York, on the 27th of May 1818. After her marriage in 1840 she established a periodical called The Lily, which had some success. In 1849 she took up the idea—previously originated by Mrs Elizabeth Smith Miller—of a reform in woman’s dress, and the wearing of a short skirt, with loose trousers, gathered round the ankles. The name of “bloomers” gradually became popularly attached to any divided-skirt or knickerbocker dress for women. Until her death on the 30th of December 1894 Mrs Bloomer took a prominent part in the temperance campaign and in that for woman’s suffrage.
BLOOMFIELD, MAURICE (1855–), American Sanskrit
scholar, was born on the 23rd of February 1855, in Bielitz,
Austrian Silesia. He went to the United States in 1867, and ten
years later graduated from Furman University, Greenville, South
Carolina. He then studied Sanskrit at Yale, under W. D.
Whitney, and at Johns Hopkins, to which university he returned
as associate professor in 1881 after a stay of two years in Berlin
and Leipzig, and soon afterwards was promoted professor of
Sanskrit and comparative philology. His papers in the American Journal of Philology number a few in comparative linguistics,
such as those on assimilation and adaptation in congeneric
classes of words, and many valuable “Contributions to the
Interpretation of the Vedas,” and he is best known as a student
of the Vedas. He translated, for Max-Müller’s Sacred Books of the East, the Hymns of the Atharva-Veda (1897); contributed to
the Bühler-Kielhorn Grundriss der indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde the section “The Atharva-Veda and the Gopatha
Brahmana” (1899); was first to edit the Kauçika-Sūtra (1890),
and in 1907 published, in the Harvard Oriental series, A Vedic
Concordance. In 1905 he published Cerberus, the Dog of Hades, a
study in comparative mythology.
BLOOMFIELD, ROBERT (1766–1823), English poet, was born
of humble parents at the village of Honington, Suffolk, on the 3rd
of December 1766. He was apprenticed at the age of eleven to a
farmer, but he was too small and frail for field labour, and four
years later he came to London to work for a shoemaker. The
poem that made his reputation, The Farmer’s Boy, was written
in a garret in Bell Alley. The manuscript, declined by several
publishers, fell into the hands of Capell Lofft, who arranged for
its publication with woodcuts by Bewick in 1800. The success of
the poem was remarkable, over 25,000 copies being sold in the
next two years. His reputation was increased by the appearance
of his Rural Tales (1802), News from the Farm (1804), Wild Flowers (1806) and The Banks of the Wye (1811). Influential
friends attempted to provide for Bloomfield, but ill-health and
possibly faults of temperament prevented the success of these
efforts, and the poet died in poverty at Shefford, Bedfordshire,
on the 19th of August 1823. His Remains in Poetry and Verse
appeared in 1824.
BLOOMFIELD, a town of Essex county, New Jersey, U.S.A.,
about 12 m. W. of New York, and directly adjoining the city of
Newark on the N. Pop. (1900) 9668, of whom 2267 were foreign-born;
(1905, state census) 11,668; (1910), 15,070. Area, 5.42 sq. m.
Bloomfield is served by the Erie, and the Delaware, Lackawanna
& Western railways, and by several electric lines connecting
with Newark, Montclair, Orange, East Orange and other
neighbouring places. It is a residential suburb of Newark and
New York, is the seat of a German theological school (Presbyterian,
1869) and has the Jarvie Memorial library (1902). There
is a Central Green, and in 1908 land was acquired for another
park. Among the town’s manufactures are silk and woollen
goods, paper, electric elevators, electric lamps, rubber goods,
safety pins, hats, cream separators, brushes and novelties. The
value of the town’s factory products increased from $3,370,924
in 1900 to $4,645,483 in 1905, or 37.8%. First settled about
1670–1675 by the Dutch and by New Englanders from the
Newark colony, Bloomfield was long a part of Newark, the
principal settlement at first being known as Wardsesson. In
1796 it was named Bloomfield in honour of General Joseph
Bloomfield (1753–1823), who served (1775–1778) in the War of
American Independence, reaching the rank of major, was
governor of New Jersey in 1801–1802 and 1803–1812, brigadier-general in the United States army during the War of 1812, and
a Democratic representative in Congress from 1817 to 1821.
