Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/194

178 1870, we reach &quot;an exquisitely-carved doorway, having a staircase on each side leading to the top of the building,&quot; which gives entrance to the interior of the temple. On the soffit is the figure of the eagle referred to by so many of the travellers, and regarded by Volney and others as the emblem of the sun-god. This part of the building was greatly damaged in the earthquake of 1759, and if mea sures are uot taken to support the lintel, it must soon fall to the ground. The cello, seems to have been hypgethral ; and, like the rest of the building, it was richly ornamented, the floor now presenting a mass of broken sculpture and pillars. A spiral staircase, in the interior of a massive column, leads to the roof on each side of the portal. Further east stands the Circular Temple, which is of very small dimensions, but of beautiful workmanship and design. It consists of a semicircular cella surrounded on the outside by eight Corinthian columns, while within there is a double tier of smaller pillars, the lower row being Ionic and the upper Corinthian. Down to the last century it was used as a Greek church ; but it is now in a very ruinous condition, and &quot; choked with wretched hovels.&quot; It is known to the people of Baalbec as Barbarat- el Atikah (La Sainte Barbe). The remains of the military works of the Saracens and their successors are only too numerous about Baalbec ; but they have left no buildings of greater interest than the mosques already mentioned, the larger of which was built by Melek el As ad, and the smaller by his father, Melek el Zahir (670 A.H.) Several interesting excursions may be made in the neighbourhood, in regard to which the reader may consult Murray s Handbook, Joanne and Isambert s Itineraire, and a letter of Mrs Burton s in Unexplored Syria. The ruins of Baalbec have awakened the admiration of European travellers from the 16th century down to the present day. Baumgarten visited them in 1507, Belon in 1548, Thevet in 1550, Melchior von Seydlitz in 1557, Radzivil in 1583, Quaresmius in 1620, Monconys in 1647, De la Roque in 1688, and Maundrell in 1699. In the 18th century Pococke gave a sketch of the ruins, which was followed up by the magnificent work of Wood and Dawkins (1751), to this day one of our principal authori ties, and Volney, in 1784, supplied a graphic description. During the present century the number of travellers who have visited Baalbec has enormously increased; it may be sufficient to mention Eichardson, Addison, Lindsay, Wilson, the Duke of Ragusa, Lamartine, De Saulcy, Chesney, and Robinson. Of the chapters of the last writer, in his Biblical Researches, vol. iii., especial use has been made in the present article. In spite, however, of such a series of investigators, much might still be done to extend our knowledge of those wonderful remains. A few superficial excavations have been made from time to time ; but the ruins of Baalbec still wait for their Layard or their Schliemann.  BABATAG, or, a city of Turkey in Europe, in the government of Bulgaria and sanjak of Silistria. It stands on the lake or estuary Rasein, which communicates with the Black Sea, and is surrounded by mountains covered with woods. It used to be the winter headquarters of the Turkish army during their wars with Russia ; and, in 1854, it was bombarded by the Russians. Long. 28 32 E., lat. 44 55 N. The population of 10,000 includes many Jews, Armenians, Tatars, and Greeks. Babatag was founded by Bajazet.  BABBAGE,, a distinguished English mathematician and mechanician, was born, 20th December 1792, at Teignmouth in Devonshire. He was educated at a private school, and afterwards entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1814. Though he did not compete in the mathematical tripos, he acquired a great reputation at the university. In the year after his gradua tion he contributed a paper on the &quot; Calculus of Func tions&quot; to the Philosophical Transactions, and in 1816 was made a fellow of the Royal Society. Along with Herschel and Peacock he laboured to raise the standard of mathe matical instruction in England, and specially endeavoured to supersede the Newtonian by the Leibnitzian notation in the Calculus. With this object the three friends trans lated, in 1816, Lacroix s Treatise on the Differential and Integral Calculus, and added, in 1820, two volumes of examples. Mr Babbage s attention seems to have been very early drawn to the number and importance of the errors introduced into astronomical and other calculations through inaccuracies in the computation of tables. He contributed to the Royal Society some notices on the rela tion between notation and mechanism; and in 1822, in a letter to Sir H. Davy on the application of machinery to the calculation and printing of mathematical tables, he discussed the principles of a calculating engine, to the construction of which he devoted many years of his life. Government was induced to grant its aid, and the inventor himself spent a portion of his private fortune in the pro secution of his undertaking. He travelled through several of the countries of Europe, examining different systems of machinery; and some of the results of his investigations were published in the admirable little work, Economy of Machines and Manufactures, 1834, which Blanqui has called &quot;a hymn in honour of machinery.&quot; The great calculating engine was never completed ; the constructor apparently desired to adopt a new principle when the first specimen was nearly complete, to make it not a difference but an analytical engine, and Government declined to accept the further risk. From 1828 to 1839 Babbage held the office of Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge. He contributed largely to several scientific periodicals, and was instrumental in founding the Astronomical and Statistical Societies. He only once endeavoured to enter public life, when, in 1832, he stood unsuccessfully for the borough of Finsbury. During the later years of his life he resided in London, and, surrounded by his workshops, still continued to devote himself to the construction of machines capable of performing arithmetical and even algebraical calcula tions. He died at London, 20th October 1871. He gives a few biographical details in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 1864, a work which throws considerable light upon his somewhat peculiar character. His works, pamphlets, and papers, were very numerous; in the Passages he enumerates eighty separate writings. Of these the most important, besides the few already mentioned, are, Tables of Logarithms, 1826 ; Comparative Vieiv of the Various Institutions for the Assurance of Lives, 1826 ; Decline of Science in England, 1830; Ninth Bridgeivater Treatise, 1837; The Exposition of 1851, 1851.  BABEL was the native name of the city called Babylon by the Greeks. It means &quot; gate of god,&quot; or &quot; gate of the gods,&quot; and was the Semitic translation of the original Ac- cadian designation Ca-dimirra. According to Gen. -xi. 1-9, mankind, after the deluge, travelled from the mountain of the East (or Elwand), where the ark had rested, and settled in Shinar (Sumir, or the north-west of Chaldea). Here they attempted to build a city and a tower whose top might reach unto heaven, but were miraculously prevented by their language being confounded. In this way the diversity of human speech was accounted for; and an etymology was found for the name of Babylon in the Hebrew verb balbel, &quot; to confound.&quot; According to Alexander Poly- histor (frg. 10) and Abydenus (frgs. 5 and 6), the tower was overthrown by the winds. The native version of the story has recently been discovered among the cuneiform 