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BRAINERD

259

BRANDENBURG

See Edinger: A natomy of the Central Nervous System, etc. (1899); Ferrier: Functions of the Brain; and Barker: The Central Nervous System (1900). WM. A. LOCY.

Brai'nerd, David, one of the earliest missionaries to the American Indians, was born in Connecticut in 1718. He labored among the Indians of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New Jersey with much success. He died in 1747, while still a young man, at the house of Jonathan Edwards, who has written an account of his life.

Brainerd, Minn., a city, the seat of Crow Wing Co., on the east or left bank of the Mississippi River, 136 miles northwest of Saint Paul and about 100 miles west of Duluth. It is on the Northern Pacific and the Brainerd & Northern Minnesota Railroad. Water power for its main industries is mainly from the Mississippi, and its chief manufactures comprise, besides the car-works and machine shops of the Northern Pacific R. R., lumber and flour mills, foundries, breweries and cigar factories. A United States signal station is located here, and the city has besides a public park and athletic grounds, a lumberman's hospital, court-house and the buildings of the Y. M. C. A. The city was chartered in 1883, and is governed by a mayor and city council. Population (1910), 8,526.

Brake (car), a device for stopping a car. All practical brakes act by friction, blocks of metal called shoes being pressed against the rims of the wheels. They differ in the method of forcing these shoes against the wheels. The older method was by hand power, the force being transmitted from a wheel through a chain and system of levers, but as the speed of trains increased, quicker and more powerful brakes were required. For high speed trains, the brake must act practically at the same time on every wheel on the train, that is, it must be continuous, and also be capable of being controlled by the locomotive engineer, so that the train can be controlled quickly from one point. A point of safety is that the brakes must act automatically in case of accident, such as in case of the breaking of the connections of the train. Four kinds of power have been used for "such continuous brakes: mechanical, hydraulic, electromagnetic and air. Air brakes have proven themselves to be so superior to all others that they are the only brakes having extensive use to-day. Air brakes are of two kinds: vacuum and compressed air brakes. The vacuum is produced by a form of injector placed on the locomotive, which partially exhausts cylinders or bellows placed under car. The atmospheric pressure then compresses the bellows or forces in the piston of the cylinder, and this acts on a mechanism which puts

on or off the brakes. In some systems, as in the Saunder's vacuum brake, the brakes are on normally, and they are held off by the atmospheric pressure as long as the vacuum is maintained. In other brakes, exhausting the air throws on the brakes. The air brake used more extensively than any other is the Westinghouse quick-action automatic air-brake. This acts by compressed air produced by a compressor on the locomotive. The compressed air is stored in a tank on the tender of the locomotive, and from thence distributed by flexible connections and pipes to the brake cylinders placed under each car of the train. The action of this brake is quick and powerful. In its improved form, the action travels with a high velocity, so that with a train of fifty cars, having a length of 1,900 feet, the action takes place at the last car in 2j seconds after application at the first car. The theoretical velocity possible is that of the velocity of sound in air, and that would take if seconds to travel the 1,900 feet, so that the action of these automatic brakes is almost perfect. The secret of this quick action is in the triple-valve, a mechanism too involved to be described here. The invention of this quick-acting brake was to avoid the injury to rear cars and their loads in the case of long trains where the rear cars were not retarded until a considerable time after the brake had acted on the forward cars. All passenger trains in the United States are now equipped with air brakes, and on most of the large railroad systems the freight trains are equipped with similar brakes. In numbers of tests it has been shown that ordinary trains going from 40 to 50 miles per hour can be stopped in less than 20 seconds and within a distance of 1,000 feet by air brakes.

Branching. A branch is a repetition of the axis from which it springs. There are two prominent forms of branching. One is known as dichotomous, and is chiefly characteristic of the lower plants. , It consists in the division of the apex of the axis into branches, usually two in number, as the name indicates. In cases of dichotomy, therefore, an axis stops where it branches. The other type is known as monopodial, and consists in giving off branches from the side of the axis, which itself continues to develop more or less. This is the type more characteristic of the higher plants.

Bran'denburg (brdn'den-boorg), a central province of Prussia, which formed the starting point of the present kingdom Its area is 15,383 square miles, one and a half times the size of Maryland. The population is 4,092,616, largely Protestant. Brandenburg came into the possession of the Hohenzollerns, the present ruling family of Germany, in the i5th century. Late?