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 studied jurisprudence at the university of Vienna, he entered the government service in a legal capacity, and after holding various minor offices was transferred in 1843 to a responsible post on the Lottery Commission. He had already embarked upon politics, and severely criticized the government in a pamphlet, Pia Desideria eines österreichischen Schriftstellers (1842); and in 1845 he made a journey to England, after which his political opinions became more pronounced. After the Revolution, in 1848, he quitted the government service in order to devote himself entirely to letters. He lived in Vienna until his death on the 9th of August 1890, and was ennobled for his work. As a writer of comedies and farces, Bauernfeld takes high rank among the German playwrights of the century; his plots are clever, the situations witty and natural and the diction elegant. His earliest essays, the comedies Leichtsinn aus Liebe (1831); Das Liebes-Protokoll (1831) and Die ewige Liebe (1834); Bürgerlich und Romantisch, (1835) enjoyed great popularity. Later he turned his attention to so-called Salonstücke (drawing-room pieces), notably Aus der Gesellschaft (1866); Moderne Jugend (1869), and Der Landfrieden (1869), in which he portrays in fresh, bright and happy sallies the social conditions of the capital in which he lived.

 BAUFFREMONT, a French family which derives its name from a village in the Vosges, spelt nowadays Beaufremont. In consequence of an alliance with the house of Vergy the Bauffremonts established themselves in Burgundy and Franche-Comté. In 1448 Pierre de Bauffremont, lord of Charny, married Maríe, a legitimatized daughter of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy. Nicolas de Bauffremont, his son Claude, and his grandson Henri, all played important parts in the states-general of 1576, 1588 and 1614, and their speeches have been published. Alexandre Emmanuel Louis de Bauffremont (1773–1833), a prince of the Holy Roman Empire, was created a peer of France in 1817, and duke in 1818. After having served in the army of the princes he returned to France under the Empire, and had been made a count by Napoleon.

 BAUHIN, GASPARD (1560–1624), Swiss botanist and anatomist, was the son of a French physician, Jean Bauhin (1511–1582), who had to leave his native country on becoming a convert to Protestantism. He was born at Basel on the 17th of January 1560, and devoting himself to medicine, he pursued his studies at Padua, Montpellier, and some of the celebrated schools in Germany. Returning to Basel in 1580, he was admitted to the degree of doctor, and gave private lectures in botany and anatomy. In 1582 he was appointed to the Greek professorship in that university, and in 1588 to the chair of anatomy and botany. He was afterwards made city physician, professor of the practice of medicine, rector of the university, and dean of his faculty. He died at Basel on the 5th of December 1624. He published several works relative to botany, of which the most valuable was his Pinax Theatri Botanici, seu Index in Theophrasti, Dioscoridis, Plinii, et botanicorum qui a seculo scripserunt opera (1596). Another great work which he planned was a Theatrum Botanicum, meant to be comprised in twelve parts folio, of which he finished three; only one, however, was published (1658). He also gave a copious catalogue of the plants growing in the environs of Basel, and edited the works of P. A. Mattioli (1500–1577) with considerable additions. He likewise wrote on anatomy, his principal work on this subject being Theatrum Anatomicum infinitis locis auctum (1592).

His son, (1606–1685), was professor of botany at Basel for thirty years. His elder brother, (1541–1613), after studying botany at Tübingen under Leonard Fuchs (1501–1566), and travelling with Conrad Gesner, began to practise medicine at Basel, where he was elected professor of rhetoric in 1766. Four years later he was invited to become physician to the duke of Württemberg at Montbéliard, where he remained till his death in 1613. He devoted himself chiefly to botany. His great work, Historia plantarum nova et absolutissima, a compilation of all that was then known about botany, was not complete at his death, but was published at Yverdon in 1650–1651, the Prodromus having appeared at the same place in 1619. He also wrote a book De aquis medicatis (1605).

 BAULK, or (a word common to Teutonic languages, meaning a ridge, partition, or beam), the ridge left unploughed between furrows or ploughed fields; also the uncultivated strip of land used as a boundary in the “open-field” system of agriculture. From the meaning of something left untouched comes that of a hindrance or check, so of a horse stopping short of an obstacle, of the “baulk-line” in billiards, or of the deceptive motion of the pitcher in baseball. From the other original meaning, i.e. “beam,” comes the use of the word for the cross or tie-beam of a roof, or for a large log of timber sawn to a one or one and a half foot square section (see ).

 BAUMBACH, RUDOLF (1840–1905), German poet, was born at Kranichfeld on the Ilm in Thuringia, on the 28th of September 1840, the son of a local medical practitioner, and received his early schooling at the gymnasium of Meiningen, to which place his father had removed. After studying natural science in various universities, he engaged in private tuition, both independently and in families, in the Austrian towns of Graz, Brünn, Görz and Triest respectively. In Triest he caught the popular taste with an Alpine legend, Zlatorog (1877), and songs of a journeyman apprentice, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (1878), both of which have run into many editions. Their success decided him to embark upon a literary career. In 1885 he returned to Meiningen, where he received the title of Hofrat, and was appointed ducal librarian. His death occurred on the 14th of September 1905.

Baumbach was a poet of the breezy, vagabond school, and wrote, in imitation of his greater compatriot, Victor Scheffel, many excellent drinking songs, among which Die Lindenwirtin has endeared him to the German student world. But his real strength lay in narrative verse, especially when he had the opportunity of describing the scenery and life of his native Thuringia. Special mention may be made of Frau Holde (1881), Spielmannslieder (1882), Von der Landstrasse (1882), Thüringer Lieder (1891), and his prose, Sommermärchen (1881).

 BAUMÉ, ANTOINE (1728–1804), French chemist, was born at Senlis on the 26th of February 1728. He was apprenticed to the chemist Claude Joseph Geoffroy, and in 1752 was admitted a member of the École de Pharmacie, where in the same year he was appointed professor of chemistry. The money he made in a business he carried on in Paris for dealing in chemical products enabled him to retire in 1780 in order to devote himself to applied chemistry, but, ruined in the Revolution, he was obliged to return to a commercial career. He devised many improvements in technical processes, e.g. for bleaching silk, dyeing, gilding, purifying saltpetre, &c., but he is best known as the inventor of the hydrometer associated with his name (often in this connexion improperly spelt Beaumé). Of the numerous books and papers he wrote the most important is his Élémens de pharmacie théorique et pratique (9 editions, 1762–1818). He became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1772, and an associate of the Institute in 1796. He died in Paris on the 15th of October 1804.

 BAUMGARTEN, ALEXANDER GOTTLIEB (1714–1762), German philosopher, born at Berlin. He studied at Halle, and became professor of philosophy at Halle and at Frankfort on the Oder, where he died in 1762. He was a disciple of Leibnitz and Wolff, and was particularly distinguished as having been the first to establish the Theory of the Beautiful as an independent science. Baumgarten did good service in severing (q.v.) from the other philosophic disciplines, and in marking out a definite object for its researches. The very name (Aesthetics), which Baumgarten was the first to use, indicates the imperfect and partial nature of his analysis, pointing as it does to an element so variable as feeling or sensation as the ultimate ground of judgment in questions pertaining to beauty. It is important