advancing £250,000 in 1880 for supplying seed to the impoverished tenants. She was devoted to the protection of animals and prevention of cruelty, and took up with characteristic zeal the cause of the costermongers’ donkeys, building stables for them on her Columbia market estate, and giving prizes for the best-kept animals. She helped to inaugurate the society for the prevention of cruelty to children, and was a keen supporter of the ragged school union. Missionary efforts of all sorts; hospitals and nursing; industrial homes and refuges; relief funds, &c., found in her a generous supporter. She was associated with Louisa Twining and Florence Nightingale; and in 1877–1878 raised the Turkish compassionate fund for the starving peasantry and fugitives in the Russo-Turkish War (for which she obtained the order of the Medjidieh, a solitary case of its conference on a woman). She relieved the distressed in far-off lands as well as at home, her helping hand being stretched out to the Dyaks of Borneo and the aborigines of Australia. She was a liberal patroness of the stage, literature and the arts, and delighted in knowing all the cultured people of the day. In short, her position in England for half a century may well be summed up in words attributed to King Edward VII., “after my mother (Queen Victoria) the most remarkable woman in the kingdom.”
BURDON-SANDERSON, SIR JOHN SCOTT, Bart. (1828–1905),
English physiologist, was born at West Jesmond, near Newcastle,
on the 21st of December 1828. A member of a well-known
Northumbrian family, he received his medical education at the
university of Edinburgh and at Paris. Settling in London, he
became medical officer of health for Paddington in 1856 and
four years later physician to the Middlesex and the Brompton
Consumption hospitals. When diphtheria appeared in England
in 1858 he was sent to investigate the disease at the different
points of outbreak, and in subsequent years he carried out a
number of similar inquiries, e.g. into the cattle plague and into
cholera in 1866. He became first principal of the Brown Institution
at Lambeth in 1871, and in 1874 was appointed Jodrell
professor of physiology at University College, London, retaining
that post till 1882. When the Waynflete chair of physiology
was established at Oxford in 1882, he was chosen to be its first
occupant, and immediately found himself the object of a furious
anti-vivisectionist agitation. The proposal that the university
should spend £10,000 in providing him with a suitable laboratory,
lecture-rooms, &c., in which to carry on his work, was strongly
opposed, by some on grounds of economy, but largely because
he was an upholder of the usefulness and necessity of experiments
upon animals. It was, however, eventually carried by a small
majority (88 to 85), and in the same year the Royal Society
awarded him a royal medal in recognition of his researches into
the electrical phenomena exhibited by plants and the relations
of minute organisms to disease, and of the services he had
rendered to physiology and pathology. In 1885 the university
of Oxford was asked to vote £500 a year for three years for
the purposes of the laboratory, then approaching completion.
This proposal was fought with the utmost bitterness by Sanderson’s
opponents, the anti-vivisectionists including E. A. Freeman,
John Ruskin and Bishop Mackarness of Oxford. Ultimately
the money was granted by 412 to 244 votes. In 1895 Sanderson
was appointed regius professor of medicine at Oxford, resigning
the post in 1904; in 1899 he was created a baronet. His attainments,
both in biology and medicine, brought him many honours.
He was Croonian lecturer to the Royal Society in 1867 and 1877
and to the Royal College of Physicians in 1891; gave the
Harveian oration before the College of Physicians in 1878;
acted as president of the British Association at Nottingham in
1893; and served on three royal commissions—Hospitals (1883),
Tuberculosis, Meat and Milk (1890), and University for London
(1892). He died at Oxford on the 23rd of November 1905.
BURDWAN, or Bardwan, a town of British India, in Bengal, which gives its name to a district and to a division. It has a station on the East Indian railway, 67 m. N.W. from Calcutta. Pop. (1901) 35,022. The town consists really of numerous villages scattered over an area of 9 sq. m., and is entirely rural in character. It contains several interesting ancient tombs, and at Nawab Hat, some 2 m. distant, is a group of 108 Siva lingam temples built in 1788. The place was formerly very unhealthy, but this has been to a large extent remedied by the establishment of water-works, a good supply of water being derived from the river Banka. Within the town, the principal objects of interest are the palaces and gardens of the maharaja. The chief educational institution is the Burdwan Raj college, which is entirely supported out of the maharaja’s estate.
The town owes its importance entirely to being the headquarters of the maharaja of Burdwan, the premier nobleman of lower Bengal, whose rent-roll is upwards of £300,000. The raj was founded in 1657 by Abu Ra Kapur, of the Kapur Khatri family of Kotli in Lahore, Punjab, whose descendants served in turn the Mogul emperors and the British government. The great prosperity of the raj was due to the excellent management of Maharaja Mahtab Chand (d. 1879), whose loyalty to the government—especially during the Santal rebellion of 1855 and the mutiny of 1857—was rewarded with the grant of a coat of arms in 1868 and the right to a personal salute of 13 guns in 1877. Maharaja Bijai Chand Mahtab (b. 1881), who succeeded his adoptive father in 1888, earned great distinction by the courage with which he risked his life to save that of Sir Andrew Fraser, the lieutenant-governor of Bengal, on the occasion of the attempt to assassinate him made by Bengali malcontents on the 7th of November 1908.
The District of Burdwan lies along the right bank of the river Bhagirathi or Hugli. It has an area of 2689 sq. m. It is a flat plain, and its scenery is uninteresting. Chief rivers are the Bhagirathi, Damodar, Ajai, Banka, Kunur and Khari, of which only the Bhagirathi is navigable by country cargo boats throughout the year. The district was acquired by the East India Company under the treaty with Nawab Mir Kasim in 1760, and confirmed by the emperor Shah Alam in 1765. The land revenue was fixed in perpetuity with the zemindar in 1793. In 1901 the population was 1,532,475, showing an increase of 10% in the decade. There are several indigo factories. The district suffered from drought in 1896–1897. The Eden Canal, 20 m. long, has been constructed for irrigation. The weaving of silk is the chief native industry. As regards European industries, Burdwan takes the first place in Bengal. It contains the great coal-field of Raniganj, first opened in 1874, with an output of more than three million tons. The Barrakur ironworks produce pig-iron, which is reported to be as good as that of Middlesbrough. Apart from Burdwan town and Raniganj, the chief places are the river-marts of Katwa and Kalna. The East Indian railway has several lines running through the district.
The Division of Burdwan comprises the six districts of Burdwan, Birbhum, Bankura, Midnapore, Hugli and Howrah, with a total area of 13,949 sq. m., and a population in 1901 of 8,240,076.
BUREAU (a Fr. word from burel or bureau, a coarse cloth used for coverings), a writing-table or desk (q.v.), also in America a low chest of drawers. From the meaning of “desk,” the word is applied to an office or place of business, and particularly a government department; in the United States the term is used of certain subdivisions of the executive departments, as the bureau of statistics, a division of the treasury department. The term “bureaucracy” is often employed to signify the concentration of administrative power in bureaux or departments, and the undue interference by officials not only in the details of government, but in matters outside the scope of state interference. The word is also frequently used in the sense of “red-tapism.”
BURFORD, a market town in the Woodstock parliamentary division of Oxfordshire, England, 18 m. W.N.W. of Oxford. Pop. (1901) 1146. It is pleasantly situated in the valley of the Windrush, the broad, picturesque main street sloping upward from the stream, beside which stands the fine church, to the summit of the ridge flanking the valley on the south, along which runs the high road from Oxford. The church of St John the Baptist has a nave and aisles, mainly Perpendicular in appearance owing to alterations in that period, but actually of
