BEG 
Bed of justice, in the French customs, a 
throne upon which the king used to be seated 
when lie went to the parliament. The king 
never held a bed of justice unless for affairs 
that concerned the state, and then all the offi- 
cers of parliament were clothed in scarlet 
robes. 
Bed of the carriage of a great gun, a thick 
plank that lies under the piece, being in fact 
the body of the carriage. 
Bed, in masonry, a course or range of 
stones; and the joint of the bed is the mortar 
between two stones placed over each other. 
BEDCHAMBER, lords of, in the Bri- 
tish customs, 14 lords who attend in their 
turns, each a week, during which time they 
lie in the king’s bed-chamber, and wait on 
him when he dines in private. Their salary 
is 1000/. per annum. The first of these is 
called groom of the stole. There are also 
twelve grooms of the bed-chamber. 
BEDA, a sacred book of the religion and 
laws of the brahmins of Hindustan, called also 
veda. 
BEDOUINS, in the Arabian customs, 
tribes of Arabs, who live in tents, and are dis- 
persed all over Arabia, Egypt, and the north, 
of Africa. 
BEE, in zoology. See Apis. 
BEECH-galls, hard protuberances found 
on the leaves of the beech, wherein are lodg- 
ed the maggots of a certain fly. These galls 
are of an oblong figure and somewhat flatted. 
They resemble the stone of a plum in shape, 
and are very hard. In each gall there is single 
cavity inhabited by a white worm, which in 
time passes through the nymph state into that 
of the fly, to which it owes its origin. 
Be E c H-nyast, the fruit of the beech-tree, 
said to be good for fattening hogs, deer, Sec. 
and to have supplied men instead of bread. 
The island of Chios sustained a siege by means 
of mast. 
Beech-ozV, an oil drawn by expression 
from the mast of the beech-tree, after it has 
been shelled and pounded. This oil is very 
common in some parts of France, and used 
instead of butter ; but most of those who take 
a great deal of it, complain of pains and a 
heaviness of the stomach. 
BEELE, a kind of pick-ax, used by the 
miners for separating the ores from the rocks 
in which they lie : this instrument is called a 
tubber by the miners of Cornwall. 
BEER, a common and well-known liquor, 
made with malt and hops, and used in those 
parts of Europe where vines will not grow, 
and where cyder is scarce. See Brewing, 
See. 
BEET, in botany. See Beta. 
BEETLE, in entomology, a common Eng- 
lish name for all insects that are furnished 
with shelly wing-cases; those which have 
them divided by a straight suture are pro- 
perly beeties, and belong to the coleoptera 
Order. The scarabaei are beetles in the 
strictest sense of the word. 
BEGGAR. See Vagrant. 
BEGIIARDI, a certain sect of Christians 
which arose in Germany, and in the Low- 
countries, about the end of the thirteenth 
.century. They made profession of a monas- 
tical life, without observing celibacy ; and 
maintained, if they are not scandalized by 
the monks) that man could become as per- 
fect in this life as he shall be in heaven ; that j 
every intellectual nature is of itself happy, J 
BEL 
without the succour of grace; and that he 
who is in this state of perfection ought to per- 
form no good works, nor worship the host. 
BEGLEHBEG, a governor of one of the 
principal governments in the Turkish em- 
pire. There are two sorts of begleibegs; 
the one have a certain revenue assigned upon 
the cities, boroughs, and villages of their go- 
vernment, which they raise by power of the 
commission granted to them by the sultan ; 
the others have a certain rent paid by the 
treasurer of the grand signior. r i hey are be- 
come almost independent, and have under 
their jurisdiction several sangiacs, or parti- 
cular governments, and begs, agas, and other 
officers who obey them. 
BEGONIA, in botany, a genus of plants of 
the monoeeia polyandria class and order; the 
character* of which are: the flowers are ot two 
kinds ; the one is the male flower, with no cal. 
but many petals, some broader, and others 
narrower ; the other, which produces the em- 
bryo fruit, is of the rosaceous sort, and is 
composed of several petals, arranged in a 
circular form, and placed on a foliated cup, 
which finally becomes a trigonal alated caps, 
and containing small seeds. There are 13 
species, chiefly stove plants. 
BEGUINS, congregations of devout young 
women, who maintain themselves by the 
work of their hands, leading a middle kind of 
life between the secular and religious. These 
societies consist of several houses placed to- 
gether in one inclosure, with one or more 
churches, according to the number of be- 
gums. There is in every house a prioress, 
without whose leave they cannot stir out. 
