the church of St. Maria Maggiore. Bernini was of a dark complexion, with a lively, expressive eye. He was a kind critic of other men, severe only upon himself. He felt too late that he had, in pursuing originality, acquired an affected, fluttering mannerism. He was a rhetorician in art, a too florid strainer for fantastic novelties. He did great harm to art, more even than the mere imitators of the Greeks' dead mythology and untranslatable ideal.—W. T.
BERNINI, Giuseppe Maria, an Italian capuchin, missionary of his order in the East Indies, was born at Carignan in Piedmont, and died in 1753. His works are—"Notizie laconiche di alcuni usi, sacrifizj ed idoli nel regno di Neipal, raccolte nel anno 1747," a translation of which appeared in vol. ii. of the Asiatic Researches; a translation of the Adhiatma Ramayana, and of the Djana Sagara.—J. S., G.
BERNIS, François-Joachim de Pierre de, a celebrated French cardinal and man of letters, born at St. Marcel de l'Ardeche in 1715; died at Rome in 1794. He was of an ancient family of Languedoc, and being a younger son was destined to the church. Accordingly, after finishing his education at the seminary of Saint Sulpice, he took orders, but neither his tastes nor his fortunes inviting him to any ecclesiastical preferment, he depended on his talents and agreeable manners for a good reception at court, and established himself at Paris. He was speedily known as one of the most expert of the innumerable epigrammatists who infested the metropolis, and although his verses savoured more of the gaiety of a man of fashion than of the decency of an abbé, they were not the less agreeable to Madame Pompadour, who obtained for the needy churchman a lodging in the Tuileries, and a pension of 1500 francs. A more respectable sphere of action than that to which he was thus introduced, was opened to him in being appointed ambassador to Venice. He displayed so much address as mediator between that republic and the pope, Benedict XIV., that on his return to France he was admitted into the council of state. Shortly after this he was named secretary of state for foreign affairs, and in 1758 received from Clement XIII. the cardinal's hat. During his ministry the Seven Years' war, so disastrous to France, occurred; and notwithstanding his exertions to counteract the mischievous policy of Pompadour and her minions, he was loaded with obloquy, and obliged to retire from Paris. After the death of Pompadour, he was again offered the seals of office, but declined to accept them, and was named archbishop of Albi. In 1769 he was sent as ambassador to Rome, and there the remainder of his life was passed in a style of princely magnificence which all but rivalled that of the Vatican, and rendered his house the general resort of distinguished foreigners. It was Bernis who received at Rome, in 1791, the exiled aunts of Louis XVI.; but these were among the last noble personages on whom his hospitality was exercised, for the Revolution swept away the sources of his revenue, and reduced him to distress. The court of Spain came to his relief with a handsome pension. He died in 1794. His only poetical performance which can be decently mentioned, is entitled "La Religion Vengée." It was published after his death. His prose works, although frequently reprinted, are of no great merit, and are only interesting to the historian.—J. S., G.
BERNITZ, Martin Bernhardi von, a Polish surgeon, and surgeon to the king of Poland in the latter half of the seventeenth century. His writings are principally on botany, the chief of them being a catalogue of the plants, both exotic and indigenous, cultivated in the year 1651 in the royal gardens at Warsaw, and of those growing around that city, which was published at Danzig in 1652, and with the addition of the Viridarium of Simon Pauli at Copenhagen in 1653. In 1676 and 1677 he published at Leipzig, "Fasciculi duo remediarum," in 4to, of which the first volume contained a list of the antiarthritic remedies made use of by the king of Poland; and the second a collection of various medicines described by other authors as specifics. Bernitz also inserted several memoirs on botanical subjects in the Acta Acad. Naturæ Curios.—W. S. D.
BERNO, Giuseppe, an Italian physician, born at Monciovello in 1788; died in 1818. He was the son of a surgeon, and studied first at Ivrea, and afterwards at Turin, at the latter of which places he obtained his degree of doctor in 1809. The only work published by Berno is "On the efficacy of the Springs of Courmaîeur and Saint Didier," which appeared at Turin in 1817, the year before his death.—W. S. D.
