part ii

. (Paris, 1896, 1900).

(J. B. B.)

BASIL (Russ. VASILY), the name of four grand-dukes of Moscow and tsars of Muscovy.

BASIL I. DMITREVICH (1371-1425), son of Dmitri (Demetrius) Donskoi, whom he succeeded in 1389, married Sophia, the daughter of Vitovt, grand-duke of Lithuania. In his reign the grand-duchy of Muscovy became practically hereditary, and asserted its supremacy over all the surrounding principalities. Nevertheless Basil received his _yarluik_, or investiture, from the Golden Horde and was compelled to pay tribute to the grand khan, Tokhtamuish. He annexed the principality of Suzdal to Moscovy, together with Murom, Kozelsk Peremyshl, and other places; reduced the grand-duchy of Rostov to a state of vassalage; and acquired territory from the republic of Great Novgorod by treaty. In his reign occurred the invasion of Timur (1395), who ruined the Volgan regions, but did not penetrate so far as Moscow. Indeed Timur's raid was of service to the Russian prince as it all but wiped out the Golden Horde, which for the next twelve years was in a state of anarchy. During the whole of this time no tribute was paid to the khan, though vast sums of money were collected in the Moscow treasury for military purposes. In 1408 the Mirza Edigei ravaged Muscovite territory, but was unable to take Moscow. In 1412, however, Basil found it necessary to pay the long-deferred visit of submission to the Horde. The most important ecclesiastical event of the reign was the elevation of the Bulgarian, Gregory Tsamblak, to the metropolitan see of Kiev (1425) by Vitovt, grand-duke of Lithuania; the immediate political consequence of which was the weakening of the hold of Muscovy on the south-western Russian states. During Basil's reign a terrible visitation of the "Black Death" decimated the population.

See T. Schiemann, _Russland bis ins 17. Jahrhundert_ (Gotha, 1885-1887).

BASIL II., called TEMNY ("the BLIND") (1415-1462), son of the preceding, succeeded his father as grand-duke of Moscow in 1425. He was a man of small ability and unusual timidity, though not without tenacity of purpose. Nevertheless, during his reign Moscow steadily increased in power, as if to show that the personality of the grand-dukes had become quite a subordinate factor in its development. In 1430 Basil was seized by his uncle, George of Halicz, and sent a prisoner to Kostroma; but the nation, dissatisfied with George, released Basil and in 1433 he returned in triumph to Moscow. George, however, took the field against him and Basil fled to Novgorod. On the death of George, Basil was at constant variance with George's children, one of whom, Basil, he had blinded; but in 1445 the grand-duke fell into the hands of blind Basil's brother, Shemyak, and was himself deprived of his sight and banished to Uglich (1445). The clergy and people, however, being devoted to the grand-duke, assisted him not only to recover his throne a second time, but to put Shemyak to flight, and to seize Halicz, his patrimony. During the remainder of Basil II.'s reign he slowly and unobtrusively added district after district to the grand-duchy of Muscovy, so that, in fine, only the republics of Novgorod and Pskov and the principalities of Tver and Vereya remained independent of Moscow. Yet all this time the realm was overrun continually by the Tatars and Lithuanians, and suffered severely from their depredations. Basil's reign saw the foundation of the Solovetsk monastery and the rise of the khanate of the Crimea. In 1448 the north Russian Church became virtually independent of the patriarchal see of Constantinople by adopting the practice of selecting its metropolitan from among native priests and prelates exclusively.

See S. M. Solovev, _History of Russia_ (Russ.), (Petersburg, 1895).

BASIL III., IVANOVICH (1479-1533), tsar of Muscovy, son of Ivan III. and Sophia Palaeologa, succeeded his father in 1505. A crafty prince, with all the tenacity of his race, Basil succeeded in incorporating with Muscovy the last remnants of the ancient independent principalities, by accusing the princes of Ryazan and Syeversk of conspiracy against him, seizing their persons, and annexing their domains (1517-1523). Seven years earlier (24th of January 1510) the last free republic of old Russia, Pskov, was deprived of its charter and assembly-bell, which were sent [v.03 p.0469] to Moscow, and tsarish governors were appointed to rule it. Basil also took advantage of the difficult position of Sigismund of Poland to capture Smolensk, the great eastern fortress of Poland (1512), chiefly through the aid of the rebel Lithuanian, Prince Michael Glinsky, who provided him with artillery and engineers from western Europe. The loss of Smolensk was the first serious injury inflicted by Muscovy on Poland and only the exigencies of Sigismund compelled him to acquiesce in its surrender (1522). Equally successful, on the whole, was Basil against the Tatars. Although in 1519 he was obliged to buy off the khan of the Crimea, Mahommed Girai, under the very walls of Moscow, towards the end of his reign he established the Russian influence on the Volga, and in 1530 placed the pretender Elanyei on the throne of Kazan. Basil was the first grand-duke of Moscow who adopted the title of tsar and the double-headed eagle of the East Roman empire. By his second wife, Helena Glinska, whom he married in 1526, Basil had a son Ivan, who succeeded him as Ivan IV.

See Sigismund Herberstain, _Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii_ (Vienna, 1549); P. A. Byelov, _Russian History Previous to the Reforms of Peter the Great_ (Russ.), (Petersburg, 1895); E. I. Kashprovsky, _The War of Basil III. with Sigismund I._ (Russ.), (Nyezhin, 1899).

BASIL IV., SHUISKY (d. 1612), tsar of Muscovy, was during the reigns of Theodore I. and Boris Godunov, one of the leading boyars of Muscovy. It was he who, in obedience to the secret orders of Tsar Boris, went to Uglich to inquire into the cause of the death of Demetrius, the infant son of Ivan the Terrible, who had been murdered there by the agents of Boris. Shuisky obsequiously reported that it was a case of suicide; yet, on the death of Boris and the accession of his son Theodore II., the false boyar, in order to gain favour with the first false Demetrius, went back upon his own words and recognized the pretender as the real Demetrius, thus bringing about the assassination of the young Theodore. Shuisky then plotted against the false Demetrius and procured his death (May 1606) also by publicly confessing that the real Demetrius had been indeed slain and that the reigning tsar was an impostor. This was the viler in him as the pseudo-Demetrius had already forgiven him one conspiracy. Shuisky's adherents thereupon proclaimed him tsar (19th of May 1606). He reigned till the 19th of July 1610, but was never generally recognized. Even in Moscow itself he had little or no authority, and was only not deposed by the dominant boyars because they had none to put in his place. Only the popularity of his heroic cousin, Prince Michael Skopin-Shuisky, who led his armies and fought his battles for him, and soldiers from Sweden, whose assistance he purchased by a disgraceful cession of Russian territory, kept him for a time on his unstable throne. In 1610 he was deposed, made a monk, and finally carried off as a trophy by the Polish grand hetman, Stanislaus Zolkiewski. He died at Warsaw in 1612.

See D. I. Ilovaisky, _The Troubled Period of the Muscovite Realm_ (Russ.), (Moscow, 1894); S. I. Platonov, _Sketches of the Great Anarchy in the Realm of Moscow_ (Petersburg, 1899); D. V. Tsvyeltev, _Tsar Vasily Shuisky_ (Russ.), (Warsaw, 1901-1903); R. Nisbet Bain, _Slavonic Europe_, ch. viii. (Cambridge, 1907).

(R. N. B.)

BASILIAN MONKS, those who follow the rule of Basil the Great. The chief importance of the monastic rule and institute of St Basil lies in the fact that to this day his reconstruction of the monastic life is the basis of the monasticism of the Greek and Slavonic Churches, though the monks do not call themselves Basilians. St Basil's claim to the authorship of the Rules and other ascetical writings that go under his name, has been questioned; but the tendency now is to recognize as his at any rate the two sets of Rules. Probably the truest idea of his monastic system may be derived from a correspondence between him and St Gregory Nazianzen at the beginning of his monastic life, the chief portions whereof are translated by Newman in the _Church of the Fathers_, "Basil and Gregory," §§ 4, 5. On leaving Athens Basil visited the monasteries of Egypt and Palestine; in the latter country and in Syria the monastic life tended to become more and more eremitical and to run to great extravagances in the matter of bodily austerities (see MONASTICISM). When (_c._ 360) Basil formed his monastery in the neighbourhood of Neocaesarea in Pontus, he deliberately set himself against these tendencies. He declared that the cenobitical life is superior to the eremitical; that fasting and austerities should not interfere with prayer or work; that work should form an integral part of the monastic life, not merely as an occupation, but for its own sake and in order to do good to others; and therefore that monasteries should be near towns. All this was a new departure in monachism. The life St Basil established was strictly cenobitical, with common prayer seven times a day, common work, common meals. It was, in spite of the new ideas, an austere life, of the kind called contemplative, given up to prayer, the reading of the Scriptures and heavy field-work. The so-called Rules (the Longer and the Shorter) are catechisms of the spiritual life rather than a body of regulations for the corporate working of a community, such as is now understood by a monastic rule. Apparently no vows were taken, but obedience, personal poverty, chastity, self-denial, and the other monastic virtues were strongly enforced, and a monk was not free to abandon the monastic life. A novitiate had to be passed, and young boys were to be educated in the monastery, but were not expected to become monks.

St Basil's influence, and the greater suitability of his institute to European ideas, ensured the propagation of Basilian monachism; and Sozomen says that in Cappadocia and the neighbouring provinces there were no hermits but only cenobites. However, the eastern hankering after the eremitical life long survived, and it was only by dint of legislation, both ecclesiastical (council of Chalcedon) and civil (Justinian Code), that the Basilian cenobitic form of monasticism came to prevail throughout the Greek-speaking lands, though the eremitical forms have always maintained themselves.

Greek monachism underwent no development or change for four centuries, except the vicissitudes inevitable in all things human, which in monasticism assume the form of alternations of relaxation and revival. The second half of the 8th century seems to have been a time of very general decadence; but about the year 800 Theodore, destined to be the only other creative name in Greek monachism, became abbot of the monastery of the Studium in Constantinople. He set himself to reform his monastery and restore St Basil's spirit in its primitive vigour. But to effect this, and to give permanence to the reformation, he saw that there was need of a more practical code of laws to regulate the details of the daily life, as a supplement to St Basil's Rules. He therefore drew up constitutions, afterwards codified (see Migne, _Patrol. Graec._ xcix., 1704-1757), which became the norm of the life at the Studium monastery, and gradually spread thence to the monasteries of the rest of the Greek empire. Thus to this day the Rules of Basil and the Constitutions of Theodore the Studite, along with the canons of the Councils, constitute the chief part of Greek and Russian monastic law.

The spirit of Greek monachism, as regenerated by Theodore, may best be gathered from his _Letters, Discourses and Testament_.[1] Under the abbot were several officials to superintend the various departments; the liturgical services in the church took up a considerable portion of the day, but Theodore seems to have made no attempt to revive the early practice of the Studium in this matter (see ACOEMETI); the rest of the time was divided between reading and work; the latter included the chief handicrafts, for the monks, only ten in number, when Theodore became abbot, increased under his rule to over a thousand. One kind of work practised with great zeal and success by the Studite monks, was the copying of manuscripts, so that to them and to the schools that went forth from them we owe a great number of existing Greek MSS. and the preservation of many works of classical and ecclesiastical antiquity. In addition to this, literary and theological studies were pursued, and the mysticism of pseudo-Dionysius was cultivated. The life, though simple and self-denying and hard, was not of extreme austerity. There was a division of the monks into two classes, similar to the division in vogue in later time in the West into choir-monks and lay-brothers. The life of the choir-monks was predominantly contemplative, [v.03 p.0470] being taken up with the church services and private prayer and study; the lay-brothers carried on the various trades and external works. There is little or no evidence of works of charity outside the monastery being undertaken by Studite monks. Strict personal poverty was enforced, and all were encouraged to approach confession and communion frequently. Vows had been imposed on monks by the council of Chalcedon (451). The picture of Studite life is the picture of normal Greek and Slavonic monachism to this day.

During the middle ages the centre of Greek monachism shifted from Constantinople to Mount Athos. The first monastery to be founded here was that of St Athanasius (_c._ 960), and in the course of the next three or four centuries monasteries in great numbers--Greek, Slavonic and one Latin--were established on Mount Athos, some twenty of which still survive.

Basilian monachism spread from Greece to Italy and Russia. Rufinus had translated St Basil's Rules into Latin (_c._ 400) and they became the rule of life in certain Italian monasteries. They were known to St Benedict, who refers his monks to "the Rule of our holy Father Basil,"--indeed St Benedict owed more of the ground-ideas of his Rule to St Basil than to any other monastic legislator. In the 6th and 7th centuries there appear to have been Greek monasteries in Rome and south Italy and especially in Sicily. But during the course of the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries crowds of fugitives poured into southern Italy from Greece and Sicily, under stress of the Saracenic, Arab and other invasions; and from the middle of the 9th century Basilian monasteries, peopled by Greek-speaking monks, were established in great numbers in Calabria and spread northwards as far as Rome. Some of them existed on into the 18th century, but the only survivor now is the monastery founded by St Nilus (_c._ 1000) at Grottaferrata in the Alban Hills. Professor Kirsopp Lake has (1903) written four valuable articles (_Journal of Theological Studies_, iv., v.) on "The Greek monasteries of South Italy"; he deals in detail with their scriptoria and the dispersal of their libraries, a matter of much interest, in that some of the chief collections of Greek MSS. in western Europe--as the Bessarion at Venice and a great number at the Vatican--come from the spoils of these Italian Basilian houses.

Of much greater importance was the importation of Basilian monachism into Russia, for it thereby became the norm of monachism for all the Slavonic lands. Greek monks played a considerable part in the evangelization of the Slavs, and the first Russian monastery was founded at Kiev (_c._ 1050) by a monk from Mount Athos. The monastic institute had a great development in Russia, and at the present day there are in the Russian empire some 400 monasteries of men and 100 of women, many of which support hospitals, almshouses and schools. In the other Slavonic lands there are a considerable number of monasteries, as also in Greece itself, while in the Turkish dominions there are no fewer than 100 Greek monasteries. The monasteries are of three kinds: _cenobia_ proper, wherein full monastic common life, with personal poverty, is observed; others called _idiorrhythmic_, wherein the monks are allowed the use of their private means and lead a generally mitigated and free kind of monastic life; and the _lauras_, wherein the life is semi-eremitical. Greek and Slavonic monks wear a black habit. The visits of Western scholars in modern times to Greek monasteries in search of MSS.--notably to St Catherine's on Mount Sinai, and to Mount Athos--has directed much attention to contemporary Greek monachism, and the accounts of these expeditions commonly contain descriptions, more or less sympathetic and intelligent, of the present-day life of Greek monks. The first such account was Robert Curzon's in parts iii. (1834) and iv. (1837) of the _Monasteries of the Levant_; the most recent in English is Athelstan Riley's _Athos_ (1887). The life is mainly given up to devotional contemplative exercises; the church services are of extreme length; intellectual study is little cultivated; manual labour has almost disappeared; there are many hermits on Athos (_q.v._).

The ecclesiastical importance of the monks in the various branches of the Orthodox Church lies in this, that as bishops must be celibate, whereas the parochial clergy must be married, the bishops are all recruited from the monks. But besides this they have been a strong spiritual and religious influence, as is recognized even by those who have scant sympathy with monastic ideals (see Harnack, _What is Christianity?_ Lect. xiii., end).

Outside the Orthodox Church are some small congregations of Uniat Basilians. Besides Grottaferrata, there are Catholic Basilian monasteries in Poland, Hungary, Galicia, Rumania; and among the Melchites or Uniat Syrians.

There have been Basilian nuns from the beginning, St Macrina, St Basil's sister, having established a nunnery which was under his direction. The nuns are devoted to a purely contemplative life, and in Russia, where there are about a hundred nunneries, they are not allowed to take final vows until the age of sixty. They are very numerous throughout the East.

AUTHORITIES.--In addition to the authorities for different portions of the subject-matter named in the course of this article, may be mentioned, on St Basil and his Rules, Montalembert, _Monks of the West_, second part of bk. ii., and the chapter on St Basil in James O. Hannay's _Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism_ (1903). On the history and spirit of Basilian Monachism, Helyot, _Hist. des Ordres Religieux_, i. (1714); Heimbucher, _Orden und Kongregationen_ (1907), i., § 11; Abbé Marin, _Les Moines de Constantinople_ (1897); Karl Holl, _Enthusiasmus und Bussgewalt beim griechischen Mönchtum_ (1898); Otto Zöckler, _Askese und Mönchtum_, pp. 285-309 (1897). For general information see Wetzer und Welte, _Kirchenlexicon_ (ed. ii.), art. "Basilianer," and Herzog-Hauck, _Realencyklopädie_ (ed. iii.), in articles "Mönchtum," "Orientalische Kirche," and "Athosberg," where copious references will be found.

(E. C. B.)

[1] Specimen passages, and also a general picture of the life, will be found in Miss Alice Gardner's _Theodore of Studium_, ch. v.

BASILICA, a word of Greek origin (see below), frequently used in Latin literature and inscriptions to denote a large covered building that could accommodate a considerable number of people. Strictly speaking, a basilica was a building of this kind situated near the business centre of a city and arranged for the convenience of merchants, litigants and persons engaged on the public service; but in a derived sense the word might be used for any large structure wherever situated, such as a hall of audience (Vitruv. vi. 5. 2) or a covered promenade (St Jerome, _Ep._ 46) in a private palace; a riding school (_basilica equestris exercitatoria_, _C.I.L._ vii. 965); a market or store for flowers (_basilica floscellaria_ [_Notitia_]), or other kinds of goods (_basilica vestiaria_, _C.I.L._ viii. 20156), or a hall of meeting for a religious body. In this derived sense the word came naturally to be applied to the extensive buildings used for Christian worship in the age of Constantine and his successors.

The question whether this word conveyed to the ancients any special architectural significance is a difficult one, and some writers hold that the name betokened only the use of the building, others that it suggested also a certain form. Our knowledge of the ancient basilica as a civil structure is derived primarily from Vitruvius, and we learn about it also from existing remains and from incidental notices in classical writers and in inscriptions. If we review all the evidence we are led to the conclusion that there did exist a normal form of the building, though many examples deviated therefrom. This normal form we shall understand if we consider the essential character of the building in the light of what Vitruvius tells us of it.

Vitruvius treats the basilica in close connexion with the forum, to which in his view it is an adjunct. In the earlier classical times, both in Greece and Italy, business of every kind, political, commercial and legal, was transacted in the open forum, and there also were presented shows and pageants. When business increased and the numbers of the population were multiplied, it was found convenient to provide additional accommodation for these purposes. Theatres and amphitheatres took the performances and games. Markets provided for those that bought and sold, while for business of more important kinds accommodation could be secured by laying out new _agorae_ or _fora_ in the immediate vicinity of the old. At Rome this was done by means of the so-called imperial fora, the latest and most splendid of which was that of Trajan. These fora corresponded to the later Greek or Hellenistic agora, which, as Vitruvius tells us, was of regular form and surrounded by colonnades in two stories, and they had the practical use of relieving the pressure on the [v.03 p.0471] original forum (Cic., _ad Att._, iv. 16). The basilica was a structure intended for the same purposes. It was to all intents and purposes a covered forum, and in its normal form was constituted by an arrangement of colonnades in two stories round a rectangular space, that was not, like the Greek agora, open, but covered with a roof. Vitruvius writes of it as frequented by merchants, who would find in it shelter and quiet for the transaction of their business. Legal tribunals were also set up in it, though it is a mistake to suppose the basilica a mere law court. The magistrates who presided over these tribunals had sometimes platforms, curved or rectangular in plan, provided as part of the permanent fittings of the edifice.

According to Vitruvius (v. 1. 4, cf. also vi. 3. 9) the building is to be in plan a rectangle, not more than three times nor less than twice as long as it is broad. If the site oblige the length to be greater, the surplus is to be cut off to form what he calls _chalcidica_, by which must be meant open vestibules. The interior is divided into a central space and side aisles one-third the width of this. The ground plan of the basilica at Pompeii (fig. 1) illustrates this description, though the superstructure did not correspond to the Vitruvian scheme. The columns between nave and aisles, Vitruvius proceeds, are the same height as the width of the latter, and the aisle is covered with a flat roof forming a terrace (_contignatio_) on which people can walk. Surrounding this on the inner side is a breastwork or parapet (_pluteum_), which would conceal these promenaders from the view of the merchants in the basilica below. On the top of this parapet stood the upper row of columns, three-quarters as high as the lower ones. The spaces between these columns, above the top of the _pluteum_, would be left free for the admission of light to the central space, which was covered by a roof called by Vitruvius (v. 1. 6) _mediana testudo_. Nothing is said about a permanent tribunal or about an apse.

[Illustration: FIG. 1.--Basilica at Pompeii. 1, Portico (Chalcidicum); 2, hall of basilica; 3, aisles; 4, altar; 5, tribunal; 6, offices.]

How far existing remains agree with the Vitruvian scheme will be seen as we proceed. We have now to consider the derivation of the word "basilica," the history of the form of building, and its architectural scheme as represented in actual relics.

The word "basilica" is a Latinized form of the Greek adjective [Greek: basilikê], "royal," and some feminine substantive, such as _domus_, or _stoa_, must be understood with it. A certain building at Athens, wherein the [Greek: archôn basileus] transacted business and the court of the Areopagus sometimes assembled, was called [Greek: basileios stoa], and it is an accredited theory, though it is by no means proved, that we have here the origin of the later basilica. It is difficult to see why this was called "royal" except for some special but accidental reason such as can in this case be divined. There are other instances in which a term that becomes specific has been derived from some one specimen accidentally named. "Labyrinth" is one case in point, and "basilica" may be another. It is true that we do not know what was the shape of the King Archon's portico, but the same name ([Greek: basileios stoa]) was given to the grand structure erected by Herod the Great along the southern edge of the Temple platform at Jerusalem, and this corresponded to the Vitruvian scheme of a columned fabric, with nave and aisles and clerestory lighting.

Whether the Roman basilicas, with which we are chiefly concerned, were derived directly from the Athenian example, or mediately from this through structures of the same kind erected in the later Greek cities, is hard to say. We should naturally look in that direction for the prototypes of the Roman basilicas, but as a fact we are not informed of any very early basilicas in these cities. The earliest we know of is the existing basilica at Pompeii, that may date back into the 2nd century B.C., whereas basilicas made their appearance at Rome nearly at the beginning of that century. The first was erected by M. Porcius Cato, the censor, in 184 B.C., and was called after his name Basilica Porcia. Cato had recently visited Athens and had been struck by the beauty of the city, so that it is quite possible that the importation was direct.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.--Plan of Basilica Julia, Rome.

(From Baedeker's _Central Italy_, by permission of Karl Baedeker.)]

[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Plan of Basilica Ulpia, from Capitoline plan of Rome.]

Rome soon obtained other basilicas, of which the important Basilica Fulvia-Aemilia came next in point of time, till by the age of Augustus there were at least five in the immediate neighbourhood of the forum, the latest and most extensive being the Basilica Julia, which ran parallel to its southern side, and is shown in plan in fig. 2. The great Basilica Ulpia was built by Trajan in connexion with his forum about A.D. 112, and a fragment of the Capitoline plan of Rome gives the scheme of it (fig. 3), while an attempted restoration of the interior by Canina is shown in fig. 4. The vaulted basilica of Maxentius or Constantine on the Via Sacra dates from the beginning of the 4th century, and fig. 5 gives the section of it. The number of public basilicas we read of at Rome alone amounts to about a score, while many private basilicas, for business or recreation, must also have existed, that in the palace of Domitian on the Palatine being the best known. In provincial cities in Italy, and indeed all over the empire, basilicas were almost universal, and in the case of Italy we have proof of this as early as the date of the death of Augustus, for Suetonius (_Aug_. 100) tells us that the body of that emperor, when it was brought from Nola in Campania to Rome, rested "_in basilica cujusque oppidi._"

[Illustration: FIG. 4.--Interior view of Trajan's Basilica (_Basilica Ulpia_), as restored by Canina.]

As regards existing examples, neither in the peninsula nor the provinces can it be said that these give any adequate idea of the former abundance and wide distribution of basilicas. Northern Africa contributes one or two examples, and a plan is given of that at Timgad (fig. 6). The Gallic basilicas, which must have been very numerous, are represented only by the noble structure at Trier (Trèves), which is now a single vast hall 180 ft. long, 90 ft. wide and 100 ft. high, commanded at one end by a spacious apse. There is reason to conjecture that this is the basilica erected by Constantine, and some authorities believe that originally it had internal colonnades. In England basilicas remain in part at Silchester (fig. 7), Uriconium (Wroxeter), [v.03 p.0472] Chester (?) and Lincoln, while three others are mentioned in inscriptions (_C.I.L._ vii. 287, 445, 965).

