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

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Bunsen founded no school of chemistry; that is to say, no body of chemical
doctrine is associated with his name. Indeed, he took little or no part in
discussions of points of theory, and, although he was conversant with the
trend of the chemical thought of his day, he preferred to spend his
energies in the collection of experimental data. One fact, he used to say,
properly proved is worth all the theories that can be invented. But as a
teacher of chemistry he was almost without rival, and his success is
sufficiently attested by the scores of pupils who flocked from every part
of the globe to study under him, and by the number of those pupils who
afterwards made their mark in the chemical world. The secret of this
success lay largely in the fact that he never delegated his work to
assistants, but was constantly present with his pupils in the laboratory,
assisting each with personal direction and advice. He was also one of the
first to appreciate the value of practical work to the student, and he
instituted a regular practical course at Marburg so far back as 1840.
Though alive to the importance of applied science, he considered truth
alone to be the end of scientific research, and the example he set his
pupils was one of single-hearted devotion to the advancement of knowledge.

See Sir Henry Roscoe's "Bunsen Memorial Lecture," _Trans. Chem. Soc._,
1900, which is reprinted (in German) with other obituary notices in an
edition of Bunsen's collected works published by Ostwald and Bodenstein in
3 vols. at Leipzig in 1904.

BUNTER, the name applied by English geologists to the lower stage or
subdivision of the Triassic rocks in the United Kingdom. The name has been
adapted from the German _Buntsandstein, Der bunte Sandstein_, for it was in
Germany that this continental type of Triassic deposit was first carefully
studied. In France, the Bunter is known as the _Gres bigarre_. In northern
and central Germany, in the Harz, Thuringia and Hesse, the Bunter is
usually conformable with the underlying Permian formation; in the
south-west and west, however, it transgresses on to older rocks, on to Coal
Measures near Saarbruck, and upon the crystalline schists of Odenwald and
the Black Forest.

The German subdivisions of the Bunter are as follows:--(1) _Upper
Buntsandstein_, or _Roet_, mottled red and green marls and clays with
occasional beds of shale, sandstone, gypsum, rocksalt and dolomite. In
Hesse and Thuringia, a quartzitic sandstone prevails in the lower part. The
"Rhizocorallium Dolomite" (_R. Jenense_, probably a sponge) of the latter
district contains the only Bunter fauna of any importance. In Lorraine and
the Eifel and Saar districts there are micaceous clays and sandstones with
plant remains--the _Voltzia_ sandstone. The lower beds in the Black Forest,
Vosges, Odenwald and Lorraine very generally contain strings of dolomite
and carnelian--the so-called "Carneol bank." (2) _Middle
Buntsandstein-Hauptbuntsandstein_ (900 ft.), the bulk [v.04 p.0802] of this
subdivision is made up of weakly-cemented, coarse-grained sandstones,
oblique lamination is very prevalent, and occasional conglomeratic beds
make their appearance. The uppermost bed is usually fine-grained and bears
the footprints of _Cheirotherium_. In the Vosges district, this subdivision
of the Bunter is called the _Gres des Vosges, _or the _Gres principal_,
which comprises: (i.) red micaceous and argillaceous sandstone; (ii.) the
_conglomerat principal_; and (iii.) _Gres bigarre principal_ (=_gres des
Vosges_, properly so-called). (3) _Lower Buntsandstein_, fine-grained
clayey and micaceous sandstones, red-grey, yellow, white and mottled. The
cement of the sandstones is often felspathic; for this reason they yield
useful porcelain clays in the Thuringerwald. Clay galls are common in the
sandstones of some districts, and in the neighbourhood of the Harz an
oolitic calcareous sandstone, _Rogenstein_, occurs. In eastern Hesse, the
lowest beds are crumbly, shaly clays, _Brockelschiefern_.

