BRANDENBURG BRANDYW1NE. 



661 



that the number of Bramins respectable for know- 

 ledge and virtue is very small ; that the great body 

 of them are devoted to ambition, intrigue, and vo- 

 luptuousness, and that their character is disgraced by 

 avarice, meanness, and cruelty. Their charity ex- 

 tends only to those of their own cast. The objects 

 of their worship, besides their innumerable gods, are 

 almost every species of animals, and a variety of 

 malignant demons. The transmigration of souls is 

 one of their essential doctrines, and they believe in 

 the existence of a hell. Some of the ceremonies of 

 the Braminical worship are horrible : some are more 

 licentious than the orgies of Bacchus. The sacrifices 

 Commonly consist of vegetables, but animals are 

 sometimes sacrificed, and the burning of widows is a 

 relic of the horrid practice of offering human victims. 

 See Indian Mythology. 



BRANDENBURG, mark or marquisate of; one of the 

 most extensive districts in the former circle of Upper 

 Saxony. The soil is, in some parts, fertile, but mostly 

 sandy, and fit for grain. It is rich in wood, fish, flax, 

 hemp, hops, tobacco, and pastures, particularly for 

 sheep ; it also produces lime, salt-petre, turf, and 

 some iron, &C. B. carries on an active trade in 

 manufactured articles, and is well situated for com- 

 merce, since it has many canals, rivers, lakes, and 

 many towns lying on them. Most of the inhabitants 

 profess the Lutheran faith ; the rest are Calvinists. 

 From 1685 to 1688, many French refugees, Walloons, 

 and inhabitants of Lorraine and of the Palatinate, 

 settled in the mark. During the reign of Frederic 

 II., prior to 1777, more than 10,000 families took up 

 their residence there. The country is watered by the 

 Elbe, Spree, Havel, Oder, Wartha, Netze, and Ucker. 

 The district of B. is divided into the Electoral Mark, 

 and the New Mark. I. The former includes, 1. the 

 Old Mark (capital Stendal) ; 2. the Priegnitz (capi- 

 tal Perleberg) ; 3. the Middle Mark (capital Berlin) ; 

 4. the Ucker Mark (capital Prenglau). II. The New 

 Mark (capital Custrin) receives its name from this 

 circumstance, that the elector Frederic II. redeemed 

 it, in 1455, from the knights of the Teutonic order, 

 to whom it had been pledged until that period. At 

 present, B. is the most important of the Prussian 

 states, including as it does, the capital (Berlin), and 

 the governments of Potsdam and Frankfort. It con- 

 tains, upon 15,800 square miles, 1,335,160 inhabi- 

 tants, and 150 towns, &c. The first people who are 

 known to have inhabitated B. were the Suevi. They 

 were succeeded by the Sclavonians, a barbarous peo- 

 ple, whom Henry I. conquered and converted to 

 Christianity in the early part of the tenth cen- 

 tury. The government was first conferred on a Saxon 

 count, and did not become hereditary till the time of 

 Albert, whose son was raised to the dignity of elector 

 in 1100. This race becoming extinct, Charles IV. 

 assigned the electorate to his son Sigismund, who 

 became emperor in 1415, and sold the region to Fre- 

 deric, burgrave of Nuremberg, the ancestor of the 

 present reigning family. Frederic William the 

 Great made various accessions to the territories of 

 his ancestors, and obliged the king of Poland, in 

 1 656, to declare Prussia an independent state. The 

 Old Mark was ceded to Napoleon in 1807, and 

 formed part of the kingdom of Westphalia ; but it 

 was restored to Prussia in 1814. The elector of B. 

 held the seventh rank among the electors of the 

 empire, and had five votes in the council of princes. 



BRANDENBURG ; capital of the province of the same 

 name (q. v.), on the Havel, thirty miles west of Ber- 

 lin, formerly the residence of the reigning family of 

 Prussia. It contains 12,000 inhabitants. 



BRANDES, Ernest; a learned and able German 

 scholar and statesman, was born at Hanover in 1758. 

 Happily endowed by nature, and educated under 



favourable circumstances, he afterwards extended his 

 views by travel, by his connexion with public affairs, 

 by his intercourse with the best society, and by an 

 intimate union with the greatest scholars in Germany. 

 From 1775 to 1788, he studied at Gottingen, of which 

 he afterwards became the benefactor, when the go- 

 vernment of Hanover appointed him secretary of the 

 cabinet, and intrusted him with the chief direction of 

 the aflairs of the university. During a tour which 

 he made through Germany and France (1780-81) his 

 attention was particularly drawn to the theatres of Paris 

 and Vienna, and he gave his opinion concerning them 

 in his well-known remarks upon the theatres of 

 London, Paris, and Vienna. During his residence 

 in England, in the winter of 1784, 1785, he formed 

 many literary and political connexions, besides gain- 

 ing a complete knowledge of the English constitution. 

 His journey gave his mind a political turn. After 

 having been appointed to fill a number of honourable 

 offices, he was made a member of the privy council. 

 When the French took possession of Hanover, in 

 1803, he was one of the delegates appointed to treat 

 with Mortier and remained a member of the govern- 

 ment, until the committee of administration was 

 established by the victors. B. had gained so much 

 respect, that his death, in 1810, was lamented as a 

 public calamity. Great powers of observation, and 

 an extensive knowledge of the world, are displayed 

 in all his works. 



BRANDT, Nicholas or Sebastian ; a German chemist 

 of the seventeenth century, usually considered the 

 discoverer of phosphorus. Leibnitz mentions him 

 as a chemist of Hamburg, who, during a course of 

 experiments on urine, for the purpose of discovering 

 a solvent which would convert silver into gold, acci- 

 dentally produced phosphorus, in 1667 or 1669. He 

 communicated his discovery to another chemist, who 

 showed it to Leibnitz and Boyle. 



BRANDT, Sebastian (named Titio), born at Strasburg, 

 in 1458, died there in 1520. He studied law at Bale, 

 where he was graduated ; and delivered lectures on 

 this science for many years with great applause. He 

 was still more distinguished for his poetical talents, and 

 the emperor Maximilian I. invited him several times 

 to his court. He has immortalized himself by a poem 

 called the Ship of Fools, or the Ship from the Land 

 of Folly, which satirizes the crimes and follies of his 

 age, first published at Bale, 1494, 4to. Four editions 

 appeared in one year. It has since been repeatedly 

 printed and translated into all the languages of 

 Europe. In Germany, it was, for about a century, 

 truly a national book, so well known and esteemed 

 by all classes, that the celebrated preacher Geiler of 

 Kaisersberg delivered public lectures upon it from the 

 pulpit at Strasburg. In this work, we find a collec- 

 tion of moral instructions and satires upon the crimes, 

 vices, and abuses, common both in public and private 

 life. The book is divided into a hundred and thir- 

 teen chapters, which, however, have no connexion 

 with each other. The descriptions are not, in gene- 

 ral, poetic, but still contain many happy and beauti- 

 ful passages, often display learning, and not seldom 

 vigour ; and the Ship of Fools will always be a valu- 

 able book, full of sound reasoning, pure morality, 

 clear and bold thoughts, and knowledge of man- 

 kind. It has been republished by Hagen in his 

 Fool's Books. 



BRANDY. See Distillation. 



BRANDYWINE ; a small river which rises in the state 

 of Pennsylvania, passes into the state of Delaware, 

 and, after a course of about forty-five miles, joins the 

 Christiana, two miles below Wilmington. It abounds 

 in favourable sites for the application of water-power ; 

 and the Brandy wine flour mills form the finest collec- 

 tion of the kind in the United States. This river is 