The township of Bloomfield was incorporated in 1812. From it
were subsequently set off Belleville (1839), Montclair (1868) and
Glen Ridge (1895).
BLOOMINGTON, a city and the county-seat of McLean
county, Illinois, U.S.A., in the central part of the state, about
125 m. S.W. of Chicago. Pop. (1890) 20,484; (1900) 23,286,
of whom 3611 were foreign-born, there being a large German
element; (1910 census) 25,768. The city is served by the
Chicago & Alton, the Illinois Central, the Cleveland, Chicago,
Cincinnati & St Louis, and the Lake Erie & Western railways,
and by electric inter-urban lines. Bloomington is the seat of
the Illinois Wesleyan University (Methodist Episcopal, co-educational,
founded in 1850), which comprises a college of
liberal arts, an academy, a college of law, a college of music and
a school of oratory, and in 1907 had 1350 students. In the town
of Normal (pop. in 1900, 3795), 2 m. north of Bloomington, are
the Illinois State Normal University (opened at Bloomington
in 1857 and removed to its present site in 1860), one of the first
normal schools in the Middle West, and the state soldiers’
orphans’ home (1869). Bloomington has a public library, and
Franklin and Miller parks; among its principal buildings are
the court house, built of marble, and the Y.M.C.A. building.
Among the manufacturing establishments are foundries and
machine shops, including the large shops of the Chicago & Alton
railway, slaughtering and meat-packing establishments, flour
and grist mills, printing and publishing establishments, a caramel
factory and lumber factories. The value of the city’s factory
products increased from $3,011,899 in 1900 to $5,777,000 in
1905, or 91.8%. There are valuable coal mines in and near
the city, and the city is situated in a fine farming region.
Bloomington derives its name from Blooming Grove, a small
forest which was crossed by the trails leading from the Galena
lead mines to Southern Illinois, from Lake Michigan to St Louis,
and from the Eastern to the far Western states. The first settlement
was made in 1822, but the town was not formally founded
until 1831, when it became the county-seat of McLean county.
The first city charter was obtained in 1850, and in 1857 the
public school system was established. In 1856 Bloomington
was the meeting place of a state convention called by the Illinois
editors who were opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Bill (see
Decatur). This was the first convention of the Republican
party in Illinois; among the delegates were Abraham Lincoln,
Richard Yates, John M. Palmer and Owen Lovejoy. The city
has been the residence of a number of prominent men, including
David Davis (1815–1886), an associate justice of the United
States Supreme Court in 1862–1877, a member of the United
States Senate in 1877–1883, and president pro tempore of the
Senate in 1881–1883; Governor John M. Hamilton (1847–1905),
Governor Joseph W. Fifer (b. 1840); and Adlai Ewing
Stevenson (b. 1835), a Democratic representative in Congress in
1875–1877 and 1879–1881, and vice-president of the United
States in 1893–1897. Bloomington’s prosperity increased after
1867, when coal was first successfully mined in the vicinity.
In the Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for 1905 may be found a paper, “The Bloomington Convention of 1856 and Those Who Participated in it.”
BLOOMINGTON, a city and the county-seat of Monroe county,
Indiana, U.S.A., about 45 m. S. by W. of Indianapolis. Pop.
(1890) 4018; (1900) 6460, including 396 negroes; (1910) 8838.
It is served by the Chicago, Indianapolis & Louisville and the
Indianapolis Southern (Illinois Central) railways. Bloomington
is the seat of the Indiana University (co-educational since 1868),
established as a state seminary in 1820, and as Indiana College
in 1828, and chartered as the State university in 1838; in 1907–1908
it had 80 instructors, 2051 students, and a library of 65,000
volumes; its school of law was established in 1842, suspended
in 1877 and re-established in 1889; its school of medicine was
established in 1903; but most of the medical course is given
in Indianapolis; a graduate school was organized in 1904; and
a summer school (or summer term of eleven weeks) was first
