Book: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4

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BUNGAY, a market-town in the Lowestoft parliamentary division of Suffolk,
England; 113 m. N.E. from London on a branch from Beccles of the Great
Eastern railway. Pop. (1901) 3314. It is picturesquely placed in a deep
bend of the river Waveney, the boundary with Norfolk. Of the two parish
churches that of St Mary has a fine Perpendicular tower, and that of Holy
Trinity a round tower of which the lower part is Norman. St Mary's was
attached to a Benedictine nunnery founded in 1160. The ruins of the castle
date from 1281. They are fragmentary though massive; and there are traces
of earth-works of much earlier date. The castle was a stronghold of the
powerful family of Bigod, being granted to Roger Bigod, a Norman follower
of the Conqueror, in 1075. A grammar school was founded in 1592. There are
large printing-works, and founding and malting are prosecuted. There is a
considerable carrying trade on the Waveney.

BUNION (a word usually derived from the Ital. _bugnone_, a swelling, but,
according to the _New English Dictionary_, the late and rare literary use
of the word makes an Italian derivation unlikely; there is an O. Eng. word
"bunny," also meaning a swelling, and an O. Fr. _buigne_, modern _bigne_,
showing a probable common origin now lost, cf. also "bunch"), an inflamed
swelling of the _bursa mucosa_, the sac containing synovial fluid on the
metatarsal joint of the big toe, or, more rarely, of the little toe. This
may be accompanied by corns or suppuration, leading to an ulcer or even
gangrene. The cause is usually pressure; removal of this, and general
palliative treatment by dressings, &c. are usually effective, but in severe
and obstinate cases a surgical operation may be necessary.

BUNKER HILL, the name of a small hill in Charlestown (Boston),
Massachusetts, U.S.A., famous as the scene of the first considerable
engagement in the American War of Independence (June 17, 1775). Bunker Hill
(110 ft.) was connected by a ridge with Breed's Hill (75 ft.), both being
on a narrow peninsula a short distance to the north of Boston, joined by a
causeway with the mainland. Since the affair of Lexington (April 19, 1775)
General Gage, who commanded the British forces, had remained inactive at
Boston awaiting reinforcements from England; the headquarters of the
Americans were at Cambridge, with advanced posts occupying much of the 4 m.
separating [v.04 p.0799] Cambridge from Bunker Hill. When Gage received his
reinforcements at the end of May, he determined to repair his strange
neglect by which the hills on the peninsula had been allowed to remain
unoccupied and unfortified. As soon as the Americans became aware of Gage's
intention they determined to frustrate it, and accordingly, on the night of
the 16th of June, a force of about 1200 men, under Colonel William Prescott
and Major-General Israel Putnam, with some engineers and a few field-guns,
occupied Breed's Hill--to which the name Bunker Hill is itself now
popularly applied--and when daylight disclosed their presence to the
British they had already strongly entrenched their position. Gage lost no
time in sending troops across from Boston with orders to assault. The
British force, between 2000 and 3000 strong, under (Sir) William Howe,
supported by artillery and by the guns of men-of-war and floating batteries
stationed in the anchorage on either side of the peninsula, were fresh and
well disciplined. The American force consisted for the most part of
inexperienced volunteers, numbers of whom were already wearied by the
trench work of the night. As communication was kept up with their camp the
numbers engaged on the hill fluctuated during the day, but at no time
exceeded about 1500 men. The village of Charlestown, from which a galling
musketry fire was directed against the British, was by General Howe's
orders almost totally destroyed by hot shot during the attack. Instead of
attempting to cut off the Americans by occupying the neck to the rear of
their position, Gage ordered the advance to be made up the steep and
difficult ascent facing the works on the hill. Whether or not in
obedience--as tradition asserts--to an order to reserve fire until they
could see the whites of their assailants' eyes, the American volunteers
with admirable steadiness waited till the attack was on the point of being
driven home, when they delivered a fire so sustained and deadly that the
British line broke in disorder. A second assault, made like the first, with
the precision and discipline of the parade-ground met the same fate, but
Gage's troops had still spirit enough for a third assault, and this time
they carried the position with the bayonet, capturing five pieces of
ordnance and putting the enemy to flight. The loss of the British was 1054
men killed and wounded, among whom were 89 commissioned officers; while the
American casualties amounted to 420 killed and wounded, including General
Joseph Warren, and 30 prisoners. (See AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE.)

