Page:EB1911 - Volume 04.djvu/669

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BROOKITE—BROOKLINE
  

signing the Articles of Association and forming an unincorporated joint-stock company. The farm was assiduously, if not very skilfully, cultivated, and other industries were established—most of the members paying by labour for their board—but nearly all of the income, and sometimes all of it, was derived from the school, which deservedly took high rank and attracted many pupils. Among these were included George William Curtis and his brother James Burrill Curtis, Father Isaac Thomas Hecker (1819–1888), General Francis C. Barlow (1834–1896), who as attorney-general of New York in 1871–1873 took a leading part in the prosecution of the “Tweed Ring.” For three years the undertaking went on quietly and simply, subject to few outward troubles other than financial, the number of associates increasing to seventy or eighty. It was during this period that Nathaniel Hawthorne had his short experience of Brook Farm, of which so many suggestions appear in the Blithedale Romance, though his preface to later editions effectually disposed of the idea—which gave him great pain—that he had either drawn his characters from persons there, or had meant to give any actual description of the colony. Emerson refused, in a kind and characteristic letter, to join the undertaking, and though he afterwards wrote of Brook Farm with not uncharitable humour as “a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an age of reason in a patty-pan,” among its founders were many of his near friends. In 1844 the growing need of a more scientific organization, and the influence which F. M. C. Fourier’s doctrines, as modified by Albert Brisbane (1809–1890), had gained in the minds of Ripley and many of his associates, combined to change the whole plan of the community. It was transformed, with the strong approval of all its chief members and the consent of the rest, into a Fourierist “phalanx” in 1845. There was an accession of new members, a momentary increase of prosperity, a brilliant new undertaking in the publication of a weekly journal, the Harbinger, in which Ripley, Charles A. Dana, Francis G. Shaw and John S. Dwight were the chief writers, and to which James Russell Lowell, J. G. Whittier, George William Curtis, Parke Godwin, T. W. Higginson, Horace Greeley and many more now and then contributed. But the individuality of the old Brook Farm was gone. The association was not rescued even from financial troubles by the change. With increasing difficulty it kept on till the spring of 1846, when a fire which destroyed its nearly completed “phalanstery” brought losses which caused, or certainly gave the final ostensible reason for, its dissolution. The experiment was abandoned in the autumn of 1847. Besides Ripley and Hawthorne, the principal members of the community were Charles A. Dana, John S. Dwight, Minot Pratt (c. 1805–1878), the head farmer, who, like George Partridge Bradford (1808–1890), left in 1845, and Warren Burton (1810–1866) a preacher and, later, a writer on educational subjects. Indirectly connected with the experiment, also, as visitors for longer or shorter periods but never as regular members, were Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Orestes A. Brownson, Theodore Parker and William Henry Channing, Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. The estate itself, after passing through various hands, came in 1870 into the possession of the “Association of the Evangelical Lutheran Church for Works of Mercy,” which established here an orphanage, known as the “Martin Luther Orphan Home.”

The best account of Brook Farm is Lindsay Swift’s Brook Farm, Its Members, Scholars and Visitors (New York, 1900). Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs (Boston, 1894), is by Dr J. T. Codman, one of the pupils in the school. See also Morris Hillquit’s History of Socialism in the United States (New York, 1903).  (E. L. B.) 


BROOKITE, one of the three modifications in which titanium dioxide (TiO2) occurs in nature; the other minerals with the same chemical composition, but with different physical and crystallographic characters, being rutile (q.v.) and anatase (q.v.) The two latter are tetragonal in crystallization, whilst brookite is orthorhombic. The name was given by A. Lévy in 1825 in honour of the English mineralogist H. J. Brooke (1771–1857). Two types of brookite crystals may be distinguished. The commoner type of crystals are thin and tabular, and often terminated by numerous small and brilliant faces (fig. 1); the faces of the orthopinacoid (a) and of the prisms (m, l) are vertically striated. These crystals are of a rich reddish-brown colour and are often translucent. Crystals of the second type have the appearance of six-sided bipyramids (fig. 2) owing to the equal development of the prism m {110} and the pyramid e {122}; these crystals are black and opaque, and constitute the variety known as arkansite.

The lustre of brookite is metallic-adamantine. There is no distinct cleavage (rutile and anatase have cleavages); hardness 51/2–6; sp. gr. 4.0. The optical characters are interesting: the optic axes for red and for blue light lie in planes at right angles to each other, whilst for yellow-green light the crystals are uniaxial. The acute bisectrix of the optic axes is perpendicular to the orthopinacoid (a) for all colours, so that this phenomenon of the crossing of the optic axial planes may be readily observed in the thin tabular crystals of the first-mentioned type.


Fig. 1. 

Fig. 2.

Brookite occurs only as crystals, never in compact masses, and is usually associated with either anatase or rutile. The crystals are found attached to the walls of cavities in decomposed igneous rocks and crystalline schists; it is also found as minute isolated crystals in many sedimentary rocks. The best-known locality is Fronolen near Tremadoc in North Wales, where crystals of the thin tabular habit occur with crystallized quartz, albite and anatase on the walls of crevices in diabase. Similar crystals of relatively large size are found attached to gneiss at several places in the Swiss and Tirolese Alps. Thicker crystals of prismatic, rather than tabular, habit and of a rich red colour combined with considerable transparency and brilliancy are found in the gold-washings of the Sanarka river in the southern Urals. The arkansite variety occurs with rutile in the elaeolite-syenite of Magnet Cove in Hot Spring county, Arkansas. Minute crystals of brookite have been detected with anatase and rutile in the iron-ore of Cleveland in Yorkshire.

Crystals of brookite, as well as of anatase and rutile, have been prepared artificially by the interaction of steam and titanium fluoride, the particular modification of titanium dioxide which results depending on the temperature at which the reaction takes place. Brookite is liable to become altered to rutile: aggregates of rutile needles with the form of brookite (arkansite) are not uncommon at Magnet Cove, Arkansas.  (L. J. S.) 


BROOKLIME, known botanically as Veronica Beccabunga (natural order Scrophulariaceae), a succulent herb growing on margins of brooks and ditches in the British Isles, and a native of Europe, north Africa and north and western Asia. It has smooth spreading branches, blunt oblong leaves and small bright blue or pink flowers.


BROOKLINE, a township of Norfolk county, Massachusetts, U.S.A., about 3 m. S.W. of Boston, lying immediately S. of the Back Bay district. Pop. (1890) 12,103; (1900) 19,935, of whom 6536 were foreign-born; (1910, census) 27,792. The area of the township in 1906 was 6.75 sq. m. It is served by the Boston & Albany railway, and is connected with Boston by an electric line. Brookline is the wealthiest of the residential suburbs of Boston; and contains a number of beautiful estates and homes. Within its limits are the villages of Cottage Farm, Longwood, and Reservoir Station, or Chestnut Hill—the Chestnut Hill reservoir is just beyond the township. Brookline has an excellent public library. At Clyde Park are the grounds and club-house of the Boston Country Club. Brookline has long been regarded as a model city suburb. It is connected with