Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 02.djvu/819

BELKNAP. bed which is now used in both the naval service and the coast survey. He was appointed superintendent of the United States Naval Observatory in 1885, and became a rear-admiral in 1889.

BELKNAP, (1744-98). An American Congregational minister, born in Boston, and pastor at Dover, N. H., and at Boston. He was a graduate of Harvard (1762), and in 1791 founded the Massachusetts Historical Society. Among his works are a painstaking and readable History of New Hampshire (1792); American Biography (1798); The Foresters: An American Tale (1796); and a Collection of Psalms and Hymns (1795). He devoted much of his life to historical and biographical research. His Life, with parts of his correspondence, appeared in New York, 1847.

BELKNAP, William Worth (1829-90). An American soldier. He was born at Newburgh, N. Y., graduated at Princeton in 1848, and set- tled as a lawyer in Keokuk, Iowa. He entered the Union Army as major of volunteers, 1861; distinguished himself in Sherman's Atlanta campaign, and was brevetted major-general in 1865. He was Secretary of War under President Grant from 1869 to 1876, and in the latter year was impeached on charges of corruption; but resigned before the proceedings could be formally begun, so that this charge was dropped on the ground of lack of jurisdiction.

BELL (perhaps connected in origin with bell, bellow, to roar). A hollow, cup-shaped, metallic percussion instrument, suspended by a neck and sounded by a swinging clapper, or a hollow metallic sphere sounded by a loose ball in its interior. From a remote antiquity, cymbals and hand-bells were used in religious ceremonies. In Egypt it is certain that the feast of Osiris was announced by ringing bells; the Jewish high-priests wore golden bells attached to their vestments, and in Athens the priests of Cybele used bells in their rites. The Greeks employed them (koda) in camps and garrison; and the Romans announced the hour of bathing and of business by the tintinnabulum. The introduction of bells into Christian churches is usually ascribed to Paulinus, Bishop of Nola, in Campania (A.D. 353-431); but there is no evidence of their existence for a century later. That they were first made in Campania, is inferred from the name given to them — campanæ; hence, campanile. the bell-tower. Their use in churches and monasteries soon spread through Christendom. They were introduced into Gaul about 500; and Benedict, Abbot of Wearmouth, brought one from Italy for his church about 680. Pope Sabinian (600) ordained that every hour should be announced by sound of bell, that the people might be warned of the approach of the canonical hours (q.v.). Bells came into use in the East in the Ninth Century, and in Switzerland and Germany in the Eleventh Century. Most of the bells first used in Western Christendom seem to have been hand-bells. Several examples, some of them, it is believed, as old as the Sixth Century, are still preserved in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. They are made of thin plates of hammered iron, bent into a four-sided form, fastened with rivets, and brazed or bronzed. Perhaps the most remarkable is that which is still preserved at Belfast, and said to have belonged to Saint Patrick, called the Clog-an-eadhachta Phatraic, or 'the bell of Patrick's Will.' It is 6 inches high, 5 inches, broad, and 4 inches deep, and is kept in a case or shrine of brass, enriched with gems and with gold and silver filigree, and made (as an inscription in Irish shows) between the years 1091 and 1105. The bell itself is believed to be men tioned in the Annals of Ulster as early as the year 552. The four-sided bell of Saint Gall, an Irish missionary, who died about 646, is still shown in the monastery of the city which bears his name in Switzerland. Church-bells were suspended either in the steeples or church-towers, or in special bell-towers. They were long of comparatively small size; the bell which a king presented to the Church of Orleans in the Eleventh Century, and which was remarkable in its age, weighed only 2600 pounds. In the Thirteenth Century much larger bells began to be cast, but it was not until the Fifteenth Century that they reached really considerable dimensions. The bell 'Jacqueline,' of Paris, cast in 1400, weighed 15,000 pounds; another Paris bell, cast in 1472, weighed 25,000 pounds; the famous bell of Rouen, cast in 1501, weighed 36,364 pounds. The largest bell in the world is the great bell of Moscow, cast in 1733, it being 21 feet high, 21 feet in diameter, and weighing 432,000 pounds. This bell, in 1737, was injured by a fire and remained partly buried in the earth until 1837, when it was raised, and now forms the dome of a chapel formed by excavating the earth beneath it. Among other large bells are: another at Moscow, cast in 1819, and weighing 127,830 pounds; the great bell of Burma, 12 feet high, 16¼ feet in diameter, weighing 260,000 pounds; the great bell at Peking, 14 feet high, 13 feet in diameter, and weighing 130,000 pounds; those at Novgorod, Russia, 62,000 pounds; Olmütz, Rouen, and Vienna, each weighing about 40,000 pounds; Houses of Parliament, London, 30,000 pounds; New York City Hall, 23,000 pounds; Montreal Cathedral, 28,500 pounds; Notre Dame, Paris, 28,672 pounds; Saint Peter's, Rome, 18,600 pounds; Saint Paul's, London, 11,470 pounds.

The art of casting bells seems to have made little advance as the result of modern inventions, it being impossible to make better bells to-day than were made three or four hundred years ago. The material used in making bells is a kind of bronze known as bell-metal (see ), which is an alloy of copper and tin. Authorities differ as to the best proportions of the copper and tin. Some give 80 parts of copper to 20 of tin, or 4 to 1; others state the proportions as being 3 to 1. In the reign of Henry III. of England, it would seem to have been 2 to 1; and the small bronze bells discovered by Layard in the palace of Nimrud are found to contain 10 of copper to 1 of tin. Hand-bells are often made of brass, antimony alloyed with tin, German silver, real silver, and gold. The notion that in old times silver was mixed with bell-metal to sweeten the tone is a mistake. Silver, in any quantity, would injure the tone. The quality of a bell depends not only on the composition of the metal it is made of, but very much also on its shape, and on the proportions between its height, width, and thickness, for which the bell-founder has rules derived from experience and confirmed by science. The pitch of a bell is higher the smaller it is. For a peal of