A comparison of the plans of existing basilicas shows considerable variety in form. Some basilicas (Julia, Ulpia, Pompeii) have the central space surrounded by galleries supported on columns or piers, according to the normal scheme, and the newly excavated Basilica Aemilia, north of the Roman forum, agrees with these. In some North African examples, in the palace basilica of Domitian, and at Silchester, there are colonnades down the long sides but not across the ends. Others (Trier [?], Timgad) have no interior divisions. One (Maxentius) is entirely a vaulted structure and in form resembles the great halls of the Roman Thermae. At Pompeii, Timgad and Silchester, there are fixed tribunals, while vaulted apses that may have contained tribunals occur in the basilica of Maxentius. In the Basilica Julia there was no tribunal at all, though we know that the building was regularly used for the centumviral court (Quint. xii. 5. 6), and the same was the case in the Ulpia, for the semicircular projection at the end shown on the Capitoline-plan, was not a vaulted apse and was evidently distinct from the basilica.

[Illustration: FIG. 5.--Section of the Basilica of Maxentius or Constantine (Temple of Peace).]

In view of the above it might be questioned whether it is safe to speak of a normal form of the basilica, but when we consider the vast number of basilicas that have perished compared to the few that have survived, and the fact that the origins and traditions of the building show it to have been, as Vitruvius describes it, essentially a columned structure, there is ample justification for the view expressed earlier in this article. There can be little doubt that the earlier basilicas, and the majority of basilicas taken as a whole, had a central space with galleries, generally in two stories, round it, and some arrangement for clerestory lighting. Later basilicas might vary in architectural scheme, while affording the same sort of accommodation as the older ones.

The relation of the civil basilica of the Romans to the Christian church has been extensively discussed, and the reader will find the controversy ably summarized in Kraus's _Geschichte der christlichen Kunst_, bk. 5. There is nothing remarkable in the fact that a large church was called a basilica, for the term was applied, as we have seen, to structures of many kinds, and we even find "basilica" used for the meeting-place of a pagan religious association (_Röm. Mitt._ 1891, p. 109). The similarity in some respects of the early Christian churches to the normal form of the columned basilica is so striking, that we can understand how the theory was once held that Christian churches were the actual civil basilicas turned over from secular to religious uses. There is no evidence for this in the case of public basilicas, and it stands to reason that the demands on these for secular purposes would remain the same whether Christianity were the religion of the empire or not. Moreover, though there are one or two civil basilicas that resemble churches, the latter differ in some most important respects from the form of the basilica that we have recognized as normal. The early Christian basilicas, at any rate in the west, had very seldom, if ever, galleries over the side aisles, and their interior is always dominated by the semi-dome of an apse that terminates the central nave, whereas, with the doubtful exception of Silchester (_Archaeologia_, liii. 549), there is no instance known of a vaulted apse in a columned civil basilica of the normal kind.

[Illustration: FIG. 6.--Plan of Basilica adjoining the Forum of the Roman city of Timgad, in North Africa.

(From Gsell's _Monuments antiques de l'Algerie_, by permission of A. Fontemoing.) ]

When buildings were first expressly erected for Christian worship, in the 3rd or perhaps already in the 2nd century A.D. (Leclercq, _Manuel_, ch. iii. "Les édifices chrétiens avant la paix de l'église"), they probably took the form of an oblong interior [v.03 p.0473] terminated by an apse. After the time of Constantine, when the numbers of the faithful were enormously increased, side aisles were added, and in this way the structure came to assume an appearance similar to that of the civil basilica. A striking confirmation of this view has recently come to light at S. Saba on the Aventine at Rome, where a small and very early church, without aisles, has been discovered beneath the floor of the present basilica.

There are, on the other hand, instances in which private basilicas in palaces and mansions were handed over to the Christians for sacred uses. We know that to have been the case with the basilicas of S. Croce in Gerusalemme and S. Maria Maggiore at Rome, which originated in the halls of the Sessorian and Liberian palaces respectively, granted by Constantine to the Christians. We may adduce also as evidence of the same practice a passage in bk. x. ch. 71 of the theological romance known as _The Recognitions of Clement_, probably dating from the early half of the 3rd century, in which we are told that Theophilus of Antioch, on his conversion by St Peter, made over "the basilica of his house" for a church. But however this may have been, with, perhaps, the single exception of S. Croce, the existing Christian basilicas were erected from the ground for their sacred purpose. At Rome the columns, friezes and other materials of the desecrated temples and public buildings furnished abundant materials for their construction. The decadence of art is plainly shown by the absence of rudimentary architectural knowledge in these reconstructions. Not only are columns of various heights and diameters made to do duty in the same colonnade, but even different orders stand side by side (_e.g._ Ionic, Corinthian and Composite at S. Maria in Trastevere); while pilasters assume a horizontal position and serve as entablatures, as at S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura. There being no such quarry of ready-worked materials at Ravenna, the noble basilicas of that city are free from these defects, and exhibit greater unity of design and harmony of proportions.

[Illustration: FIG. 7.--Plan of Basilica adjoining the Forum of the Roman city at Silchester, Hants. (From _Archaeologia,_ vol. liii.)]

An early Christian basilica may be thus described in its main features:--A porch supported on pillars (as at S. Clemente) gave admission into an open court or _atrium_, surrounded by a colonnaded cloister (S. Clemente, Old St Peter's, S. Ambrogio at Milan, Parenzo). In the centre of the court stood a cistern or fountain (_cantharus_, _phiale_), for drinking and ablutions. In close contiguity to the atrium, often to the west, was the baptistery, usually octagonal (Parenzo). The church was entered through a long narrow porch (_narthex_), beyond which penitents, or those under ecclesiastical censure, were forbidden to pass. Three or more lofty doorways, according to the number of the aisles, set in marble cases, gave admission to the church. The doors themselves were of rich wood, elaborately carved with scriptural subjects (S. Sabina on the Aventine), or of bronze similarly adorned and often gilt. Magnificent curtains, frequently embroidered with sacred figures or scenes, closed the entrance, keeping out the heat of summer and the cold of winter.

The interior consisted of a long and wide nave, sometimes as much as 80 ft. across, terminating in a semicircular apse, with one or sometimes (St Paul's, Old St Peter's, St John Lateran) two aisles on each side, separated by colonnades of marble pillars supporting horizontal entablatures (Old St Peter's, S. Maria Maggiore, S. Lorenzo) or arches (St Paul's, S. Agnese, S. Clemente, the two basilicas of S. Apollinare at Ravenna). Above the pillars the clerestory wall rose to a great height, pierced in its upper part by a range of plain round-headed windows. The space between the windows and the colonnade (the later triforium-space) was usually decorated with a series of mosaic pictures in panels. The colonnades sometimes extended quite to the end of the church (the Ravenna basilicas), sometimes ceased some little distance from the end, thus admitting the formation of a transverse aisle or transept (St Paul's, Old St Peter's, St John Lateran). Where this transept occurred it was divided from the nave by a wide arch, the face and soffit of which were richly decorated with mosaics. Over the crown of the arch we often find a bust of Christ or the holy lamb lying upon the altar, and, on either side, the evangelistic symbols, the seven candlesticks and the twenty-four elders. Another arch spanned the semicircular apse, in which the church always terminated. From Carolingian times this was designated the _arch of triumph_, because a cross was suspended from it.

[Illustration: FIG. 8.--S. Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna.]

The conch or semi-dome that covered the apse was always covered with mosaic pictures, usually paintings of our Lord, either seated or standing, with St Peter and St Paul, and other apostles and saints, on either hand. The beams of the roof were sometimes concealed by a flat ceiling, richly carved and gilt. The altar, standing in the centre of the chord of the apse on a raised platform reached by flights of steps, was rendered conspicuous by a lofty canopy supported by marble pillars (_ciborium_, _baldacchino_), from which depended curtains of the richest materials. Beneath the altar was the _confessio_, a subterranean chapel, containing the body of the patron saint, and relics of other holy persons. This was approached by descending flights of steps from the nave or aisles. The _confessio_ in some cases reproduced the original place of interment of the patron saint, either in a catacomb-chapel or in an ordinary grave, and thus formed the sacred nucleus round which the church arose. We have good examples of this arrangement at St Peter's and St Paul's at Rome, and S. Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna. It was copied in the original cathedral of Canterbury. The bishop or officiating presbyter advanced from his seat in the centre of the semicircle of the apse to the altar, and celebrated the Eucharist with his face to the congregation below. At the foot of the altar steps a raised platform, occupying the upper portion of the nave, formed a choir for the singers, readers and other inferior clergy. This oblong space was separated from the aisles and from the western portion of the nave by low marble walls or railings (_cancelli_). From these walls projected _ambones_ or pulpits with desks, also of marble, ascended by steps.

The exterior of the basilicas was usually of an extreme plainness. The vast brick walls were unrelieved by ornament, save occasionally by arcading as at S. Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna, and had no compensating grace of outline or beauty of proportion. An exception was made for the entrance front, which was sometimes covered with plates of marble mosaics or painted stucco (Old St Peter's, S. Lorenzo). But in spite of any decorations the external effect of a basilica must always have been heavy and unattractive. S. Apollinare in Classe at Ravenna (fig. 8) affords a typical [v.03 p.0474] example. The campanile is a later addition. Within, apart from the beautiful mosaic decoration, a fine effect was produced by the arch of triumph and the apse, which terminated the nave and dominated the whole vast space of the interior.

[Illustration: FIG. 9.--Façade of old St Peter's, Rome.]

[Illustration: FIG. 10.--Ground-Plan of the original Basilica of St Peter's at Rome.

_a_, Porch. _b_, Atrium. _c_, Cloisters. _d_, Narthex. _e_, Nave. _f_, _f_, Aisles, _g_, Bema. _h_, Altar, protected by a double screen. _i_, Bishop's throne in centre of the apse. _k_, Sacristy. _l_, Tomb of Honorius. _m_, Church of St Andrew. ]

To pass from general description to individual churches, the first place must be given, as the earliest and grandest examples of the type, to the world-famous Roman basilicas; those of St Peter, St Paul and St John Lateran, _"omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput."_ It is true that no one of these exists in its original form, Old St Peter's having been entirely removed in the 16th century to make room for its magnificent successor; and both St Paul's and St John Lateran having been greatly injured by fire, and the last named being so completely modernized as to have lost all interest. Of the two former, however, we possess drawings and plans and minute descriptions, which give an accurate conception of the original buildings. To commence with St Peter's, from the illustrations annexed (figs. 9, 10, 11) it will be seen that the church was entered through a vast colonnaded _atrium_, 212 ft. by 235 ft., with a fountain in the centre,--the atrium being preceded by a porch mounted by a noble flight of steps. The church was 212 ft. wide by 380 ft. long; the nave, 80 ft. in width, was six steps lower than the side aisles, of which there were two on each side. The four dividing colonnades were each of twenty-two Corinthian columns. Those next the nave supported horizontal entablatures. The inner colonnades bore arches, with a second clerestory. The main clerestory walls were divided into two rows of square panels containing mosaics, and had windows above. The transept projected beyond the body of the church,--a very unusual arrangement. The apse, of remarkably small dimensions, was screened off by a double row of twelve wreathed columns of Parian marble. The pontifical chair was placed in the centre of the curve of the apse, on a platform raised several steps above the presbytery. To the right and left the seats of the cardinals followed the line of the apse. At the centre of the chord stood the high altar beneath a ciborium, resting on four pillars of porphyry. Beneath the altar was the subterranean chapel, the centre of the devotion of so large a portion of the Christian world, believed to contain the remains of St Peter; a vaulted crypt ran round the foundation wall of the apse in which many of the popes were buried. The roof showed its naked beams and rafters.

[Illustration: FIG. 11.--Sectional view of the old Basilica of St Peter, before its destruction in the 16th century.]

[Illustration: FIG. 12.--Ground-Plan of St Paul's, Rome, before its destruction by fire.

_a_, Narthex. _b_, Nave. _c_, _c_, Side aisles. _d_, Altar. _e_, Bema. _f_, Apse.]

The basilica of St Paul without the walls, dedicated 324 A.D., rebuilt 388-423, remained in a sadly neglected state, but substantially unaltered, till the disastrous fire of 1823, which reduced the nave to a calcined ruin. Its plan and dimensions (figs. 12, 13) were almost identical with those of St Peter's.

The only parts of the modernized five-aisled basilica of St John Lateran (of which we have a plan in its original state, Agincourt, pl. lxxiii. No. 22) which retain any interest, are the double-vaulted aisle which runs round the apse, a most unusual arrangement, and the baptistery. The latter is an octagonal building standing some little distance from the basilica to the south. Its roof is supported by a double range of columns, one above the other, encircling the baptismal basin sunk below the floor.

Of the three-aisled basilicas the best example is the Liberian or S. Maria Maggiore dedicated 365, and reconstructed 432 A.D. Its internal length to the chord of the apse is 250 ft. by 100 ft. in breadth. The Ionic pillars of grey granite, uniform in style, twenty on each side, form a colonnade of great dignity and beauty, unfortunately broken towards the east by intrusive arches opening into chapels. The clerestory, though modern, is excellent in style and arrangement. Corinthian pilasters divide the windows, beneath which are very remarkable mosaic pictures of subjects from Old Testament history, generally supposed to [v.03 p.0475] date from the pontificate of Sixtus III., 432-440. The face of the arch of triumph presents also a series of mosaics illustrative of the infancy of our Lord, of great value in the history of art. The apse is of later date, reconstructed by Paschal I. in 818.

[Illustration: FIG. 13.--Section of the Basilica of St Paul, Rome.]

[Illustration: FIG. 14.--Section of Basilica of S. Agnese at Rome.]

Of the remaining Roman basilicas that of S. Sabina on the Aventine is of special interest as its interior, dating from about A.D. 430, has preserved more of the primitive aspect than any other. Its carved wooden doors of early Christian date are of unique value, and in the spandrils of its inner arcades, upborne by splendid antique Corinthian columns, are some good specimens of _opus sectile_ or mosaic of cut marble. The ancient roof is an open one. The basilicas of S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura and S. Agnese deserve

## particular notice, as exhibiting galleries corresponding to those of the

civil basilicas and to the later triforium, carried above the aisles and returned across the entrance end. It is doubtful, however, whether these galleries are part of the original schemes. The architectural history of S. Lorenzo's is curious. When originally constructed in A.D. 432, it consisted of a short nave of six bays, with an internal narthex the whole height of the building. In the 13th century Honorius III. disorientated the church by pulling down the apse and erecting a nave of twelve bays on its site and beyond it, thus converting the original nave into a square-ended choir, the level being much raised, and the magnificent Corinthian columns half buried. As a consequence of the church being thus shifted completely round, the face of the arch of triumph, turned away from the present entrance, but towards the original one, is invested with the usual mosaics (Agincourt, pl. xxviii. Nos. 29, 30, 31). The basilica of S. Agnese, of which we give a section (fig. 14), is a small but interesting building, much like what S. Lorenzo must have been before it was altered.

[Illustration: FIG. 15.--Plan of Basilica of S. Clemente in Rome.

1. Porch. 2. Atrium. 3. Nave. 4. Aisle for men. 5. Aisle for women. 6. Chorus cantorum. 7. Altar. 8. Gospel-ambo. 9. Epistle-ambo. 10. Confessio. 11. Bishop's throne.]

Though inferior in size, and later in date than most of the basilicas already mentioned, that of S. Clemente is not surpassed in interest by any one of them. This is due to its having retained its original ritual arrangements and church-fittings more perfectly than any other. These fittings have been removed from the earlier church, lying below the existing building, which at some unknown date and for some unrecorded reason was abandoned and filled up with earth, while a new building was erected upon it as a foundation. The most probable account is that the earlier church was so completely overwhelmed in the ruin of the city in 1084, when Robert Guiscard burnt all the public buildings from the Lateran to the Capitol, that it was found simpler and more convenient to build a new edifice at a higher level than to repair the old one. The annexed plan (fig. 15) and view (fig. 16) show the peculiarities of the existing building. The church is preceded by an _atrium_, the only perfect example remaining in Rome, in the centre of which is the _cantharus_ or fountain for ablutions. The atrium is entered by a portico made up of earlier fragments very carelessly put together. The _chorus cantorum_, which occupies about one-third of the nave, is enclosed by a low marble screen, about 3 ft. high, a work of the 9th century, preserved from the old church but newly arranged. The white marble slabs are covered with patterns in low relief, and are decorated with ribbons of glass mosaic of the 13th century. These screen-walls stand quite free of the pillars, leaving a passage between. On the ritual north stands the gospel-ambo, of octagonal form, with a double flight of steps westwards and eastwards. To the west of it stands the great Paschal candlestick, with a spiral shaft, decorated with mosaic. Opposite, to the south, is the epistle-ambo, square in plan, with two marble reading-desks facing east and west, for the reading of the epistle and the gradual respectively. The sanctuary is raised two steps above the choir, from which it is divided by another portion of the same marble screen. The altar stands beneath a lofty _ciborium_, supported by marble columns, with a canopy on smaller shafts above. It retains the rods and rings for the curtains to run on. Behind the altar, in the centre of the curved line of the apse, is a marble episcopal throne, bearing the monogram of Anastasius who was titular cardinal of this church in 1108. The conch of the apse is inlaid with mosaics of quite the end of the 13th century. The subterranean church, disinterred by the zeal of Father Mullooly, the prior of the adjacent Irish Dominican convent, is supported by columns of very rich marble of various kinds. The aisle walls, as well as those of the narthex, are covered with fresco-paintings of various dates from the 7th to the 11th century, in a marvellous state of preservation (See _St Clement, Pope and Martyr, and his Basilica in Rome_, by Joseph Mullooly, O.P., Rome, 1873.)

[Illustration: FIG. 16.--Interior of S. Clemente in Rome.]

The fullest lists of early Christian basilicas outside Rome are given in Kraus's _Realencyklopädie der christlichen Alterthümer_, Freiburg i. B., 1882, art. "Basilica," and more recently in Leclercq's _Manuel d'archéologie chrétienne_, Paris 1907, vol. i. App. i., "Essai de Classement des Principaux Monuments." Only a few characteristic specimens in different regions can here be noticed. In Italy, apart from Rome, the most remarkable basilican churches are the two dedicated to S. Apollinare at Ravenna. They are of smaller dimensions than those of Rome, but the design and proportions are better. The cathedral of this city, a noble basilica with double aisles, erected by Archbishop Ursus, A.D. 400 (Agincourt, pl. xxiii. No. 21), was unfortunately destroyed on the erection of the present tasteless building. Of the two basilicas of S. Apollinare, the earlier, S. Apollinare Nuovo, originally an Arian church erected by Theodoric, 493-525, measuring 315 ft. in length by 115 ft. in breadth, has a nave 51 ft. wide, separated from the single aisles by colonnades of twenty-two pillars, supporting arches, a small prismatic block bearing a sculptured cross intervening with very happy effect between the capital and the arch. Below the windows a continuous band of saintly figures, male on one side and female on the other, advancing in stately procession towards Our Lord and the Virgin Mother respectively, affords one of the most beautiful examples of mosaic ornamentation to be found [v.03 p.0476] in any church (fig. 17). The design of the somewhat later and smaller church of S. Apollinare in Classe, A.D. 538-549, measuring 216 ft. by 104 ft., is so similar that they must have proceeded from the same architect (Agincourt, pl lxxiii. No. 35).

[Illustration: FIG. 17.--Arches of S Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna.]

The cathedral on the island of Torcello near Venice, originally built in the 7th century, but largely repaired c. A.D. 1000, deserves special attention from the fact that it preserves, in a more perfect state than can be seen elsewhere, the arrangements of the seats in the apse (fig. 18). The bishop's throne occupies the centre of the arc, approached by a steep flight of steps. Six rows of stone benches for the presbyters, rising one above another like the seats in a theatre, follow the curve on either side--the whole being singularly plain and almost rude. The altar stands on a platform; the sanctuary is divided from the nave by a screen of six pillars. The walls of the apse are inlaid with plates of marble. The church is 125 ft. by 75 ft. The narrow aisles are only 7 ft. in width.

[Illustration: FIG. 18.--Apse of Basilica, Torcello, with Bishop's throne and seats for the clergy. (From a drawing by Lady Palgrave.)]

Another very remarkable basilica, less known than it deserves to be, is that of Parenzo in Istria, _c._ A.D. 542. Few basilicas have sustained so little alteration. From the annexed ground-plan (fig. 19) it will be seen that it retains its _atrium_ and a baptistery, square without, octagonal within, to the west of it. Nine pillars divide each aisle from the nave, some of them borrowed from earlier buildings. The capitals are Byzantine. The choir occupies the three easternmost bays. The apse, as at Torcello, retains the bishop's throne and the bench for the presbyters apparently unaltered. The mosaics are singularly gorgeous, and the apse walls, as at Torcello, are inlaid with rich marble and mother-of-pearl. The dimensions are small--121 ft. by 32 ft. (See _Kunstdenkmale des österreichischen Kaiserreichs_, by Dr G. Heider and others.)

[Illustration: FIG. 19.--Ground-Plan of Cathedral of Parenzo, Istria.

_a_, Cloistered atrium. +, Narthex. _b_, Nave. _c_, _c_, Aisles. _d_, Chorus cantorum. _e_, Altar. _f_, Bishop's throne. _g_, Baptistery. _h_, Belfry. _i_, Chapel of St Andrew.]

In the Eastern church, though the erection of St Sophia at Constantinople introduced a new type which almost entirely superseded the old one, the basilican form, or as it was then termed _dromical_, from its shape being that of a race-course (_dromos_), was originally as much the rule as in the West. The earliest church of which we have any clear account, that of Paulinus at Tyre, A.D. 313-322, described by Eusebius (_Hist. Eccl._ x. 4 § 37), was evidently basilican, with galleries over the aisles, and had an atrium in front. That erected by Constantine at Jerusalem, on the side of the Holy Sepulchre, 333, followed the same plan (Euseb., _Vit. Const._ iii. c. 29), as did the original churches of St Sophia and of the Apostles at Constantinople. Both these buildings have entirely passed away, but we have an excellent example of an oriental basilica of the same date still standing in the church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, rebuilt by Justinian in the 6th century (fig. 20). Here we find an oblong atrium, a vestibule or narthex, double aisles with Corinthian columns, and a transept, each end of which terminates in an apse, in addition to that in the usual position. Beneath the centre of the transept is the subterranean church of the Nativity (Vogué, _Les Églises de la Terre Sainte_, p. 46).

Constantinople preserved till recently a basilican church of the 5th century, that of St John Studios, 463, now a ruin. It had a nave and side aisles divided by columns supporting a horizontal entablature, with another order supporting arches forming a gallery above. There was the usual apsidal termination. The chief difference between the Eastern and Roman basilicas is in the galleries. This feature is very rare in the West, and only occurs in some few examples, the antiquity of which is questioned at Rome but never at Ravenna. It is, on the other hand, a characteristic feature of Eastern churches, the galleries being intended for women, for whom privacy was more studied than in the West (Salzenberg, _Altchrist. Baudenkmale von Constantinople_).

[Illustration: FIG. 20.--Plan of church of the Nativity, Bethlehem. 1, Narthex; 2, nave; 3, 3, aisles.]

Other basilican churches in the East which deserve notice are those of the monastery of St Catherine on Mt. Sinai built by Justinian, that of Dana between Antioch and Bir of the same date, St Philip at Athens, Bosra in Arabia, Xanthus in Lycia, and the very noble church of St Demetrius at Thessalonica. Views and descriptions of most of these may be found in Texier and Pullan's _Byzantine Architecture_, Couchaud's _Choix d'églises byzantines_, and the works of the count de Vogué. In the Roman province of North Africa there are abundant remains of early Christian churches, and S. Gsell, _Les Monuments antiques de l'Algérie_, has noticed more than 130 examples. Basilicas of strictly early Christian date are not now to be met with in France, Spain or Germany, but the interesting though very plain "Basse Oeuvre" at Beauvais may date from Carolingian times, while Germany can show at Michelstadt in the Odenwald an unaltered basilica of the time of Charles the Great. The fine-columned basilica of St Mauritius, near Hildesheim, dates from the 11th century, and the basilican form has been revived in the noble modern basilica at Munich.

[Illustration: FIG. 21.--Plan of early Christian Basilica of about the 4th century at Silchester, Hants.

(From _Archaeologia_, liii.)]

England can show more early Christian survivals than France or Germany. In the course of the excavation of the Roman city of Silchester, there was brought to light in 1892 the remains of a small early Christian basilica dating from the 4th century of which fig. 21 gives the plan (_Archaeologia_, vol. liii.). It will be [v.03 p.0477] noted that the apse is flanked by two chambers, of the nature of sacristies, cut off from the rest of the church, and known in ecclesiastical terminology as _prothesis_ and _diaconicon_. These features, rare in Italy, are almost universal in the churches of North Africa and Syria. Another existing English basilica of early date is that of Brixworth in Northamptonshire, probably erected by Saxulphus, abbot of Peterborough, _c._ A.D. 680. It consisted of a nave divided from its aisles by quadrangular piers supporting arches turned in Roman brick, with clerestory windows above, and a short chancel terminating in an apse, outside which, as at St Peter's at Rome, ran a circumscribing crypt entered by steps from the chancel. At the west end was a square porch, the walls of which were carried up later in the form of a tower.

[Illustration: FIG. 22.--Ground-Plan of the original Cathedral at Canterbury, as restored by Willis.

A, High altar. B, Altar of our Lord. C, C, Steps to crypt. D, Crypt. E, F, Chorus cantorum. G, Our Lady's altar. H, Bishop's throne. K, South porch with altar. L, North porch containing school. M, Archbishop Odo's tomb.]