The significance of the battle of Bunker Hill is not, however, to be gauged
by the losses on either side, heavy as they were in proportion to the
numbers engaged, nor by its purely military results, but by the moral
effect which it produced; and when it is considered from this standpoint
its far-reaching consequences can hardly be over-estimated. "It roused at
once the fierce instinct of combat in America ..., and dispelled ... the
almost superstitious belief in the impossibility of encountering regular
troops with hastily levied volunteers ... No one questioned the conspicuous
gallantry with which the provincial troops had supported a long fire from
the ships and awaited the charge of the enemy, and British soldiers had
been twice driven back in disorder before their fire."[1] The pride which
Americans naturally felt in such an achievement, and the self-confidence
which it inspired, were increased when they learnt that the small force on
Bunker Hill had not been properly reinforced, and that their ammunition was
running short before they were dislodged from their position.[2] Had the
character of the fighting on that day been other than it was; had the
American volunteers been easily, and at the first assault, driven from
their fortified position by the troops of George III., it is not impossible
that the resistance to the British government would have died out in the
North American colonies through lack of confidence in their own power on
the part of the colonists. Bunker Hill, whatever it may have to teach the
student of war, taught the American colonists in 1775 that the odds against
them in the enterprise in which they had embarked were not so overwhelming
as to deny them all prospect of ultimate success.

In 1843 a monument, 221 ft. high, in the form of an obelisk, of Quincy
granite, was completed on Breed's Hill (now Bunker Hill) to commemorate the
battle, when an address was delivered by Daniel Webster, who had also
delivered the famous dedicatory oration at the laying of the corner-stone
in 1825. Bunker Hill day is a state holiday.

See R. Frothingham, _The Centennial: Battle of Bunker Hill_ (Boston, 1895),
and _Life and Times of Joseph Warren_ (Boston, 1865); Boston City Council,
_Celebration of Centen. Aniv. of Battle of Bunker Hill_ (Boston, 1875);
G.E. Ellis, _Hist. of Battle of Bunker's_ (Breed's) _Hill_ (Boston, 1875);
S. Sweet, _Who was the Commander at Bunker Hill?_ (Boston, 1850); W.E.H.
Lecky, _History of England in the Eighteenth Century_, vol. iii (London,
1883); Sir George O. Trevelyan, _The American Revolution_ (London, 1899);
Fortescue, _History of the British Army_, vol. iii. pp. 153 seq. (London,
1902).

(R. J. M.)

[1] W.E.H. Lecky, _History of England in the Eighteenth Century_, iii. 428.

[2] General Gage's despatch. _American Remembrancer_, 1776, part 11, p.
132.

BUNN, ALFRED (1796-1860), English theatrical manager, was appointed
stage-manager of Drury Lane theatre, London, in 1823. In 1826 he was
managing the Theatre Royal, Birmingham, and in 1833 he undertook the joint
management of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, London. In this undertaking he
met with vigorous opposition. A bill for the abolition of the patent
theatres was passed in the House of Commons, but on Bunn's petition was
thrown out by the House of Lords. He had difficulties first with his
company, then with the lord chamberlain, and had to face the keen rivalry
of the other theatres. A longstanding quarrel with Macready resulted in the
tragedian assaulting the manager. In 1840 Bunn was declared a bankrupt, but
he continued to manage Drury Lane till 1848. Artistically his control of
the two chief English theatres was highly successful. Nearly every leading
English actor played under his management, and he made a courageous attempt
to establish English opera, producing the principal works of Balfe. He had
some gift for writing, and most of the libretti of these operas were
translated by himself. In _The Stage Before and Behind the Curtain_ (3
vols., 1840) he gave a full account of his managerial experiences. He died
at Boulogne on the 20th of December 1860.

BUNNER, HENRY CUYLER (1855-1896), American writer, was born in Oswego, New
York, on the 3rd of August 1855. He was educated in New York City. From
being a clerk in an importing house, he turned to journalism, and after
some work as a reporter, and on the staff of the _Arcadian_ (1873), he
became in 1877 assistant editor of the comic weekly _Puck_. He soon assumed
the editorship, which he held until his death in Nutley, N.J., on the 11th
of May 1896. He developed _Puck_ from a new struggling periodical into a
powerful social and political organ. In 1886 he published a novel, _The
Midge_, followed in 1887 by _The Story of a New York House_. But his best
efforts in fiction were his short stories and sketches--_Short Sixes_
(1891), _More Short Sixes_ (1894), _Made in France_ (1893), _Zadoc Pine and
Other Stories_ (1891), _Love in Old Cloathes and Other Stories_ (1896), and
_Jersey Street and Jersey Lane_ (1896). His verses--_Airs from Arcady and
Elsewhere_ (1884), containing the well-known poem, _The Way to Arcady;
Rowen_ (1892); and _Poems_ (1896), edited by his friend Brander
Matthews--display a light play of imagination and a delicate workmanship.
He also wrote clever _vers de societe_ and parodies. Of his several plays
(usually written in collaboration), the best was _The Tower of Babel_
(1883).