The following are the subdivisions usually adopted in England:--(1) Upper
Mottled Sandstone, red variegated sandstones, soft and generally free from
pebbles. (2) Bunter Pebble Beds, harder red and brown sandstones with
quartzose pebbles, very abundant in some places. (3) Lower Mottled
Sandstone, very similar to the upper division. The Bunter beds occupy a
large area in the midland counties where they form dry, healthy ground of
moderate elevation (Cannock Chase, Trentham, Sherwood Forest, Sutton
Coldfield, &c.). Southward they may be followed through west Somerset to
the cliffs of Budleigh Salterton in Devon; while northward they pass
through north Staffordshire, Cheshire and Lancashire to the Vale of Eden
and St Bees, reappearing in Elgin and Arran. A deposit of these rocks lies
in the Vale of Clwyd and probably flanks the eastern side of the Pennine
Hills, although here it is not so readily differentiated from the Keuper
beds. The English Bunter rests with a slight unconformity upon the older
formations. It is generally absent in the south-eastern counties, but
thickens rapidly in the opposite direction, as is shown by the following
table:--

+----------------+----------------+---------------------+
| Lancashire and | | Leicestershire and |
| W. Cheshire. | Staffordshire. | Warwickshire. |
+----------------+----------------+---------------------+
|(1) 500 ft. | 50-200 ft. | Absent |
|(2) 500-750 ft. | 100-300 ft. | 0-100 ft. |
|(3) 200-500 ft. | 0-100 ft. | Absent |
+----------------+----------------+---------------------+

The material forming the Bunter beds of England came probably from the
north-west, but in Devonshire there are indications which point to an
additional source.

In the Alpine region, most of the Trias differs markedly from that of
England and northern Germany, being of distinctly marine origin; here the
Bunter is represented by the _Werfen beds_ (from Werfen in Salzburg) in the
northern Alps, a series of red and greenish-grey micaceous shales with
gypsum, rock salt and limestones in the upper part; while in the southern
Alps (S. Tirol) there is an upper series of red clays, the _Campil beds_,
and a lower series of thin sandstones, the _Seis beds_. Mojsisovics von
Mojsvar has pointed out that the Alpine Bunter belongs to the single zone
of _Natica costata_ and _Tirolites cassianus_.

Fossils in the Bunter are very scarce; in addition to the footprints of
_Cheirotherium_, direct evidence of amphibians is found in such forms as
_Trematosaurus_ and _Mastodonsaurus. Myophoria costata_ and _Gervillea
Murchisoni_ are characteristic fossils. Plants are represented by _Voltzia_
and by equisetums and ferns.

In England, the Bunter sandstones frequently act as valuable reservoirs of
underground water; sometimes they are used for building stone or for
foundry sand. In Germany some of the harder beds have yielded building
stones, which were much used in the middle ages in the construction of
cathedrals and castles in southern Germany and on the Rhine. In the
northern Eifel region, at Mechernich and elsewhere, this formation contains
lead ore in the form of spots and patches (_Knotenerz_) in the sandstone;
some of the lead ore was worked by the Romans.

For a consideration of the relationship of the Bunter beds to formations of
the like age in other parts of the world, see TRIASSIC SYSTEM.

(J. A. H.)

BUNTING, JABEZ (1779-1858), English Wesleyan divine, was born of humble
parentage at Manchester on the 13th of May 1779. He was educated at
Manchester grammar school, and at the age of nineteen began to preach,
being received into full connexion in 1803. He continued to minister for
upwards of fifty-seven years in Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Liverpool,
London and elsewhere. In 1835 he was appointed president of the first
Wesleyan theological college (at Hoxton), and in this position he succeeded
in materially raising the standard of education among Wesleyan ministers.
He was four times chosen to be president of the conference, was repeatedly
secretary of the "Legal Hundred," and for eighteen years was secretary to
the Wesleyan Missionary Society. Under him Methodism ceased to be a society
based upon Anglican foundation, and became a distinct church. He favoured
the extension of lay power in committees, and was particularly zealous in
the cause of foreign missions. Bunting was a popular preacher, and an
effective platform speaker; in 1818 he was given the degree of M.A. by
Aberdeen University, and in 1834 that of D.D. by Wesleyan University of
Middletown, Conn., U.S.A. He died on the 16th of June 1858. His eldest son,
William Maclardie Bunting (1805-1866), was also a distinguished Wesleyan
minister; and his grandson Sir Percy William Bunting (b. 1836), son of T.P.
Bunting, became prominent as a liberal nonconformist and editor of the
_Contemporary Review_ from 1882, being knighted in 1908.

See _Lives_ of Jabez Bunting (1859) and W.M. Bunting (1870) by Thomas
Percival Bunting.