The first church built in England under Roman influence was the original Saxon cathedral of Canterbury. From the annexed ground-plan (fig. 22), as conjecturally restored from Eadmer's description, we see that it was an aisled basilica, with an apse at either end, containing altars standing on raised platforms approached by steps. Beneath the eastern platform was a crypt, or _confessio_, containing relics, "fabricated in the likeness of the confessionary of St Peter at Rome" (Eadmer). The western apse, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, contained the bishop's throne. From this and other indications Willis thinks that this was the original altar end, the eastern apse being a subsequent addition of Archbishop Odo, _c._ 950, the church having been thus turned from west to east, as at the already-described basilica of S. Lorenzo at Rome. The choir, as at S. Clemente's, occupied the eastern part of the nave, and like it was probably enclosed by breast-high partitions. There were attached porches to the north and south of the nave. The main entrance of the church was through that to the south. At this _suthdure_, according to Eadmer, "all disputes from the whole kingdom, which could not legally be referred to the king's court, or to the hundreds and counties, received judgment." The northern porch contained a school for the younger clergy.

AUTHORITIES.--Vitruvius, _De Architectura_, v. 1, vi. 3, 9; Huelsen, _The Roman Forum_ (1906); Mau, _Pompeii: its Life and Art_; C. Lange, _Haus und Halle_; Canina, _Edifizii di Roma Antica_; Ciampini, _Vetera Monimenta_; Seroux d'Agincourt, _L'Histoire de l'art par les monumens_; Bunsen and Plattner, _Beschreibung der Stadt Rom_; Gutensohn and Knapp, _Basiliken des christlichen Roms_; Zestermann, _Die antiken u. die christlichen Basiliken_; Hübsch, _Die altchristlichen Kirchen_; Messmer, _Über den Ursprung, &c., der Basilica_; Letarouilly, _Edifices de Rome moderne_; Von Quast, _Altchristliche Bauwerke von Ravenna_; Texier and Pullan, _Byzantine Architecture_; Vogué, _Eglises de la Terre Sainte; Syrie Centrale, Architecture, &c._; Couchaud, _Choix d'églises byzantines_; Dehio und von Bezold, _Die kirchliche Baukunst des Abendlandes_; Holtzinger, _Die altchristliche Architectur in systematischer Darstellung_; Kraus, _Geschichte der christlichen Kunst_; Leclercq, _Manuel d'archéologie chrétienne_ (Paris, 1907).

(E. V.; G. B. B.)

BASILICA, a code of law, drawn up in the Greek language, with a view to putting an end to the uncertainty which prevailed throughout the East Roman empire in the 9th century as to the authorized sources of law. This uncertainty had been brought about by the conflicting opinions of the jurists of the 6th century as to the proper interpretation to be given to the legislation of the emperor Justinian, from which had resulted a system of teaching which had deprived that legislation of all authority, and the imperial judges at last were at a loss to know by what rules of law they were to regulate their decisions. An endeavour had been made by the emperor Leo the Isaurian to remedy this evil, but his attempted reform of the law had been rather calculated to increase its uncertainty; and it was reserved for Basil the Macedonian to show himself worthy of the throne, which he had usurped, by purifying the administration of justice and once more reducing the law into an intelligible code. There has been considerable controversy as to the part which the emperor Basil took in framing the new code. There is, however, no doubt that he abrogated in a formal manner the ancient laws, which had fallen into desuetude, and the more probable opinion would seem to be, that he caused a revision to be made of the ancient laws which were to continue in force, and divided them into forty books, and that this code of laws was subsequently enlarged and distributed into sixty books by his son Leo the Philosopher. A further revision of this code is stated to have been made by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, the son and successor of Leo, but this statement rests only on the authority of Theodorus Balsamon, a very learned canonist of the 12th century, who, in his preface to the _Nomocanon_ of Patriarch Photius, cites passages from the Basilica which differ from the text of the code as revised by the emperor Leo. The weight of authority, however, is against any further revision of the code having been made after the formal revision which it underwent in the reign of the emperor Leo, who appointed a commission of jurists under the presidency of Sympathius, the captain of the body-guard, to revise the work of his father, to which he makes allusion in the first of his _Novellae_. This latter conclusion is the more probable from the circumstance, that the text of the code, as revised by the emperor Leo, agrees with the citations from the Basilica which occur in the works of Michael Psellus and Michael Attaliates, both of them high dignitaries of the court of Constantinople, who lived a century before Balsamon, and who are silent as to any second revision of the code having taken place in the reign of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, as well as with other citations from the Basilica, which are found in the writings of Mathaeus Blastares and of Constantine Harmenopulus, both of whom wrote shortly after Balsamon, and the latter of whom was far too learned a jurist and too accurate a lawyer to cite any but the official text of the code.

Authors are not agreed as to the origin of the term Basilica, by which the code of the emperor Leo is now distinguished. The code itself appears to have been originally entitled _The Revision of the Ancient Laws_ ([Greek: hê anakatharsis tôn palaiôn nomôn]); next there came into use the title [Greek: hê hexêkontabiblos], derived from the division of the work into sixty books; and finally, before the conclusion of the 10th century, the code came to be designated [Greek: ho basilikos], or [Greek: ta basilika], being elliptical forms of [Greek: ho basilikos nomos] and [Greek: ta basilika nomima], namely the Imperial Law or the Imperial Constitutions. This explanation of the term "Basilica" is more probable than the derivation of it from the name of the father of the emperor Leo, inasmuch as the Byzantine jurists of the 11th and 12th centuries ignored altogether the part which the emperor Basil had taken in initiating the legal reforms, which were completed by his son; besides the name of the father of the emperor Leo was written [Greek: basileios], from which substantive, according to the genius of [v.03 p.0478] the ancient Greek language, the adjective [Greek: basilikos] could not well be derived.

No perfect MS. has been preserved of the text of the Basilica, and the existence of any portion of the code seems to have been ignored by the jurists of western Europe, until the important bearing of it upon the study of the Roman law was brought to their attention by Viglius Zuichemus, in his preface to his edition of the Greek _Paraphrase of Theophilus_, published in 1533. A century, however, elapsed before an edition of the sixty books of the Basilica, as far as the MSS. then known to exist supplied materials, was published in seven volumes, by Charles Annibal Fabrot, under the patronage of Louis XIII. of France, who assigned an annual stipend of two thousand livres to the editor during its publication, and placed at his disposal the royal printing-press. This edition, although it was a great undertaking and a work of considerable merit, was a very imperfect representation of the original code. A newly-restored and far more complete text of the sixty books of the Basilica was published at Leipzig in six volumes (1833-1870), edited by K. W. E. Heimbach and G. E. Heimbach. It may seem strange that so important a body of law as the Basilica should not have come down to us in its integrity, but a letter has been preserved, which was addressed by Mark the patriarch of Alexandria to Theodoras Balsamon, from which it appears that copies of the Basilica were in the 12th century very scarce, as the patriarch was unable to procure a copy of the work. The great bulk of the code was an obstacle to the multiplication of copies of it, whilst the necessity for them was in a great degree superseded by the publication from time to time of synopses and encheiridia of its contents, composed by the most eminent jurists, of which a very full account will be found in the _Histoire au droit byzantin_, by the advocate Mortreuil, published in Paris in 1846.

BASILICATA, a territorial division of Italy, now known as the province of Potenza, which formed a part of the ancient Lucania (_q.v._). It is bounded N. by the province of Foggia, N E. by those of Bari and Lecce, E. by the Gulf of Taranto (for a distance of 24 m.), S. by the province of Cosenza, and W. by the Mediterranean (for a distance of 10 m. only), and by the provinces of Salerno and Avellino. It has an area of 3845 sq. m. The province is as a whole mountainous, the highest point being the Monte Pollino (7325 ft.) on the boundary of the province of Cosenza, while the Monte Vulture, at the N.W. extremity, is an extinct volcano (4365 ft.). It is traversed by five rivers, the Bradano, Basento, Cavone or Salandrella, Agri and Sinni. The longest, the Bradano, is 104 m. in length; all run S.E. or E. into the Gulf of Taranto. The province is traversed from W. to E. by the railway from Naples to Taranto and Brindisi, which passes through Potenza and reaches at Metaponto the line along the E. coast from Taranto to Reggio di Calabria. A branch line runs N. from Potenza via Melfi to Rocchetta S. Antonio, a junction for Foggia, Gioia del Colle and Avellino (the second of these lines runs through the province of Potenza as far as Palazzo S. Gervasio), while a branch S. from the Naples and Taranto line at Sicignano terminates at Lagonegro, on the W. edge of the province. Communications are rendered difficult by the mountainous character of the interior. The mountains are still to some extent clothed with forests; in places the soil is fertile, especially along the Gulf of Taranto, though here malaria is the cause of inefficient cultivation. Olive-oil is the most important product. The total population of the province was 490,705 in 1901. The chief towns are Potenza (pop. 1901, 16,186), Avigliana (18,313), Matera (17,237), Melfi (14,649), Rionero in Vulture (11,809), Lauria (10,099).

BASILIDES, one of the most conspicuous exponents of Gnosticism, was living at Alexandria probably as early as the first decades of the 2nd century. It is true that Eusebius, in his _Chronicle_, dates his first appearance from A.D. 133, but according to Eusebius, _Hist. Eccl._ iv. 7 §§ 6-8, Agrippa Castor, who lived under Hadrian (117-138), already wrote a polemic against him, so that his activity may perhaps be set back to a date earlier than 138. Basilides wrote an exegetical work in twenty-four books on "his" gospel, but which this was is not known. In addition to this there are certain writings by his son Isidorus [Greek: Peri prosphuous psuchês]; [Greek: Exêgêtika] on the prophet Parchor ([Greek: Parchôr]); [Greek: Êthika]. The surviving fragments of these works are collected and commented on in Hilgenfeld's _Ketzergeschichte_, 207-218. The most important fragment published by Hilgenfeld (p. 207), part of the 13th book of the _Exegetica_, in the _Acta Archelai et Manetis_ c. 55, only became known in its complete form later, and was published by L. Traube in the _Sitzungsbericht der Münchener Akad._, phil. histor. Kl. (1903), pp. 533-549. Irenaeus (_Adv. Haer._ i. 24 §§ 3-7) gives a sketch of Basilides' school of thought, perhaps derived from Justin's _Syntagma_. Closely related to this is the account in the _Syntagma_ of Hippolytus, which is preserved in Epiphanius, _Haer._ 24, Philaster, _Haer._ 32, and Pseudo-Tertullian, _Haer._ 4. These are completed and confirmed by a number of scattered notices in the _Stromateis_ of Clemens Alexandrinus. An essentially different account, with a pronounced monistic tendency, is presented by the so-called _Philosophumena_ of Hippolytus (vii. 20-27; x. 14). Whether this last account, or that given by Irenaeus and in the _Syntagma_ of Hippolytus, represents the original system of Basilides, has been the subject of a long controversy. (See Hilgenfeld p. 205, note 337.) The most recent opinion tends to decide against the _Philosophumena_; for, in its composition, Hippolytus appears to have used as his principal source the compendium of a Gnostic author who has introduced into most of the systems treated by him, in addition to the employment of older sources, his own opinions or those of his sect. The _Philosophumena_, therefore, cannot be taken into account in describing the teaching of Basilides (see also H. Stachelin, "Die gnostischen Quellen Hippolyts" in _Texte und Untersuchungen_, vi. 3; and the article GNOSTICISM). A comparison of the surviving fragments of Basilides, moreover, with the outline of his system in Irenaeus-Hippolytus (_Syntagma_) shows that the account given by the Fathers of the Church is also in the highest degree untrustworthy. The principal and most characteristic points are not noticed by them. If we assume, as we must needs do, that the opinions which Basilides promulgates as the teaching of the "barbari" (_Acta Archelai_ c. 55) were in fact his own, the fragments prove him to have been a decided dualist, and his teaching an interesting further development of oriental (Iranian) dualism. Entirely consistent with this is the information given by the _Acta Archelai_ that Basilides, before he came to Alexandria, had appeared publicly among the Persians (_fuit praedicator apud Persas_); and the allusion to his having appealed to prophets with oriental names, Barkabbas and Barkoph (Agrippa in Eusebius _Hist. Eccl._ iv. 7 § 7). So too his son Isidorus explained the prophecies of a certain Parchor ( = Barkoph) and appealed to the prophecies of Cham[1] (Clemens Alexandrinus, _Stromat._ vi. 6 § 53). Thus Basilides assumed the existence of two principles, not derivable from each other: Light and Darkness. These had existed for a long time side by side, without knowing anything of each other, but when they perceived each other, the Light had only looked and then turned away; but the Darkness, seized with desire for the Light, had made itself master, not indeed of the Light itself, but only of its reflection (_species_, _color_). Thus they had been in a position to form this world: _unde nec perfectum bonum est in hoc mundo, et quod est, valde est exiguum_. This speculation is clearly a development of that which the Iranian cosmology has to tell about the battles between Ahura-Mazda and Angro-Mainyu (Ormuzd and Ahriman). The Iranian optimism has been replaced here by a strong pessimism. This material world is no longer, as in Zoroastrianism, essentially a creation of the good God, but the powers of evil have created it with the aid of some stolen portions of light. This is practically the transference of Iranian dualism to the more Greek antithesis of soul and body, spirit and matter (cf. Irenaeus i. 24 § 5: _animae autem eorum solam esse salutem, corpus enim natura corruptibile existit_). The fundamental dualism of Basilides is confirmed also by one or two other passages. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Basilides saw the proof of _naturam sine radice et sine loco rebus supervenientem_ (_Acta Archelai_). According to Clemens, _Strom._ iv. 12 § 83, &c., Basilides taught that even those who have not sinned in act, even Jesus himself, possess a sinful nature. It is possibly also in connexion with the dualism of his fundamental [v.03 p.0479] views that he taught the transmigration of souls (Origen in _Ep. ad Rom_. lib. v.; Opp. de la Rue iv. 549; cf. Clemens, _Excerpta ex Theodoto_, § 28). Isidorus set up celibacy, though in a modified form, as the ideal of the perfect (Clemens, _Strom_. iii. 1 § 1, &c.) Clemens accuses Basilides of a deification of the Devil ([Greek: theiazein ton diabolon]), and regards as his two dogmas that of the Devil and that of the transmigration of souls (_Strom_. iv. 12 § 85: cf. v. 11 § 75). It is remarkable too that Isidorus held the existence of two souls in man, a good and a bad (Clemens, _Strom_. ii. 20 113); with which may be compared the teaching of Mani about the two souls, which it is impossible to follow F, Ch. Baur in excluding,[2] and also the teaching of the _Pistis Sophia_ (translated by C. Schmidt, p. 182, &c.). According to Clemens (_Strom_. ii. 20 § 112), the followers of Basilides spoke of [Greek: pneumata tina prosêrtêmena têi logikêi phuchêi kata tina tarachon kai sunchusin archikên]: that is to say, here also is assumed an original confusion and intermingling. Epiphanius too tells us that the teaching of Basilides had its beginning in the question as to the origin of evil (_Haer_. xxiv. 6).

Now, of this sharply-defined dualism there is scarcely a trace in the system described by the Fathers of the Church. It is therefore only with caution that we can use them to supplement our knowledge of the true Basilides. The doctrine described by them that from the supreme God (the _innatus pater_) had emanated 365 heavens with their spirits, answers originally to the astronomical conception of the heavens with their 365 daily aspects (Irenaeus i. 24. 7; _Trecentorum autem sexaginta quinque caelorum locales positiones distribuunt similiter ut mathematici_). When, therefore, the supreme God is called by the name [Greek: Abrasax] or [Greek: Abraxas], which contains the numerical value 365, it is worthy of remark that the name of the Persian god Mithras ([Greek: Meithras]) also was known in antiquity to contain this numerical value (Jerome in _Amos_ 3; Opp. Vallarsi VI. i. 257). Speculations about the Perso-Hellenistic Mithras appear to have been transferred to the Gnostic Abraxas. Further, if the _Pater innatus_ be surrounded by a series of (from five to seven) Hypostases (according to Irenaeus i. 24. 3; [Greek: Nous, Logos, Phronêsis, Sophia, Dunamis]; according to Clemens, _Strom_. iv. 25 § 164, [Greek: Dikaiosunê] and [Greek: Eirênê] may perhaps be added), we are reminded of the _Ameshas-spentas_ which surround Ahura-Mazda. Finally, in the system of Basilides, the (seven ?) powers from whom this world originates are accepted as the lowest emanations of the supreme God. This conception which is repeated in nearly every Gnostic system, of (seven) world-creating angels, is a specifically oriental speculation. The seven powers which create and rule the world are without doubt the seven planetary deities of the later Babylonian religion. If, in the Gnostic systems, these become daemonic or semi-daemonic forces, this points to the fact that a stronger monotheistic religion (the Iranian) had gained the upper hand over the Babylonian, and had degraded its gods to daemons. The syncretism of the Babylonian and the Persian religion was also the nursing-ground of Gnosticism. When, then, Basilides identified the highest angel of the seven, the creator of the worlds, with the God of the Jews, this is a development of the idea which did not occur until late, possibly first in the specifically Christian circles of the Gnostics. We may note in this connexion that the system of Basilides ascribes the many battles and quarrels in the world to the privileged position given to his people by the God of the Jews.[3]

It is at this point that the idea of salvation is introduced into the system. The confusion in the world has meanwhile risen to such a pitch that the supreme God sends his _Nous_, who is also called Christ, into the world (Irenaeus i. 24. 4). According to Clemens, the Saviour is termed [Greek: pneuma diakonoumenon] (_Strom_. ii. 8 § 36) or [Greek: diakonos] (_Excerpta ex Theodoto_, § 16). It is impossible certainly to determine how Basilides conceived the relation of this Saviour to Jesus of Nazareth. Basilides himself (_Strom_. iv. 12 § 83) knows of an earthly Jesus and denies the principle of his sinlessness (see above). According to the account given by Irenaeus, the Saviour is said to have appeared only as a phantasm; according to the _Excerpta ex Theodoto_, 17, the Diakonos descended upon Jesus at His baptism in the form of a dove, for which reason the followers of Basilides celebrated the day of the baptism of Jesus, the day of the [Greek: epiphaneia]. as a high festival (Clemens, _Strom_. i. 21 § 18). The various attempts at combination probably point to the fact that the purely mythical figure of a god-saviour (Heros) was connected first by Basilides with Jesus of Nazareth. As to what the conception of Basilides was of the completion of the process of redemption, the available sources tell us next to nothing. According to an allusion in Clemens, _Strom_. ii. 8 § 36, with the mission of the Saviour begins the great separation of the sexes, the fulfilment and the restoration of all things. This agrees with the beginning of the speculation of Basilides. Salvation consists in this, that that which was combined for evil is once more separated.

Among the later followers of Basilides, actual magic played a determining part. They hand down the names of the rulers of the several heavens as a weighty secret. This was a result of the belief, that whoever knew the names of these rulers would after death pass through all the heavens to the supreme God. In accordance with this, Christ also, in the opinion of these followers of Basilides, was in the possession of a mystic name (Caulacau = [Hebrew: QAW LAQAW] Jes. xxviii. 10) by the power of which he had descended through all the heavens to earth, and had then again ascended to the Father. Redemption, accordingly, could be conceived as simply the revelation of mystic names. In this connexion the name Abraxas and the Abraxas gems must be remembered. Whether Basilides himself had already given this magic tendency to Gnosticism cannot be decided.

Basilides, then, represents that form of Gnosticism that is closest to Persian dualism in its final form. His doctrine is most closely related to that of Satornil (Saturninus). From most of the other Gnostic sects, with the exception perhaps of the Jewish-Christian Gnosticism, he is distinguished by the fact that with him the figure of the fallen female god (Sophia Achamoth), and, in general, the idea of a fall within the godhead is entirely wanting. So far as we can see, on the other hand, Basilides appears actually to represent a further development of Iranian dualism, which later produced the religious system of Mani.

Accounts of the teaching of Basilides are to be found in all the more complete works on Gnosticism (see bibliography to the article GNOSTICISM). The original sources are best reproduced in Hilgenfeld, _Ketzergeschichte des Urchristentums_ (1884), pp. 195-230. See also Krüger, article "Basilides," in Herzog-Hauck, _Realencyklopadie_, ed. 3.

(W. BO.)

[1] = Nimrod = Zoroaster, cf. Pseudo-Clement, _Homil._ ix. 3; _Recogn._ iv. 27.

[2] The materials are in Baur, _Das manichäische Religionssystem_ (1831), p. 162, &c.

[3] Whether the myth of the creation of the first man by the angels, which recurs in many Gnostic systems, found a place also in the system of Basilides, cannot be determined with any certainty. Philastrius, however, says: _hominem autem ab angelis factum asserit_, while according to Epiphanus xxiv. 2, men are created by the God of the Jews.

BASILISK (the [Greek: Basiliskos] of the Greeks, and _Tsepha_ (cockatrice) of the Hebrews), a name given by the ancients to a horrid monster of their own imagination, to which they attributed the most malignant powers and an equally fiendish appearance. The term is now applied, owing to a certain fanciful resemblance, to a genus of lizards belonging to the family _Iguanidae_, the species of which are characterized by the presence, in the males, of an erectile crest on the head, and a still higher, likewise erectile crest--beset with scales--on the back, and another on the long tail. _Basiliscus americanus_ reaches the length of one yard; its colour is green and brown, with dark crossbars, while the crest is reddish. This beautiful, strictly herbivorous creature is rather common amidst the luxuriant vegetation on the banks of rivers and streams of the Atlantic hot lands of Mexico and Guatemala. The lizards lie upon the branches of trees overhanging the water, into which they plunge at the slightest alarm. Then they propel themselves by rapid strokes of the hind limbs, beating the water in a semi-erect position and letting the long rudder-like tail drag behind. They are universally known as _pasa-rios_, _i.e._ ferrymen.

BASIM, a town of India, in the Akola district, Berar, 52 m. S.S.E. from Akola station of the Great Indian Peninsula railway. Pop. (1901) 13,823. Until 1905 it was the headquarters of the district of Basim, which had an area of 2949 sq. m.; but in that [v.03 p.0480] year the district was abolished, its component _taluks_ being divided between the districts of Akola and Yeotmal. Its western portion, the Basim _taluk_, consists of a fertile tableland, about 1000 ft. above sea-level, sloping down westward and southward to the rich valley of the Penganga; its eastern portion, the _taluks_ of Mangrul and Pasud, mainly of a succession of low hills covered with poor grass. In the Pasud _taluk_, however, there are wide stretches of woodland, while some of the peaks rise to a height of 2000 ft., the scenery (especially during the rains) being very beautiful. The climate of the locality is better than that of the other districts of Berar; the hot wind which blows during the day in the summer months being succeeded at night by a cool breeze. The principal crops are millet, wheat, other food grains, pulse, oilseeds and cotton; there is some manufacture of cotton-cloth and blankets, and there are ginning factories in the town. In 1901 the population was 353,410, showing a decrease of 11% in the decade, due to the famine of 1899-1900, which was severely felt in the district.

BASIN, THOMAS (1412-1491), bishop of Lisieux and historian, was born probably at Caudebec in Normandy, but owing to the devastation caused by the Hundred Years' War, his childhood was mainly spent in moving from one place to another. In 1424 he went to the university of Paris, where he became a master of arts in 1429, and afterwards studied law at Louvain and Pavia. He attended the council of Ferrara, and was soon made canon of the church at Rouen, professor of canon law in the new university of Caen and vicar-general for the bishop of Bayeux. In 1447 he became bishop of Lisieux. He was much involved in the wars between the English and French and was employed by Charles VII. of France, and by his successor Louis XI., at whose request Basin drew up a memorandum setting forth the misery of the people and suggesting measures for alleviating their condition. In 1464 the bishop joined the league of the Public Weal, and fell into disfavour with the king, who seized the temporalities of his see. After exile in various places Basin proceeded to Rome and renounced his bishopric. At this time (1474) Pope Sixtus IV. bestowed upon him the title of archbishop of Caesarea. Occupied with his writings Basin then passed some years at Trier, and afterwards transferred his residence to Utrecht, where he died on the 3rd of December 1491. He was buried in the church of St John, Utrecht.

Basin's principal work is his _Historiae de rebus a Carolo VII. et Ludovico XI. Francorum regibus eorumque in tempore in Gallia gestis_. This is of considerable historical value, but is marred to some extent by the author's dislike for Louis XI. At one time it was regarded as the work of a priest of Liége, named Amelgard, but it is now practically certain that Basin was the writer. He also wrote a suggestion for reform in the administration of justice entitled _Libellus de optimo ordine forenses lites audiendi et deferendi_; an _Apologia_, written to answer the charges brought against him by Louis XI; a _Breviloquium_, or allegorical account of his own misfortunes; a _Peregrinatio_; a defence of Joan of Arc entitled _Opinio et consilium super processu et condemnatione Johanne, dicte Puelle_, and other miscellaneous writings. He wrote in French, _Advis de Monseigneur de Lysieux au roi_ (Paris, 1677).

See the edition of the _Historiae_, by J. E. J. Quicherat (Paris, 1855-1859); also G. du F. de Beaucourt, _Charles VII et Louis XI d'après Thomas Basin_ (Paris, 1858).

