stances permit, to enjoin confinement to a warm room or
removal to a more genial climate during the winter months.When expectoration is attended with difficulty, such ramedies as squill in combination with ammonia may prove useful. When, on the other hand, bronchorrhcea exists, astringents are called for. The inhalation of vapour contain ing iodine or turpentine is often followed with marked benefit in this way. Where breathlessness accompanies the disease, besides the use of ethereal preparations, marked relief is often derived from large doses of iodide of potassium. Counter-irritation to the chest with turpentine, mustard, or croton oil is generally attended with good results. In aged and weak persons stimulants are an indispensable part of the treatment. Acute exacerbations of the disease, which are so apt to arise in the chronic form, must be dealt with on the principles already indicated in treating of acute bronchitis.
BRÖNDSTED, Peter Oluf, archaeologist, was the son of a Danish clergyman, and was born at Horsens in Jutland on 17th November 1781. He received his academical educa tion at the university of Copenhagen ; and in 1 802 he visited Paris in company with his friend Koes. After remaining there two years, they went together to Italy. Both were zealously attached to the study of antiquities ; and congeniality of tastes and pursuits induced them both, in 1810, to join Baron Stackelberg, Von Haller, and Linckh of Stuttgard, in an expedition to Greece, where they examined with attention the interesting remains of ancient art, and engaged with ardour in excavations among the ruins, which were carried on, especially by Brondsted and Stackelberg, with very interesting results. The discoveries Brondsted made were made public in several works, which show learn ing and sagacity such as have seldom been applied to the elucidation of antiquity with happier results. After three years of active researches in Greece, Brondsted returned to Copenhagen, where, as a reward for his labours, he was appointed professor of Greek in the university. He now beg-an to arrange and prepare for publication the vast materials he had collected during his travels ; but finding that Copenhagen did not afford him -the desired facilities, he exchanged his professorship for the office of Danish envoy at the papal court in 1818, and took up his abode at Rome. He also, in 1820 and 1821, went to Sicily and the Ionian Isles to collect additional materials for his great work ; and when the artistic illustrations were completed, he obtained leave to visit Paris to superintend the publica tion. In 1826, he came over to London, chiefly with a view to study the Elgin marbles and other- remains of anti quity in the British Museum, and became acquainted with the principal archaeologists of England.
He returned to Copenhagen in 1832, when he immedi ately received the appointment of director of the royal museum of antiquities, and the professorship of archaeology and philology. His merits were ten years afterwards further rewarded with the honourable office of rector of the univer sity ; but an unlucky fall from his horse caused the death of this eminent man on the2Gth June 1842. His principal work was the Travels and Archaeological Researches in Greece, published in German and French, 1826-30. His dissertations on points of ancient art are very numerous.
BRONGNIART, Alexandre, a distinguished French mineralogist, was the son of the eminent architect who designed the Bourse and other public buildings of Paris, and was born in that city in 1770. At an early age he joined the army of the Pyrenees; but having committed some slight political offence, he was thrown into prison, and detained there for some time. On his release he was appointed professor of natural history in the College des Quatre Nations, and soon after succeeded Haiiy as professor in the school of mines. In 1800 he was made director of the SeVres porcelain factory, in which he revived the almost forgotten art of painting on glass. He did not confine himself entirely to mineralogy, for it is to him that we owe the division of Reptiles into the four orders of Saurians, Batrachians, Chelonians, and Ophidians. In 1816 he was elected into the Academy ; and in the following year he visited the Alps of Switzerland and Italy, and afterwards Sweden and Norway. The result of his researches he published from time to time in the Journal des Mines and Dictionnaire des Sciences Naturelles. He died at Paris, October 7, 1847.
His principal works are Traite clemcntaire dc mineralogie ap- pliquie aux Arts ; the Tableau des terrains qui composcnt Vecorcc dv, globe, oti Essai sur la structure dc la partic connuc de la tcrrc ; and the Traite des Arts ceramiqucs 1845. Brongniart was also the co adjutor of Cuvier in the admirable Essai sur la rjioyraphic mineralo- gique des environs de Paris.
BRONTE, a city of Sicily in the intendency of Catania, It stands in a healthy situation at the western foot of Mount Etna, on the river Giaretta, near a celebrated water fall. It has considerable manufactures of linen and woolleu cloths, and some paper-mills. Good wine is produced in the neighbourhood. Bronte is of comparatively modern origin, having all been built since the 16th century. It gave the title of duke to Lord Nelson. Population, 14,589.
BRONTE, Charlotte, modern English novelist, was born on the 21st April 1816. Her father, the Rev. Patrick Bronte, was a native of county Down, Ireland; her mother, Maria Bran well, was of Cornish family. At the date of his marriage, in 1812, Mr Bronte held the living of Hartshead in Yorkshire, and there his to eldest daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, were born. In 1815 he removed to Thornton, in the parish of Bradford, where Charlotte, her brother Patrick Branwell, and her younger sisters, Emily and Anne, were born. In 1820 he was presented to the living of Haworth, and removed in that year to the parsonage, a bleak and solitary house, standing close by the churchyard and backed by a wide expanse of moorland. Mrs Bronte died soon after their removal, and the little family of young children were left to educate and train themselves. They saw little of their father, whose health was bad, and who seems to have been eccentric in his modes of thinking and acting. The charge of the little flock devolved upon the eldest daughter, a girl of between seven and eight when her mother died ; and, under the peculiar circum stances of their life, the children s intellectual powers and sympathies developed with rapidity. Utterly deprived of all companions of their own age, with none of the usual outlets for their pent-up energies, they lived in a little world of their own. The harsh realities around them, the bleak scenery, the coarse and rugged natures of the few inha bitants with whom they came in contact, only impelled them to construct for themselves an ideal world, modelled after their own strange and untrained imaginations, in which they found satisfaction and reality. By the time Charlotte Bronte was thirteen years of age, it had become her constant habit, and one of her few pleasures, to weave imaginary tales, idealizing her favourite historical heroes, and bodying forth in narrative form her own thoughts and feelings. Nor was she alone in this curious occupation ; all the family took part in the composition of juvenile stories and magazine articles. It Mas a strange training for a child, boding little good for her future happiness when thrown into the ordinary routine of life.
family circle was the entering of the two eldest girls, in 1824, at a school recently opened at Cowan s Bridge, near Haworth, and intended for daughters of clergymen. A vivid picture of this school, and one which Miss Bronto always maintained was not over-coloured, is presented in
Jane Eyre, for the Lowood of that story is Cowan s Bridge