a catalogue of the medicinal plants cultivated in the Oxford garden.—J. H. B.
BOBART, Jacob, an English botanist, but of German extraction, was the son of the preceding. He lived during the latter half of the seventeenth century. He succeeded his father as superintendent of the Oxford botanic garden, and he was associated with his father, Dr. Stephens, and Mr. Browne, in the publication of the second edition of the "Catalogus plantarum horti medici Oxoniensis." He also edited the second volume of Morison's Historia Plantarum in 1698. Linnæus named a genus of cyperaceous plants Bobartia, in honour of the two Bobarts.—J. H. B.
BOBLAYE, Emil le Puillon de, a French military engineer, born at Pontivy in the department of Morbihan, 1792; died at Paris, 1843. He was long employed in surveys of France, accompanied the French scientific expedition to the Morea, and was latterly engaged in the survey of Algeria. Boblaye published several memoirs on geological and geognostic subjects in the Mémoires du Museum, Annales des Sciences Naturelles, and Comptes rendus de l'Acad. des Sciences, and was also the author, in conjunction with Virlet, of the "Geognostic Description of the Morea," Paris, 1833, forming the first portion of the report upon the French exploration of that peninsula.—W. S. D.
* BOCANDE, Bertrand, a distinguished French naturalist and traveller, was born at Nantes at the beginning of the present century. M. Bocandé has travelled in tropical Africa, where he resided for seventeen or eighteen years, devoting his attention to the collection of facts connected with the topography and natural history of the region of the Senegambia, and the documents furnished by him have materially advanced our knowledge of the topography of that interesting country. By an intimate acquaintance with the Mandingo language, M. Bocandé has also been able to obtain an insight into the religious views of the people amongst whom he has resided so long, thus furnishing a key to the explanation of their institutions, which could never have been obtained by travellers merely passing through the district. The collections of objects of natural history made by him have also been very extensive. Of insects alone he has collected no fewer than forty-five thousand specimens. His writings consist of some memoirs in the Bulletins de la Société de Géographie, and a work entitled "Notes sur la Guinée Portugaise, ou Senegambie Méridionale."—W. S. D.
BOCANEGRA, Pedro Atanasio, was born at Granada, and died in 1688. He was a pupil of the canon Cano, and an exact imitator of Moya and Vandyck. In 1676 he became one of the king's painters, and this turned his head, and provoked the rivalry of Matias de Torres and Ardemans. Juan de Sevilla being the victor in competition for painting the Corpus Christi banners, Ardemans challenged him to a painting duel, and without any outline took his likeness in less than an hour. The brag, unable to bear his defeat, is said to have died of sheer vexation. The Granada cathedral possesses many of his works, among which the learned Cean Bermudez praises an altarpiece, representing San Pedro, Nolasco finding the choir of his convent occupied by the Virgin and a company of angels, and a Crucifixion, which he says might pass for a Vandyck.—W. T.
BOCARRO, Antonio. This Portuguese writer lived in the seventeenth century, and succeeded Diego de Conto in the distinguished post of royal historiographer of India. He wrote the third decade of Portuguese Asia, a work commenced already by the celebrated Jaen Barros, and still preserved in manuscript. The style of this writer is considered very agreeable and simple, although somewhat prolix. Jöcher has a great opinion of Bocarro's ability and talents as a historian.—A. C. M.
BOCARRO FRANCEZ, Manoel, a Portuguese physician and astronomer, born at Lisbon in 1588, studied in France, and lived in intimacy with the most eminent men of the seventeenth century. He is best known as an astronomer, and wrote some observations on a comet which appeared in 1619. He was also the author of some highly esteemed verses in his mother tongue, and of a short history of Portugal in Latin, and several other works are attributed to him. Died at Florence, 1662.—W. S. D.
