BONSTETTEN
BORNE
at the Woolwich Royal Military Academy.
His mathematical works, some of which
were translated into Turkish, had a very
extensive circulation. Wheeler (Dictionary
of Freethinkers) describes him, from per
sonal information, as a Rationalist. D.
May 15, 1821.
BONSTETTEN, Karl Victor von, Swiss writer. B. Sept. 3, 1745. Ed. Yverdun, and Geneva, Leiden, Cambridge, and Paris Universities. Bonstetten, who was a man of extraordinarily wide culture, became a member of the Grand Council of Berne in 1775, and in 1787 he was appointed a provincial judge. He was afterwards a judge of the Superior Court at Lugano. He knew Voltaire and Rousseau, and wrote several Deistic works. D. Feb. 3, 1832.
BONWICK, James, anthropologist. B. July 8, 1817. A long and adventurous career in Tasmania and Australia made Bonwick one of the leading authorities of his time on the natives of those islands. His Daily Life of the Tasmanians (1870) is a classic, and he wrote various other works on Australia. He was appointed Archivist to the Government of New South Wales, and was a member from its founda tion of the Anthropological Institute. In his Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought (1878) he makes a discreet attempt to show that all the Christian doctrines were borrowed from the ancient Egyptian reli gion. He was a Theist, and he held with Max Miiller that " there has been no entirely new religion since the beginning of the world " (p. 426). D. Feb. 6, 1906.
BOOTH, James, C.B., lawyer. B. 1796. Ed. Cambridge (St. John s). Booth was admitted to the Society of Lincoln s Inn in 1818, and he practised in the Chancery Courts. In 1839 he was appointed counsel to the Speaker of the House of Commons, and from 1850 to 1865 he was Secretary to the Board of Trade. He received his title in 1866, on his retirement. In his Problem of the World and the Church
93
Reconsidered (published anonymously in
1871) Booth rejects Christianity, while he
remains a Theist. " Truth, justice, and
self-respect," he says, " which owe nothing
to the Church, will not suffer from the
extinction of a system of dogma which has
too long usurped their place " (closing
paragraph). In his last few years he was
a Vice-President of the London Sunday
Lecture Society. D. May 11, 1880.
BORN, Baron Ignaz von, Austrian mineralogist. B. Dec. 26, 1742. Ed. Vienna. He entered the Jesuit Society, but quitted it and studied law at Prague University. He devoted himself, however, to geology and mineralogy, and in 1770 he was appointed Director of the Mint and Mines at Prague. In 1779 he became Royal Councillor and Director of the Vienna Mint. He made important dis coveries in metallurgy, and held a number of high offices in the Austrian adminis tration. We are assured that the Baron devoted his considerable income to philan thropy and to scientific experiments. Born was a Freemason and anti-clerical, appa rently a Deist. A drastic satire of the monastic bodies (Joannis PhysiophiU Speci men Monachologia) , in the form of a study of the natural history of monks, which was published anonymously in 1782, was written under his direction. Joseph II (who is said to have been interested in its production) refused the Archbishop s demand for its suppression. D. July 24, 1791.
BORNE, Ludwig, German author. B. May 6, 1786. Ed. Berlin, Halle, Heidel berg, and Giessen Universities. Son of a Jewish banker named Baruch, he was com pelled by a law against the Jews to abandon his position in the civil service, and in 1818 he formally adopted Christianity and the name of Ludwig Borne. He was, in reality, a Rationalist, and after the Revolution of 1830 he went to live at Paris. In his later years he followed Lamennais [SEE] , and dreamed of establishing a sort of very 94