BASIN, or BASON (the older form _bacin_ is found in many of the Romanic languages, from the Late Lat. _baccinus_ or _bacchinus_, probably derived from _bacca_, a bowl), a round vessel for holding liquids. Hence the term has various technical uses, as of a dock constructed with flood-gates in a tidal-river, or of a widening in a canal for unloading barges; also, in physical geography, of the drainage area of a river and its tributaries.

In geology, "basin" is equivalent to a broad shallow syncline, _i.e._ it is a structure proper to the bed rock of the district covered by the term; it must not be confused with the physiographic river basin, although it occasionally happens that the two coincide to some extent. Some of the better known geological basins in England are, the _London basin_, a shallow trough or syncline of Tertiary, Cretaceous and Jurassic rocks; the _Hampshire basin_, of similar formations; and the numerous _coal basins_, _e.g._ the S. Wales coalfield, the Forest of Dean, N. Staffordshire coalfield, &c. The _Paris basin_ is made of strata similar to those in the London and Hampshire basins. Strictly speaking, a structural basin is formed of rock beds which exhibit a _centroclinal_ dip; an elongated narrow syncline or trough is not a basin. "Rock-basins" are comparatively small, steep-sided depressions that have been scooped out of the solid rock in mountainous regions, mainly through the agency of glaciers (see CIRQUE). Lakes sometimes occupy basins that have been caused by the removal in solution of some of the more soluble constituents (rock salt, &c.) in the underlying strata; occasionally lake basins have been formed directly by crustal movements.

BASINET (a diminutive of "basin"), a form of helmet or headpiece. The original small basinet was a light open cap, with a peaked crown. This was used alternately to, and even in conjunction with, the large heavy heaume. But in the latter half of the 13th century the basinet was developed into a complete war head-dress and replaced the heaume. In this form it was larger and heavier, had a vizor (though not always a pivoted vizor like that of the later armet), and was connected with the gorget by a "camail" or mail hood, the head and neck thus being entirely covered. It is always to be recognized by its peaked crown. The word is spelt in various forms, "bassinet," "bascinet," "bacinet," or "basnet." The form "bassinet" is used for the hooded wicker cradle or perambulator for babies.

BASINGSTOKE, a market-town and municipal borough of Hampshire, England, 48 m. W.S.W. from London by the London & South-Western railway; served also by a branch of the Great Western railway. Pop. (1901) 9793. The church of St Michael and All Angels is a fine specimen of a late Perpendicular building (principally of the time of Henry VIII.). The chapel of the Holy Ghost is a picturesque ruin, standing in an ancient cemetery, built for the use of the local gild of the Holy Ghost which was founded in 1525, but flourished for less than a century. Close to the neighbouring village of Old Basing are remains of Basing House, remarkable as the scene of the stubborn opposition of John, fifth marquess of Winchester, to Cromwell, by whom it was taken after a protracted siege in 1645. A castle occupied its site from Norman times. Numerous prehistoric relics have been discovered in the district, and a large circular encampment is seen at Winklebury Hill. Basingstoke has considerable agricultural trade, and brewing, and the manufacture of agricultural implements, and of clothing, are carried on. The Basingstoke canal, which connects the town with the river Wey and so with the Thames, was opened about 1794, but lost its trade owing to railway competition. It was offered for sale by auction unsuccessfully in 1904, but was bought in 1905. The municipal borough is under a mayor, four aldermen and twelve councillors. Area, 4195 acres.

Basingstoke is a town of great antiquity, and excavations have brought to light undoubted traces of Roman occupation. The first recorded historical event relating to the town is a victory won here by Æthelred and Alfred over the Danes in 871. According to the Domesday survey it had always been a royal manor, and comprised three mills and a market. A charter from Henry III. in 1256 granted to the men of Basingstoke the manor and hundred of that name and certain other privileges, which were confirmed by Edward III., Henry V. and Henry VI. As compensation for loss sustained by a serious fire, Richard II. in 1392 granted to the men of Basingstoke the rights of a corporation and a common seal. A charter from James I. dated 1622 instituted two bailiffs, fourteen capital burgesses, four justices of the peace, a high steward and under steward, two serjeants-at-mace and a court of record. Charles I. in 1641 changed the corporation to a mayor, seven aldermen and seven burgesses. Basingstoke returned two members to parliament in 1295, 1302 and 1306, but no writs are extant after this date. In 1202-1203 the market day was changed from Sunday to Monday, but in 1214 was transferred to Wednesday, and has not since been [v.03 p.0481] changed. Henry VI. granted a fair at Whitsun to be held near the chapel of the Holy Ghost. The charter from James I. confirmed another fair at the feast of St Michael the Archangel, and that of Charles I. granted two fairs on Basingstoke Down at Easter and on the 10th and 11th of September. The wool trade flourished in Basingstoke at an early date, but later appears to have declined, and in 1631 the clothiers of Basingstoke were complaining of the loss of trade and consequent distress.

See _Victoria County History--Hants_; F. G. Baigent and J. E. Millard, _History of Basingstoke_ (Basingstoke, 1889).

BASIN-STAND, a piece of furniture consisting of a small stand, usually supported on three legs, and most commonly made of mahogany or rosewood, for holding a wash-hand basin. The smaller varieties were used for rose-water ablutions, or for the operation of hair-powdering. The larger ones, which possessed sockets for soap-dishes, were the predecessors of the ample modern wash-hand stand. Both varieties, often of very elegant form, were in extensive use throughout a large part of the 18th century.

BASKERVILLE, JOHN (1706-1775), English printer, was born at Wolverley in Worcestershire on the 28th of January 1706. About 1726 he became a writing master at Birmingham, and he seems to have had a great talent for calligraphy and for cutting inscriptions in stone. While at Birmingham he made some important improvements in the process of japanning, and gained a considerable fortune. About the year 1750 he began to make experiments in type-founding, producing types much superior in distinctness and elegance to any that had hitherto been employed. He set up a printing-house, and in 1757 published his first work, a _Virgil_ in royal quarto, followed, in 1758, by his famous edition of Milton. In that year he was appointed printer to the university of Cambridge, and undertook editions of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. The _Horace_, published in 1762, is distinguished even among the productions of the Baskerville press for its correctness and for the beauty of the paper and type. A second _Horace_ appeared in 1770 in quarto, and its success encouraged Baskerville to publish a series of quarto editions of Latin authors, which included Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Lucretius, Terence, Sallust and Florus. This list of books issued by Baskerville from his press lends some irony to the allegation that he was a person of no education. These books are admirable specimens of typography; and Baskerville is deservedly ranked among the foremost of those who have advanced the art of printing. His contemporaries asserted that his books owed more to the quality of the paper and ink than to the type itself, but the difficulty in obtaining specimens from the Baskerville press shows the estimation in which they are now held. His wife, Sarah Baskerville, carried on the business for some time after his death, which took place on the 8th of January 1775.

BASKET, a vessel made of twigs, cane or rushes, as well as of a variety of other materials, interwoven together, and used for holding, protecting or carrying any commodity. The process of interweaving twigs, rushes or leaves, is practised among the rudest nations of the world; and as it is one of the most universal of arts, so also does it rank among the most ancient industries, being probably the origin of all the textile arts of the world. Decorative designs in old ceramic ware are derived from the marks left by the basket mould used before the invention of the potter's wheel, and in the willow pattern on old china, and the basket capitals or mouldings of Byzantine architecture, the influence of the basketmaker's art is clearly traceable. Essentially a primitive craft, its relative importance is in inverse ratio to the industrial development of a people.

The word "basket" has been generally identified with the Latin _bascauda_, as in Martial (xiv. 99):--

"Barbara de pictis veni bascauda Britannis: Sed me iam mavult dicere Roma suam."

But its etymology is unknown, and the _New English Dictionary_ states that there is no evidence to connect basket with _bascauda_, which denotes rather a tub, tray or brazen vessel.

Among many uncivilized tribes, baskets of a superior order are made and applied to various useful purposes. The North American Indians prepare strong water-tight _Wattape_ baskets from the roots of a species of _abies_, and these they frequently adorn with very pretty patterns made from the dyed quills of their native porcupine, _Erethizon dorsatum_. Wealthy Americans have formed collections of the beautiful ware treasured as heirlooms in Indian families, and large prices have been paid for baskets made by the few squaws who have inherited the traditions and practice of the art, as much as £300 having been given for one specimen. It has been computed that baskets to the value of £1,000,000 were recently drawn from California and Arizona within two years. The Indians of South America weave baskets equally useful from the fronds of the Carnahuba and other palms. The Kaffirs and Hottentots of South Africa are similarly skilful in using the Ilala reed and the roots of plants; while the Abyssinians and the tribes of Central Africa display great adroitness in the art of basket-weaving.

Basket-making, however, has by no means been confined to the fabrication of those simple and useful utensils from which its name is derived. Of old, the shields of soldiers were fashioned of wicker-work, either plain or covered with hides. Xenophon, in his story of the Thirty Tyrants at Athens, relates that the exiled Greeks who had seized on the Peiraeus made themselves shields of whitened osiers; and similar weapons of defence are still constructed by modern savages. The huts of the earliest settlers in Rome and in western Europe generally were made of osier work plastered with clay. Some interesting remains of British dwellings of this nature found near Lewes in 1877 were described by Major-General H. L. F. Pitt-Rivers in _Archaeologia_, vol. xlvi. pp. 456-458. Boats of the same material, covered with the skins of animals, attracted the notice of the Romans in Britain; they seem to have been of the ordinary boat-shape. The basketwork boats mentioned by Herodotus as being used on the Tigris and Euphrates were round and covered with bitumen. Boats of this shape are still used on these rivers, and boats of analogous construction are employed in crossing the rivers of India, in which the current is not rapid. Nor have methods of making much changed. The strokes employed in the construction of basket-work found in Etruscan tombs and now exhibited in the Museo Etrusco at Florence, and in similar articles discovered in Egyptian tombs, are the same as those used by the English basket-maker to-day. General Pitt-Rivers, on comparing the remains excavated near Lewes with a modern hamper in his possession, found the method to be identical.

Since about the middle of the 19th century the character of basket-work in England has been greatly modified. The old English cradle, reticule, and other small domestic wares, have been driven out of the market by cheap goods made on the continent of Europe, and the coarse brown osier packing and hampers have been largely superseded by rough casks and cases made from cheap imported timber. This loss has, however, been more than counterbalanced by the production of work of a higher class, such as finely made chairs, tables, lounges and other articles of furniture; luncheon and tea-baskets and similar requisites of travel. In addition to the foregoing the chief categories of English manufacture are: vegetable and fruit baskets, transit and travelling hampers, laundry and linen baskets,

## partition baskets for wine, and protective wicker cases for fragile ware

such as glass carboys, stone and other bottles. Wicker shields or cases made from cane pith, for the protection of shells, have been introduced by the English military authorities. Some evidence of the above-mentioned developments is afforded by a comparison of the wages lists of the London Union of Journeymen Basketmakers issued in 1865 and in 1896. The former consists of 87 printed pages; the latter of 144 pages, and these more closely set.

No machinery is used in basket-making. A considerable training and natural aptitude go to form the expert workman, for the ultimate perfection of shape and beauty of texture depend upon the more or less perfect conception of form in the [v.03 p.0482] craftsman's mind and on his power to impress it on a recalcitrant material. In England at least, he rarely uses a mould; every stroke made has a permanent effect on the symmetry of the whole work and no subsequent pressure will alter it. Wages in London vary from 25s. to 50s. per week according to aptitude. The Basketmakers' Company is one of the oldest craft gilds of the city of London and still exists.

Employment is given by the London Association for the Welfare of the Blind to a number of partially or wholly blind workpeople, who are engaged in the making of some of the coarser kinds of baskets; but the work, which bears obvious traces of its origin, is not commercially remunerative, and the association depends for partial support on the contributions of the charitable, and on supplementary sales of fine or fancy work produced under ordinary conditions and largely imported. Similar associations exist in some English provincial towns, in Edinburgh, in Dublin and Belfast, and in certain European cities.

The materials which are actually employed in the construction of basket-work are numerous and varied, but it is from certain species of willow that the largest supply of basket-making materials is produced. Willows for basket-work are extensively grown on the continent of Europe, whence large quantities are exported to Great Britain and the United States; but no rods surpass those of English growth for their tough and leathery texture, and the finest of basket-making willows are now cultivated in England--in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and the valleys of the Thames and the Trent. In the early part of the 19th century, considerable attention was given in Britain to the cultivation of willows suitable for basket-making, and the industry was first stimulated by premiums offered by the Society of Arts. Mr William Scaling of Basford, Notts, was a most successful grower and published some admirable pamphlets on the cultivation of willows. The most extensive English willow plantation or salicetum (Lat. _salix_, willow) of the present day is that planted by Mr W. P. Ellmore at Thurmaston near Leicester, and consists of about 100 acres of the finest qualities. Mr Ellmore, a practical basket-maker, successfully introduced some valuable continental varieties (see OSIER).

Willows are roughly classed by the basket-maker into "osier" and "fine." The former consists of varieties of the true osier, _Salix viminalis_; the latter of varieties of _Salix triandra_, _S. purpurea_ and some other species and hybrids of tougher texture. For the coarsest work, dried unpeeled osiers, known as "brown stuff," are used; for finer work, "white (peeled) stuff" and "buff" (willows stained a tawny hue by boiling them previous to peeling). Brown stuff is sorted, before it reaches the workman, into lengths varying from 3½ ft. to 8 or 10 ft., the smallest being known in London and the home counties as "luke," the largest as "great," and the intermediate sizes as "long small," "threepenny" and "middleboro." White and buff rods are more carefully sorted, the smallest, about 2 ft. or less, being known as "small tack," and rising sizes as "tack," "short small," "small," "long small," "threepenny," "middleboro" and "great." Rods of two to three years' growth, known as "sticks," are used to form the rigid framework of the bottoms and lids of square work. In every case, except the last, the stuff is soaked in tanks to render it pliable before use--brown from three to seven days, white and buff from half-an-hour to half a day. The rods are used whole for ordinary work, but for baskets of slight and finer texture each is divided into "skains" of different degrees of size. "Skains" are osiers cleft into three or four parts, by means of an implement called a "cleaver," which is a wedge-shaped tool of boxwood inserted at the point or top end of the rod and run down through its entire length. They are next drawn through an implement resembling the common spokeshave, keeping the grain of the split next the iron or stock of the shave, while the pith is presented to the steel edge of the instrument, and in order to bring the split into a shape still more regular, it is passed through another implement called an upright, consisting of a flat piece of steel, each end of which is fashioned into a cutting edge, like that of an ordinary chisel and adjusted to the required width by means of a thumb-screw.

The tools required by a basket-maker are few and simple. They consist, besides the foregoing, of a shop-knife for cutting out material; a picking knife for cutting off the protruding butts and tops of the rods after the work is completed; two or three bodkins of varying sizes; a flat piece of iron somewhat narrowly triangular in shape for driving the work closely together; a stout pair of shears and a "dog" or "commander" for straightening sticks. The employer supplies a screw block or vice for gripping the bottom and cover sticks of square work, and a lapboard on which the workman fixes the upsetted bottom while siding up the basket. This is the full kit. A common round or oval basket may, however, be made with no other tools than a shop-knife and a bodkin. On the continent of Europe shapes or blocks are in use on which the fabric is in some cases woven.

[Illustration]

The technicalities of basket-making may be easily followed by a glance at the illustration here reproduced by the courtesy of the Society of Arts.[1] It will be seen that the "bye-stakes" are merely inserted in the "upsett," whereas the stakes are driven in at each side of the "bottom-sticks" and pricked up to form the rigid framework of the side. When the "bottom-stick" and "stake" are formed of one and the same continuous rod, it is termed a "league." If the bottom is made on a hoop the butts of the stakes are "sliped," _i.e._ cut away with a long cut of the shop-knife, and turned tightly round the hoop; they are then said to be "scallomed" on. The chief strokes used in constructing an ordinary basket are:--the "slew"--two or more rods woven together; the "rand," rods woven in singly; the "fitch," two rods tightly worked alternately one under the other, employed for skeleton work such as cages and waste-paper baskets; the "pair," two rods worked alternately one over the other, used for filling up bottoms and covers of round and oval baskets; and the "wale," three or more rods worked alternately, forming a string or binding course. Various forms of plaiting, roping and tracking are used for bordering off or finishing.

An ordinary oval basket is made by preparing the requisite number of bottom sticks, preserving their length greater than the required width of the bottom. They are ranged in pairs on the floor parallel to each other at small intervals, in the direction of the longer diameter of the basket, thus forming what may be called the "woof," for basket-work is literally a web. These parallel rods are then crossed at right angles by two pairs of the largest osiers, on the butt ends of which the workman places his feet; and they are confined in their places by being each woven alternately over and under the parallel pieces first laid down and their own butts which form the end bottom sticks. The whole now forms what is technically called the "slath," which is the foundation of the basket. Next other rods are taken and [v.03 p.0483] woven under and over the sticks all round the bottom until it be of sufficient size, and the woof be occupied by them. Thus the bottom or foundation on which the superstructure is to be raised is finished. This latter part is accomplished by sharpening the large ends of as many long and stout osiers as may be necessary to form the stakes or skeleton. These are forced between the bottom sticks from the edge towards the centre, and are turned up or "upset" in the direction of the sides; then other rods are woven in and out between each of them, until the basket is raised to the intended height, or, more correctly speaking, the depth it is to receive. The edge or border is finished by turning down the ends of the stakes, now standing up, behind and in front of each other, whereby the whole is firmly and compactly united, and it is technically known as the "belly." A lid is constructed on the same plan as that of the bottom, and tied on with hinges formed of twisted rods; simple handles may be made by inserting similar rods by the sides of two opposite stakes and looping them under the border to form rope-like handles of three strands. This is the most simple kind of basket, from which others differ only in being made with finer materials and in being more nicely executed; but in these there is considerable scope for taste and fancy, and articles are produced of extreme neatness and ingenuity in construction.

In addition to willows many other materials are employed in the fabrication of wicker-work. Among the more important of these is the stem of _Calamus viminalis_ or other allied species--the cane or rattan of commerce--which is used whole or made into skains. Since 1880 the central pith of this material, known as "cane-pulp" or "cane-pith," has been largely used in Great Britain and on the continent of Europe in the manufacture of furniture and other finer classes of work. About the same period plaited rush and straw, often coloured, came into use together with enamelled skains of cane. It must be admitted, however, that basket-work in these developments has encroached somewhat on the domain of cabinet-making; for wood and nails are now much used in constructing basket-work chairs, tables and other furniture.

With splits of various species of bamboo the Japanese and Chinese manufacture baskets of unequalled beauty and finish. The bamboo wicker-work with which the Japanese sometimes encase their delicate egg-shell porcelain is a marvellous example of manipulation, and they and the Chinese excel in the application of bamboo wicker-work to furniture. In India "Cajan" baskets are extensively made from the fronds of the Palmyra palm, _Borassus flabelliformis_, and this manufacture has been established in the Black Forest of Germany, where it is now an important and characteristic staple. Among the other materials may be enumerated the odorous roots of the khus-khus grass, _Anatherum muricatum_, and the leaves of various species of screw pine, used in India and the East generally. The fronds of the palm of the Seychelles, _Lodoicea sechellarum_, are used for very delicate basket-work in those islands. Strips of the New Zealand flax plant, _Phormium tenax_, are made into baskets in New Zealand. Esparto fibre is used in Spain and Algeria for rude fruit baskets. Various species of _Maranta_ yield basket materials in the West Indies and South America; and the _Tirite_, a species of _Calathea_, a member of the order _Zingiberaceae_, is also employed similarly in Trinidad. Baskets are also frequently made from straw, from various sedges (_Cyperus_), and from shavings and splints of many kinds of wood.

The chief centres of English basket manufacture outside London are Thurmaston near Leicester, Basford near Nottingham, and Grantham. Large but decreasing quantities of light basket-work are made for the English market in Verdun, in the department of the Aisne, and in other parts of France; and great quantities of fancy and other work are produced in Belgium, in the Netherlands and in Germany, notably at Lichtenfels in Bavaria, at Sonnefeld in Saxony and in the Black Forest.

The import and export values of baskets and basket-ware, and of willows and rods for basket-making, have been enumerated in the Board of Trade returns for the United Kingdom since 1900, in which year basket-ware from foreign countries was imported to the value of £239,402. In 1901 the imports increased to £264,183; then they declined to £227,070 in 1905. The main sources of supply are shown in this comparison of 1900 and 1905:

+----------+---------+---------+---------+ | | 1900. | 1905. | | +----------+---------+---------+---------+ | Belgium | £72,031 | £77,766 | +£5,735 | | Holland | 58,214 | 54,407 | - 3,807 | | France | 55,870 | 27,910 | -27,960 | | Germany | 33,155 | 22,892 | -10,263 | | Japan | 8,140 | 25,536 | +17,396 | | Portugal | 5,066 | 3,971 | - 1,095 | +----------+---------+---------+---------+

The increase from Japan (for 1904 the value was £52,377) and the decrease from France are remarkable.

The import values of foreign willows increased from £52,219 in 1900 to £62,286 in 1905, the most important exporting countries being:--

1900. 1905. Germany £22,594 £34,752 +£12,158 Belgium 18,800 11,864 - 6,936 Holland 9,771 12,750 + 2,979

Small British re-exports of willows (£1808 in 1900 and £371 in 1905) and of baskets (£3785 in 1900 and £6633 in 1905) to foreign parts and British possessions are tabulated. No particulars of exports of British produce and manufacture are specified in the returns.

(T. O.)

[1] See the report of a paper by T. Okey, published in the _Journal_ of the Society of Arts, January 11th, 1907.

BASKET-BALL, a game adapted to the open air, but usually played upon the floor of a gymnasium and in the cold season. It was the invention, in 1891, of James Naismith, an instructor in the gymnasium of the Young Men's Christian Association training-school at Springfield, Massachusetts. A demand had arisen for a game for the gymnasium class, which would break the monotony and take the place, during the winter months, of football and baseball, and which was not too rough to be played indoors. The idea of the game was first published in the _Triangle_, the school paper. It soon became one of the most popular indoor games of America, for girls as well as for men, and spread to England and elsewhere.

Basket-ball is played on a marked-off space 60 ft. by 40 ft. in extent, though in the open air the dimensions may be greater. In the middle of each short side and 10 ft. above the floor or ground, is placed a basket consisting of a net suspended from a metal ring 18 in. in diameter, backed, at a distance of 6 in., by a back-board 6 ft. long and 4 ft. high. The object of the game is to propel an inflated, leather-covered ball, 30 in. in circumference, into the opponents' basket, which is the goal, by striking it with the open hands. The side wins that scores most goals during two periods of play divided by an interval of rest. Although there is practically no limit to the number of players on each side, all indoor matches are played by teams of five, in positions opposing one another as in lacrosse, centre, right and left forwards and right and left guards (or backs). A referee has the general supervision of the game and decides when goals have been properly scored, and an umpire watches for infringements of the rules, which constitute _fouls_. There are also a scorer and timekeeper.

The game is started with the two opposing centres standing within a 4-foot ring in the middle of the floor. The referee puts the ball in play by tossing it into the air over the heads of the centres, who jump into the air for its possession or endeavour to bat it towards the opposing goal. From this moment the ball is in play until it falls into a basket, or passes the boundary-lines, or a foul is made. After a goal has been scored, the ball is again put in play by the referee in the centre. Should it be thrown across the boundary, a player of the opposing side, standing on the line at the point where the ball went over, puts it in play by passing or throwing it to one of his own side in any direction, there being no off-side rule--another point of similarity to lacrosse. His opponents, of course, try to prevent the pass or intercept the throw, thus securing the ball themselves. When a foul has been called, a player of the opposing side is allowed a "free throw" for his opponents' basket from a mark 15 ft. distant from it and without interference. A goal scored from a [v.03 p.0484] free throw counts one point; one scored while the ball is in play counts two. Hacking, striking, holding and kicking are foul, but a player may interfere with an opponent who has the ball so long as he uses one arm only and does not hold. A player must throw the ball from where he gets it, no running with it being allowed excepting when continuously bounding it on the floor. Basket-ball is an extremely fast game and admits of a high degree of combination or team-play. The principal qualifications of a good player are quickness of movement and of judgment, coolness, endurance, accuracy and self-control. Good dodging, throwing, passing and team-play are the important requisites of the game, which is looked upon as excellent winter training for outdoor games. Basket-ball, with somewhat modified rules, is extremely popular with young women.

See _Spalding's Basket-Ball Guide_; and George T. Hepbron, _How to Play Basket-Ball_; and _Spalding's Basket-Ball Guide for Women_.