Their vow is conceived in these terms : ‘ I 
promise to be obedient anti chaste, as long as 
1 continue in tiiis beguinage.’ They observe 
a three years noviciate, before they take the 
habit; and the rector of the parish is their su- 
perior, but. can do nothing without the advice 
of eight beguins. They were formerly es- 
tablished in several parts of Flanders. 
BEHEADING, a capital punishment 
among the Romans: it was performed at first 
with an ax, but afterwards with a sword, as 
was formerly the case in Holland and France. 
In France, however, during the last 15 years 
the guillotine has been used for the purpose 
of dispatching criminals ; and in the course 
of that space of time a multitude of the most 
loyal, virtuous, and most honourable men in 
Europe, for actions the most praiseworthy, 
have been cruelly murdered by that instru- 
ment. 
BEHEN, in the materia medica, the name 
of two roots, the one white the other red, 
both accounted cordials and restorative. 
BEJAR1A, a genus of the dodecandria 
monogynia class and order: the essential cha- 
racter is; calyx seven-cleft; petals seven; stam. 
fourteen ; berry seven-celled, many-seeded. 
There are two species, one a tree and the 
other a shrub, of New Granada. r I he tree 
has purple flowers, and the shrub flesh-co- 
loured, something allied to the rhododen- 
drons. 
BEIZA, orBEiZATH, in Hebrew antiquity, 
a word signifying an egg, was a certain mea- 
sure in use among the Jews. The beiza was 
likewise a gold coin, weighing forty drachms, 
among the Persians. 
BELAY, in the sea-language, is to make 
fast the ropes in their proper places. 
BE LEM N FEES, in natural history, are 
BEL 213 
fossils, composed of several thin boats or 
crusts, encircling one another, and all of a 
striated texture ; they have usually a hollow 
in the middle, of a conical shape; sometimes 
empty, and' sometimes filled up with spar, 
pyrites, or a marine shell of the straight con- 
camerated kind. They have usually a chink 
running down the whole length of the body, 
and sometimes two or three ; but the addi- 
tional ones usually begin at- the apex of the 
stone, and run up but a little way. Their 
figure is sometimes conic, sometimes cyiirt- 
dric: some are of all the intermediate, figures 
between conic and cylindric, and some al- 
most orbicular. They are of various sizes, 
frofti a quarter of an inch to eight inches iit 
length, and though always of the same struc- 
ture, are of various colours, and they have a 
peculiar smell when scraped. They are 
found in all sorts of strata, sometimes in clay, 
sometimes among gravel, often immersed in 
beds of stone, often in loose flints, and are 
sometimes found covered with a sparry crust 
of a different texture with the body of the 
mass. The finest specimens have been pro- 
i cured from chalk-pits of Oxfordshire. 
BELL, a well-known machine, ranked by- 
musicians among the musical instruments of 
percussion. The music of belts is altogether 
melody ; but the pleasure arising from it con- 
sists in the variety of interchanges, and the 
various successions and general predomi- 
nance of the consonances in the sounds pro- 
duced. The metal of which a bell is made, 
is a composition of tin and copper, or pewter 
and copper; the proportion one to the other 
is almost 20 pounds of pewter, or 23 pounds 
of tin, to 100 weight of copper. Bell-metal 
is prohibited to be imported, as are hawk- 
bells, See. 
The constituent parts of a bell are the bodv 
or barrel, the clapper on the inside, and the 
ear or cannon on which it hangs to a large 
beam of wood. The sound of a bell consists 
in a vibratory motion of its parts, much like 
that of a musical chord. The stroke of the 
dapper must necessarily change the figure of 
the bell, and of a round make it oval ; but 
the metal having a great degree of elasticity, 
that part will return back again which the 
stroke drove farthest off from the centre, and 
that even some small matter nearer the centre 
than before; so that the two parts which be- 
fore were extremes of the longest diameter, 
do then become those of the shortest ; and 
thus the external surface of the bell under- 
goes alternate changes of figure, and by that 
means gives that tremulous motion to the air, 
in which the sound consists. To understand 
this more completely, let us conceive that a 
bell is composed of a series of circular zones, 
decreasing in diameter all the way to its top, 
each of which may be considered as a flat ring, 
composed of as many concentric. circles as its 
thickness will admit of. If tiiis ring is struck at 
the point a, (Plate Miscel. fig. 1 1.) the part so 
struck tends towards g, and at the same time 
the parts b and d tend towards i and m, and 
this action in these parts necessarily causes the 
point c to approach towards e ; by their elastic 
power, however, these parts presently regain 
the position in which they were before the 
bell was struck ; but as they return with an 
accelerated force, they generally go beyond 
the point where they ought to rest. The 
part a, therefore, after havin returned from 
g to a, tends towards/, the part c towards h, 