BERNOULLI, Christoph, a German naturalist and technologist, was born on the 15th May, 1782, at Basle, studied natural history in Göttingen in 1801, and in 1802 went to Halle as a teacher in the high school of that city. After occupying this post for two years, he quitted Halle, and travelled to Berlin and Paris. On his return to his native town in 1806 he opened a private school; and in 1817 obtained the professorship of natural history in the university of Basle. After his appointment to this post, he turned his private studies principally to technology and statistics, and published numerous works upon subjects connected with these sciences. His best writings are his earlier ones—"On the Luminosity of the Sea," Göttingen, 1802; "Physical Anthropology," Halle, 1804; and "Introduction to Physics and Mineralogy," Halle, 1807. Of his later writings the principal are—"On the theory of the steam-engine," 1824; "Considerations on the Cotton Manufacture," 1825; "On Mechanical cotton-spinning," 1829; "Manuals of Technology," 1833-34, and 2nd edition, 1840; "Of the steam-engine," 1833; "Of industrial Physics, Mechanics, and Hydraulics," 1834-35; a German edition of Baines' History of the British cotton manufacture, 1836; and a "Manual of the statistics of Population," 1840-41.—W. S. D.
BERNOULLI, James, the head of a respectable family of Antwerp, who, having been driven into exile during the tyranny of the duke of Alva in the Netherlands, migrated with his eight children to Frankfort in 1583. A grandson of James Bernoulli migrated to Bâle, and there became the progenitor of a race of philosophers, who for three generations, extending from the latter part of the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, made themselves illustrious by their labours for the advancement of mathematical, mechanical, and physical science. In the ensuing articles, fourteen members of that family will be spoken of, viz.:—1, Nicholas; 2, 3, 4, 5, his sons Nicholas, James, John, and a fourth son whose name has not been ascertained; 6, Nicholas, son of the second Nicholas; 7, 8, a son and daughter of James; 9, 10, 11, Nicholas, Daniel, and John, sons of John; 12, 13, John and James, sons of the second John; 14, Jerome, probably a descendant of the fourth son of the first Nicholas. The most distinguished of the family were James and John, sons of the first Nicholas, and Daniel, who are ranked among the first mathematicians and physicists of the world. A reputation of a similar kind, though of a less high order, was attained by the third and fourth Nicholas, the second John, and his sons John and James. Jerome was noted as a mineralogist.—(Vita Jacobi Bernoullii, a J. J. Battierio.)
Bernoulli, Nicholas, was born at Bâle about the year 1625. He was much respected by his fellow-citizens, and rose to the position of assessor of their principal court of justice. He married Margaret Schonauer, by whom he had four sons, Nicholas, James, John, and a fourth whose name is unknown. He lived upwards of eighty years, and survived his most distinguished son, James.—(Vita J. Bern., a Batt.)
Bernoulli, Nicholas, son of the foregoing, was president of the senate of Bâle, and father to the third Nicholas Bernoulli.—(Vita J. Bern., a Batt.)
Bernoulli, James, the earliest mathematician and philosopher of the family, son of Nicholas Bernoulli and Margaret Schonauer his wife, was born at Bâle on the 27th December, 1654, and educated first at the school, and afterwards at the university of that city, where he had the benefit of the instruction of an eminent scholar, John James Hoffmann. In 1671 he took the degree of master of arts, and in 1676 became a licentiate of divinity. Against the wish of his father, who intended him for the clerical profession, he devoted himself at an early age to the study of mathematics and astronomy. Amongst the fruits of those studies was an essay on comets, "Conamen novi Systematis Cometarum," in which he maintained the doctrine afterwards demonstrated by Newton and Halley, that those bodies are not meteors, but stars having regular orbits and periods of revolution. He was in consequence taxed with impiety, on the ground of the inconsistency of his opinions with the then general belief, that comets were special warnings of the divine wrath. Bernoulli denied that inconsistency, on the ground that the tails of comets, whose presence or absence is independent of their orbits and periods, might be received as warnings of the kind supposed, notwithstanding the regularity of the motions of the nuclei; and this explanation appears to have satisfied the objectors. According to the custom of gentle-
