wind. The church contains a monument to Lord Edward Bruce, killed in a duel with Sir Edward Sackville, afterwards earl of Dorset, in 1613. There are numerous tile-works and potteries of fine ware; and a considerable trade is carried on in anchovies and oysters caught in the Scheldt. A large sugar-beet industry has also sprung up here in modern times.

Bergen-op-Zoom is a very old town, but little is known of its early history beyond the fact that it was taken by the Normans in 880. In the 13th century it became the seat of Count Gerhard of Wesemael, who surrounded it with walls and built a castle. By the end of the 15th century it had become one of the most prosperous towns of Holland, on account of its fisheries and its cloth-trade. In 1576 the town joined the United Netherlands, and was shortly afterwards fortified. In 1588 it was successfully defended against the duke of Parma by an English and Dutch garrison commanded by Colonel Morgan, and in 1605 it was suddenly attacked by Du Terail. In 1622 the Spaniards, under Spinola, made another attempt to take the town, but were forced to abandon the enterprise after a siege of ten weeks and the loss of 1200 men. Towards the end of the 17th century the fortifications were greatly strengthened by Coehoorn, and in 1725 they were further extended. In 1747, however, the town was taken by the French, under Marshal Löwendahl, who surprised it by means of a subterranean passage. Restored at the end of the war, it was again taken by the French under Pichegru in 1795. The English, under Sir Thomas Graham, afterwards Lord Lynedoch, in March 1814 made an attempt to take it by a coup de main, but were driven back with great loss by the French, who surrendered the place, however, by the treaty of peace in the following May.

The lordship of Bergen-op-Zoom appears, after the definite union of the Low Countries with the Empire in 924, as an hereditary fief of the Empire, and the succession of its lords may be traced from Henry (1098-1125), who also held Breda.In 1533 it was raised to a margraviate by the emperor Charles V., and was held by various families until in 1799 it passed, through the Sultzbach branch of the Wittelsbachs, to the royal house of Bavaria, by whom it was renounced in favour of the Batavian republic in 1801.

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BERGERAC, a town of south-western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Dordogne, on the right bank of the Dordogne, 60 m. E. of Bordeaux on the railway to Cahors. Pop. (1906) town, 10,545; commune, 15,623. The river is rendered navigable by a large dam and crossed by a fine bridge which leads to the suburb of La Madeleine. Apart from a few old houses in the older quarter by the river, the town contains no monuments of antiquarian interest. There is a handsome modern church built in the middle of the 19th century. Bergerac is the seat of a sub-prefect and has tribunals of first instance and of commerce and a communal college. Wine of fine quality is grown in the district and is the chief source of the commerce of the town, which is mainly carried on with Libourne and Bordeaux. There is trade in grain, truffles, chestnuts, brandy and in the salmon of the Dordogne. The town has flour-mills, iron-works, tanneries, distilleries and nursery-gardens, and it has manufactures of casks and of vinegar. There are quarries of millstone in the vicinity. In the 16th century Bergerac was a very flourishing and populous place, but most of its inhabitants having embraced Calvinism it suffered greatly during the religious wars and by the revocation of the edict of Nantes (1685). It was in 1577 the scene of the signing of the sixth peace between the Catholics and Protestants. Its fortifications and citadel were demolished by Louis XIII. in 1621.

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BERGHAUS, HEINRICH (1797-1884), German geographer, was born at Kleve on the 3rd of May 1797. He was trained as a surveyor, and after volunteering for active service under General Tauenzien in 1813, joined the staff of the Prussian trigonometrical survey in 1816. He carried on a geographical school at Potsdam in company with Heinrich Lange, August Petermann, and others, and long held the professorship of applied mathematics at the Bauakademie. But he is most famous in connexion with his cartographical work. His greatest achievement was the Physikalischer Atlas (Gotha, 1838-1848), in which work, as in others, his nephew Hermann Berghaus (1828-1890) was associated with him. He had also a share in the re-issue of the great Stieler Handatlas (originally produced by Adolf Stieler in 1817-1823). and in the production of other atlases. His written works were numerous and important, including Allgemeine Länder- und Völkerkunde (Stuttgart, 1837-1840), Grundriss der Geographie in fünf Bückern (Berlin, 1842), Die Völker des Erdballs (Leipzig, 1845-1847), Was man van der Erde weiss (Berlin, 1856-1860), and various large works on Germany. In 1863 he published Briefwechsel mit Alexander van Humboldt (Leipzig). He died at Stettin on the 17th of February 1884.

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BERGK, THEODOR (1812-1881), German philologist, was born at Leipzig on the 22nd of May 1812. After studying at the university of his native town, where he profited by the instruction of G. Hermann, he was appointed in 1835 to the lectureship in Latin at the orphan school at Halle. After holding posts at Neustrelitz, Berlin and Cassel, he succeeded (1842) K. F. Hermann as professor of classical literature at Marburg. In 1852 he went to Freiburg, and in 1857 returned to Halle. In 1868 he resigned his professorship, and settled down to study and literary work in Bonn. He died on the 20th of July 1881, at Ragatz in Switzerland, where he had gone for the benefit of his health. Bergk’s literary activity was very great, but his reputation mainly rests upon his work in connexion with Greek literature and the Greek lyric poets. His Poetae Lyrici Graeci (1843. 5th ed. 1900, &c.) , and Griechische Litteraturgeschichte (1872-1887, completed by G. Hinrichs and R. Peppmüller) are standard works. He also edited Anacreon (1834), the fragments of Aristophanes (1840), Aristophanes (3rd ed. , 1872), Sophocles (and ed. , 1868), a lyric anthology (4th ed. , 1890). Among his other works may be mentioned: Augusti Rerum a se gestarum Index (1873); Inschriften römischer Schleudergeschosse (1876); Zur Geschichte und Topographie der Rheinlande in römischer Zeit (1882); Beiträge zur römischen Chronologie (1884).