BRI 
Brief is • ;so taken for a letter patent, 
granting a licence to a subject to make col- 
lection for any public or private loss, as 
briefs for loss by fire, to be read by mi- 
nisters in churches, &c. These briefs must 
be read in all churches and chapels, within 
two months after receipt thereof; and the 
sums thereby collected shall be paid over 
to the undertaker of briefs, within six 
months after the delivery of the briefs, un- 
der penalty of 20 1. 
Brief is likewise an abridgement of a cli- 
ent’s case, wrote out for the instruction of 
counsel, on a trial at law. 
Briefs, apostolical, letters which the 
pope dispatches to princes, or other magis- 
trates, relating to any public affair. These 
briefs are distinguished from bulls, in this re- 
spect the latter are more ample, and always 
written on parchment, and sealed with lead 
or green wax ; whereas briefs are very con- 
cise, written on paper, sealed with red wax, 
and with the seal of the fisherman, or St. 
Peter in a boat. 
BRIG. See Brigantine. 
BRIGADE, in the military art, a party 
or division of a body of soldiers, whether 
horse or foot, under the command of a bri- 
gadier. An army is divided into brigades 
of horse and brigades of foot : a brigade of 
horse is a body of eight or ten squadrons ; 
a brigade of foot consists of four, five, or six 
battalions. The eldest brigade has the 
right of the first line, and the second the 
right of the second, and the two next take 
the left of the two lines, and the youngest 
stand in the centre. 
Brigade major is an officer appointed 
by the brigadier, to assist him in the ma- 
nagement and ordering of his brigade. 
BRIGADIER is the general officer who 
has the command of a brigade. The eldest 
colonels are generally advanced to this post. 
He that is upon duty is brigadier of the day. 
They march at the head of their own bri- 
gades, and are allowed a seijeant and ten 
men, of their own brigade for their guard. 
BRIGANTINE, a small light vessel, 
which can both row and sail well, and is 
either for fighting or giving chace. It has 
about tvvelve or fifteen benches for the 
rowers^ one man to a bench : all the hands 
aboard are soldiers, and each man has his 
musquet lying ready under his oar. 
BRIGGS (Henry), in biography, a very 
considerable mathematician, born near Ha- 
lifax, Yorkshire, in 1656 ; and in 1579 hav- 
ing attained a good share of gramatical 
knowledge, he went to St. John’s College, 
BRI 
Cambridge, where he took his degrees in 
regular order, and in 1588 was chosen 
fellow of his college. The bent of his mind 
was to the mathematics, in which he made 
so great and rapid a progress, that in 1592 
he was appointed examiner and lecturer in 
that branch of science. In 1596 he was 
elected to the first professorship of geo- 
metry at Gresham College ; he constructed 
a table for finding the latitude, from the 
variation of the magnetic needle being 
given. About the year 1609 he contracted 
an acquaintance with Mr. Usher, after- 
wards Archbishop of'Armagh, and in cor- 
respondence with him, he mentions his em- 
ployment upon the calculation of eclipses, 
and soon after writes that he is wholly 
engaged about the noble invention of loga- 
rithms, which had just made their appear- 
ance, and in the improvement of which he 
afterwards had so great a concern. On this 
subject he delivered various lectures at 
Gresham College, and proposed to alter 
the scale from the hyperbolic form which 
Napier had given them, to that in which 1 
should be the logarithm of the ratio of 10 
to 1. In 1616 Briggs made a visit to Na- 
pier at Edinburgh, and communicated to 
him his wishes. The alteration was agreed 
upon, and in 1617 he published his first 
1000 of logarithms. He succeeded in 1619 
to the Savilian professorship of geometry 
at Oxford, upon which he resigned the 
duties of Gresham College. Here he de- 
voted himself most sedulously to his stu- 
dies, and published many works connected 
with the higher branches of mathematics. 
His “ Arithmetica Logarithmica” was 
printed in 1624; it contained the logarithms 
of 3P,000 natural numbers to 14 places of 
figures, besides the index. He completed 
a table of logarithmic sines and tangents 
for the 100th part of every degree to 14 
places ; with a table of natural sines, tan- 
gents, and secants, with the construction 
of the whole. These tables were printed 
under the title of Trigonometria Britan- 
nica. “ In the construction of these two 
works,” says one of Mr. Briggs’s biogra- 
phers, “on the Logarithms of Numbers, 
and of Sines and Tangents, our author, 
besides extreme labour and application’ 
manifests the highest powers of genius and 
invention; as we here for the first time 
meet with several of the'' most important 
discoveries in the mathematics, and what 
have hitherto been considered as of much 
later invention ; such as the Binomial Theo- 
rem; the Differential Method and Con- 
