Part 13

Up to the publication of Dr H.N. van der Tuuk's essay, _Over schrift en uitspraak der Tobasche taal_ (1855), our knowledge of the Batta language was confined to lists of words more or less complete, chiefly to be found in W. Marsden's _Miscellaneous Works_, in F.W. Junghuhn's _Battalander_, and in the _Tijdschrift van het Bataviaasch Genootschap, _vol. iii. (1855). By his exhaustive works (_Bataksch Leesboek_, in 4 vols., 1861-1862; _Bataksch-nederduitsch Woordenboek_, 1861; _Tobasche Spraakkunst_, 1864-1867) van der Tuuk made the Batta language the most accessible of the various tongues spoken in Sumatra. According to him, it is nearest akin to the old Javanese and Tagal, but A. Schreiber (_Die Battas in ihrem Verhaltnis zu den Malaien von Sumatra_, 1874) endeavoured to prove its closer affinity with the Malay proper. Like most languages spoken by less civilized tribes, Batta is poor in general terms, but abounds in terms for special objects. The number of dialects is three, viz. the Toba, the Mandailing and the Dairi dialects; the first and second have again two subdivisions each. The Battas further possess six peculiar or recondite modes of speech, such as the _hata andung_, or language of the wakes, and the _hata poda_ or the soothsayer's language. A fair acquaintance with reading and writing is very general among them. Their alphabet is said, with the Rejang and Lampong alphabets, to be of Indian origin. The language is written on bark or bamboo staves from bottom to top, the lines being arranged from left to right. The literature consists chiefly in books on witchcraft, in stories, riddles, incantations, &c., and is mostly in prose, occasionally varied by verse.[1]

See also "Reisen nach dem Toba See," _Petermanns Mitteil_. (1883); Modigliani, _Fra i Batacchi indipendenti_ (Rome, 1892); Neumann, "Het Pane- en Bilastroomgebied," _Tydschr. Aardr. Gen._, 1885-1887; Van Dijk in the same periodical (1890-1895); Wing Easton in the _Jaarboek voor het Mynwezen_, 1894; Niemann in the _Encyclopaedia van Nederlandsch-Indie_, under the heading _Bataks_, with very detailed bibliography; Baron J. v. Brenner, _Besuch bei den Kannibalen Sumatras_ (Wurzburg, 1893); H. Breitenstein, _21 Jahre in Indien, Java, Sumatra_ (Leipzig, 1899-1900); G.P. Rouffaer, _Die Batik-Kunst in niederlandisch-Indien und ihre Geschichte_ (Haarlem, 1899).

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Mr C.A. van Ophuijsen has published (in _Bijd. tot Land-, Taalen Volken-Kunde_, 1886) an interesting collection of Battak poetry. He describes a curious leaf language used by Battak lovers, in which the name of some leaf or plant is substituted for the word with which it has greatest phonetic similarity.

BATTEL, or BATTELS (of uncertain origin, possibly connected with "battle," a northern English word meaning to feed, or "batten"), a word used at Oxford University for the food ordered by members of the college as distinct from the usual "commons"; and hence college accounts for board and provisions supplied from kitchen and buttery, and, generally, the whole of a man's college accounts. "Batteler," now a resident in a college, was originally a rank of students between commoners and servitors who, as the name implies, were not supplied with "commons," but only such provisions as they ordered for themselves.

BATTEN, SIR WILLIAM (_floruit_ 1626-1667), British sailor, son of Andrew Batten, master in the royal navy, first appears as taking out letters of marque in 1626, and in 1638 he obtained the post of surveyor to the navy, probably by purchase. In March 1642 he was appointed second-in-command under the earl of Warwick, the parliamentary admiral who took the fleet out of the king's hands. It was Vice-Admiral Batten's squadron which bombarded Scarborough when Henrietta Maria landed there. He was accused (it appears unjustly) by the Royalists of directing his fire particularly on the house occupied by the queen, and up to the end of the First Civil War showed himself a steady partisan of the parliament. To the end of the First Civil War, Batten continued to patrol the English seas, and his action in 1647 in bringing into Portsmouth a number of Swedish ships of war and merchantmen, which had refused the customary salute to the flag, was approved by parliament. When the Second Civil War began he was distrusted by the Independents and removed from his command, though he confessed his continued willingness to serve the state. When part of the fleet revolted against the parliament, and joined the prince of Wales in Holland, May 1648, Batten went with them. He was knighted by the prince, but being suspected by the Royalists, was put ashore mutinously in Holland and returned to England. He lived in retirement during the Commonwealth period. At the Restoration Sir William Batten became once more surveyor of the navy. In this office he was in constant intercourse with Pepys, whose diary frequently mentions him; but the insinuations of Pepys against him must not be taken too seriously, as there is no evidence to show that Batten in making a profit from his office fell below the standards of the time. In 1661 he became M.P. for Rochester, and in 1663 he was made master of the Trinity House. He died in 1667.