BASNAGE, JACQUES (1653-1723), French Protestant divine, was the eldest son of the eminent lawyer Henri Basnage, sieur de Franquenay (1615-1695), and was born at Rouen in Normandy in 1653. He studied classical languages at Saumur and afterwards theology at Geneva. He was pastor at Rouen (his native place) from 1676 till 1685, when, on the revocation of the edict of Nantes, he obtained leave of the king to retire to Holland. He settled at Rotterdam as a minister pensionary till 1691, when he was chosen pastor of the Walloon church. In 1709 the grand pensionary A. Heinsius (1641-1720) secured his election as one of the pastors of the Walloon church at the Hague, intending to employ him mainly in civil affairs. Accordingly he was engaged in a secret negotiation with Marshal d'Uxelles, plenipotentiary of France at the congress of Utrecht--a service which he executed with so much success that he was entrusted with several important commissions, all of which he discharged with great ability. In 1716 Dubois, who was at the Hague at the instance of the regent Orleans, for the purpose of negotiating the Triple Alliance between France, Great Britain and Holland, sought the advice of Basnage, who, in spite of the fact that he had failed to receive permission to return to France on a short visit the year before, did his best to further the negotiations. The French government also turned to him for help in view of the threatened rising in the Cevennes. Basnage had welcomed the revival of the Protestant church due to the zeal of Antoine Court; but he assured the regent that no danger of active resistance was to be feared from it, and, true to the principles of Calvin, he denounced the rebellion of the Camisards (_q.v._) in his _Instructions pastorales aux Réformés de France sur l'obéissance due aux souverains_ (Paris, 1720), which was printed by order of the court and scattered broadcast in the south of France. Basnage died on the 22nd of September 1723.

Basnage was a good preacher and a prolific writer. His works include several dogmatic and polemical treatises, but the most important are the historical. Of these may be mentioned _Histoire de la religion des églises réformées_ (Rotterdam, 1690), the _Histoire de l'église depuis Jésus-Christ jusqu'à présent_ (_ib_. 1699)--both of them written from the point of view of Protestant polemics--and, of greater scientific value, the _Histoire des Juifs_ (Rotterdam, 1706, Eng. trans. 1708) and the _Antiquités judaiques ou remarques critiques sur la république des Hébreux_ (1713). He also wrote short explanatory introductions and notes to a collection of copper-plate engravings, much valued by connoisseurs, called _Histoires du Vieux et du Nouveau Testament, représentées par des figures gravées en taille-douce par R. de Hooge_ (Amsterdam, 1704).

BASOCHE, or BAZOCHE, with the analogous forms BASOQUE, BASOGUE and BAZOUGES; from the Lat. _basilica_, in the sense of law courts, a French gild of clerks, from among whom legal representatives (_procureurs_) were recruited. This gild was very ancient, even older than the gild of the _procureurs_, with which it was often at variance. It dated, no doubt, from the time when the profession of _procureur_ (procurator, advocate or legal representative) was still free in the sense that persons rendering that service to others when so permitted by the law were not yet public and ministerial officers. For this purpose there was established near each important juridical centre a group of clerks, that is to say, of men skilled in law (or reputed to be so), who at first would probably fill indifferently the rôles of representative or advocate. Such was the origin of the Basoche of the parlement of Paris; which naturally formed itself into a gild, like other professions and trades in the middle ages. But this organization eventually became disintegrated, dividing up into more specialized bodies: that of the advocates, whose history then begins; and that of legal representatives, whose profession was regularized in 1344, and speedily became a saleable charge. The remnant of the original clerks constituted the new Basoche, which thenceforward consisted only of those who worked as clerks for the procureurs, the richer ones among them aspiring themselves to attain the position of procureur. They all, however, retained some traces of their original conditions. "They are admitted," writes an 18th-century author, "to plead before M. le lieutenant civil _sur les réferés_[1] and before M. le juge auditeur; so that the procureurs of these days are but the former clerks of the Basoche, admitted to officiate in important cases in preference to other clerks and to their exclusion." From its ancient past the Basoche had also preserved certain picturesque forms and names. It was called the "kingdom of the _Basoche_," and for a long time its chief, elected each year in general assembly, bore the title of "king." This he had to give up towards the end of the 16th century, by order, it is said, of Henry III., and was thenceforth called the "chancellor." The Basoche had besides its _maîtres des requêtes_, a grand court-crier, a referendary, an advocate-general, a _procureur-général_, a chaplain, &c. In early days, and until the first half of the 16th century, it was organized in companies in a military manner and held periodical reviews or parades (_montres_), sometimes taking up arms in the king's service in time of war. Of this there survived later only an annual _cavalcade_, when the members of the Basoche went to the royal forest of Bondy to cut the maypole, which they afterwards set up in the court-yard of the Palais. We hear also of satirical and literary entertainments given by clerks of the Palais de Justice, and of the moralities played by them in public, which form an important element in the history of the national theatre; but at the end of the 16th century these performances were restricted to the great hall of the Palais.

To the last the Basoche retained two principal prerogatives. (1) In order to be recognized as a qualified procureur it was necessary to have gone through one's "stage" in the Basoche, to have been entered by name for ten years on its register. It was not sufficient to have been merely clerk to a procureur during the period and to have been registered at his office. This rule was the occasion of frequent conflicts during the 17th and 18th centuries between the members of the Basoche and the procureurs, and on the whole, despite certain decisions favouring the latter, the parlement maintained the rights of the Basoche. Opinion was favourable to it because the _certificats de complaisance_ issued by the procureurs were dreaded. These _certificats_ held good, moreover, in places where there was no Basoche. (2) The Basoche had judiciary powers recognized by the law. It had disciplinary jurisdiction over its members and decided personal actions in civil law brought by one clerk against another or by an outsider against a clerk. The judgment, at any rate if delivered by a _maître des requêtes_, was authoritative, and could only be contested by a civil petition before the ancient council of the Basoche. The Châtelet of Paris had its special basoche, which claimed to be older even than that of the Palais de Justice, and there was contention between them as to certain rights. The clerks of the procureurs at the _cour des comptes_ of Paris had their own Basoche of great antiquity, called the "empire de Galilée." The Basoche of the Palais de Justice had in its ancient days the right to create provostships in localities within the jurisdiction of the parlement of Paris, and thus there sprang up a certain number of local basoches. Others were independent in origin; among such being the "regency" of Rouen and the Basoche of the parlement of Toulouse.

[v.03 p.0485] See also _Répertoire de jurisprudence des Guyot; Recueil des Statuts du royaume de la basoche_ (Paris, 1654); L. A. Fabre, _Études historiques sur les clercs de la basoche_ (Paris, 1856).

(J. P. E.)

[1] A procedure for obtaining a provisional judgment on urgent cases.

BASQUE PROVINCES (_Provincias Vascongadas_), a division of north-eastern Spain, comprising the three provinces of Álava, Biscay or Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa. Pop. (1900) 603,596; area 2739 sq. m., the third in density in Spain. The territory occupied by the Basque Provinces forms a triangle bounded on the west and south by the provinces of Santander, Burgos and Logrono, on the east by Navarre, on the north by France and the Bay of Biscay. The French Pays Basque forms part of the arrondissements of Bayonne and Mauléon. For an account of the people, their origin, customs and language, see BASQUES. Of the Provinces, Guipúzcoa is the only one which is wholly Basque, Álava is the least so. Its capital, Vitoria, is said to have been founded by the Gothic king Leovigild (581). Older than these divisions, the date of which is uncertain, the ancient limits of the dioceses of Pamplona, Bayonne and Calahorra, probably corresponded more nearly to the boundaries of the ancient tribes, the Autrigones, the Caristi, the Varduli and the Vascones, with their still differing dialects, than do these civil provinces.

Leaving aside the legendary and uncertain portion of their history, we find the Provinces in some districts dependent allies of Navarre, in others of Castile. In Biscay the counts of Haro were lords of Biscay from 1093 to 1350. There was a short union with Castile under Pedro the Cruel, but the definitive union did not take place till 1370. In Álava the ruling power was the confederation of Arriaga (so called after its meeting place), which united the province to the crown of Castile in 1332. Guipúzcoa, which had been dependent sometimes on Navarre, sometimes on Castile, was definitively united to Castile in 1200. From the year 1425 the provinces were desolated by party wars among the lesser nobles (_parientes mayores_) but these came to an end in 1460-1498, when Henry IV. and Ferdinand the Catholic strengthened the power of the towns and forbade the erection of any fortified house in the country. Though the three Basque Provinces were thus united to the crown of Spain, they still remained a land apart (_tierra apartada_). Their juntas acted to some extent in common; and although no written federal pact is known to have existed, they employed, as the symbol of their unity, a seal with the word _Iruracbat_, "The Three One," engraved upon it. They preserved their own laws, customs, _fueros_ (see BASQUES), which the Spanish kings swore to observe and maintain. Unless countersigned by the juntas the decrees of Cortes and Spanish legislation or royal orders had no force in the Provinces. In the junta of 1481 Guipúzcoa alone proposed a treaty of friendship, peace and free trade for ten years with England, and this was signed in Westminster, on the 9th of March 1482 (see Rymer, _Foedera_). The Basques still made their own treaties with England and France and are mentioned apart from Spain in the treaty of Utrecht (1713). They still preserved in their municipal institutions the old style of _republicas_ derived from the _civitates_ and _respublicae_ of ancient Rome. This kind of independence and autonomy lasted unchallenged until the death of Ferdinand VII. in 1833, when, in default of male heirs, his brother Don Carlos claimed the throne, confirmed the Basque _fueros_, and raised the standard of revolt against his niece, Isabel II. A seven years' war followed, in which an English legion under Sir George de Lacy Evans and a naval force under Lord John Hay took part. It was ended by the Convenio de Vergara (August 31st, 1839) in which the concession and modification of the _fueros_ was demanded. The troubled period which followed the expulsion of Isabel II. in 1868 gave opportunity for a second Carlist war from 1872 to 1876. This ended, unlike the former one, in the utter defeat of the Carlist forces, and left the Provinces at the mercy of the government, without terms or agreement. In general government and legislation the Provinces were then assimilated to the rest of the nation. After 1876, the Provincial parliaments (_diputaciones_) were elected like the other provincial councils of Spain, deprived of many privileges and subjected to the ordinary interference of the civil governors. But their representatives, assisted by the senators and deputies of the Basque Provinces in the Cortes, negotiated successive pacts, each lasting several years, securing for the three Provinces their municipal and provincial self-government, and the assessment, distribution and collection of their principal taxes and octroi duties, on the understanding that an agreed sum should be paid annually to the state, subject to an increase whenever the national taxation of other provinces was augmented. In December 1906, after long discussion, the contribution of the Basque Provinces to the state, according to the law of the 21st of July 1876, was fixed for the next twenty years; for the first ten years at 8,500,000 pesetas, for the next ten an additional 500,000 pesetas, from 31st December 1916 to 31st December 1926, the province of Guipúzcoa paying in addition 700,000 pesetas to the treasury. These pacts have hitherto been scrupulously observed, and as the local authorities levy the contribution after their own local customs, landed property and the industrial and commercial classes are less heavily taxed in these territories than in the rest of Spain. Enough is raised, however, besides the amount handed over to the government, to enable the schools, roads, harbours and public works of every kind to be maintained at a standard which compares very favourably with other parts of Spain. When the three provinces sent in their first contingent of conscripts in 1877, it was found that all but about sixty knew how to read and write, and succeeding contingents have kept up this high standard.

In agriculture the Basque Provinces and the Pays Basque were great cider countries, but during the 19th century this was gradually replaced by wine-growing. The chief industries of the Basque Provinces are the sea fisheries and iron mining. Some of the mines round Bilbao have been worked from prehistoric times. In 1905 the Basque Provinces produced 5,302,344 tons of iron, over five millions of which came from Biscay, out of a total of 9,395,314 tons for the whole of Spain. More than the half of this total 5,845,895 tons, was exported to England. The swords of Mondragon in Guipúzcoa were renowned before those of Toledo. Eibar in the same province has long been a small-arms factory. There in the 19th century Señor Zuloaga successfully revived the artistic inlaying of gold and silver in steel and iron.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--Of older works, though often uncritical, R. P. Henao's _Averiguaciones de las Antiguedades de Cantabria_ (Salamanca, 1688) is still valuable (new edition, 1894). For all that relates to the manners and customs of the people, _Corografía de Guipúzcoa_, by R. P. M. de Larramendi, S.J., is indispensable. Written about 1750, it was first printed in Barcelona in 1882 (later edition, San Sebastian, 1896). There are excellent chapters on the Basque Provinces in the _Introduccion a la Historia Natural, y a la Geografía Fisica de España_, by D. Guillermo Bowles (Madrid, 1775). _El Guipuzcoano instruido_ (San Sebastian, 1780), in the form of a dictionary, gives full details of the life, the rights, duties and obligations of a Basque citizen of that date. The _Diccionario Geografico-Historico de España_, tome i., ii. _El Reyno de Navarra Senorio de Vizcaya y Provincias de Álava y Guipúzcoa_ (Madrid, 1802), is full of local information, but with a strong bias in favour of the central government. The best works on the various editions of the _fueros_ are _Historia de la Legislacion ... civil de España_, by A. Marichalar, Marques de Montesa, and Cayetano Manrique; _Fueros de Navarra Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa y Álava_ (Madrid, 2nd ed., 1868); and the _Noticia de las cosas memorables de Guipúzcoa_, by D. Pablo de Gorosabel (Tolosa, 1899-1901), the last volume of which by C. de Echegaray, gives the legislative acts down to May 1900. _Las Provincias Vascongadas a Fines de la Edad Media_, by D. Carmelo de Echegaray (San Sebastian, 1895), is excellent. There is a _Historia de Bizcaya_, by Dr E. de Labayru, and a _Compendio_ of the same by Fermin Herran (Bilbao, 1903). D. Carmelo de Echegaray, Cronista de las Provincias Vascongadas, with his colleagues D. Serapio Mugica, F. Soraluce, and other historians, has examined, catalogued and indexed the municipal archives of all the towns, without which no true history can be written. Several discoveries of important missing documents and MSS. were thus made. The development of the Basque mining industry is fully described in _Las Minas de hierro de la provincia de Vizcaya, progressos realizados en esta region derde 1870 hasta 1899_ (Bilbao, 1900).

(W. WE.)

BASQUES, a people inhabiting the three Basque Provinces--Biscay, Álava and Guipúzcoa--and Navarre in Spain, and the arrondissement of Bayonne and Mauléon in France. The number of those who can be considered in any sense pure Basques is [v.03 p.0486] probably about 600,000 in Europe, with perhaps 100,000 emigrants in the Americas, chiefly in the region of La Plata in South America. The word Basques is historically derived from _Vascones_, which, written _Wascones_, has also given the name _Gascons_ to a very different race. The Basques call themselves _Eskualdunak_, _i.e._ "those who possess the _Eskuara_," and their country Eskual-Herria.

_Language_.--The original and proper name of the language is Eskuara (euskara, uskara), a word the exact meaning of which has not yet been ascertained, but which probably corresponds with the idea "clearly speaking." The language is highly interesting and stands as yet absolutely isolated from the other tongues of Europe, though from the purely grammatical point of view it recalls the Magyar and Finnic languages. It is an agglutinative, incorporating and polysynthetic system of speech; in the general series of organized linguistic families it would take an intermediate place between the American on the one side and the Ugro-Altaic or Ugrian on the other.

Basque has no graphic system of its own and uses the Roman character, either Spanish or French; a few particular sounds are indicated in modern writings by dotted or accented letters. The alphabet would vary according to the dialects. Prince L. L. Bonaparte counts, on the whole, thirteen simple vowels, thirty-eight simple consonants. Nasal vowels are found in some dialects as well as "wet" consonants--_ty_, _dy_, _ny_, &c. The doubling of consonants is not allowed and in actual current speech most of the soft consonants are dropped. The letter _r_ cannot begin a word, so that _rationem_ is written in Basque _arrazoin_.

Declension is replaced by a highly developed postpositional system; first, the definite article itself _a_ (plural _ak_) is a postposition--_zaldi_, "horse," _zaldia_ "the horse," _zaldiak_, "the horses." The declensional suffixes or postpositions, which, just like our prepositions, may be added to one another, are postponed to the article when the noun is definite. The principal suffixes are _k_, the mark of the plural, and of the singular nominative agent; _n_, "of" and "in"; _i_, "to"; _z_, "by"; _ik_, "some"; _ko_, "from," "of" (Lat. _a_); _tik_, "from" (Lat. _ex_); _tzat_, _kotzat_, _tzako_, "for"; _kin_, _gaz_, "with"; _gatik_, "for the sake of"; _gana_, "towards"; _ra_, _rat_, "to," "into," "at," &c. Of these suffixes some are joined to the definite, others to the indefinite noun, or even to both.

The personal pronouns, which to a superficial observer appear closely related to those of the Semitic or Hamitic languages, are _ni_, "I"; _hi_, "thou"; _gu_, "we"; _zu_, "you" in modern times, _zu_ has become a polite form of "thou," and a true plural "you" (_i.e._ more than one) has been formed by suffixing the pluralizing sign _k--zuek_. The pronouns of the third person are mere demonstratives. There are three: _hura_ or _kura_, "that"; _hau_ or _kau_, "this"; _ori_ or _kori_, "this" or "that." Other unexplained forms are found in the verbal inflexions, _e.g._ _d_, _it_, and _t_, "I" or "me"; _d-akus-t_, "it see I" = I see it; _d-arrai-t_, "it follows me." The demonstratives are used as articles: _gazt-en-or_, "this younger one"; _andre-ori_, "this lady at some distance." The reflective "self" is expressed by _buru_, "head." The relative does not exist, and in its place is used as a kind of verbal participle with the ending _n: doa_, "he goes"; _doana_, "he who is going"; in the modern Basque, however, by imitation of French or Spanish, the interrogative _zein_, _zoin_, is used as a relative. Other interrogatives are _nor_, "who"; _zer_, "what"; _zembait_, "how much," &c. _Bat_, "one"; _batzu_, "several"; _bakotch_, "each"; _norbait_, "some one"; _hanitz_ or _hainitz_, "much"; _elkar_, "both"; are the most common indefinite pronouns. The numeral system is vicesimal; _e.g._ 34 is _hogoi ta hamalaur_, "twenty and fourteen." The numbers from one to ten are: 1, _bat_; 2, _bi_; 3, _hiru_; 4, _lau_; 5, _bortz_ or _bost_; 6, _sei_; 7, _zazpi_; 8, _zortzi_; 9, _bederatzi_; 10, _hamar_; 20, _hogoi_ or _hogei_; 40, _berrogoi_ (_i.e._ twice twenty); 100, _ehun_. There is no genuine word for a thousand.

The genders in Basque grammar are distinguished only in the verbal forms, in which the sex of the person addressed is indicated by a special suffix; so that _eztakit_ means, "I do not know it"; but to a woman one says also: _eztakinat_, "I do not know it, oh woman!" To a man one says: _eztakiat_ (for _eztakikat_), "I do not know it, oh man!" moreover, certain dialectic varieties have a respectful form: _eztakizut_, "I do not know it, you respectable one," from which also a childish form is derived, _eztakichut_, "I do not know it, oh child!"

The Basque conjugation appears most complicated, since it incorporates not only the subject pronouns, but, at the same time, the indirect and direct complement. Each transitive form may thus offer twenty-four variations--"he gives it," "he gives it to you," "he gives them to us," &c., &c. Primitively there were two tenses only, an imperfect and a present, which were distinguished in the transitive verb by the place of the personal subject element: _dakigu_, "we are knowing it" (_gu_, _i.e._ we), and _ginaki_, "we were knowing it"; in the intransitive by a nasalization of the radical: _niz_, "I am"; _nintz_, "I was." In modern times a conjectural future has been derived by adding the suffix _ke_, _dakiket_, "I will, shall or probably can know it." No proper moods are known, but subjunctive or conjunctive forms are formed by adding a final _n_, as _dakusat_, "I am looking at it"; _dakusadan_, "if I see it." No voices appear to have been used in the same radical, so that there are separate transitive and intransitive verbs.

In its present state Basque only employs its regular conjugation exceptionally; but it has developed, probably under the influence of neo-Latin, a most extensive conjugation by combining a few auxiliary verbs and what may be called participles, in fact declined nouns: _ikusten dut_, "I have it in seeing," "I see it"; _ikusiko dut_, "I have it to be seen," "I will see it," &c. The principal auxiliaries are: _izan_, "to be"; and _ukan_, "to have"; but _edin_, "to can"; _eza_, "to be able"; _egin_, "to make"; _joan_, "to go"; _eroan_, "to draw," "to move," are also much used in this manner.

The syntax is simple, the phrases are short and generally the order of words is: subject, complement, verb. The determining element follows the determined: _gizon handia_, "man great the"--the great man: the genitive, however, precedes the nominative--_gizonaren etchea_, "the man's house." Composition is common and it has caused several juxtaposed words to be combined and contracted, so that they are partially fused with one another--a process called _polysyntheticism; odei_, "cloud," and _ots_, "noise," form _odots_, "thunder"; _belar_, "forehead," and _oin_, "foot," give _belaun_, "knee," front of the foot. The vocabulary is poor; general and synthetic words are often wanting; but particular terms abound. There is no proper term for "sister," but _arreba_, a man's sister, is distinguished from _ahizpa_, a woman's sister. We find no original words for abstract ideas, and God is simply "the Lord of the high."

The vocabulary, however, varies extremely from place to place and the dialectic varieties are very numerous. They have been summed up by Prince L. L. Bonaparte as eight; these may be reduced to three principal groups: the eastern, comprising the Souletine and the two lower Navarrese; the central formed by the two upper Navarrese, the Guipúzcoan and the Labourdine; and the western, formed by the Biscayan, spoken too in Álava. These names are drawn from the territorial subdivisions, although the dialects do not exactly correspond with them.

_Ethnology and Anthropology._--The earliest notices of the geography of Spain, from the 5th century B.C., represent Spain as occupied by a congeries of tribes distinguished mainly as Iberi, Celtiberi and Celts. These had no cohesion together, and unless temporarily united against some foreign foe, were at war with one another and were in constant movement; the ruder tribes being driven northwards by the advancing tide of Mediterranean civilization. The tribes in the south in Baetica had, according to Trogus and Strabo, written laws, poems of ancient date and a literature. Of this nothing has reached us. We have only some inscriptions, legends on coins, marks on pottery and on megalithic monuments, in alphabets slightly differing, and belonging to six geographical districts. These still await an interpreter; but they show that a like general language was once spoken through the whole of Spain, and for a short distance on [v.03 p.0487] the northern slope of the Pyrenees. The character of the letters is clearly of Levant origin, but the particular alphabets, to which each may be referred, and their connexion, if any, with the Basque, are still undetermined. It was early remarked by the classical scholars among the Basques after the Renaissance that certain names in the ancient toponymy of Spain, though transcribed by Greek and Latin writers, _i.e._ by foreigners, ignorant of the language, yet bear a strong resemblance to actual place-names in Basque (_e.g._ Iliberis, Iriberry); and in a few cases (Mondiculeia, Mendigorry; Iluro, Oloron) the site itself shows the reason of the name. Andres de Poza (1587), Larramendi (1760), Juan B. Erro (1806) and others had noted some of these facts, but it was W. von Humboldt (1821) who first aroused the attention of Europe to them. This greater extension of a people speaking a language akin to the Basque throughout Spain, and perhaps in Sicily and Sardinia, has been accepted by the majority of students, though some competent Basque scholars deny it; and the certain connexion of the Basques, either with the Iberians or Celtiberians, whether in race or language, cannot be said to be conclusively proved as long as the so-called Celtiberian inscriptions remain uninterpreted. (See also IBERIANS.)

After so many centuries of close contact and interpenetration with other peoples, we can hardly expect to find a pure physical type among the present Basques. All that we can expect is to be able to differentiate them from their neighbours. The earliest notice we have of the Basques, by Einhard (778), speaks of their wonderful agility. The next, the pilgrim of the Codex Calixtinus (12th century), says the Basques are fairer in face (_facie candiliores_) than the Navarrese.

Anthropologists no longer rely solely on craniology, and the measurement of the skull, to distinguish race. The researches of Aranzadi (1889 and 1905) and of Collignon (1899) show them as less fair than northern Europeans, but fairer than any of the southern races; not so tall as the Scandinavians, Teutons or British, but taller than their neighbours of southern races. There is no tendency to prognathism, as in some of the Celts. The profile is often very fine; the carriage is remarkably upright. Neither markedly brachycephalous nor dolichocephalous, the skull has yet certain peculiarities. In the conjunction of the whole physical qualities, says Collignon, there is a Basque type, differing from all those he has studied in Europe and northern Africa. There are differences of type among themselves, yet, when they emigrate to South America, French and Spanish Basques are known simply as Basques, distinct from all other races.

On the origin of the Basques, the chief theories are:--(1) that they are descended from the tribes whom the Greeks and Latins called Iberi; (2) that they belong to some of the fairer Berber tribes ("Eurafrican," Hervé) and through the ancient Libyans, from a people depicted on the Egyptian monuments; (3) the Atlantic theory, that they belong to a lost Atlantic continent, whose inhabitants were represented by the Guanches of the Canary Islands, and by a fair race on the western coast of Africa; (4) that they are an indigenous race, who have never had any greater extension than their present quarters.

The remains of prehistoric races hitherto discovered in Spain throw little light on the subject, but some skulls found in southeastern Spain in the age of metal resemble the Basque skulls of Zaraus.

The megalithic remains, the dolmens, menhirs, cromlechs and stone circles are said to resemble more closely those of northern Africa than the larger remains of Brittany and of the British Isles. Aristotle tells us that the Iberi fixed obelisks round the tomb of each warrior in number equal to the enemies he had slain (_Polit._ vii. c. 2. 6), but proof is wanting that these Iberi were Basques.