BUNSEN, CHRISTIAN CHARLES JOSIAS, BARON VON (1791-1860), Prussian
diplomatist and scholar, was born on the 25th of August 1791 at Korbach, an
old town in the little German principality of Waldeck. His father was a
farmer who was driven by poverty to become a soldier. Having studied at the
Korbach grammar school and Marburg university, Bunsen went in his
nineteenth year to Goettingen, where he supported himself by teaching and
later by acting as tutor to W.B. Astor, the American merchant. He won the
university prize essay of the year 1812 by a treatise on the _Athenian Law
of Inheritance_, and a few months later the university of Jena granted him
the honorary degree of doctor of philosophy. During 1813 he travelled with
Astor in South Germany, and then turned to the study of the religion, laws,
language and literature of the Teutonic [v.04 p.0800] races. He had read
Hebrew when a boy, and now worked at Arabic at Munich, Persian at Leiden,
and Norse at Copenhagen. At the close of 1815 he went to Berlin, to lay
before Niebuhr the plan of research which he had mapped out. Niebuhr was so
impressed with Bunsen's ability that, two years later, when he became
Prussian envoy to the papal court, he made the young scholar his secretary.
The intervening years Bunsen spent in assiduous labour among the libraries
and collections of Paris and Florence. In July 1817 he married Frances
Waddington, eldest daughter and co-heiress of B. Waddington of Llanover,
Monmouthshire.

As secretary to Niebuhr, Bunsen was brought into contact with the Vatican
movement for the establishment of the papal church in the Prussian
dominions, to provide for the largely increased Catholic population. He was
among the first to realize the importance of this new vitality on the part
of the Vatican, and he made it his duty to provide against its possible
dangers by urging upon the Prussian court the wisdom of fair and impartial
treatment of its Catholic subjects. In this object he was at first
successful, and both from the Vatican and from Frederick William III., who
put him in charge of the legation on Niebuhr's resignation, he received
unqualified approbation. Owing partly to the wise statesmanship of Count
Spiegel, archbishop of Cologne, an arrangement was made by which the thorny
question of "mixed" marriages (_i.e._ between Catholic and Protestant)
would have been happily solved; but the archbishop died in 1835, the
arrangement was never ratified, and the Prussian king was foolish enough to
appoint as Spiegel's successor the narrow-minded partisan Baron Droste. The
pope gladly accepted the appointment, and in two years the forward policy
of the Jesuits had brought about the strife which Bunsen and Spiegel had
tried to prevent. Bunsen rashly recommended that Droste should be seized,
but the _coup_ was so clumsily attempted, that the incriminating documents
were, it is said, destroyed in advance. The government, in this _impasse_,
took the safest course, refused to support Bunsen, and accepted his
resignation in April 1838.

After leaving Rome, where he had become intimate with all that was most
interesting in the cosmopolitan society of the papal capital, Bunsen went
to England, where, except for a short term as Prussian ambassador to
Switzerland (1830-1841), he was destined to pass the rest of his official
life. The accession to the throne of Prussia of Frederick William IV., on
June 7th, 1840, made a great change in Bunsen's career. Ever since their
first meeting in 1828 the two men had been close friends and had exchanged
ideas in an intimate correspondence, published under Ranke's editorship in
1873. Enthusiasm for evangelical religion and admiration for the Anglican
Church they held in common, and Bunsen was the instrument naturally
selected for realizing the king's fantastic scheme of setting up at
Jerusalem a Prusso-Anglican bishopric as a sort of advertisement of the
unity and aggressive force of Protestantism. The special mission of Bunsen
to England, from June to November 1841, was completely successful, in spite
of the opposition of English high churchmen and Lutheran extremists. The
Jerusalem bishopric, with the consent of the British government and the
active encouragement of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of
London, was duly established, endowed with Prussian and English money, and
remained for some forty years an isolated symbol of Protestant unity and a
rock of stumbling to Anglican Catholics.