There is no separate life of Batten, but many notices of him will be found in Penn's _Life of Sir W. Penn_, and in Pepys' _Diary_.

BATTEN, (1) A term (a form of "baton") used in joinery (q.v.) for a board not more than 4 to 7 in. broad or 3 in. thick, used for various purposes, such as for strengthening or holding together laths and other wood-work; and specially, on board ship, a strip of wood nailed to a mast to prevent rubbing, or fixing down a tarpaulin over a hatchway, in rough weather, to keep out water. (2) A verb (the root is found in words of several Teutonic languages meaning profit or improvement, and also in the English "better" and "boot") meaning to improve in condition, especially in the case of animals by feeding; so, to feed gluttonously; the word is used figuratively of prospering at the expense of another.

BATTENBERG, the name of a family of German counts which died out about 1314, whose seat was the castle of Kellerburg, near Battenberg, a small place now in the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau. The title was revived in 1851, when Alexander (1823-1888), a younger son of Louis II., grand-duke of Hesse, contracted a morganatic marriage with a Polish lady, Countess Julia Theresa von Haucke (1825-1895), who was then created countess of Battenberg. Raised to the rank of a princess in 1858, the countess and her children were allowed to style themselves princes and princesses of Battenberg, with the addition of _Durchlaucht_ or Serene Highness. The eldest son of this union, Louis Alexander (b. 1854), married in 1884 Victoria, daughter of Louis IV., grand-duke of Hesse, and became an admiral in the British navy. The second son, Alexander Joseph (q.v.), was prince of Bulgaria from 1879 to 1886. The third son, Henry Maurice, was born in 1858, and married on the 23rd of July 1885 Beatrice, youngest daughter of Victoria, queen of England. He died at sea on the 20th of January 1896 when returning from active service with the British troops during the Ashanti War, and left three sons and a daughter, Victoria Eugenie, who was married in 1906 to Alphonso XIII., king of Spain. The fourth son, Francis Joseph, born in 1861, married in 1897 Anna, daughter of Nicholas I., prince of Montenegro, and is the author of _Die volkswirtschaftliche Entwickelung Bulgariens von 1879 bis zur Gegenwart_ (Leipzig, 1891). The only daughter of the princess of Battenberg, Marie Caroline, born in 1852, was married in 1871 to Gustavus Ernest, prince and count of Erbach-Schonberg.

BATTER, an architectural term of unknown origin, used of the face of a wall which is slightly inclined to the perpendicular. It is most commonly employed in retaining walls, the lower courses of which are laid at right angles to the batter, so as to resist the thrust of the earth inside. For aesthetic reasons it is often adopted in the lowest or basement porticos of a great building. From a historical point of view it is the most ancient system employed, as throughout Egypt and Chaldaea all the temples built in unburnt brick were perforce obliged to be thicker at the bottom, and this gave rise to the batter or raking side which was afterwards in Egypt copied in stone. For defensive purposes the walls of the lower portions of a fortress were built with a batter as in the case of the tower of David and some of the walls built by Herod at Jerusalem. The Crusaders also largely adopted the principle, which was followed in some of the castles of the middle ages throughout Europe.

BATTERING RAM (Lat. _aries_, ram), a military engine used before the invention of cannon, for beating down the walls of besieged fortresses. It consisted of a long heavy beam of timber, armed at the extremity with iron fashioned something like the head of a ram. In its simplest form the beam was carried in the hands of the soldiers, who assailed the walls with it by main force. The improved ram was composed of a longer beam, in some cases extending to 120 ft., shod with iron at one end, and suspended, either by the middle or from two points, from another beam laid across two posts. This is the kind described by Josephus as having been used at the siege of Jerusalem (_B.J._ iii. 7. 19). The ram was shielded from the missiles of the besieged by a penthouse (_vinea_) or other overhead protection. It was often mounted on wheels, which greatly facilitated its operations. A hundred soldiers at a time, and sometimes even a greater number, were employed to work it, and the parties were relieved in constant succession. No wall could resist the continued application of the ram, and the greatest efforts were always made to destroy it by various means, such as dropping heavy stones on the head of the ram and on the roof of the penthouse; another method being to seize the ram head with grapnels and then haul it up to a vertical position by suitable windlasses on the wall of the fortress. Sometimes the besieged ran countermines under the ram penthouse; this if successful would cause the whole engine to fall into the excavation. In medieval warfare the low penthouse, called _cat_, was generally employed with some form of ram.

