acting as a kind of intermediary between the Cabinet and the army. After the Armistice he resigned (Dec. 1918) owing to disagreements with Sig. Orlando's Government over the Pact of London. He was opposed to the annexation by Italy of the Alto Adige because of its German population, and of North Dalmatia with its Slav majority; but he advocated the annexa- tion of Fiume as a purely Italian town. His attitude on the Alto Adige and Dalmatian questions lost him the popularity he had hitherto enjoyed with the majority of the nation, and his speech at Milan on the League of Nations, in which he set forth these views, was unfavourably received. He came in for severe criticism for having, at a moment when Italy's representatives found their country's aspirations challenged at every turn by the Allies, to some extent given away the Italian case and provided opponents with arguments from the mouth of an Italian ex- minister. At the same time everyone recognized his sterling qualities of honesty and genuine patriotism; however much people might disagree with his views, there was no doubt that he was inspired solely by what he believed were his country's best interests and noblest traditions, and his death at Rome on May 6 1920 was deeply regretted by all, regardless of party divisions.
BITTER, KARL THEODORE FRANCIS (1867-1915), American sculptor (see 4.13), died in New York April 10 1915. In 1911 he finished a model designed for the Henry Hudson monument. He was director of sculpture at the San Francisco
Exposition (1912-5), and at the time of his death was president of the National Sculpture Society.
BJERKNES, VILHELM (1862- ), Norwegian physicist, son of Carl Anton Bjerknes, professor of mathematics in the
university of Christiania, was born in 1862, and was educated
at the university of Christiania. He became at a very early age
assistant to, and collaborator with, his father, who had dis-
covered by mathematical analysis the remarkable apparent
actions at a distance between pulsating and oscillating bodies in
a fluid, and their analogy with the electric and magnetic actions
at a distance. Apparently no attempt had been made to demon-
strate experimentally the theories arrived at by the older pro-
fessor until his son, then a lad of about 17 or 18 years of age,
turned his mathematical knowledge and remarkable mechanical
genius to the devising of a series of instruments, by which all the
well-known phenomena of electricity and magnetism were
illustrated and reproduced, by spheres and discs and mem-
branes, set into rhythmic vibration in a bath containing a
viscous fluid such as syrup. These remarkable demonstrations
formed the most important exhibit in the department of physics
at the Exposition Internationale d'Electricite held in Paris in
1881, and aroused the greatest interest in the scientific world.
The younger Bjerknes studied electric waves (1890-1) in Bonn, Germany, in the laboratory of Hertz, where he succeeded in giving the explanation of the phenomenon called " multiple resonance," discovered by Sarasin and De la Rive. Continuing his experiments at the university of Christiania (1891-2), he proved experimentally the influence which the conductivity and the magnetic properties of the metallic conductors exert upon the electric oscillations, and measured the depth to which the electric oscillations penetrate in metals of different con- ductivity and magnetic permeability (the " skin effect "). Finally he furnished (1895) a complete theory of the phenomenon of electric resonance, involving a method of utilizing resonance experiments for the determination of the wave lengths, and especially of the damping (the logarithmic decrement) of the oscillations in the transmitter and the receiver of the electric oscillations. These methods from that time have been in continuous use, and have contributed much to the development of wireless telegraphy. His papers on electric oscillations were published in Annalen der Physik (1891-5). In 1895, after he had been appointed to the newly created professorship of mechanics and mathematical physics at the university of Stockholm, where he had been lecturer since 1893, he returned to hydrodynamic investigations, pursuing them in two different directions. In his Vorlesungen iiber Hydrodynamische Fernkrafle nach C. A. Bjerknes Theorie (1900-2) he gave the first complete mathematical and experimental exposition of the dis- coveries of his father, whose age and excessive self-criticism had prevented him from finishing his work himself; and in a later book, Die Kraftfelder (1909), he stated the same theory in a very much generalized form according to methods of his own. On the other hand, he developed in 1898 the general law for the formation of circulations and vortices in a frictionless fluid, and began to apply the general vortex theory to atmospheric and oceanic motions. This attack upon the meteorological problems from a hydrodynamical point of view was after 1906 supported by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, of which he became a Research Associate. Two introductory volumes, Statics and Kinematics, of a greater work, Dynamic Meteorology and Hydrography, were published in 1913 under the auspices of the Institution.
In 1907 he was called back to the university of Christiania, where a personal professorship of mechanics and mathematical physics was created for him. In 1912 he was called to the university of Leipzig to create there a new professorship of geophysics and to organize, according to his own plans, a Geophysical Institute for atmospheric investigations. There, in 1916, he started the publication Synoptische Darstellung attnospharischer Zusldnde iiber Europa; but in 1917 he returned to Norway, where he was attached, as professor of geophysics, to the new Geophysic Institute in the city of Bergen. He was the originator there of an improved and more scientific weather service, afterwards controlled by his son and collaborator, Jakob Bjerknes (b. 1897), which occasioned a new view of cyclones and anticyclones as waves in a surface of discontinuity separating air of polar from air of more equatorial origin, and cutting the ground along a line which can be followed on the weather maps, now generally called " the polar front." In 1893 Bjerknes married Honoria Bonnevie, who in earlier years assisted him much in his scientific work.
BLACHE, VIDAL DE LA (1845-1918), French geographer, was born at Pezenas, Herault, Jan. 22 1845. He was edu-
cated at the Ecole Normale Superieure inParis, and en-
tered upon the study of geography by way of that of history.
The relations between geographical causes and historical effects
were with him the subject of a life-study, the results of which
are seen in one of his best-known works, the Tableau General de
la Geographie de France prefixed to Lavisse's Histoire de France
(1903) and later republished separately; but he always refrained
from pressing the theory of geographical " control " to an
extreme. He joined the French school at Athens in 1867, and
was thus enabled to travel extensively in Mediterranean lands.
From 1872 to 1877 he was in charge, latterly as professor, of the
department of history and geography at Nancy; from 1877 to
1898 he taught geography in the higher grades at the Ecole
Normale Superieure, and from 1898 to 1909 he held the chair
of geography in the Faculte des Lettres at Paris. He lectured
widely, and among his publications is the monumental Atlas
General: Histoire et Geographie, first published in 1894; he
founded in 1891 and edited until his death the periodical Annales
de Geographie, and contributed constantly to its pages. He died
at Tamaris-sur-mer (Var) on April 5 1918.
BLAKE, EDWARD (1833-1912), Irish-Canadian statesman (see 4.35), died at Toronto March i 1912.
BLAKELOCK, RALPH ALBERT (1847-1919), American
painter (see 4.38) died near Elizabethtown, N. Y., in the Adirondacks, Aug. 9 1919. Because of insanity he was kept under restraint during the last 18 years of his life. In 1913 he was made an associate of the National Academy of Design and in 1915 a full member. In 1916 the Toledo Art Museum paid $20,000 for his " Brook by Moonlight."
BLINDNESS (see 4.59). In England legislators have been slow to recognize the claims of the blind. It is true that as far back as the reign of Elizabeth and onwards through the reigns of George III., William IV. and Victoria provision was made by way of maintenance or education, mostly through the Poor Law authorities, but this was totally inadequate. In 1889 the Report
