Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume II.djvu/197

AZURAKA BAAL 177 A/I K IK A. Gomez Eanncs de, a Portuguese his- torian, born at Azurara, died in the latter part of the 15th century. Although he was early made a monk and admitted into the order of Christ, he passed his youth as a soldier, and in 1459 was appointed to reform the archives of the state. His principal work was a chrcjnicle of the discovery and conquest of Guinea. This was discovered in .the bibliothdque royale of Paris in 1837, and published (8vo, Paris, 1841) by the Portuguese ambassador at the French court, the visconde de Carreira, who transcribed the MS. with his own hand. AZTMITES (Gr. a, not, and &/ai, leaven), a po- lemical term, applied to the western church by the eastern or Greek branch. About 1025 a con- troversy sprung up as to the kind of bread that ought to be used in the eucharist. The Latin church maintained that unleavened bread only was allowable, since, as they affirmed, the Lord's last supper having been held on the day before the Hebrew passover, unleavened bread was the only kind procurable. The Greek church endeavored to prove that the last sup- per did not take place on the day before the pass- over, and consequently that unleavened bread could not be had ; moreover, they charged that the use of unleavened bread was a relic of Judaism. The term azymites was at first used as one of reproach, but was adopted as honor- able by those to whom it was applied. The controversy raged long and high, the parties calling themselves azymites and prozymites, anti-leaveners and pro-leaveners. B BTHE second letter in all languages whose , alphabets have a Phoenician origin, as He- brew, Greek, Latin, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. In English, French, and German it is strictly a palato- labial, the sound being produced by compress- ing the air within the mouth, vocalizing it by the vibrations of the membranes forming the palate or roof of the mouth, the uvula at the game time closing the nasal orifices. The sound can be imperfectly formed and prolonged while the lips are tightly closed. The perfect sound is produced at the commencement of a syllable by a sudden opening of the lips for the passage of the vocalized breath; at the close of a syllable by suddenly closing the lips upon the vocalized current. It differs from P in that in sounding the latter the breath passes out without compression and vocalization. In Spanish, in later Latin and modern Greek, the prevalent sound of B is nearly identical with that of V, produced by pressing the upper teeth upon the lower lip, causing only a par- tial closure of the mouth, so that the sound can be indefinitely prolonged. Thus in modern Greek (as perhaps in the ancient), /JooUedf is pronounced vasilefs, the v having its conso- nantal sound. The Greek B sometimes, though not always, represented the Latin V; thus Virgilius was written Rip-yihiof or Ovip-yifaof. The Hebrew beth has the sound of V except when a diacritical point indicates that it is softened to B. In the passage of a word from one language to another an interchange not un- frequently takes place between B and P, F (ph), V, and less frequently M. For example : Lat. J, Gr. cnr6, Eng. off ; Gr. /}por6f, Lat. mor[t]s. In German, B, chiefly at the end of words, is often pronounced like P; thus, ab like op. The sound of B, being formed with the mouth closed, is wanting in many of the dialects of the American Indians, who enuaciate almost wholly with the lips open. In the calendar B is the second dominical letter. In music it is the seventh degree of the diatonic scale of 0, and the 12th of the diatonic-chromatic scale. According to the tempered system of tuning, the ratio of B to the fundamental note is -fa. In the ancient diatonic scale B was not used as a key-note, its fifth, F, being imperfect. In the German notation our B is called H, B flat, half a tone lower than B, being called B. As a numeral, /3 among the Greeks represented 2, and with a stroke beneath 2,000; among the Romans B was occasionally used to denote 300, and with a line above it 3,000. BAADER, Franz acr Ton, a German mystic, born in Munich, March 27, 1765, died there, May 23, 1841. After extensive studies he was appointed by the Bavarian government inspec- tor general of mines, and in 1826 he became professor of philosophy and speculative theol- ogy at the newly established university of Mu- nich. He was a devoted follower of Bohme, whose mysticism predominated in his philo- sophical theories and in his devout interpreta- tion of Roman Catholic theology. He wrote on the natural sciences and technology, but his principal writings are metaphysical. In his Fermenta Cognitionii he extols Bohme as the greatest of thinkers. His chief disciple, Franz Hoflmann of Wurzburg, has endeavored to re- duce Baader's mystic aphorisms to a system, and has edited his complete philosophical works (16 vols., Leipsic, 1850-'60). BAAL, a Semitic word signifying owner, lord, or master, and in the highest sense denoting the deity. The Hebrews never used it as a designation of their deity, but always to dis- tinguish some god of the surrounding nations. In this sense, with some adjunct appended, it indicated several local deities : Baal-zebub was the fly god of the Ekronites, corresponding to the Zet)f and/ivioc of the Greeks ; Baal-peor an-