BATTERSEA, a south-western metropolitan borough of London, England, bounded N. by the Thames, N.E. by Lambeth, and S.E., S., and W. by Wandsworth. Pop. (1901) 168,907. The principal thoroughfares are Wandsworth Road and Battersea Park and York Roads from east to west, connected north and south with the Victoria or Chelsea, Albert and Battersea bridges over the Thames. The two first of these three are handsome suspension bridges; the third, an iron structure, replaced a wooden bridge of many arches which was closed in 1881, after standing a little over a century. Battersea is a district mainly consisting of artisans' houses, and there are several large factories by the river. The parish church of St Mary, Church Road (1776), preserves from an earlier building stained glass and monuments, including one to Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke (d. 1751), and his second wife, who had a mansion close by. Of this a portion remains on the riverside, containing a room associated with Pope, who is said to have worked here upon the "Essay on Man." Wandsworth Common and Clapham Common (220 acres) lie

## partly within the borough, but the principal public recreation ground is

Battersea Park, bordering the Thames between Albert and Victoria Bridges, beautifully laid out, containing a lake and subtropical garden, and having an area of nearly 200 acres. It was constructed with difficulty by embanking the river and raising the level of the formerly marshy ground, and was opened in 1858. Among institutions are the Battersea Polytechnic, the Royal Masonic Institution for girls, founded in 1788, and Church of England and Wesleyan Training Colleges. Battersea is in the parliamentary borough of Battersea and Clapham, including the whole of the Battersea division and part of the Clapham division. The borough council consists of a mayor, 9 aldermen and 54 councillors. Area, 2160.3 acres.

An early form of the name is _Patricsey_ or Peter's Island; the manor at the time of the Domesday survey, and until the suppression of the monasteries, belonging to the abbey of St Peter, Westminster. It next passed to the crown, and subsequently to the family of St John and to the earls Spencer. York Road recalls the existence of a palace of the archbishops of York, occasionally occupied by them between the reigns of Edward IV. and Mary. Battersea Fields, bordering the river, were formerly a favourite resort, so that the park also perpetuates a memory. The art of enamelling was introduced, c. 1750, at works in Battersea, examples from which are highly valued.

BATTERY (Fr. _batterie_, from _battre_, to beat), the action of beating, especially in law the unlawful wounding of another (see ASSAULT). The term is applied to the apparatus used in battering, hence its use in military organization for the unit of mobile artillery of all kinds. This consists of from four to eight guns with their _personnel_, wagons and train. In the British service the term is applied to field, horse, field-howitzer, heavy and mountain artillery units. "Battery" is also used to imply a mass of guns in action, especially in connexion with the military history of the 18th and early 19th centuries. In siegecraft, a battery is simply an emplacement for guns, howitzers or mortars, constructed for the purposes of the siege, and protected as a rule by a parapet. In fortification the term is applied similarly to permanent or semi-permanent emplacements for the artillery of the defence. In all these senses the presence of artillery is implied in the use of the word (see ARTILLERY, and FORTIFICATION AND SIEGECRAFT). The word is also used for the "pitcher" and "catcher" in baseball; for a collection of utensils, primarily of hammered copper or brass, especially in the French term _batterie de cuisine_; and for the instruments of percussion in an orchestra.