During his stay in England Bunsen had made himself very popular among all
classes of society, and he was selected by Queen Victoria, out of three
names proposed by the king of Prussia, as ambassador to the court of St
James's. In this post he remained for thirteen years. His tenure of the
office coincided with the critical period in Prussian and European affairs
which culminated in the revolutions of 1848. With the visionary schemes of
Frederick William, whether that of setting up a strict episcopal
organization in the Evangelical Church, or that of reviving the defunct
ideal of the medieval Empire, Bunsen found himself increasingly out of
sympathy. He realized the significance of the signs that heralded the
coming storm, and tried in vain to move the king to a policy which would
have placed him at the head of a Germany united and free. He felt bitterly
the humiliation of Prussia by Austria after the victory of the reaction;
and in 1852 he set his signature reluctantly to the treaty which, in his
view, surrendered the "constitutional rights of Schleswig and Holstein."
His whole influence was now directed to withdrawing Prussia from the
blighting influence of Austria and Russia, and attempting to draw closer
the ties that bound her to Great Britain. On the outbreak of the Crimean
War he urged Frederick William to throw in his lot with the western powers,
and create a diversion in the north-east which would have forced Russia at
once to terms. The rejection of his advice, and the proclamation of
Prussia's attitude of "benevolent neutrality," led him in April 1854 to
offer his resignation, which was accepted.

Bunsen's life as a public man was now practically at an end. He retired
first to a villa on the Neckar near Heidelberg and later to Bonn. He
refused to stand for a seat, in the Liberal interest, in the Lower House of
the Prussian diet, but continued to take an active interest in politics,
and in 1855 published in two volumes a work, _Die Zeichen der Zeit: Briefe,
&c._, which exercised an immense influence in reviving the Liberal movement
which the failure of the revolution had crushed. In September 1857 Bunsen
attended, as the king's guest, a meeting of the Evangelical Alliance at
Berlin; and one of the last papers signed by Frederick William, before his
mind gave way in October, was that which conferred upon him the title of
baron and a peerage for life. In 1858, at the special request of the regent
(afterwards the emperor) William, he took his seat in the Prussian Upper
House, and, though remaining silent, supported the new ministry, of which
his political and personal friends were members.

Literary work was, however, his main preoccupation during all this period.
Two discoveries of ancient MSS. made during his stay in London, the one
containing a shorter text of the _Epistles of St Ignatius_, and the other
an unknown work _On all the Heresies_, by Bishop Hippolytus, had already
led him to write his _Hippolytus and his Age: Doctrine and Practice of Rome
under Commodus and Severus_ (1852). He now concentrated all his efforts
upon a translation of the Bible with commentaries. While this was in
preparation he published his _God in History_, in which he contends that
the progress of mankind marches parallel to the conception of God formed
within each nation by the highest exponents of its thought. At the same
time he carried through the press, assisted by Samuel Birch, the concluding
volumes of his work (published in English as well as in German) _Egypt's
Place in Universal History_--containing a reconstruction of Egyptian
chronology, together with an attempt to determine the relation in which the
language and the religion of that country stand to the development of each
among the more ancient non-Aryan and Aryan races. His ideas on this subject
were most fully developed in two volumes published in London before he
quitted England--_Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History as
applied to Language and Religion_ (2 vols., 1854).

In 1858 Bunsen's health began to fail; visits to Cannes in 1858 and 1859
brought no improvement, and he died on November 28th, 1860. One of his last
requests having been that his wife would write down recollections of their
common life, she published his _Memoirs_ in 1868, which contain much of his
private correspondence. The German translation of these _Memoirs_ has added
extracts from unpublished documents, throwing a new light upon the
political events in which he played a part. Baron Humboldt's letters to
Bunsen were printed in 1869.

Bunsen's English connexion, both through his wife (d. 1876) and through his
own long residence in London, was further increased in his family. He had
ten children, including five sons, Henry (1818-1855), Ernest (1810-1903),
Karl (1821-1887), Georg (1824-1896) and Theodor (1832-1892). Of these Karl
(Charles) and Theodor had careers in the German diplomatic service; and
Georg, who for some time was an active politician in Germany, eventually
retired to live in London; Henry, who was an English clergyman, became a
naturalized Englishman, [v.04 p.0801] and Ernest, who in 1845 married an
Englishwoman, Miss Gurney, subsequently resided and died in London. The
form of "de" Bunsen was adopted for the surname in England. Ernest de
Bunsen was a scholarly writer, who published various works both in German
and in English, notably on Biblical chronology and other questions of
comparative religion. His son, Sir Maurice de Bunsen (b. 1852), entered the
English diplomatic service in 1877, and after a varied experience became
minister at Lisbon in 1905.

