Page:1902 Encyclopædia Britannica - Volume 26 - AUS-CHI.pdf/255

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

BERISLAY — variously affected, the symptoms will be modified, some being more prominent in one case and some in another. There is no specific treatment for beri-beri. The most important measure is the removal of patients from the locality. If this is done they generally recover spontaneously, which again is in keeping with the theory of. chronic poisoning. Symptoms may be treated as they arise. For prevention it is advisable to move other people from the same locality, or withdraw them from the operation of the same influence whatever it may be. Sir Patrick Manson. Tropical Diseases, new ed., 1900. A full bibliography is given by Dr Manson in Allbutt’s System of Medicine.. (A. Sl.) Berislav, or Borislav, a town of south-west Russia, government and 46 miles N.E. of Kherson, situated on the left bank of the Dnieper. It is supposed to have been founded in 1450 by the Turks. It contains steam flour-mills. The population is 12,081. Berja, a town of Spain, province of Almeria, in a valley to the east of the Rio Grande. The country around Berja is mostly mountainous, and produces in a few valleys cereals, wine, oil, oranges, esparto grass, and fruits. Lead mines are in the district, and paper, cotton goods, and linen are manufactured in the town. Population (1897), 12,116. a c lly of Alameda county, California, U.S.A., situated in 37° 52' FT. lat., and 122° 16' W. long., on the east shore of San Francisco Bay, adjoining Oakland on the north and opposite San Francisco. It is traversed by two branches of the Southern Pacific railway. It is the site of the University of California, founded in 1868, one of. the largest and most prosperous educational institutions in the state. It is richly endowed, having property valued at $8,000,000 and an income exceeding $500,000. Besides the literary, scientific, and engineering departments, which are at Berkeley, it has law, medical, and other departments in San Francisco, and an astronomical observatory (Lick) on Mount Hamilton near San Jose. Its professors and instructors in all departments in 1900 numbered 483, and its students 3024, about 40 per cent, of whom were women. Population (1890) 5101 • (1900), 13,214. '

Berkeley Fort. See Nile. Berkeley, Miles Joseph (1803 1889), British botanist, was born in 1803 at Biggin, Derbyshire, and educated at Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford. He took holy orders, and was curate at Margate and Market Harborough, afterwards being vicar of Sibbertoft. An English country clergyman of good family, he had acquired so enthusiastic a love of cryptogamic botany in his early years that he soon became well known as the leading British authority on Fungi and plant pathology, a position he maintained till very late in life. Berkeley was especially famous as a systematist in mycology, some 6000 species of Fungi being credited to him, but it would be an error to regard him as merely a specialist in this direction. His Introduction to Gryptogamic Botany, published in 1857, and his papers on “Vegetable Pathology” in the Gardener’s Chronicle in 1854 and onwards, show that he . had a very broad grasp of the whole domain of physiology and morphology as understood in those days. Moreover, it should be pointed out that Berkeley commenced his work as a field naturalist and collector, his earliest objects of study having been the Mollusca and other branches of zoology, as testified by his papers in the Zoological Joumal and the Magazine of Natural History, between 1828 and 1836. As a microscopist he was an assiduous and accurate worker, as is shown by his numerous drawings of the smaller Algae and Fungi, and by the admir- I

BERKSHIRE 223 able dissections of Mosses and Hepatics which he contributed ; his investigations into the potato murrain, caused b y Phytophthora infestans, and the grape mildew, to which he gave the name Oidium Tuckeri, and the pathogenic lungi of wheat rust, hop mildew, and various diseases of cabbage,, pears, coffee, onions, tomatoes, <kc., were important in results on the life-history of these pests, at a time when very little was known of such matters, and must always be considered in any historical account of the remarkable advances in the biology of these organisms which were made between 1850 and 1880 ; and when it is remembered that this work was done without any of the modern appliances or training of a properly equipped laboratory,, the significance of Berkeley’s genius as a pioneer gains considerably in importance. It is as the founder of. British mycology, however, that Berkeley’s name will live, in the history of botany, and his most important work is contained in the account of native British Fungi in Sir W. Hooker’s British Flora (1836), the Introduction to Cryptogamic Botany (1857), and in his Outlines of British Fungology (1860), together with his magnificent herbarium of over 9000 species now at Kew. This collection is enriched by numerous notes and sketches, and forms one of the most important type series in the world. Berkeley s writings abound in evidence of his appreciation of the labours of others, whether as collaborators with himself as a collector, as were Broome in England and Curtis in America, or as workers in foreign countries with whom he had corresponded or whose works he had studied, as. in the case of the Tulasnes, de Bary, Pringsheim, Fries, and other Continental workers engaged, like himself, in laying the foundations of modern cryptogamic botany. Berkeley died in July 1889. He was a man of refined and courteous bearing, an accomplished classical student, with the simple and modest habits that befit a man of true learning. A list of his publications will be found in the Catalogue of^ Scientific Papers of the Royal Society, and sketches of his life in Proc. B. S. vol. xlvii., 1890,.p. 9, by Sir Joseph Hooker, and Annals of Botany vol. xi., 1897, by Sir W. T. Thiselton-Dyer. (h. m. w.)

Berkhampstead, Great, a market town and railway station, in the Watford parliamentary division of Hertfordshire, England, 26 miles N.W. of London. The grammar school has been extended, and a high school for girls, on the same foundation, established. The sewerage is improved. A large chemical factory has been established. Area of ancient parish, of which the present parish and urban district is only part (since 1898), 4364 acres; population (1881), 4485; (1891), 5034; (1901), 5219. Berkshire, a south-eastern county of England bounded N. and H.E. by the Thames, S.E. by Surrey S. by Hampshire, and W. by Wilts. Area and Population.—The area of the ancient county is 462,224 acres, or 722 square miles, with a population in 1881 of 218,363 and m 1891 of 238,709, of whom 117,208 were males and 121,501 lemales, the number of persons per square mile being 331 and or acres to a person 1’91. In 1901 the preliminary census report gave the population as 254,931. The area of the administrative county, as given in the census returns of 1891, was 461,742 acres with a population of 236,163; in 1901 (including the county borough of Reading), a population of 252,580. But a slight alteration in the area was made in 1895, by the transference to Berks of the part of the parish of Hungerford in Wilts, and of the parish of Combe in Hampshire, and by the transference to Wilts of part of the parish of Shalbourn in Berks. The registration county comprises 574,298 acres, with a population in 1891 of 268,357, of whom 111,543 were urban and. 156,814 rural. Within the registration area the increase of population between 1881 and 1891 was 9-60 per cent. The excess of births over deaths between 1881 and 1891 was 34,690, but the increase in the resident population was only 20,727. The following table gives the numbers of marriages, births, and deaths, with the number of illegitimate births for 1880, 1890, and 1898