Iberian inscriptions have been found on the so-called _toros de guisando_, rude stone bulls or boars, on other monuments of northern Spain and in ancient sepulchres; some of these figures, _e.g._ at the _Cerro de los Santos_ in Murcia, recall the physical type of the modern Basques, but they are associated with others of very varied types.

Of the religion of the Basques anterior to Christianity, little is certainly known. The few notices we have point to a worship of the elements, the sun, the moon and the morning star, and to a belief in the immortality of the unburnt and unburied body. The custom of the _couvade_, attributed by Strabo to the Cantabri, is unknown among the modern Basques. As elsewhere, the Romans assimilated Basque local deities to their own pantheon, thus we find Deo _Baicorrixo_ (Baigorry) and _Herauscorrtsehe_ in Latin inscriptions. But the name which the Basques themselves give to the Deity is _Jaincoa_, _Jaungoikoa_, which may mean lord or master, Lord of the high; but in the dialect of Roncal, _Goikoa_ means "the moon," and _Jaungoikokoa_ would mean "Lord of the moon." The term _Jaun_, lord or master, _Etcheko Jauna_, the lord or master of the house, is applied to every householder.

There is no aid to be got from folk-tales; none can be considered exclusively Basque and the literature is altogether too modern. The first book printed in Basque, the _Linguae Vasconum Primitiae_, the poems of Bernard d'Echepare, is dated 1545. The work which is considered the standard of the language is the Protestant translation of the New Testament made by Jean de Liçarrague, under the auspices of Jeanne d'Albret, and printed at La Rochelle in 1571. The _pastorales_ are open-air dramas, like the moralities and mysteries of the middle ages. They are derived from French materials; but a dancing chorus, invariably introduced, and other parts of the _mise-en-scène_, point to possibly earlier traditions. No MS. hitherto discovered is earlier than the 18th century. The greater part of the other literature is religious and translated. It is only recently that a real literature has been attempted in Basque with any success.

In spite of this modernity in literature there are other matters which show how strong the conservatism of the Basques really is. Thus, in dealing with the language, the only true measure of the antiquity of the race, we find that all cutting instruments are of stone; that the week has only three days. There are also other survivals now fast disappearing. Instead of the plough, the Basques used the _laya_, a two-pronged short-handled steel digging fork, admirably adapted to small properties, where labour is abundant. They alone of the peoples of western Europe have preserved specimens of almost every class of dance known to primitive races. These are (1) animal (or possibly totem) dances, in which men personate animals, the bear, the fox, the horse, &c.; (2) dances to represent agriculture and the vintage performed with wine-skins; (3) the simple arts, such as weaving, where the dancers, each holding a long coloured ribbon, dance round a pole on which is gradually formed a pattern like a Scotch tartan; (4) war-dances, as the sword-dance and others; (5) religious dances in procession before the Host and before the altar; (6) ceremonial dances in which both sexes take part at the beginning and end of a festival, and to welcome distinguished people. How large a part these played in the life of the people, and the value attached to them, may be seen in the vehement defence of the religious dances by Father Larramendi, S.J., in his _Corografia de Guipúzcoa_, and by the large sums paid for the privilege of dancing the first _Saut Basque_ on the stage at the close of a _Pastorale_.

The old Basque house is the product of a land where stone and timber were almost equally abundant. The front-work is of wood with carved beams; the balconies and huge over-hanging roof recall the Swiss chalet, but the side and back walls are of stone often heavily buttressed. The cattle occupy the ground-floor, and the first storey is reached often by an outside staircase. The carven tombstones with their ornaments resemble those of Celtic countries, and are found also at Bologna in Italy.

In customs, in institutions, in administration, in civil and political life there is no one thing that we can say is peculiarly and exclusively Basque; but their whole system taken together marks them off from other people and especially from their neighbours.

_Character_.--The most marked features in the Basque character are an intense self-respect, a pride of race and an obstinate conservatism. Much has been written in ridicule of the claim of all Basques to be noble, but it was a fact both in the laws of [v.03 p.0488] Spain, in the _fueros_ and in practice. Every Basque freeholder (_vecino_) could prove himself noble and thus eligible to any office. They are not a town race; a Basque village consists of a few houses; the population lives in scattered habitations. They do not fear solitude, and this makes them excellent emigrants and missionaries. They are splendid seamen, and were early renowned as whale fishermen in the Bay of Biscay. They were the first to establish the cod-fishery off the coast of Newfoundland. They took their full part in the colonization of America. Basque names abound in the older colonial families, and Basque newspapers have been published in Buenos-Aires and in Los Angeles, California. As soldiers they are splendid marchers; they retain the tenacity and power of endurance which the Romans remarked in the Iberians and Celtiberians. They are better in defence than in attack. The failure to take Bilbao was the turning-point in both Carlist wars. In civil institutions and in the tenures of property the legal position of women was very high. The eldest born, whether boy or girl, inherited the ancestral property, and this not only among the higher classes but among the peasantry also. In the _fueros_ an insult done to a woman, or in the presence of a woman, is punished more severely than a similar offence among men. This did not prevent women from working as hard as, or even harder than, the men. All authors speak of the robust appearance of the women-rowers on the Bidassoa, and of those who loaded and unloaded the ships in Bilbao.

_Institutions_.--In their municipal institutions they kept the old Roman term _respublica_ for the _civitas_ and the territory belonging to it. All municipal officers were elective in some form or other, and there is hardly any mode of election, from universal suffrage to nomination by a single person chosen by lot, that the Basques have not tried. The municipalities sent deputies to the juntas or parliaments of each province. These assemblies took place originally in the open air, as in other parts of the Pyrenees, under trees, the most celebrated of which is the oak of Guernica in Biscay, or under copses, as the Bilzaar in the French Pays Basque. The cortes of Navarre met at Pamplona. Delegates from the juntas met annually to consider the common interests of the three provinces. Besides the separate municipalities and the juntas, there were often associations and assemblies of three or five towns, or of three or four valleys, to preserve the special privilege or for the special needs of each. Hence was formed a habit of self-government, the practice of legislative, judicial and administrative functions, which resulted gradually in a code of written or unwritten laws embodied in the _fueros_ or _fors_ of each province, and the _cartas-pueblos_ of the towns. In form these _fueros_ or charters are often grants from the lord or sovereign; in reality they are only a confirmation or codification of unwritten customary laws in practice among the people, the origin of which is lost in antiquity. The kings of Castile, of Spain and of Navarre were obliged at their accession, either in person, or by deputy, to swear to observe these _fueros_; and this oath was really kept. While the cortes were trampled upon and absolutism reigned both in Spain and in France, the Basque _fueros_ were respected; in Spain to the middle of the 19th century and in France down to the Revolution. The _fueros_ thus observed made the Basque provinces a land apart (_una tierra apartada_), a self-governing republic (_una verdadera autonomia_), under an absolute monarchy, to which, however, they were always loyal. And this independence was acknowledged, not only in local, but also in international and European treaties, as in art. 15 of the treaty of Utrecht 1713. So the act of the 3rd of June 1876, which assimilated the Basque Provinces to the rest of Spain, acknowledged the true self-government which they had enjoyed for centuries.

The circumstances and methods which enabled the Basques to preserve this independence were, first, the isolation caused by their peculiar language; next, the mountainous and easily-defended nature of the country, its comparative poverty and the possession of a sea-board. Then there were the rights and the safeguards which the _fueros_ themselves gave against encroachments. The rights were:--freedom of election to all offices and to the juntas; exemption from all forced military service except for the defence of the country and under their own officers; and payment beforehand exacted for all service beyond their own frontiers (this did not of course exclude voluntary service of individuals in the Spanish or French armies). Then there was free trade with foreign nations, and especially between the Basques of both nations. The customs' frontier of Spain really began on the Ebro. Then no decree or sentence of the royal authorities could have effect in the provinces except countersigned by the junta. Otherwise the resisting and even the killing of a royal officer was no murder. But chiefest of all the safeguards was the provision that no tax or contribution should be levied or paid to the crown till all petitions had been heard and wrongs redressed; that such a vote should be the last act of the junta or cortes, and the money should be paid not as a demand of right or a tax, but as a free gift and above all a voluntary one. It was paid in a lump sum, and the repartition and levying were left entirely in the hands of the junta and the municipalities.

As a further precaution against the inroads of absolutism, no lawyer was allowed to be a deputy to the junta and all clergy were likewise excluded. The Basques considered that men of these professions would be always on the side of tyranny. One lawyer (_letrado_) was present at the juntas for consultation on the points of law, but he was not allowed to vote. So strictly was this observed that after the battle of Vitoria in 1813, when it was difficult to get together a quorum for the reorganization of the country, the _letrado_, though one of the most active and influential members in consultation, was not allowed to vote.

The relations between Church and State among the Basques have been very remarkable. They are a highly religious people, eminently conservative in their religious practices. In religion alone, through Ignatius de Loyola of Guipúzcoa and Francis Xavier of Navarre, they have left their mark upon Europe. They have kept the earliest form of Christian marriage and of the primitive order of deaconesses, forgotten elsewhere in the West. The feast of Corpus Christi instituted by Pope Urban IV. (1262) still appears in Basque almanacs as _Phesta-berria_, the New Feast. The earliest notice that we have of them speaks of their liberality to the clergy; yet with all this religious conservatism they have never allowed themselves to be priest-ridden. They constantly resisted the attempts of the crown to force upon them the authority of the Spanish bishops. When Ferdinand the Catholic came to Biscay in 1477 to swear to the _fueros_, he was compelled to send back the bishop of Pamplona whom he had brought with him. No strange priest could enter the town when the junta was sitting, and in some places if a deputy was seen speaking to a priest before a session he lost his vote for that day. The bishops had no share in ecclesiastical patronage in Guipúzcoa; all was in the hands of the king, of the nobles or of the municipalities, or else the priests were chosen by competitive examination or elected by the people. They would not allow the priest to interfere with the games or dances, and when the drama was forbidden in all Spain in 1757 by the authority of the Spanish bishops, the cortes of Navarre compelled the king to withdraw the order.

For a stranger coming from lands of larger farms and apparently higher cultivation, the agriculture of the Basques seems poor, but the old scattered homesteads show a sense of security that has been lacking in many parts of Spain; and the Basques have shown great adaptability in suiting their agriculture to new conditions, helped by the presence of the courts at San Sebastian and Biarritz. When the old self-sufficient village industries declined, in consequence of the invention of machinery and manufacture elsewhere, the Basques entered at once upon emigration to the agricultural parts of the Americas, and the result has been that the Basque Provinces and the Pays Basque probably have never been more prosperous than they are now, and perhaps a new Eskual-herria and a new Eskuara are being built up in the distant lands to which they are such valued immigrants.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--For so restricted a literature the _Essai d'une bibliographie de la langue basque_, by Julien Vinson (Paris, 1891), with the volume of additions and corrections, 1898, is practically exhaustive, and is a mine of information on the principal works. See also for the language, A. Oihenart, _Notitia utriusque Vasconiae_ (Paris. 1638 and 1656), 4to., ch. xiv.; Fl. Lecluse, _Manuel de la [v.03 p.0489] langue basque_ (Toulouse, 1826); C. Ribary, _Essai sur la langue basque_ (1866), translated from the Hungarian by Julien Vinson (Paris, 1877); W. J. Van Eys, _Grammaire comparée des dialectes basques_ (Paris, London, Amsterdam, 1879); Prince L. L. Bonaparte, _Le Verbe basque en tableaux_ (London, 1864-1869); J. Vinson, articles in _Revue de linguistique_ (Paris, 1867-1906); L'Abbé Ithurry, _Grammaire basque_ (Bayonne, 1895-1906); Dr H. Schuchardt, _Die Entstehung der Bezugsformen des Baskischen_ (Wien, 1893); W. J. Van Eys, _Dictionnaire basque-français_ (Paris, 1873); R. M. de Azkue, _Diccionario vascongado español-français_ (Tours, 1906); _Monumenta Linguae Ibericae_, edidit Aemilius Hubner, fol. (Berlin, 1893) (texts and introduction good; analysis and interpretation faulty). Other works of interest on various subjects are:--Wentworth Webster, _Basque Legends_ (London, 1877 and 1879); Puyol y Camps, "La Epigraphia Numismatica Iberica," in tomo xvi. of _Boletin de la Real Academia de la Historia_ (Madrid, 1890), (for geographical distribution of the alphabets); T. de Aranzadi, _El Pueblo Euskalduna. Estudio de Antropologia_ (San Sebastian, 1889); and the same author's _Existe una raza Euskara? Sus caracteres antropologicos_ (1905); _La Tradition au pays basque_ (Paris, 1899), (a collection of papers by local authorities); Julien Vinson, _Les Basques et le pays basque_ (Paris, 1882), a sufficient survey for the general reader; the same author's _Le Folk-Lore du pays basque_ (Paris, 1883), treats of the Pastorales and embraces the whole Folk-Lore; _Le Codex de Saint-Jacques de Compostella_, lib. iv. (Paris, 1882), by R. P. F. Fita and J. Vinson, gives the first Basque vocabulary; _Les Coutumes générales gardées et observées au pais & baillage de Labourt_ (Bordeaux, 1700); G. Olphe-Galliard, _Le Paysan basque à travers les âges_ (Paris, 1905); Pierre Yturbide, _Le Pays de Labourd avant 1789_ (Bayonne, 1905), (for the time of the English domination); Henry O'Shea, _La Tombe basque_ (Pau, 1889), (valuable for the comparison of Basque and Celtic sepulchral ornament). See also the bibliography to BASQUE PROVINCES.

(W. WE.; J. VN.)

BASRA (written also BUSRA, BASSORA and BUSSORA), the name of a vilayet of Asiatic Turkey, and of its capital. The vilayet has an area of 16,470 sq. m., formed in 1884 by detaching the southern districts of the Bagdad vilayet. It includes the great marshy districts of the lower Euphrates and Tigris, and of their joint stream, the Shatt el-Arab, and a sanjak on the western shore of the Persian Gulf. A settled population is found only along the river banks. Except the capital, Basra, there are no towns of importance. Korna, at the junction of the two great rivers; Amara on the Tigris; Shatra on the Shatt el-Haï canal, connecting the Tigris and Euphrates; Nasrieh, at the junction of that canal with the Euphrates and Suk esh-Sheiukh, on the lower reaches of the Euphrates, are the principal settlements, with a population varying from 3000 to 10,000 or somewhat less. Along the Shatt el-Arab and the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates there are vast plantations of date-palms, which produce the finest dates known. Here and there are found extensive rice-fields; liquorice, wheat, barley and roses are also cultivated in places. But in general the ancient canals on which the fertility of the country depends have been allowed to go to ruin. The whole land is subject to inundations which render settled agriculture impracticable, and the population consists chiefly of nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes whose wealth consists in herds of buffaloes, horses, sheep and goats. The principal exports are wool, dates, cereals, gum, liquorice-root and horses. The climate is humid and unhealthy. The population is estimated at about 200,000 almost exclusively Moslems, of whom three-quarters are Shi`ites. There are about 4000 Jews and perhaps 6000 Christians, among whom are reckoned the remains of the curious sect of Sabaeans or Mandaeans, whose headquarters are in the neighbourhood of Suk esh-Sheiukh.

The capital of the vilayet, also called Basra, is situated in 47° 34' E. long. and 32° N. lat., near the western bank of the Shatt el-Arab, about 55 m. from the Persian Gulf. The town proper lies on the canal el-`Assar about 1½ to 2 m. W. of the Shatt el-Arab. There are no public buildings of importance. The houses are meanly built, partly of sun-dried and partly of burnt bricks, with flat roofs surrounded by parapets. The bazaars are miserable structures, covered with mats laid on rafters of date trees. The streets are irregular, narrow and unpaved. The greater part of the area of the town is occupied by gardens and plantations of palm-trees, intersected by a number of little canals, cleansed twice daily with the ebb and flow of the tide, which rises here about 9 ft. These canals are navigated by small boats, called _bellem_ (plur. _ablam_), resembling dug-outs in form, but light and graceful. At high-tide, accordingly, the town presents a very attractive appearance, but at low-tide, when the mud banks are exposed, it seems dirty and repulsive, and the noxious exhalations are extremely trying. The whole region is subject to inundations. The town itself is unhealthy and strangers especially are apt to be attacked by fever. Basra is the port of Bagdad, with which it has steam communication by an English line of river steamers weekly and also by a Turkish line. The Shatt el-Arab is deep and broad, easily navigable for ocean steamers, and there is weekly communication by passenger steamer with India, while two or more freight lines, which also take passengers, connect Basra directly with the Mediterranean, and with European and British ports. It is the great date port of the world, and the dates of Basra are regarded as the finest in the market. Besides dates the principal articles of export are wool, horses, liquorice, gum and attar of roses. The annual value of the exports is approximately £1,000,000 and of the imports a little more. The foreign trade is almost exclusively in the hands of the English, but of late the Germans have begun to enter the market, and the Hamburg-American line of steamers has established direct communication. Since 1898 there has been a British consul at Basra (before that time he was a representative of the Indian government). France and Russia also maintain consular establishments at Basra. The settled population of Basra is probably under 50,000, but how much it is impossible to estimate. It is a heterogeneous mixture of all the nations and religions of the East--Turks, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Armenians, Chaldaeans and Jews. Of the latter there are about 1900, engaged in trade and commerce. Fewest in number are the Turks, comprising only the officials. Most numerous are the Arabs, chiefly Shi`ites. The wealthiest and most influential personage in the capital and the vilayet is the _nakib_, or marshal of the nobility (_i.e._ descendants of the family of the prophet, who are entitled to wear the green turban). Basra is a station of the Arabian mission of the Dutch Reformed Church of America.

_History._--The original city of Basra was founded by the caliph Omar in A.D. 636 about 8 m. S.W. of its present site, on the edge of the stony and pebbly Arabian plateau, on an ancient canal now dry. The modern town of Zobeir, a sort of health suburb, occupied by the villas of well-to-do inhabitants of Basra, lies near the ruin mounds which mark the situation of the ancient city. In the days of its prosperity it rivalled Kufa and Wasit in wealth and size, and its fame is in the tales of the _Arabian Nights_. With the decay of the power of the Abbasid caliphate its importance declined. The canals were neglected, communication with the Persian Gulf was cut off and finally the place was abandoned altogether. The present city was conquered by the Turks in 1668, and since that period has been the scene of many revolutions. It was taken in 1777 after a siege of eight months by the Persians under Sadik Khan. In about a year it fell again into the hands of the Turks, who were again deprived of it by the sheikh of the Montefik (Montafiq) Arabs. The town was in the October following recovered by Suleiman Pasha, who encountered the sheikh on the banks of the Euphrates and put him to flight; it has since remained in the hands of the Turks.

(J. P. PE.)

BASS, the name of a family of English brewers. The founder of the firm, William Bass (b. 1720), was originally a carrier, one of his chief clients being Benjamin Printon, a Burton-on-Trent brewer. By 1777 Bass had saved a little money, and seeing the growing demand for Burton beer he started as a brewer himself. The principal market for Burton beer at that time was in St Petersburg, whither the beer could be sent by water direct from Burton via the Trent and Hull, and William Bass managed to secure a tolerable share of the large Russian orders. But in 1822 the Russian government placed a prohibitory duty on Burton ales, and the Burton brewers were forced into cultivating the home market. William Bass opened up a connexion with London, and established a fairly profitable home trade. A misunderstanding between the East India Company and the London brewers who were the proprietors of Hodgson's India [v.03 p.0490] Pale Ale, at that time the standard drink of Englishmen in the East, resulted in Bass being asked to supply a beer which would withstand the Indian climate and be generally suitable to the Indian market. After a series of experiments he produced what is still known as Bass's pale ale. This new and lighter beer at once became popular all over India, and Bass's firm became the largest in Burton. After William Bass's death the business was carried on by his son, M. T. Bass, and then by his grandson, Michael Thomas Bass (1799-1884). In 1827 a vessel laden with Bass's beer was wrecked in the Irish Channel. A large proportion of the cargo was however salved and sold at Liverpool, where it met with great approval in the local market, and through this chance circumstance the firm opened up a regular trade in the north-west of England and Ireland. "Bass" was, however, little drunk in London till 1851, when it was supplied on draught at the Exhibition of that year, since which time its reputation has been world-wide. In 1880 the business was turned into a limited liability company. Michael Thomas Bass, besides actively conducting and extending the firm's operations, was a man of great public spirit and philanthropy, and the towns of Burton and Derby are largely indebted to his munificence. He took a keen interest in all questions affecting the welfare of the working classes, and was largely instrumental in securing the abolition of imprisonment for debt. On his death, prior to which he had taken into partnership Messrs Ratcliff and Gretton, two of the leading officials of the brewery, converting the business into a limited company known as Messrs Bass, Ratcliff & Gretton, Ltd., the control of the firm passed to his sons, Michael Arthur Bass and Hamar Bass (d. 1898). Michael Arthur Bass (1837-1909), after twenty-one years in parliament as member first for Stafford, then for two divisions of Staffordshire, was in 1886 raised to the peerage as Baron Burton; by a special patent of 1897 the peerage descended to his daughter, Nellie, the wife of Mr J. E. Baillie of Dochfour, the baronetcy descending to his nephew W. A. Hamar Bass (b. 1879).

BASS (the same word as "base," and so pronounced, but influenced in spelling by the Ital. _basso_), deep, low; especially in music, the lower

## part in the harmony of a composition, the lowest male voice, or the

lowest-pitched of a class of instruments, as the bass-clarinet.

Bass or bast (a word of doubtful origin, pronounced _b[)a]s_) is the fibrous bark of the lime tree, used in gardening for tying up plants, or to make mats, soft plaited baskets, &c. Basswood is the American lime-tree, Tilia Americana; white basswood is T. heterophylla.

The name bass is also given to a fish closely resembling the perch.

BASSA, a province of the British protectorate of Northern Nigeria, occupying the angle made by the meeting of the Benue river with the Niger. It has an area of 7000 sq. m., with a population estimated at about one and a half millions. It is bounded N. by the Benue, W. by the Niger, S. by the frontier of Southern Nigeria, and E. by the province of Muri. The province is heavily forested, and is estimated to be one of the richest of the protectorate in natural products. It has never been penetrated by Moslem influence, and is inhabited in the greater part by warlike and unruly pagans. Early in the 16th century the Igbira (Okpoto or Ibo) were one of the most powerful pagan peoples of Nigeria and had their capital at Iddah. At a later period the Bassas conquered the western portion of the state and the Munshis the eastern, while the Okpoto still held the south and a wedge-shaped district partially dividing the Munshis and Bassas. The Bassas are a very remarkable pagan race who permeate the entire protectorate of Northern Nigeria, and are to be found in small colonies in almost every province. They are clever agriculturists, naturally peaceful and industrious. The Munshis, though also good agriculturists, are a warlike and most unruly race, as are also the Okpoto.

The districts which now comprise the province of Bassa came nominally under British control in 1900, but up to the year 1903 administrative authority was confined to the western half with Dekina (in 7° 3' E., 7° 41' N.) for its capital. In December of 1903 a disturbance resulting in the murder of the British resident led to the despatch of a military expedition, and as a result of the operations the frontiers of the districts under control were extended to the borders of the Munshi country in about 8° E. The western portion of the province, occupied by friendly and peaceful tribes upon the Niger, has been organized for administration on the same system as the rest of the protectorate. Courts of justice are operative and taxes are peacefully collected. The Okpoto, however, remain turbulent, as do their neighbours the Munshis. Spirits, of which the importation is forbidden in Northern Nigeria, are freely smuggled over the border from Southern Nigeria. Arms and powder are also imported. The slave-trade is still alive in this district, and an overland route for slaves is believed to have been established through eastern Bassa to the Benue. In consequence of the natural wealth of the province, there are trading establishments of the Niger Company and of Messrs Holt on the Niger and Benue, and colonies of native traders have penetrated the country from the north. Roman Catholic and Protestant missions are established at Dekina and Gbebe.

BASSANO, JACOPO DA PONTE (1510-1592), Venetian painter, was born at Bassano. He was educated by his father, who was himself an artist, and then completed his studies at Venice. On the death of his father he returned to Bassano and settled there. His subjects were generally peasants and villagers, cattle and landscapes, with some portraits and historical designs. His figures are well designed, and his animals and landscapes have an agreeable air of simple nature. His compositions, though they have not much eloquence or grandeur, have abundance of force and truth; the local colours are well observed, the flesh-tints are fresh and brilliant, and his chiaroscuro and perspective are unexceptionable. He is said to have finished a great number of pictures; but his genuine works are somewhat rare and valuable--many of those which are called originals being copies either by the sons of Bassano or by others. Bassano's style varied considerably during his lifetime. He naturally was at first a copier of his father, but his productions in this style are not of great value. He was then strongly attracted by the lightness and beautiful colouring of Titian, and finally adopted the style which is recognized as his own. Although he painted few great pictures, and preferred humble subjects, yet his altar-piece of the Nativity at Bassano is estimated highly by the best judges, and in Lanzi's opinion is the finest work of its class.