See also L. von Ranke, _Aus dem Briefwechsel Friedrich Wilhelms IV. mit
Bunsen_ (Berlin, 1873). The biography in the 9th edition of this
encyclopaedia, which has been drawn upon above, was by Georg von Bunsen.

BUNSEN, ROBERT WILHELM VON (1811-1899), German chemist, was born at
Goettingen on the 31st of March 1811, his father, Christian Bunsen, being
chief librarian and professor of modern philology at the university. He
himself entered the university in 1828, and in 1834 became _Privat-docent_.
In 1836 he became teacher of chemistry at the Polytechnic School of Cassel,
and in 1839 took up the appointment of professor of chemistry at Marburg,
where he remained till 1851. In 1852, after a brief period in Breslau, he
was appointed to the chair of chemistry at Heidelberg, where he spent the
rest of his life, in spite of an urgent invitation to migrate to Berlin as
successor to E. Mitscherlich. He retired from active work in 1889, and died
at Heidelberg on the 16th of August 1899. The first research by which
attention was drawn to Bunsen's abilities was concerned with the cacodyl
compounds (see ARSENIC), though he had already, in 1834, discovered the
virtues of freshly precipitated hydrated ferric oxide as an antidote to
arsenical poisoning. It was begun in 1837 at Cassel, and during the six
years he spent upon it he not only lost the sight of one eye through an
explosion, but nearly killed himself by arsenical poisoning. It represents
almost his only excursion into organic chemistry, and apart from its
accuracy and completeness it is of historical interest in the development
of that branch of the science as being the forerunner of the fruitful
investigations on the organo-metallic compounds subsequently carried out by
his English pupil, Edward Frankland. Simultaneously with his work on
cacodyl, he was studying the composition of the gases given off from blast
furnaces. He showed that in German furnaces nearly half the heat yielded by
the fuel was being allowed to escape with the waste gases, and when he came
to England, and in conjunction with Lyon Playfair investigated the
conditions obtaining in English furnaces, he found the waste to amount to
over 80%. These researches marked a stage in the application of scientific
principles to the manufacture of iron, and they led also to the elaboration
of Bunsen's famous methods of measuring gaseous volumes, &c., which form
the subject of the only book he ever published (_Gasometrische Methoden_,
1857). In 1841 he invented the carbon-zinc electric cell which is known by
his name, and which conducted him to several important achievements. He
first employed it to produce the electric arc, and showed that from 44
cells a light equal to 1171.3 candles could be obtained with the
consumption of one pound of zinc per hour. To measure this light he
designed in 1844 another instrument, which in various modifications has
come into extensive use--the grease-spot photometer. In 1852 he began to
carry out electrolytical decompositions by the aid of the battery. By means
of a very ingenious arrangement he obtained magnesium for the first time in
the metallic state, and studied its chemical and physical properties, among
other things demonstrating the brilliance and high actinic qualities of the
flame it gives when burnt in air. From 1855 to 1863 he published with
Roscoe a series of investigations on photochemical measurements, which W.
Ostwald has called the "classical example for all future researches in
physical chemistry." Perhaps the best known of the contrivances which the
world owes to him is the "Bunsen burner" which he devised in 1855 when a
simple means of burning ordinary coal gas with a hot smokeless flame was
required for the new laboratory at Heidelberg. Other appliances invented by
him were the ice-calorimeter (1870), the vapour calorimeter (1887), and the
filter pump (1868), which was worked out in the course of a research on the
separation of the platinum metals. Mention must also be made of another
piece of work of a rather different character. Travelling was one of his
favourite relaxations, and in 1846 he paid a visit to Iceland. There he
investigated the phenomena of the geysers, the composition of the gases
coming off from the fumaroles, their action on the rocks with which they
came into contact, &c., and on his observations was founded a noteworthy
contribution to geological theory. But the most far-reaching of his
achievements was the elaboration, about 1859, jointly with G.R. Kirchhoff,
of spectrum analysis, which has put a new weapon of extraordinary power
into the hands both of chemists and astronomers. It led Bunsen himself
almost immediately to the isolation of two new elements of the alkali
group, caesium and rubidium. Having noticed some unknown lines in the
spectra of certain salts he was examining, he set to work to obtain the
substance or substances to which these were due. To this end he evaporated
large quantities of the Duerkheim mineral water, and it says much both for
his perseverance and powers of manipulation that he dealt with 40 tons of
the water to get about 17 grammes of the mixed chlorides of the two
substances, and that with about one-third of that quantity of caesium
chloride was able to prepare the most important compounds of the element
and determine their characteristics, even making goniometrical measurements
of their crystals.

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