Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume III.djvu/383

 BUCER BtJCH 577 would never suffer any person to mount him but Alexander. Bl'CER, Martin, a German reformer, born at Schlettstadt, in Alsace, in 1491, died in Cam- bridge, England, Feb. 27, 1551. His real name, according to some, was Butzer, but according to others it was Kuhhorn (Gowhorn), which, after the fashion among the learned of the time, he changed to a Greek analogue (/3o6f, ox, and K^paf, horn). Sent at the age of seven years to a Dominican convent, he gave offence by the independence of his sentiments, and was ob- liged to seek an asylum in the house of a friend. Afterward removed to Strasburg, he became acquainted with the writings of Melanchthon and Luther. After conferences with the latter he espoused the principles of the reformation, and married. In 1523 he became pastor in Strasburg, and was for 20 years one of the chief leaders of the reformation. He was inclined to favor the sentiments of Zwingli rather than those of Luther, though he was always a pa- cificator between them. To the conference of Smalcald Bueer had brought a confession known in history as the confession of the four cities, from Gonstance, Memmingen, Strasburg, and Lindau, which did not agree with the lan- piajre of the memorable 15th article of the Augsburg confession. Bucer introduced into the confession an acknowledgment of a " pres- ence of Christ for the hand and mouth," and so the four cities were saved to the league of Smalcald. In 1548 he was summoned to Augs- burg to sign the Interim, an act by which Charles V. sought to make a temporary peace between the Catholics and Protestants until he should call a general council. Bucer refused to sign this document, and rendered himself obnoxious to Charles. On the invitation of Cranmer he went in 1549 to England, where he was immediately appointed professor of the- ology at Cambridge. He lived only two years after his removal. After he had been dead six years his body was dug up in the reign of Mary, and chained upright to a stake, in com- pany with that of Fagius (who had left Ger- many at the same time and for the same rea- sons), and burned, and his tomb was demolish- ed. Under Elizabeth the tombs of Bucer and Fagius were rebuilt. Bucer's writings are nu- merous, both in Latin and German. A com- plete edition of them, to appear in 10 volumes, was projected at Basel in 1577, but only one volume was published. Bl'CU, Leopold von, a German geologist, born at Stolpe, April 25, 1774, died in Berlin, March 4, 1853. At the age of 16 he was placed at the mining academy of Freiberg, where Alexander von Humboldt was among his fellow students. Von Buch made rapid progress, and manifested a peculiar aptitude for geological studies, as well as mineralogy. In 1797 he published Ver- such einer mineraloyischen Beschreibung von Landeck, in which he gave the results of his mineralogioal and geological investigations of the mountains of Silesia, which had never pre- viously been systematically explored. Werner, the director of the academy, had propounded the Neptunian theory of geological formation, and Von Buch warmly espoused it. In his first investigations he classed basalt, gneiss, and mica schist among the aqueous formations. In 1797 Von Buch explored the Styrian Alps, while Humboldt was engaged in meteorological and eudiometrical researches in the same regions. In the spring of 1798 Von Buch pursued his geological excursions into Italy, and his inves- tigations there unsettled his convictions of the truth of Werner's Neptunian theory; he in- clined to the belief that the leucitic and pyrox- enic varieties of basaltic rocks must be of ig- neous formation. In 1799 he went to Naples, and saw Mount Vesuvius, which he revisited on Aug. 12, 1805, in company with Humboldt and Gay-Lussac, at the time of an eruption. In 1802 he visited the south of France and ex- plored the regions of extinct volcanoes in An- vergne. The general aspect of the Puy-de- D6me, with its cone of trachyte rock and its beds of basaltic lava, convinced him of the nat- ural facts of igneous formations, and induced him to abandon Werner's exclusive doctrines of aqueous formation. The results of these geological researches were published in his Geognostische eobachtungen aufSeuen durch Deutschland und Italien (2 vols. 8vo, Berlin, 1802-'9). From the south of Europe Von Buch turned to the north, and from July, 1806, to October, 1808, he explored the Scandinavian regions, carrying his investigations as far as the North cape. The results of these re- searches were some very important discoveries with regard to the geological formation of the crust of the earth, the climatology of dif- ferent regions, and the geographical distribu- tion of plants. Von Buch was the first to sug- gest the idea of the slow and gradual elevation of the land of Sweden above the level of the sea. The results of these explorations were pub- lished in his Reue durch Noneegen und Lapp- land (2 vols. 8vo, 1810). His explorations of the Alps in Switzerland, and of the moun- tains of Germany, induced Von Buch to put forth the opinion that the highest chains of mountains have never been covered by the sea, but are the result of successive upheavings through fissures of the earth's crust, the paral- lel direction of which is indicated by the prin- cipal chains of mountains in the Alps. This suggestion had already been made by Avicen- na, and it has since been developed into a gen- eral theory by Elie de Beaumont. About this time, also, Von Buch published his views, which have since been confirmed by the labors of Noggerath, with regard to the formation of amygdaloid agates, or almond stones, in the porosities of melaphyre. In 1815 Von Buch went to the Canary islands, accompanied by Christian Smith, the Norwegian botanist. The volcanic islands, with the gigantic peak of Teneriffe, became the basis of an elaborate series of investigations on the nature of volca-