BASSANO, a city of Venetia, Italy, in the province of Vicenza, 24 m. N.E. of Vicenza and 30 m. N. of Padua by rail, at the foot of the Venetian Alps. Pop. (1901) town, 7553; commune, 15,097. It is well situated upon the Brenta, which is here spanned by a covered wooden bridge, and commands fine views. The castle, erected by the Ezzelini in the 13th century, lies in the upper portion of the town, above the river; a tower, erected by a member of the same family, is a conspicuous feature. The museum and cathedral and some of the other churches contain pictures by the da Ponte family (16th and early 17th century), surnamed Bassano from their birth-place; Jacopo is the most eminent of them. The museum also contains drawings and letters of the sculptor Antonio Canova. The church of S. Francesco, begun in the 12th century in the Lombard Romanesque style, was continued in the 13th in the Gothic style. Some of the houses have traces of paintings on their façades. In the 11th century Eccelin, a German, obtained fiefs in this district from Conrad II. and founded the family of the Ezzelini, who were prominent in the history of North Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries. Bassano apparently came into existence about A.D. 1000. Its possession was disputed between Padua and Vicenza; it passed for a moment under the power of Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan, who fortified it. At the beginning of the 15th century it went over to Venice; its industries flourished under Venetian government, especially its printing-press and manufacture of majolica, the latter of which still continues. On the 8th of September 1796 an action was fought here between the French and the Austrians, in which the French were victorious.

(T. AS.)

BASSARAB or BASSARABA, the name of a dynasty in Rumania, which ruled Walachia from the dawn of its history until 1658. [v.03 p.0491] The origin of the name and family has not yet been explained. It undoubtedly stands in close connexion with the name of the province of Bessarabia, which oriental chroniclers gave in olden times to the whole of Walachia. The heraldic sign, three heads of negroes in the Bassarab shield, seems to be of late western origin and to rest on a popular etymology connecting the second half of the word with Arabs, who were taken to signify Moors (blacks). The other heraldic signs, the crescent and the star, have evidently been added on the same supposition of an oriental origin of the family. The Servian chroniclers connect its origin with their own nationality, basing this view upon the identification of Sarab with Sorb or Serbia. All this is mere conjecture. It is, however, a fact that the first appearance of the Bassarabs as rulers (_knyaz_, _ban_ or _voivod_) is in the western part of Rumania (originally called Little Walachia), and also in the southern parts of Transylvania--the old dukedoms of Fogarash and Almash, which are situated on the right bank of the Olt (Aluta) and extend south to Severin and Craiova. Whatever the origin of the Bassarabs may be, the foundation of the Walachian principality is undoubtedly connected with a member of that family, who, according to tradition, came from Transylvania and settled first in Câmpulung and Tîrgovishtea. It is equally certain that almost every one of the long line of princes and voivods bore a Slavonic surname, perhaps due to the influence of the Slavonic Church, to which the Rumanians belonged. Starting from the 13th Century the Bassarabs soon split into two rival factions, known in history as the descendants of the two brothers Dan and Dragul. The form Drakul--devil--by which this line is known in history is no doubt a nickname given by the rival line. It has fastened on the family on account of the cruelties perpetrated by Vlad Drakul (1433-1446) and Vlad Tsepesh (1456-1476), who figure in popular legend as representatives of the most fiendish cruelty. The feud between the rival dynasties lasted from the beginning of the 15th century to the beginning of the 17th.

The most prominent members of the family were Mircea (1386-1418), who accepted Turkish suzerainty; Neagoe, the founder of the famous cathedral at Curtea de Argesh (_q.v._); Michael, surnamed the Brave (1592-1601); and Petru Cercel, famous for his profound learning, who spoke twelve languages and carried on friendly correspondence with the greater scholars and poets of Italy. He was drowned by the Turks in Constantinople in 1590 through the intrigues of Mihnea, who succeeded him on the throne of Walachia. The British Museum possesses the oldest MSS. of the Rumanian Gospels, once owned by this Petru Cercel, and containing his autograph signature. The text was published by Dr M. Caster at the expense of the Rumanian government. Mateiu Bassarab (1633-1654) established the first printing-press in Rumania, and under his influence the first code of laws was compiled and published in Bucharest in 1654. The Bassarab dynasty became extinct with Constantine Sherban in 1658. See RUMANIA: _Language and Literature_.

(M. G.)

BASS CLARINET (Fr. _clarinette basse_; Ger. _Bass-Klarinette_; Ital. _clarinetto basso_ or _darone_), practically the A, Bb or C clarinet speaking an octave lower; what therefore has been said concerning the fingering, transposition, acoustic properties and general history of the clarinet (_q.v._) also applies to the bass clarinet. Owing to its greater length the form of the bass clarinet differs from that of the clarinets in that the bell joint is bent up in front of the instrument, terminating in a large gloxinea-shaped bell, and that the mouthpiece is attached by means of a strong ligature and screws to a serpent-shaped crook of brass or silver. The compass of the modern orchestral bass clarinet is in the main the same as that of the higher clarinets in C, Bb and A, but an octave lower, and therefore for the bass clarinet in C is [Notation: E2 B5.]; for the bass clarinet in Bb the real sounds are one tone, and for the bass clarinet in A 1½ tone lower, although the notation is the same for all three.

Sometimes the treble clef is used in notation for the bass clarinet. It must then be understood that the instrument in C speaks an octave lower, the bass clarinet in Bb a major ninth and the bass clarinet in A a minor tenth lower. The tenor clef is also frequently used in orchestral works.

The quality of tone is less reedy in the bass clarinet than in the higher instruments. It resembles the bourdon stop on the organ, and in the lowest register, more especially, the tone is somewhat hollow and wanting in power although mellower than that of the bassoon. In the lowest octave the instrument speaks slowly and is chiefly used for sustained bass or melody notes; rapid passages are impossible.

The modern orchestral model may be fitted with almost every kind of key-mechanism, including the Boehm, and the degree of perfection and ingenuity attained has removed the all but insuperable difficulties which stood in the way of the original inventors who, not understanding key-work, made many futile attempts to bridge the necessarily great distance between the finger-holes by making the bore serpentine, boring the holes obliquely, &c.

The low pitch of the bass clarinet (8 ft. tone) contrasted with the moderate length of the instrument--whose bore measures only some 42 to 43 inches from mouthpiece to bell, whereas that of the bassoon, an instrument of the same pitch, is twice that length--is a puzzle to many. An explanation of the fact is to be found in the peculiar acoustic properties of the cylindrical tube played by means of a reed mouthpiece characterizing the clarinet family, which acts as a closed pipe speaking an octave lower than an open pipe of the same length, and overblowing a twelfth instead of an octave. This is more fully explained in the articles CLARINET and AULOS.

The construction of the bass clarinet demands the greatest care. The bore should theoretically be strictly cylindrical throughout its length from mouthpiece to bell joint; the slightest deviation from mathematical accuracy, such as an undue widening of the bell from the point where it joins the body to the mouth of the bell, would tend to muffle the lower notes of the instrument and to destroy correct intonation.

The origin of the bass clarinet must be sought in Germany, where Heinrich Grenser of Dresden, one of the most famous instrument-makers of his day, made the first bass clarinet in 1793. The basset horn (_q.v._) or tenor clarinet, which had reached the height of its popularity, no doubt suggested to Grenser, who was more especially renowned for his excellent fagottos, the possibility of providing for the clarinet a bass of its own. One of these earliest attempts in the form of a fagotto, stamped "A. Grenser, Dresden," with nine square-flapped brass keys working on knobs, is in the Grossherzogliches Museum at Darmstadt and was lent to the Royal Military Exhibition, London 1890.[1] Two other early specimens,[2] belonging originally to Adolphe Sax and to M. de Coussemaker, are now respectively preserved in the museums of the Brussels Conservatoire and of the Berlin Hochschule (Snoeck Collection). The tubes are of great thickness and the holes are bored obliquely through the walls. Both instruments are in A.

Attempts were made in Italy to overcome the mechanical difficulties by making the bore of the bass clarinet serpentine. A specimen by Nicolas Papalini of Pavia[3] in the museum of the Brussels Conservatoire has the serpentine bore pierced through two slabs of pear-wood; the two halves, each forming a vertical section of the instrument, are fitted together with wooden pins. The outside length is only 2 ft. 3½ in. and there are nineteen finger-holes.

Joseph Uhlmann of Vienna[4] constructed a bass clarinet, also termed "bass basset horn," with twenty-three keys and a compass from Bb through four complete octaves with all chromatic [v.03 p.0492] semitones. These instruments resemble the saxophones (_q.v._), having the bell joint bent up in front and the crook almost at right angles backwards, but the bore of the saxophone is conical.

Georg Streitwolf (1779-1837), an ingenious musical instrument-maker of Göttingen, produced in 1828 a bass clarinet with a compass extending from Ab to F, nineteen keys and a fingering the same as that of the clarinet with but few exceptions. In form it resembled the fagotto and had a crook terminating in a beak mouthpiece. The Streitwolf bass clarinet was adopted in 1834 by the Prussian infantry as bass to the wood-wind.[5] Streitwolf's first bass clarinets were in C, but later he constructed instruments in Bb as well. Like the basset horn, Streitwolf's instruments had the four chromatic open keys extending the compass downwards to Bb. The tone was of very fine quality. One of these instruments is in the possession of Herr C. Kruspe of Erfurt,[6] and another is preserved in the Berlin collection at the Hochschule.

It was, however, the successive improvements of Adolphe Sax (Paris, 1814-1894), working probably from Grenser's and later from Streitwolf's models, which produced the modern bass clarinet, and following up the work of Halary and Buffet in the same field, he secured its introduction into the orchestra at the opera. The bass clarinet in C made its first appearance in opera in 1836 in Meyerbeer's _Huguenots_, Act V., where in a fine passage the lower register of the instrument is displayed to advantage, and later in _Dinorah_ (_Le pardon de Ploermel_). Two years later (1838) at the theatre of Modena a bass clarinet by P. Maino of Milan, differing in construction from the Sax model, was independently introduced into the orchestra.[7] Wagner employed the bass clarinet in Bb and C in _Tristan und Isolde_,[8] where at the end of Act II. it is used with great effect to characterize the reproachful utterance of King Mark, thus:

[Illustration]

etc.

(K. S.)

[1] See Captain C. R. Day, _Descriptive Catalogue_ (London, 1891), No. 266, p. 125.

[2] See Victor Mahillon, _Catalogue descriptif_, vol. ii. (1896), pp. 224-226, No. 940.

[3] See Captain C. R. Day, _op. cit_. p. 123, pl. v. B. and p. 123, No. 262.

[4] See Dr Schafhäutl's report on the Munich exhibition, _Bericht der Beurtheilungscommission für Musikinstrumente_ (Munich, 1855), P. 153.

[5] See _Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung_ (Leipzig, 1834), Bd. xxxvi. March, p. 193.

[6] See Wilhelm Altenburg, _Die Klarinette_ (Heilbronn, 1904-1905), p. 33.

[7] See W. Altenburg, _op. cit._ p. 34.

[8] Orchestral score, p. 284.

BASSEIN, a district and town in the Irrawaddy division of Lower Burma, in the delta of the Irrawaddy. The district has been reduced to 4127 sq. m., from 8954 sq. m. in 1871, having given up a large tract to the district of Myaungmya formed in 1896.

A mountain range called the Anauk-pet Taungmyin stretches through the district from N. to S. along the coast. The principal river of the district is the Irrawaddy, which debouches on the sea at its eastern extremity through a delta intersected with salt water creeks, among which the Pyamalaw, Pyinzalu, Kyuntôn, and Ngawun Shagègyi or Bassein river rank as important arms of the sea. Irrawaddy and Inyègyi are the only two lakes in the district. The delta of the Irrawaddy forms, wherever cultivable, a vast sheet of rice, with cotton, sesamum, and tobacco as subsidiary crops. In 1901 the population was 391,427.

BASSEIN, the chief town and port, is the capital of the district and division, and is situated on the eastern bank of the Bassein river, one of the main arteries by which the waters of the Irrawaddy discharge themselves into the sea. It forms an important seat of the rice trade with several steam rice mills, and has great capabilities both from a mercantile and a military point of view, as it commands the great outlet of the Irrawaddy. It fell before the British arms, in May 1852, during the second Burmese war. In 1901 it had a population of 31,864. The vessels of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company ply between Rangoon and Bassein, &c., by inland waters, and a railway opened in 1903 runs northeastward through the centre of the district, to Henzada and Letpadan.

BASSELIN, OLIVIER (_c._ 1400-_c._ 1450), French poet, was born in the Val-de-Vire in Normandy about the end of the 14th century. He was by occupation a fuller, and tradition still points out the site of his mill. His drinking songs became famous under the name of Vaux-de-Vire, corrupted in modern times into "vaudeville." From various traditions it may be gathered that Basselin was killed in the English wars about the middle of the century, possibly at the battle of Formigny (1450). At the beginning of the 17th century a collection of songs was published by a Norman lawyer, Jean Le Houx, purporting to be the work of Olivier Basselin. There seems to be very little doubt that Le Houx was himself the author of the songs attributed to Basselin, as well as of those he acknowledged as his own.

It has been suggested that Basselin's name may be safely connected with some songs preserved in the _Bibliothèque Nationale_ at Paris, and published at Caen in 1866 by M. Armand Gasté. The question is discussed in M. V. Patard's _La Vérité dans la question Olivier Basselin et Jean le Houx à propos du Vau-de-Vire_ (1897). A. Gasté's edition (1875) of the _Vaux-de-Vire_ was translated (1885) by J. P. Muirhead.

BASSES-ALPES, a department of south-eastern France, formed in 1790 out of the northern portion of Provence. It is bounded N. by the department of the Hautes Alpes, E. by Italy and the department of the Alpes Maritimes, S. by that of the Var, and W. by those of Vaucluse and the Drôme. Its area is about 2698 sq. m., while its greatest length is 89½ m. and its greatest breadth 56 m. Pop. (1906) 113,126. The river Durance passes through the western part of this department, receiving (left), as affluents, the Ubaye, the Bléone and the Asse (the entire course of each of these rivers is included within the department) as well as the Verdon, the upper course of which is within the department, while the lower course forms its southern limit. It is a poor and hilly district, the highest summits (the loftiest is the Aiguille de Chambeyron, 11,155 ft.) rising round the head waters of the Ubaye. The department is divided into five arrondissements (Digne, Barcelonnette, Castellane, Forcalquier, and Sisteron), 30 cantons and 250 communes. It forms the bishopric of Digne, formerly in the ecclesiastical province of Embrun, but since 1802 in that of Aix-en-Provence. Its chief towns are Digne, Barcelonnette, Castellane, Forcalquier, and Sisteron. It is poorly supplied with railways (total length 109½ m.), the main line from Grenoble to Avignon running through it from Sisteron to Manosque, and sending off two short branch lines to Digne (14 m.) and to Forcalquier (9 m.). It is a poor department from the material point of view, being very mountainous and containing many mountain pastures. But these pastures have been much damaged by the Provençal shepherds to whom they are let out, while the forests have been very much thinned (though extensive reafforestments are now being carried out) so that the soil is very dry and made drier by exposure to the southern sun. From near the head of the Ubaye valley the pass of the Col de l'Argentière (6545 ft.) leads over from Barcelonnette to Cuneo, in Italy; it was perhaps traversed by Hannibal, and certainly in 1515 by Francis I.

See C. J. J. M. Féraud, _Histoire, géographie et statistique du Département des Basses-Alpes_ (Digne, 1861).

(W. A. B. C.)

BASSES-PYRÉNÉES, a department of south-western France, at the angle of the Bay of Biscay, formed in 1790, two-thirds of it from Béarn and the rest from three districts of Gascony--Basse-Navarre, Soule and Labourd. The latter constitute the Basque region of France (see BASQUES) and cover the west of the department. Basses-Pyrénées is bounded N. by Landes and Gers, E. by Hautes-Pyrénées (which has two enclaves forming five communes within this department), S. by Spain, and W. by the Atlantic Ocean. Pop. (1906) 426,817. Area, 2977 sq. m. The whole of the south of the department is occupied by the western and lower summits of the Pyrenees. The remainder consists of a region of heaths and plateaus to the northeast of the Gave de Pau, and of hills divided by numberless fertile valleys to the west of that river. The height of the mountains of the southern frontier increases gradually from west to east. The peak of the Rhune, to the south of St Jean de Luz, rises only to 2950 ft.; and on the border of the Basque country the mean height of the summits is not much greater. The peak of Orhy alone, in the south of the valley of Mauléon, reaches 6618 ft. But beyond that of Anie (8215 ft.), on the meridian of Orthez, which marks the boundary of Béarn, much loftier elevations appear,--Mourrous (9760 ft.), on the border of Hautes-Pyrénées, and the southern peak of Ossau (9465 ft.). The frontier between France and Spain, for the most part, [v.03 p.0493] follows the crest-line of the main range. Forts guard the upper valleys of the Nive and the Aspe, along which run important passes into Spain. The general direction of the rivers of the department is towards the north-west. The streams almost all meet in the Adour through the Gave de Pau, the Bidouze, and the Nive. In the north-east the two Luys flow directly to the Adour, which they join in Landes. In the south-west the Nivelle and the Bidassoa flow directly into the sea. The lower course of the Adour forms the boundary between Basses-Pyrénées and Landes; it enters the sea a short distance below Bayonne over a shifting bar, which has often altered the position of its mouth. The Gave de Pau, a larger stream than the Adour, passes Pau and Orthez, but its current is so swift that it is only navigable for a few miles above its junction with the Adour. On the left it receives the Gave d'Oloron, formed by the Gave d'Ossau, descending from the Pic du Midi, and the Gave d'Aspe, which rises in Spain. An important affluent of the Gave d'Oloron, the Saison or Gave de Mauléon, descends from the Pic d'Orhy. From the Pic des Escaliers, which rises above the forest of Iraty, the Bidouze descends northwards; while the forest, though situated on the southern slope of the chain, forms a part of French territory. The Nive, a beautiful river of the Basque country, takes its rise in Spain; after flowing past St Jean-Pied-de-Port, formerly capital of French Navarre and fortified by Vauban to guard the pass of Roncevaux, it joins the Adour at Bayonne. The Nivelle also belongs only partly to France and ends its course at St Jean-de-Luz. The Bidassoa, which is only important as forming part of the frontier, contains the Ile des Faisans, where the treaty of the Pyrenees was concluded (1659), and debouches between Hendaye (France) and Fuenterrabia (Spain).

The climate of the department is mild and it has an abundant rainfall,

## partly due to the west wind which drives the clouds from the gulf of

Gascony. The spring is rainy; the best seasons are summer and autumn, the heat of summer being moderated by the sea. The winters are mild. The air of Pau agrees with invalids and delicate constitutions, and St Jean-de-Luz and Biarritz are much frequented by winter visitors.

Despite extensive tracts of uncultivated land, the department is mainly agricultural. Maize and wheat are the chief cereals; potatoes, flax and vegetables are also produced. Pasture is abundant, and horses, cattle, sheep and pigs are largely reared. The vine is grown on the lower slopes sheltered from the north wind, the wines of Jurançon, near Pau, being the most renowned. Of the fruits grown, chestnuts, cider-apples, and pears are most important. About one-thirteenth of the department consists of woods, a very small proportion of which belong to the government, the rest to the communes and private individuals.

The department furnishes salt, building-stone, and other quarry products. There are mineral springs at Eaux-Bonnes, Eaux-Chaudes, Cambo-les-Bains (resorted to by the Basques on St John's Eve), St Christau, and Salies. At Le Boucau, 3 m. from Bayonne, there are large metallurgical works, the _Forges de l'Adour_, and chemical works. The manufactures of the department include woollen caps and sashes, cord slippers, chocolate, and paper, and there are also tanneries, saw- and flour-mills. "Bayonne hams" and other table delicacies are prepared at Orthez. There is a considerable fishing population at Bayonne and St Jean-de-Luz. Bayonne is the principal port. Exports consist chiefly of timber, mine-props, minerals, wine, salt and resinous products. Coal, minerals, phosphates, grain and wool are leading imports. The interior commerce of the department is, however, of greater importance to its inhabitants; it takes the form of exchange of products between the regions of mountain and plain. The railway lines of Basses-Pyrénées, the chief of which is that from Bayonne to Toulouse via Orthez and Pau, belong to the Southern Company. The Adour, the Nive and the Bidouze are navigable on their lower courses. The department has five arrondissements--Pau, Bayonne, Oloron, Orthez and Mauléon, divided into 41 cantons and 559 communes. It constitutes the diocese of Bayonne, comes within the educational circumscription (_académie_) of Bordeaux and belongs to the district of the XVIII. army corps. Pau, the capital and seat of a court of appeal, Bayonne, Oloron, Biarritz, Orthez, Eaux-Bonnes, and St Jean-de-Luz are the principal towns. The following places are also of interest:--Lescar, which has a church of the 12th and 16th century, once a cathedral; Montaner, with a stronghold built in 1380 by Gaston Phoebus, count of Foix and viscount, of Béarn; and Sauveterre, a town finely situated on the Gave d'Oloron, with an old bridge, remains of a feudal castle, and a church in the Romanesque and Gothic styles.

BASSET, or BASSETTE, a French game of cards played by five persons with a pack of fifty-two cards. Once very popular, it is now practically obsolete. It is said to be of Venetian origin and to have been introduced into France by Justiniani, the ambassador of Venice in the second half of the 17th century. It resembles lansquenet (_q.v._) in a general way, in that it is played between a banker and several punters, the players winning or losing according as cards turned up match those already exposed or not.

BASSET HORN (Fr. _Cor de Basset_, or _Cor de Bassette_; Ger. _Bassethorn_, _Basshorn_; Ital. _Corno di Bassetto_), a wood-wind instrument, not a "horn," member of the clarinet family, of which it is the tenor. The basset horn consists of a nearly cylindrical tube of wood (generally cocus or box-wood), having a cylindrical bore and terminating in a metal bell wider than that of the clarinet. For convenience in reaching the keys and holes, the modern instrument is usually bent or curved either near the mouthpiece or at the bell, which is turned upwards. The older models were bent in the middle at an obtuse angle, and had at the bottom of the lower joint, near the bell, a wooden block, inside which the bore was reflexed, and bent down upon itself.[1] The basset horn has the same fingering as the clarinet, and corresponds to the tenor of that instrument, being pitched a fifth below the clarinet in C. The alto clarinet in Eb is often substituted for the basset horn, especially in military bands, but the instruments differ in three particulars:--(1) The basset horn has a metal bell instead of the pear-shaped contracted bell of the alto clarinet. (2) The bore of the basset horn is wider than that of the alto clarinet in Eb, or of the tenor clarinet in F. (3) The tube of the basset horn is longer than that of the clarinet, and contains four additional long keys, worked by the thumb of the right hand, which in the clarinet is only used to steady the instrument. These keys give the basset horn an extended compass of two tones downwards to F [Notation: F2.] whereas the Eb clarinet only extends to G [Notation: G2.] and the F clarinet to A [Notation: A2.] (actual sounds). This brings the compass of the basset horn to a range of four octaves from [Notation: C3 to C7.], actual sounds [Notation: F2 to F6.].

[v.03 p.0494] [Illustration: FIG. 1. (From photographs lent by M. Victor Mahillon.)]

Like the clarinet, the basset horn is a transposing instrument, its music being written a fifth higher than the actual sounds. The treble clef is used in notation for all but the lowest register. The technical capabilities of the basset horn are the same as for the clarinet, except that the extra low notes from A to F (actual sounds) can only be intoned slowly and _staccato_; the notes of the upper register being better represented in the clarinet are seldom used in orchestral music.

The tone of the basset horn is extremely reedy and rich, especially in the medium and low registers; the tone colour is similar to that of the clarinet without its brilliancy; it is mellow and sensuous, but slightly sombre, and therefore well adapted for music of an elegiac funereal character.

The basset horn flourished mainly in Germany, where at the end of the 18th century it was the favourite solo instrument of many celebrated instrumentalists, such as Czerny, David, Lotz, Springer, &c. Among the great masters, Mozart seems to have been foremost in his appreciation of this beautiful instrument. In his _Requiem_, the reed family is represented by two basset horns having independent parts, and two bassoons. Mozart has also used the instrument with great effect in his opera _La Clemenza di Tito_, where he has written a fine obbligato for it in the aria "Non piu di Flori"; in _Zauberflöte_; and in chamber music, viz. short adagio for two basset horns and bassoon, and another for two clarinets and three basset horns (Series 10 of Breitkopf & Härtel's complete edition). Beethoven employed it in his _Prometheus_ overture. Mendelssohn used it in military music, and in two concerted pieces for clarinet and basset horn with pianoforte accompaniment, in F and D min., opp. 113 and 114, dedicated to Heinrich and Carl Bärmann.

The archetypes of the basset horn are the same as those of the clarinet (_q.v._). The basset horn was the outcome of the desire, prevailing during the 16th and 17th centuries, to obtain complete families of instruments to play in concert. The invention of the basset horn in 1770 is attributed to a clarinet maker of Passau, named Horn, whose name was given to the instrument;[2] by a misnomer, the basset horn became known in Italy as _corno di bassetto_, and in France as _cor de basset_. In 1782, Theodore Lotz of Pressburg made some modifications in the instrument, which was further improved by two instrumentalists of Vienna, Anton and Johann Stadler, and finally in 1812 by Iwan Mueller, a famous clarinettist, who invented the alto clarinet in Eb from the basset horn, by giving the latter a construction and fingering analogous to those of the clarinet in Bb, which he took as his model, instead of the clarinet in C.