_Electric Battery_--This term was applied by the old electricians to a collection of Leyden jars, but is now used of a device for generating electricity by chemical action, or more exactly, of a number of such devices joined up together. There are two main classes of electric battery. In _primary_ batteries, composed of a number of galvanic or voltaic "cells," "couples" or "elements," on the completion of the interactions between the substances on which the production of electricity depends, the activity of the cells comes to an end, and can only be restored with the aid of a fresh supply of those substances; in _secondary_ batteries, also called storage batteries or accumulators (q.v.), the substances after the exhaustion of the cells can be brought back to a condition in which they will again yield an electric current, by means of an electric current passed through them in the reverse direction. The first primary battery was constructed about 1799 by Alessandro Volta. In one form, the "voltaic pile," he placed a series of pairs of copper and zinc disks one above the other, separating each pair from the one above it by a piece of cloth moistened with a solution of common salt. In another form, the "couronne de tasses," he took a number of vessels or cells containing brine or dilute acid, and placed in each a zinc plate and a copper plate; these plates were not allowed to touch each other within the vessels, but each zinc plate was connected to the copper plate of the adjoining vessel. In both these arrangements an electric current passes through a wire which is connected to the terminal plates at the two ends of the series. The direction of this current is from copper to zinc; within each cell itself it is from zinc to copper. The plate to which the current flows within the cell is the _negative plate_, and that from which it flows the _positive plate_; but the point on the negative plate at which the current enters the external wire is the _positive pole_, and the point on the positive plate at which it leaves the external circuit the _negative pole_. During the time that the external connexion is maintained between the two poles and the current passes in the wire, the zinc or positive plates are gradually dissolved, and hydrogen gas is liberated at the surface of the copper or negative plates; but when the external connexion is broken this action ceases. If the materials used in the cells were perfectly pure, probably the cessation would be complete. In practice, however, only impure commercial zinc is available, and with this corrosion continues to some extent, even though the external circuit is not closed, thus entailing waste of material. This "local action" is explained as due to the fact that the impurities in the zinc plate form miniature voltaic couples with the zinc itself, thus causing its corrosion by voltaic action; and an early improvement in the voltaic cell was the discovery, applied by W. Sturgeon in 1830, that the evil was greatly reduced if the surface of the zinc plates was amalgamated, by being rubbed with mercury under dilute sulphuric acid. Another disadvantage of the simple cell composed of copper and zinc in dilute acid is that the current it yields rapidly falls off. The hydrogen formed by the operation of the cell does not all escape, but some adheres as a film to the negative plate, and the result is the establishment of a counter or reverse electromotive force which opposes the main current flowing from the zinc plate and diminishes its force. This phenomenon is known as "polarization," and various remedies have been tried for the evils it introduces in the practical use of primary batteries. Alfred Smee in 1839 modified the simple copper-zinc couple excited by dilute sulphuric acid by substituting for the copper thin leaves of platinum or platinized silver, whereby the elimination of the hydrogen is facilitated; and attempts have also been made to keep the plates free from the gas by mechanical agitation. The plan usually adopted, however, is either to prevent the formation of the film, or to introduce into the cell some "depolarizer" which will destroy it as it is formed by oxidizing the hydrogen to water (see also ELECTROLYSIS).

The former method is exemplified in the cell invented by J.F. Daniell in 1836. Here the zinc stands in dilute sulphuric acid (or in a solution of zinc sulphate), and the copper in a saturated solution of copper sulphate, the two liquids being separated by a porous partition. The hydrogen formed by the action of the cell replaces copper in the copper sulphate, and the displaced copper, instead of the hydrogen, being deposited on the copper plate polarization is avoided. The electromotive force is about one volt. This cell has been constructed in a variety of forms to suit different purposes. In a portable form, designed by Lord Kelvin in 1858, the copper plate, soldered to a gutta-percha covered wire, is placed at the bottom of a glass vessel and covered with crystals of copper sulphate; over these wet sawdust is sprinkled, and then mere sawdust, moistened with solution of zinc sulphate, upon which is placed the zinc plate. The Minotto cell is similar, except that sand is substituted for sawdust. In these batteries the sawdust or sand takes the place of the porous diaphragm. In another class of batteries the diaphragm is dispensed with altogether, and the action of gravity alone is relied upon to retard the interdiffusion of the liquids. The cell of J.H. Meidinger, invented in 1859, may be taken as a type of this class. The zinc is formed into a ring which fits the upper part of a glass beaker filled with zinc sulphate solution. At the bottom of the beaker is placed a smaller beaker, in which stands a ring of copper with an insulated connecting wire. The mouth of the beaker is closed by a lid with a hole in the centre, through which passes the long tapering neck of a glass balloon filled with crystals of copper sulphate; the narrow end of this neck dips into the smaller beaker, the copper sulphate slowly runs out, and being specifically heavier than the zinc sulphate it collects at the bottom about the copper ring. In Lord Kelvin's tray-cell a large wooden tray is lined with lead, and is covered at the bottom with copper by electrotyping. The zinc plate is enveloped in a piece of parchment paper bent into a tray shape, the whole resting on little pieces of wood placed on the bottom of the leaden tray. Copper sulphate is fed in at the edge of the tray and zinc sulphate is poured upon the parchment. A battery is formed by arranging the trays in a stack one above the other.