Novella (acted 1632); Court Begger (acted 1632); City Witt; The Damoiselle or the New Ordinary. Five New Playes (1659) included The English Moor, or The Mock Marriage; The Love-Sick Court, or The Ambitious Politique; Covent Garden Weeded; The New Academy, or The New Exchange; and The Queen and Concubine. The Antipodes (acted 1638, pr. 1640); The Sparagus Garden (acted 1635, pr. 1640); A Joviall Crew, or the Merry Beggars (acted 1641, pr. 1652, revised in 1731 as an “opera”), and The Queenes Exchange (pr. 1657), were published separately. He collaborated with Thomas Heywood in The late Lancashire Witches (pr. 1634).
See A. W. Ward, History of English Dramatic Literature, vol. iii. pp. 125–131 (1899). The Dramatic Works of Richard Brome . . . were published in 1873.
BROMELIACEAE, in botany, a natural order of Monocotyledons, confined to tropical and sub-tropical America. It includes the pine-apple (fig. 1) and the so-called Spanish moss (fig. 2), a rootless plant, which hangs in long grey lichen-like festoons from the branches of trees, a native of Mexico and the southern United States; the water required for food is absorbed from the moisture in the air by peculiar hairs which cover the surface of the shoots.
 Fig. 1.—Fruit of the pine-apple (Ananas sativa), consisting of numerous flowers and bracts united together so as to form a collective or anthocarpous fruit. The crown of the pine-apple, c, consists of a series of empty bracts prolonged beyond the fruit. |
 (From The Botanical Magazine, by permission of Lovell, Reeve & Co.) Fig. 2.—Tillandsia usneoides, Spanish moss, slightly reduced. 1, Small branch with flower; 2, flower cut vertically; 3, section of seed of Bromelia. |
The plants are generally herbs with a much shortened stem bearing a rosette of leaves and a spike or panicle of flowers. They are eminently dry-country plants (xerophytes); the narrow leaves are protected from loss of water by a thick cuticle, and have a well-developed sheath which embraces the stem and forms, with the sheaths of the other leaves of the rosette, a basin in which water collects, with fragments of rotting leaves and the like. Peculiar hairs are developed on the inner surface of the sheath by which the water and dissolved substances are absorbed, thus helping to feed the plant. The leaf-margins are often spiny, and the leaf-spines of Puya chilensis are used by the natives as fish-hooks. Several species are grown as hot-house plants for the bright colour of their flowers or flower-bracts, e.g. species of Tillandsia, Billbergia, Aechmea and others.
BROMINE (symbol Br, atomic weight 79.96), a chemical element of the halogen group, which takes its name from its pungent unpleasant smell (βρῶμος, a stench). It was first isolated by A. J. Balard in 1826 from the salts in the waters of the Mediterranean. He established its elementary character, and his researches were amplified by K. J. Löwig (1803–1890) in Das Brom und seine chemischen Verhaltnisse (1829). Bromine does not occur in nature in the uncombined condition, but in combination with various metals is very widely but sparingly distributed. Potassium, sodium and magnesium bromides are found in mineral waters, in river and sea-water, and occasionally in marine plants and animals. Its chief commercial sources are the salt deposits at Stassfurt in Prussian Saxony, in which magnesium bromide is found associated with various chlorides, and the brines of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, U.S.A.; small quantities are obtained from the mother liquors of Chile saltpetre and kelp. In combination with silver it is found as the mineral bromargyrite (bromite).
Manufacture.—The chief centres of the bromine industry are Stassfurt and the central district of Michigan. It is manufactured from the magnesium bromide contained in “bittern” (the mother liquor of the salt industry), by two processes, the continuous and the periodic. The continuous process depends upon the decomposition of the bromide by chlorine, which is generated in special stills. A regular current of chlorine mixed with steam is led in at the bottom of a tall tower filled with broken bricks, and there meets a descending stream of hot bittern: bromine is liberated and is swept out of the tower together with some chlorine, by the current of steam, and then condensed in a worm. Any uncondensed bromine vapour is absorbed by moist iron borings, and the resulting iron bromide is used for the manufacture of potassium bromide. The periodic process depends on the interaction between manganese dioxide (pyrolusite), sulphuric acid, and a bromide, and the operation is carried out in sandstone stills heated to 60° C., the product being condensed as in the continuous process. The substitution of potassium chlorate for pyrolusite is recommended when calcium chloride is present in the bittern. The crude bromine is purified by repeated shaking with potassium, sodium or ferrous bromide and subsequent redistillation. Commercial bromine is rarely pure, the chief impurities present in it being chlorine, hydrobromic acid, and bromoform (M. Hermann, Annalen, 1855, 95, p. 211). E. Gessner (Berichte, 1876, 9, p. 1507) removes chlorine by repeated shaking with water, followed by distillation over sulphuric acid; hydrobromic acid is removed by distillation with pure manganese dioxide, or mercuric oxide, and the product dried over sulphuric acid. J. S. Stas, in his stoichiometric researches, prepared chemically pure bromine from potassium bromide, by converting it into the bromate which was purified by repeated crystallization. By heating the bromate it was partially converted into the bromide, and the resulting mixture was distilled with sulphuric acid. The distillate was further purified by digestion with milk of lime, precipitation with water, and further digestion with calcium bromide and barium oxide, and was finally redistilled.
Characters.—Bromine at ordinary temperatures is a mobile liquid of fine red colour, which appears almost black in thick layers. It boils at 59° C. According to Sir W. Ramsay and S. Young, bromine, when dried over sulphuric acid, boils at 57.65° C., and when dried over phosphorus pentoxide, boils at 58.85° C. (under a pressure of 755.8 mm.), forming a deep red vapour, which exerts an irritating and directly poisonous action on the respiratory organs. It solidifies at −21° C. (Quincke) to a dark brown solid. Its specific gravity is 3.18828 (0/4°), latent heat of fusion 16.185 calories, latent heat of vaporization 45.6 calories, specific heat 0.1071. The specific heat of bromine vapour, at constant pressure, is 0.05504 and at constant volume is 0.04251 (K. Strecker). Bromine is soluble in water, to the extent of 3.226 grammes of bromine per 100 grammes of solution at 15° C., the solubility being slightly increased by the presence of potassium bromide. The solution is of an orange-red colour, and is quite permanent in the dark, but on exposure to light, gradually becomes colourless, owing to decomposition into hydrobromic acid and oxygen. By cooling the aqueous solution, hyacinth-red octahedra of a crystalline hydrate of composition Br·4H2O or Br2·8H2O are obtained (Bakhuis Roozeboom, Zeits. phys. Chem., 1888, 2. p. 449). Bromine is readily soluble in chloroform, alcohol and ether.
Its chemical properties are in general intermediate between those of chlorine and iodine; thus it requires the presence of a catalytic agent, or a fairly high temperature, to bring about its union with hydrogen. It does not combine directly with oxygen, nitrogen or carbon. With the other elements it unites to form bromides, often with explosive violence; phosphorus detonates in liquid bromine and inflames in the vapour; iron is occasionally used to absorb bromine vapour, potassium reacts energetically, but sodium requires to be heated to 200° C. The chief use of bromine in analytical chemistry is based upon the oxidizing action of bromine water. Bromine and bromine water both bleach organic colouring matters.