See J. G. H. Backofen, _Anweisung zur Klarinette, nebst einer kurzen Abhandlung über das Basset-Horn_, with illustration, p. 37 (Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1803); Iwan Mueller, _Anweisung zu der neuen Clarinette und der Clarinette-alto, nebst einigen Bemerkungen für Instrumentenmacher_ (Leipzig, Freidrich Hofmeister, 1826, with illustrations); Gottfried Weber, "Über Clarinette und Bassethorn," _Cacilia_, Band xi. pp. 35-37 (Mainz, 1834); Wilhelm Altenburg, _Die Clarinette, ihre Entstehung und Entwickelung bis zur Jetztzeit in akustischer, technischer u. musikalischer Beziehung_ (Heilbronn, 1904), pp. 16-32; good heliogravures of early basset horns in _Descriptive Catalogue of the Musical Instruments at the Royal Military Exhibition, London_, 1890, compiled by Capt. C. R. Day (1891), pl. v.

(K. S.)

[1] An instrument of this type, stamped "H. Grenser, S. Wiesner, Dresden," is in the collection of the Rev. F. W. Galpin, of Hatfield, Broad Oak.

[2] _Cantor Lectures on Musical Instruments, their Construction and Capabilities_, by A. J. Hipkins, p. 15; Henri Lavoix, _Histoire de l'instrumentation depuis le seizième siècle jusqu'à nos jours_ (Paris, 1878), on p. 123 the date is given as 1777.

BASSI, LAURA MARIA CATERINA (1711-1778), an Italian lady eminently distinguished for her learning, was born at Bologna in 1711. On account of her extraordinary attainments she received a doctor's degree, and was appointed professor in the philosophical college, where she delivered public lectures on experimental philosophy till the time of her death. She was elected member of many literary societies and carried on an extensive correspondence with the most eminent European men of letters. She was well acquainted with classical literature, as well as with that of France and Italy. In 1738 she married Giuseppe Verrati, a physician, and left several children. She died in 1778.

BASSI, UGO (1800-1849), Italian patriot, was born at Cento, and received his early education at Bologna. An unhappy love affair induced him to become a novice in the Barnabite order when eighteen years old. He repaired to Rome, where he led a life of study and devotion, and entered on his ministry in 1833. It was as a preacher that he became famous, his sermons attracting large crowds owing to their eloquence and genuine enthusiasm. He lived chiefly at Bologna, but travelled all over Italy preaching and tending the poor, so poor himself as to be sometimes almost starving. On the outbreak of the revolutionary movements in 1848, when Pope Pius IX. still appeared to be a Liberal and an Italian patriot, Bassi, filled with national enthusiasm, joined General Durando's papal force to protect the frontiers as army chaplain. His eloquence drew fresh recruits to the ranks, and he exercised great influence over the soldiers and people. When the pope discarded all connexion with the national movement, it was only Bassi who could restrain the Bolognese in their indignation. At Treviso, where he had followed Guidotti's volunteers against the Austrians, he received three wounds, delighted to shed his blood for Italy (12th of May, 1848). He was taken to Venice, and on his recovery he marched unarmed at the head of the volunteers in the fight at Mestre. After the pope's flight from Rome and the proclamation of the Roman republic, Bassi took part with Garibaldi's forces against the French troops sent to re-establish the temporal power. He exposed his life many times while tending the wounded under fire, and when Garibaldi was forced to leave Rome with his volunteers the faithful monk followed him in his wanderings to San Marino. When the legion broke up Garibaldi escaped, but Bassi and a fellow-Garibaldian, Count Livraghi, after endless hardships, were captured near Comacchio. On being brought before the papal governor, Bassi said: "I am guilty of no crime save that of being an Italian like yourself. I have risked my life for Italy, and your duty is to do good to those who have suffered for her." The governor would have freed the prisoners; but he did not dare, and gave them over to an Austrian officer. They were escorted to Bologna, falsely charged before a court martial with having been found with arms in their hands (Bassi had never borne arms at all), and shot on the 8th of August, 1849. Bassi is one of the most beautiful figures of the Italian revolution, a gentle unselfish soul, who, although unusually gifted and accomplished, had an almost childlike nature. His execution excited a feeling of horror all over Italy.

Countess Martinengo gives a charming sketch of his life in her _Italian Characters_ (2nd ed., London, 1901); see also Zironi, _Vita del Padre Ugo Bassi_ (Bologna, 1879); F. Venosta, "Ugo Bassi, Martire di Bologna," in the _Pantheon dei Martiri Italiani_ (Milan, 1863).

(L. V.*)

BASSIANUS, JOANNES, Italian jurist of the 12th century. Little is known of his origin, but he is said by Corolus de Tocco to have been a native of Cremona. He was a professor in the law school of Bologna, the pupil of Bulgarus (_q.v._), and the master of Azo (_q.v._). The most important of his writings which have been preserved in his _Summary on the Authentica_, which Savigny regarded as one of the most precious works of the school of the Gloss-writers. Joannes, as he is generally termed, was remarkable for his talent in inventing ingenious forms for explaining his ideas with greater precision, and perhaps his most celebrated work is his "Law-Tree," which he entitled _Arbor Arborum_, and which has been the subject of numerous commentaries. The work presents a tree, upon the branches of which the various kinds of actions are arranged after the manner of fruit. The civil actions, or _actiones stricti juris_, being forty-eight in number, are arranged on one side, whilst the equitable or _praetorian_ actions, in number one hundred and twenty-one, are arranged on the other side. A further scientific division of actions was made by him under twelve heads, and by an ingenious system of notation the student was enabled to class at once each of the civil or praetorian actions, as the case might be, under its proper head in the scientific division. By the side of the tree a few glosses were added by Joannes to explain and justify his classification. _His Lectures on the Pandects_ and the _Code_, which were collected by his pupil Nicolaus Furiosus, have unfortunately perished.

[v.03 p.0495] BASSOMPIERRE, FRANÇOIS DE (1579-1646), French courtier, son of Christophe de Bassompierre (1547-1596), was born at the castle of Harrouel in Lorraine. He was descended from an old family which had for generations served the dukes of Burgundy and Lorraine, and after being educated with his brothers in Bavaria and Italy, was introduced to the court of Henry IV. in 1598. He became a great favourite of the king and shared to the full in the dissipations of court life. In 1600 he took part in the brief campaign in Savoy, and in 1603 fought in Hungary for the emperor against the Turks. In 1614 he assisted Marie de' Medici in her struggle against the nobles, but upon her failure in 1617 remained loyal to the King Louis XIII. and assisted the royalists when they routed Marie's supporters at Ponts-de-Cé in 1620. His services during the Huguenot rising of 1621-22 won for him the dignity of marshal of France. He was with the army of the king during the siege of La Rochelle in 1628, and in 1629 distinguished himself in the campaign against the rebels of Languedoc. In 1615 Bassompierre had purchased from Henri, duc de Rohan (1579-1638), the coveted position of colonel-general of the Swiss and Grisons; on this account he was sent to raise troops in Switzerland when Louis XIII. marched against Savoy in 1629, and after a short campaign in Italy his military career ended. As a diplomatist his career was a failure. In 1621 he went to Madrid as envoy extraordinary to arrange the dispute concerning the seizure of the Valteline forts by Spain, and signed the fruitless treaty of Madrid. In 1625 he was sent into Switzerland on an equally futile mission, and in 1626 to London to secure the retention of the Catholic ecclesiastics and attendants of Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I. The personal influence of Henry IV. had deterred Bassompierre from a marriage with Charlotte de Montmorency, daughter of the constable Montmorency, afterwards princesse de Condé, and between 1614 and 1630 he was secretly married to Louise Marguerite, widow of Francois, prince de Conti, and through her became implicated in the plot to overthrow Richelieu on the "Day of Dupes" 1630. His share was only a slight one, but his wife was an intimate friend of Marie de' Medici, and her hostility to the cardinal aroused his suspicions. By Richelieu's orders, Bassompierre was arrested at Senlis on the 25th of February 1631, and put into the Bastille, where he remained until Richelieu's death in 1643. On his release his offices were restored to him, and he passed most of his time at the castle of Tillières in Normandy, until his death on the 12th of October 1646. He left a son, François de la Tour, by the princesse de Conti, and an illegitimate son, Louis de Bassompierre, afterwards bishop of Saintes. His _Mémoires_, which are an important source for the history of his time, were first published at Cologne in 1665. He also left an incomplete account of his embassies to Spain, Switzerland and England (Cologne, 1668) and a number of discourses upon various subjects.

The best edition of the _Mémoires_ is that issued by the Société de l'Histoire de France (Paris, 1877); see also G. Tallemant des Reaux, _Historiettes de la princesse de Conti, et du maréchal de Bassompierre_ (Paris, 1854-1860).

[Illustration: FIG. 1.--Bassoon with 17 keys. Savary Model. (Rudall, Carte & Co.)]

BASSOON (Fr. _basson_; Ger. _Fagott_; Ital. _fagotto_), a woodwind instrument with double reed mouthpiece, a member of the oboe (_q.v._) family, of which it is the bass. The German and Italian names of the instrument were bestowed from a fancied resemblance to a bundle of sticks, the bassoon being the first instrument of the kind to be doubled back upon itself; its direct ancestor, the bass pommer, 6 ft. in length, was quite straight. The English and French names refer to the pitch of the instrument as the bass of the wood-wind.

The bassoon is composed of five pieces, which, when fitted together, form a wooden tube about 8 ft. long (93 in.) with a conical bore tapering from a diameter of 1¾ in., at the bell, to 3/16 in. at the reed. The tube is doubled back upon itself, the shorter joint extending to about two-thirds of the length of the longer, whereby the height of the instrument is reduced to about 4 ft. The holes are brought into a convenient position for the fingers by the device of boring them obliquely through the thickness of the wood. The five pieces are:--(1) the bell; (2) the long joint, forming the upper part of the instrument when played, although its notes are the lowest in pitch; (3) the wing overlapping the long joint and having a projecting flap through which are bored three holes; (4) the butt or lower end of the instrument (when played) containing the double bore necessitated by the abrupt bend of the tube upon itself. Both bores are pierced in one block of wood, the prolongation of the double tube being usually stopped by a flat oval pad of cork in the older models, whereas the modern instruments have instead a U-shaped tube; (5) the crook, a narrow curved metal tube about 12 in. long, to which is attached the double reed forming the mouthpiece.

The performer holds the instrument in a diagonal position; the lower part of the tube (the butt joint) played by the right hand resting against his right thigh, and the little bell, turned upwards, pointing over his left shoulder; a strap round the neck affords additional support. The notes are produced by means of seven holes and 16, 17, or 19 keys. The mechanism and fingering are very intricate. Theoretically the whole construction of the bassoon is imperfect and arbitrary, important acoustic principles being disregarded, but these mechanical defects only enhance its value as an artistic musical instrument. The player is obliged to rely very much on his ear in order to obtain a correct intonation, and next to the strings no instrument gives greater scope to the artist.

The bassoon has an eight foot tone, the compass extending from Bb bass [1] [Notation: B1b.] to Ab treble [Notation: A4b.], or in modern instruments by means of additional mechanism to C or even F [Notation: C5 or F5.]. These extra high notes are from their extreme sweetness called _vox humana_. The pitch of the bassoon apparently lies two octaves below that of the oboe, since the lowest note of both is B, but in reality the interval is only a twelfth, as may be ascertained by comparing their fundamental scales. On the bassoon the fundamental scale is that of F maj., obtained by opening and closing the holes; the notes downwards from F to Bb [Notation: F2 to B1b.] are extra notes obtained by means of interlocking keys on the long joint, worked by the left thumb; they have no counterpart on the oboe and do not belong to the fundamental scale of the bassoon. The fundamental scale of the oboe is that of C, although the compass has been extended a tone to Bb [Notation: B3b.]. Therefore the difference in pitch between the bassoon and the oboe is a twelfth. In the first [v.03 p.0496] register of the bassoon, seven semitones [Notation: B1b to E2.] are obtained, as stated above, by means of keys in the long joint and bell; the next eight notes (holes and keys) each produce two sounds--the fundamental tone, and, by increased pressure of the breath, its harmonic octave. The remaining notes are obtained by cross fingering and by overblowing the notes of the fundamental scale a twelfth as far as Ab [Notation: A4b.] which forms the normal compass. From A to Eb the _vox humana_ notes are produced by the help of small harmonic holes opened by means of keys at the top of the wind joint; exceptional players obtain, without additional keys, two or more higher harmonic notes, which, however, are only used by _virtuosi_. This then forms the intricate scheme of fingering for the bassoon, and in order to appreciate the efforts of such instrument makers as Carl Almenräder in Germany, Triebert and Jancourt in France, Sax in Belgium, Cornelius Ward and Morton in England, to introduce improvements based upon acoustic principles, it is necessary to understand what these general principles are, and why they have been disregarded in the bassoon. In all tubes the note given by the vibrating air column is influenced directly by the length of the tube, but very little, if at all, by the diameter of the bore. The pitch, however, is greatly affected by the diameter of the opening, whether lateral or at the bell, through which the vibrating column of air is again brought into communication with the outer air. The tube only sounds the normal note in proportion to its length, when the diameter of the lateral opening is equal to the internal diameter of the tube at the opening. As in most of our early wood-wind instruments the holes would in that case have been too large to be stopped by the fingers, and key-mechanism was still primitive, instrument-makers resorted to the expedient of substituting a hole of smaller diameter nearer the mouthpiece for one of greater diameter in the position the hole should theoretically occupy. This important principle was well understood by the Romans, and perhaps even by the ancient Greeks, as is proved by existing specimens of the aulos (_q.v._) and by certain passages from the classics.[2]

Another curious acoustic phenomenon bears upon the construction of wind instruments, and especially upon the bassoon. When the diameter of the lateral opening or bell is smaller than that of the bore, the portion of the tube below the hole, which should theoretically be as though non-existent, asserts itself, lowering the pitch of the note produced at the hole and damping the tone; this is peculiarly noticeable in the A of the bassoon [Notation: A2.] whose hole is much too high and too small in diameter.[3] To cite an example of the scope of Carl Almenräder's improvements in the bassoon, he readjusted the position of the A hole, stopped by the third finger of the right hand, boring lower down the tube, not one large hole, but two of medium diameter, covered by an open key to be closed by the same finger from the accustomed position; one of these A holes communicates with the narrower bore in the butt joint, and the other with the wider bore. The effect is a perfectly clear, full and accurate tone. Almenräder's other alterations were made on the same principle, and produced an instrument more perfect mechanically and theoretically than Savary's, but lacking some of the characteristics of the bassoon. In Germany Almenräder's improvements[4] have been generally adopted and his model with 16 keys is followed by most makers, and notably by Heckel of Biebrich.[5]

The unwieldy bass pommers of the 15th and 16th centuries led to many attempts to produce a more practical bass for the orchestra by doubling back the long tube of the instrument. Thus transformed, the pommer became a fagotto. The invention of the bassoon or fagotto is ascribed to Afranio, a canon of Ferrara, in a work by his nephew, Theseus Ambrosius Albonesius, entitled _Introductio in Chaldaicam Linguam ... et descriptio ac Simulacrum Phagoti Afranii_ (Pavia, 1539). The illustration of the instrument, showing front and back views (p. 179), taken in conjunction with the detailed description (pp. 33-38), at once disposes of the suggestion that the phagotus of Afranio and the fagotto or bassoon were in any way related; the author himself is greatly puzzled as to the etymology of the word. The phagotus in fact, resembles nothing so much as the musical curiosity known as _flûte-à-bec à colonne_[6], but double and played by bellows, assigned by G. Chouquet to the 16th century. This flute consisted of a column, with base and capital, both stopped, the vent and the whistle being concealed within perforated brass boxes, in the upper and lower parts of the column. Afranio's phagotus consisted of two similar twin columns with base and capital containing finger-holes and keys; between the columns in front was a shorter column for ornament, and at the back of it another still shorter whose capital could be lifted, and a sort of bellows or bag-pipe inserted by means of which the instrument was sounded. The first instrument was made, we are told, by Ravilius of Ferrara, from Afranio's design.[7] Mersenne[8], who does not seem to have any difficulty in understanding the construction of Afranio's phagotus, does not consider him the inventor of the fagotto or bassoon, but of another kind of fagotto which he classes with the Neapolitan _sourdeline_, a complicated kind of musette[9] (see BAG-PIPE). Afranio's instrument consists, he states, of two _bassons_ as it were interconnected by tubes and blown by bellows. As in the _sourdeline_, these only speak when the springs (keys) are open. He disposes of Theseus Albonesius's fanciful etymology of the name by showing it to be nothing but the French word _fagot_, and that it was applied because the instrument consists of two or more "flutes," bound or _fagotées_ together. There is no evidence that the phagotus contained a reed, which would account for Mersenne calling the pipes flutes. Mersenne's statements thus seem to uphold the theory that Afranio's phagotus was only a double _flûte à colonne_ with bellows. Evidence is at hand that in 1555 a contrabass wind instrument was well known as fagotto. In the catalogue of the musical instruments belonging to the Flemish band of Marie de Hongrie in Spain, we find the following: "Ala dicha prinçesa y al dicho matoto dos ynstrumentos de musica contrabaxos, que llaman fagotes, metidos en dos caos redondas como pareçe por el dicho entrego."[10] Sigmund Schnitzer[11] of Nuremberg (d. 1578), a maker of wind instruments who attained considerable notoriety, has been [v.03 p.0497] named as the probable author of the transformation of pommer into bassoon.

We learn from an historical work of the 18th century, that he was renowned "almost everywhere" as a maker of _fagotte_ of extraordinary size, of skilful workmanship and pure intonation, speaking easily. Schnitzer's instruments were so highly appreciated not only all over Germany, but also in France and Italy, that he was kept continually at work producing _fagotte_ for lovers of music.[12]

An earlier chronicler of the artistic celebrities and craftsmen of Nuremberg, Johann Neudorfer, writing in 1549,[13] names Sigmund Schnitzer merely as _Pfeifenmacher und Stadtpfeifer._ Had he been also noted as an inventor of a new form of instrument, the fellow-citizen and contemporary chronicler would not have failed to note the fact. If Schnitzer had been the first to reduce the great length of the bass pommer by doubling the tube back upon itself, he would hardly have been handed down to posterity as the clever craftsman _who made fagottos of extraordinary size_; Doppelmaier, who chronicles in these eulogistic terms, wrote nearly two centuries after the supposed invention of the fagotto, the value of which was realized later by retrospection.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.--Old English double curtail (before 1688). (From Harl MS 2034 in Brit. Mus.)]

An explanation may perhaps be found in Eisel's statement about the _Deutscher Basson_, which he distinguishes from the _Basson_ (our bassoon). "The _Deutsche Bassons_, Fagotte or Bombardi, as our German ancestors termed them, before music was clothed in Italian and French style, are no longer in use" (Eisel wrote in 1738) "and therefore it is unnecessary to waste paper on them."[14] This refers, of course, to the _bombard_ or bass pommer, the extraordinarily long instruments which Schnitzer made so successfully. From this it would seem that our bassoon was not of German origin. In the meanwhile we get a clue to the early history of the pommer in transition, but we find it under a different name in no way connected with _fagotto_. In order to shorten the unwieldy proportions of the tenor pommer in C, and to increase its portability, it was constructed out of a block of wood of rather more than double the diameter of the pommer, in which two bores were cut, communicating at the bottom of the instrument which was flat. The bell and the crook containing the double reed mouthpiece were side by side at the top. This instrument, which had six holes in front and one at the back as well as two keys, was known as the _dulceian, dolcian, douçaine_, and also in France as _courtaud_ and in England as the _curtail_, _curtal_,[15] _curtoll_, &c., being mentioned in 1582--"The common bleting musick of ye Drone, Hobius (Hautboy) and Curtoll." The next step in the evolution produced the double curtail, a converted bass pommer an octave below the single curtail and therefore identical in pitch as in construction with the early fagotto in C. The instrument is shown in fig. 2, the reproduction of a drawing in the MS. of _The Academy of Armoury_ by Randle Holme,[16] written some time before 1688. At the side of the drawing is the following description: "A double curtaile.[17] This is double the bigness of the single, mentioned ch. xvi. n. 6" (the MS. begins at ch. xvii. of bk. 3) "and is played 8 notes deeper. It is as it were 2 pipes fixed in on(e) thick bass pipe, one much longer than the other, from the top of the lower comes a crooked pipe of brass in which is fixed a reed, through it the wind passeth to make the instrument make a sound. It hath 6 holes on the outside and one on that side next the man or back part and 2 brass keys, the highest called double _La sol re_, and the other double _B mi_."

We may therefore conclude that the satirical name _fagotto_, presumably bestowed in Italy, since the French equivalent _fagot_ was never used for the _basson_, was not necessarily applied to the new form of pommer at the outset, but in any case before 1555; that the very term _Phagoto d'Afranio_, by which the instrument was known during its short fabulous existence, with its pretended Greek etymology, presupposes the pre-existence in Italy of another _fagotto_ with which Afranio was acquainted, perhaps imperfectly. Afranio's was the age of ingenious mechanical devices applied to musical instruments, many of which, like Afranio's, being mere freaks, did not survive the inventor. A document selected from the valuable archives published by Edm. van der Straeten[18] suggests a satisfactory clue. In 1426 Louis Willay, a musical instrument maker of Bruges, sold to Philippe le Bon a triple set of wood-wind instruments, _i.e._ "4 bombardes, 4 douçaines and 4 flûtes," to be sent as a gift to Nicolas III., marquis of Ferrara. The new instrument, the douçaine, we may imagine, by its unusual appearance provoked the satirical wit of some courtier, and was henceforth known as _fagotto_. Just a century later Ravilius of Ferrara made Afranio's first phagotus from the inventor's design.

The bassoon has been a favourite with all the great masters, excepting Handel. Beethoven uses the bassoon largely in his symphonies, writing everywhere for it independent parts of great beauty and originality. Bach, in his mass in B min., has parts for two bassoons. Mozart wrote a concerto in Bb for bassoon, with orchestra (Kochel, No. 191). Weber has also written a concerto for bassoon in F (op. 75), scored for full orchestra.

See also Etienne Ozi, _Nouvelle Methode du Bassoon_ (Paris, 1788 and 1800); J. B. J. Willent-Bordogny, _Gran Methodo completo per il Fagotto_ (Milan, 1844), with illustrations of early bassoons (English edition, London, J. R. Lafleur & Son); Joseph Fröhlich, _Vollständige Musikschule für alle beym Orchester gebrauchliche wichtigere Instrumente_ (many practical illustrations) (Cologne, Bonn, 1811); article "Bassoon," by W. H. Stone and D. J. Blaikley in Grove's _Dictionary of Music and Musicians_ (2nd ed.); article "Fagott" in Mendel's _Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon_; for the history of the instrument, and of its prototypes, see OBOE and BOMBARD.

(K. S.)

[1] At Wagner's instigation, the wind-instrument-maker, W. Heckel of Biebrich-am-Rhein, made bassoons with an extra key, extending the compass downwards to A.

[2] Macrobius in _Somn. Scip._ lib. ii. cap. 4. 5.

[3] Gottfried Weber, "Verbesserungen des Fagotts," in _Cacilia_ (Mainz, 1825), vol. ii. p. 123.

[4] See _Traité sur le perfectionnement du basson, avec 2 tableaux, par Charles Almenräder_ (Mayence, Schott), and also the above mentioned article by Gottfried Weber in _Cacilia_, whose explanations are clearer than those of the inventor.

[5] For a description of the modern instrument see Victor Charles Mahillon, _Catalogue descriptif et analytique du musée instrumental du Conservatoire Royal de Musique_ (Bruxelles, 1896), vol. ii. pp. 275-276, No. 999.

[6] As far as is known only three of these curious instruments are in existence; two in the museum of the Conservatoire, Paris, and one in Brussels; all three bear a trefoil as maker's mark; the smallest, in F, is reproduced in the _Catalogue of the Musical Instruments exhibited at the Royal Military Exhibition, London_, 1890, by Capt. C. R. Day (London, 1891), pl. iv. F. It is also described (without illustration) in Mahillon's _Catalogue_, p. 201, No. 189. The two flutes in Paris, measuring 73 cm. and 94 cm., are described by Gustave Chouquet, _Le Musée du Conservatoire National de Musique--Catalogue descriptif et raisonné_ (Paris, 1884), Nos. 409 and 410, p. 106.

[7] An Italian translation of the description is given by Count L. F. Valdrighi in _Musurgiana_, No. 4 (Milano, 1881), "Il Phagotus di Afranio," p. 40 et seq. (without illustration). An illustration of the phagotus is given by W. J. von Wasielewski in _Gesch. d. Instrumentalmusik im XVI. Jahrh._ (Berlin, 1878), pl. v. and vi., text p. 74.

[8] See _L'Harmonie universelle_ (Paris, 1636),