BOU 



BOU 



harbours, as the body or hull of a ship : 

 thus, in the former sense, we say, a gra- 

 ve ly bottom, clayey-bottom, sandy-bot- 

 tom, Sec. and in the latter sense, a British 

 bottom a Dutch bottom, &c. 



By statute, certain commodities im- 

 ported in foreign bottoms, pay a duty 

 called petty customs, over and above 

 what they are liable to, if imported in 

 British bottoms. 



BOTTOMRY, in commerce, a marine 

 contract for the borrowing 1 of money upon 

 the keel or bottom of a ship ; that is to 

 say, when the master of a ship binds the 

 ship itself, that if the money be not paid 

 by the time appointed, the creditor shall 

 have the said ship. 



BOTTOMRY is also where a person 

 lends money to a merchant, who wants 

 it in traffic, and the lender is to be paid a 

 greater sum at the return of the ship, 

 standing 1 to the hazard of the voyage. On 

 which account, though the interest be 

 greater than what the law commonly al- 

 lows, yet it is not usury, because the mo- 

 ney being furnished at the lender's ha- 

 zard, if the ship perishes, he shares in 

 the ;oss. 



BOTTONY, a cross bottony, in herald- 

 ry, terminates at each end in three buds, 

 knots, or buttons, resembling 1 , in some 

 measure, the three-leaved grass. 



BOTTS. See OESTHIS.' 



BOUCME of court, the privilege of 

 having meat and drink at court, scot free. 

 This privilege is sometimes only extend- 

 ed to bread, beer, and wine ; and was an- 

 ciently in use as well in the houses of no- 

 blemen as in the king's court. 



BOUGUER (PETER), in biography, a 

 celebrated French mathematician, born 

 at Croisci, in Lower Bretagne, in Febru- 

 ary. 1698. His father, John, was profes- 

 sor of hydrography, and author of " A 

 Complete Treatise on Navigation." Young 

 Bouguer learnt mathematics of his fa- 

 ther, from the time he was able to speak, 

 and thus became a proficient in those 

 sciences while he was yet a child. He 

 was sent very early to the Jesuit's college 

 at Vannes, where he had the honour to 

 instruct his regent in the mathematics, 

 at eleven years of age. Two years after 

 this he had a public contest with a pro- 

 fessor of mathematics, upon a proposi- 

 tion which the latter had advanced er- 

 roneously ; and he triumphed over him ; 

 upon which the professor, unable to bear 

 the disgrace, left the country. Upon the 

 death of his father, he was appointed to 

 succeed in his office of hydrographer, af- 

 ter a public examination of his qualifica- 



tions, being then only fifteen years of 

 age ; an occupation which he discharged 

 with great respect and dignity at that 

 early age. In 1727, at the age of twenty- 

 nine, he obtained the prize proposed by 

 the Academy of Sciences, for the best 

 way of masting of ships. This first success 

 of Bouguer was soon after followed by 

 two others of the same kind ; he suc- 

 cessively gained the prizes of 1729 and 

 1731 ; the former for the best manner of 

 observing at sea the height of the stars; 

 and the latter, for the most advantageous 

 way of observing the declination of the 

 magnetic needle, or the variation of the 

 compass. 



In 1730, he was removed from the port 

 of Croisci to that of Havre, which brought 

 him into a nearer connection with the 

 Academy of Sciences, in which he obtain- 

 ed, in 1731, the place of associate geome- 

 trician, vacant by the promotion of Man- 

 pertuis to that of pensioner; and in 1735 

 he was promoted to the office of pension- 

 er astronomer. The same year he was 

 sent on the commission to South America, 

 along with Messieurs Godin, Condamine, 

 and Jussieu, to determine the measure of 

 the degrees of the meridian, and the fi- 

 gure of the earth. In this painful and 

 troublesome business, of ten years dura- 

 tion, chiefly among the lofty Cordelier 

 mountains, our author determined many 

 other new circumstances, beside the main 

 object of the voyage ; such as the expan- 

 sion and contraction of metals and other 

 substances, by the sudden and alternate 

 changes of heat arid cold among those 

 mountains; observations on the refrac- 

 tion of the atmosphere from the tops of 

 the same, with the singular phenomenon 

 of the sudden increase of the refraction, 

 when the star can be observed below the 

 line of the level ; the laws of the density 

 of the air at different heights, from ob- 

 servations made at different points of 

 these enormous mountains ; a determina- 

 tion that the mountains have an effect up- 

 on a plummet, though he did not assign 

 the exact quantity of it; a method of 

 estimating the errors committed by navi- 

 gators in determining their route ; a new 

 construction of the log for measuring a 

 ship's way : with several other useful im- 

 provements. 



Other inventions of Bouguer, made up- 

 on different occasions, were as follow : 

 the heliometei-, being a telescope with 

 two object glasses, affording a good me- 

 thod of measuring the diameters of the 

 larger planets with ease and exactness ; 

 his researches on the figure in which tw<- 



