BINGHAMTON — BIRDS Binghamton, capital town of Broome county, New York, U.S.A., situated in 42° 07' N. lat. and 75° 56' W. long., in the southern part of the state, on the north branch of Susquehanna river, at the mouth of the Chenango river, at an altitude of 863 feet. It has three railways : the Delaware and Hudson ; the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western; and the New York, Lake Erie, and Western. The city is built on both sides of both the Susquehanna and the Chenango. It is a manufacturing city of importance. In 1890 the manufacturing capital was $9,058,651. There were 10,191 persons employed, and the product was valued at $15,040,152, consisting principally of boots and shoes, flour and tobacco. The last comprised nearly onefifth of the whole. The assessed valuation of real and personal property was in 1900, $21,130,730, and the tax rate was $23.80 per $1000. The debt was only $710,555. Since 1880 the city has had a very rapid growth, due probably to increase m railroad communications and in manufactures. Binghamton was named after William Bingham, who purchased the site of the city. The first settlement was made in 1799, under the name of Chenango. In 1834 it was incorporated as the village of Binghamton, and in 1867 received a city charter. Population (1880), 17,317; (1900), 39,647, of whom 4272 were foreignborn. The death-rate in 1900 was 17‘6. Bingley, a market town and railway station in the Otley parliamentary division of Yorkshire, England, on the Aire, 5^ miles N.W. of Bradford. The grammar school has been enlarged, a technical school and free library have been provided, and a cottage hospital has been built. Bradford water - works supply water. Area of urban district, 11,831 acres; population (1891), 17,381 ; (1901), 18,451. Bintang, the chief island of the Ilhiouw archipelago, on the south side of the Strait of Singapore, in 1° 13'0J 50' N., 104° 13'-104“ 37' E. The Chinese cultivate gambler and pepper successfully, and there is a considerable trade in wood. The seat of the Dutch government is at Tanjong Pinang on the south-west coast, a small port of 4000 inhabitants (160 Europeans and about 2000 Chinese). Bio-blO, a province of Southern Chile, situated between 37° 15' and 38° 40' S. lat., and 71° 05' and 73' 02' W. long. Its area is 4158 square miles. The ! population in 1895 numbered 88,749. The capital, Los Angeles, had a population of 7868 in 1895. The province is divided into three departments. Birbhum, a district of British India, in the Burdwan division of Bengal, situated in the Gangetic plain and partly on the hills, being bounded on the south by the river Ajai. The administrative headquarters are at Suri, which is the only town in the district. The area comprises 1752 square miles. The population in 1881 was 792,031; in 1891, 798,274, giving an average density of 455 persons per square ndle. Classified according to religion, Hindus numbered 593,602; Mahommedans, 169,752; aborigines, 34,289; Christians, 542, of whom 68 were Europeans ; “ others,” 89. In 1901 the population was 901,223, showing an increase of 13 per cent. The total amount of land revenue and rates is returned at Rs. 10,84,185; the number of police at 272; the boys at school (1896-97) were 24,165, being 4P3 per cent, of the male population of school-going age; the registered death-rate in 1897 was 29*7 per thousand. The principal industry is the spinning and weaving of silk, chiefly from tusser or jungle silkworms. In 1897 the total out-turn of silk was valued at Rs.22,85,100. There are also seven lac factories, whose produce is valued at Rs.26,700. The loop-line of the East Indian
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railway runs through the district for 68 miles, with a junction at Nalhati for Murshidabad. Birch, Samuel (1813-1885), English Egyptologist and antiquary, was born 3rd November 1813, and was the son of the rector of St Mary Woolnoth, London. From an early age he manifested a tendency to the study of out-of-the-way subjects, and after a brief employment in the Record Office obtained in 1836 an appointment in the Antiquities Department of the British Museum on account of his knowledge of Chinese. He soon extended his researches to Egyptian, and when the cumbrous department came to be divided he was appointed to the charge of the Egyptian and Assyrian branch. In the latter language he had assistance, but for many years there was only one other person in the institution—in a different department — who knew anything of ancient Egyptian, and the entire arrangement of the department devolved upon Birch. He found time nevertheless for Egyptological work of the highest value, including a hieroglyphical grammar and dictionary, translations of The Took of the Dead and the Harris papyrus, and numerous catalogues and guides. He further wrote what was long a standard history of pottery, investigated the Cypriote syllabary, and proved by various publications that he had not lost his old interest in Chinese. Paradoxical in many of his views on things in general, he was sound and cautious as a philologist; while learned and laborious, he possessed much of the instinctive divination of genius. He died on 27th December 1885. (r. g.) Birds,—The first attempt at a classification of birds based upon the theory of descent—in fact the first phylogenetic tree of the Class of birds — is due to E. Haeckel (Generelle Morphologic der Organismen, vol. ii. p. 139, Berlin, 1866), who divided Ca '°ns' the whole Class into two Sub-classes : Saururce and Ornithurce, the latter into the two legions of Autophagce s. Nidifugcn and Pcedotrophce s. Insessores. His further Sub-divisions or Orders are significant, since they are accompanied by short hints as to probable lines of development and mutual relationship of the various Orders. With Huxley, “On the Classification of Birds . . .” Proc. Zool. Soc., 1867, pp. 415-472, began the earnest search for anatomical characters as affording the only trustworthy clue to the natural system. His concise diagnoses of the Orders and Sub-orders are based upon various other characters besides those yielded by the palatal bones. He took pains to show that the lineal sequence of his groups does not, and cannot, indicate their relationship, and he published a separate phylogenetic outline (Ibis, 1868, pp. 357-362). A. H. Garrod expected much from the combination of a few anatomical characters which were taken from the various organic systems, and which presumably could not stand in direct correlation with each other—notably the carotid arteries, the configuration of the nasal bones, the oil-gland, caeca, and, above all, certain muscles of the thigh. Laying, however, more stress upon the mere presence or absence than upon the quality of these characters, and using their combinations in a rather mechanical way, his ultimate system (published in Proc. Zool. Soc., 1873, pp. 624-644, and 1874, pp. 111-113) resulted in a failure. He was, however, the first to show clearly the relationship of the heron-like birds with the Steganopodes, of the stork-like birds with the American vultures, the great difference between the latter and the other birds of prey, the connexion of the Gulls and Auks with the Plovers, and that of the Sandgrouse with the Pigeons—discoveries expressed in the newly-established terms of the Orders Ciconiiformes and Charadriiformes. Garrod, his equally short-lived successor W. A. Forbes;