BOCCACCINO, Boccaccio, born at Cremona in 1460, and said to have been a pupil of Perugino, and one of the instructors of Garofalo. His principal works are a "Marriage of the Virgin," a "Madonna," a "St. Vincent," a "St. Antonio," and a beautiful figure in a dome of the "Birth of the Madonna," all at Cremona, where he died in 1518. Lanzi says he was inferior to Perugino in the air of his heads, in composition, light and shadow; but richer in his drapery, more varied in his colour, more spirited and less archaic in his attitudes, and not less harmonious in architecture and landscape.—Camillo, his son, surnamed "Il Boccalini," surpassed his father, and abandoned his dry colour, following a style much more pleasing and grand, as great at Cremona as the luckless Correggio, his contemporary, was at Parma—ungrateful, blind Parma. He studied hard and improved fast. At the early age of twenty-six he painted a "St. John" and the three companion saints, in the cupola of the church of St. Sigismund at Cremona, that in gusto and daring foreshortening approached Correggio. His best works after this are a "Raising of Lazarus" and the "Adulteress before Christ," surrounded by friezes of angels, "finely composed and designed in the greatest style." This genius of Cremona died in his prime (O envious death! with thy perpetual black extinguisher) in 1546, aged only thirty-five. After the lapse and sleep of more than a hundred years, this painter's family gave birth to Francesco Boccaccino, born at Cremona in 1680. He studied at Rome under Brandi and Marotti, and painted "in a good style" historical easel pictures and church scenes, chiefly small, imitating sometimes Albano's mythological subjects. He died in 1750.—W. T.
BOCCACCIO, Giovanni, "One of the most illustrious writers in the prose of the vulgar tongue that has ever appeared in Italy, and whose very name is alone equal to a thousand eulogies." Such is the estimate, perhaps not exaggerated, which Mazzuchelli gives of one whose fame stands as high to-day as it did in his own times. One of that distinguished triad who made the tercento glorious in Italy—the great reformer, if not creator, of Italian prose, as Dante and Petrarch were of Italian poetry. Of the time and place of his birth we cannot venture to speak with accuracy. "The cradle of Boccaccio," says another of his countrymen, "is surrounded with darkness," and he accounts for that fact on the supposition, that being an illegitimate child, neither he nor his father had any wish to dissipate the obscurity. His father was the descendant of a family who at one period (as Boccaccio himself tells us) possessed an estate and castle at Certaldo, on the banks of the Elza, in the valley of that name, some ten miles from Florence, whither they had emigrated, and became Florentine citizens. Michaele, or, as he was called, Michellino, shortened to Chellino, was the father of a merchant, who went, for distinction, by the name of Boccaccio de Chellino, and this latter, during a protracted visit to Paris, became intimate with a Frenchwoman, who was destined to be the mother of Giovanni. Who she was no one can tell, but it is asserted by Villani, without any evidence to support the assertion, that she was nobly born. Some allege, too, that the merchant married her, but this is inconsistent with the fact of the poet's having obtained a bull of legitimization from the pope to enable him to take holy orders, unless, indeed, the marriage was after Giovanni's birth. Nay, it is even doubted who his mother really was, as the merchant seems to have been a thorough contrabandista in the affairs of love, so that it would be a very idle task to investigate his maternity. Whoever she was, she died soon after the birth of her son, and thus, says Baldelli, she lost the glory of being called the mother of such a son, and the world the knowledge of her name. The important fact for the world, however, is that Giovanni came into it somewhere, and somehow, and sometime in the year 1313, as we learn inferentially from a letter of Petrarch, who, himself born in 1304, tells Boccaccio that he was his senior by nine years. To Florence we find him brought in his childhood, and, even in his seventh year, giving indications of his genius by the composition of tales in verse, which procured him the title of poet amongst his acquaintances. His father had put him under the best master in Florence, Giovanni da Strado, but determined that he too should be a merchant, and so, when he found the boy taking to poetry, he at once turned him from figures of rhetoric to figures of arithmetic, and Strado gave place to a brother merchant, with whom the boy made many journeys, travelling as far as Naples and Paris. Six years were so passed, and Giovanni returned to Florence only to convince his father that he was more suited for literature than for trade. But literature without a profession was not in the comprehension of the man of business, and so he set the youth to learn the canon law. This was as distasteful as the counting-house, and after many ineffectual struggles to subdue a taste that would not be controlled, the father at length left his son to pursue his own devices.