BUNTING, properly the common English name of the bird called by Linnaeus
_Emberiza miliaria_, but now used in a general sense for all members of the
family _Emberizidae_, which are closely allied to the finches
(_Fringillidae_), though, in Professor W.K. Parker's opinion, to be easily
distinguished therefrom--the _Emberizidae_ possessing what none of the
_Fringillidae_ do, an additional pair of palatal bones,
"palato-maxillaries." It will probably follow from this diagnosis that some
forms of birds, particularly those of the New World, which have hitherto
been commonly assigned to the latter, really belong to the former, and
among them the genera _Cardinalis_ and _Phrygilus_. The additional palatal
bones just named are also found in several other peculiarly American
families, namely, _Tanagridae_, _Icteridae_ and _Mniotiltidae_--whence it
may be perhaps inferred that the _Emberizidae_ are of Transatlantic origin.
The buntings generally may be also outwardly distinguished from the finches
by their angular gape, the posterior portion of which is greatly deflected;
and most of the Old-World forms, together with some of those of the New
World, have a bony knob on the palate--a swollen outgrowth of the dentary
edges of the bill. Correlated with this peculiarity the maxilla usually has
the tomia sinuated, and is generally concave, and smaller and narrower than
the mandible, which is also concave to receive the palatal knob. In most
other respects the buntings greatly resemble the finches, but their eggs
are generally distinguishable by the irregular hair-like markings on the
shell. In the British Islands by far the commonest species of bunting is
the yellow-hammer (_E. citrinella_), but the true bunting (or corn-bunting,
or bunting-lark, as it is called in some districts) is a very well-known
bird, while the reed-bunting (_E. schoeniclus_) frequents marshy soils
almost to the exclusion of the two former. In certain localities in the
south of England the cirl-bunting (_E. cirlus_) is also a resident; and in
winter vast flocks of the snow-bunting (_Plectrophanes nivalis_), at once
recognizable by its pointed wings and elongated hind-claws, resort to our
shores and open grounds. This last is believed to breed sparingly on the
highest mountains of Scotland, but the majority of the examples which visit
us come from northern regions, for it is a species which in summer inhabits
the whole circumpolar area. The ortolan (_E. hortulana_), so highly prized
for its delicate flavour, occasionally appears in England, but the British
Islands seem to lie outside its proper range. On the continent of Europe,
in Africa and throughout Asia, many other species are found, while in
America the number belonging to the family cannot at present be computed.
The beautiful and melodious cardinal (_Cardinalis virginianus_), commonly
called the Virginian nightingale, must be included in this family.

(A. N.)

BUNTING (a word of doubtful origin, possibly connected with _bunt_, to
sift, or with the Ger. _bunt_, of varied colour), a loosely woven woollen
cloth for making flags; the term is also used of a collection of flags, and
particularly those of a ship.

[v.04 p.0803] BUNYAN, JOHN (1628-1688), English religious writer, was born
at Elstow, about a mile from Bedford, in November 1628. His father, Thomas
Bunyan,[1] was a tinker, or, as he described himself, a "brasier." The
tinkers then formed a hereditary caste, which was held in no high
estimation. Bunyan's father had a fixed residence, and was able to send his
son to a village school where reading and writing were taught.

The years of John's boyhood were those during which the Puritan spirit was
in the highest vigour all over England; and nowhere had that spirit more
influence than in Bedfordshire. It is not wonderful, therefore, that a lad
to whom nature had given a powerful imagination and sensibility which
amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted by religious terrors.
Before he was ten his sports were interrupted by fits of remorse and
despair; and his sleep was disturbed by dreams of fiends trying to fly away
with him. As he grew older his mental conflicts became still more violent.
The strong language in which he described them strangely misled all his
earlier biographers except Southey. It was long an ordinary practice with
pious writers to cite Bunyan as an instance of the supernatural power of
divine grace to rescue the human soul from the lowest depths of wickedness.
He is called in one book the most notorious of profligates; in another, the
brand plucked from the burning. Many excellent persons, whose moral
character from boyhood to old age has been free from any stain discernible
to their fellow-creatures, have, in their autobiographies and diaries,
applied to themselves, and doubtless with sincerity, epithets as severe as
could be applied to Titus Oates or Mrs Brownrigg. It is quite certain that
Bunyan was, at eighteen, what, in any but the most austerely puritanical
circles, would have been considered as a young man of singular gravity and
innocence. Indeed, it may be remarked that he, like many other penitents
who, in general terms, acknowledge themselves to have been the worst of
mankind, fired up, and stood vigorously on his defence, whenever any
particular charge was brought against him by others. He declares, it is
true, that he had let loose the reins on the neck of his lusts, that he had
delighted in all transgressions against the divine law, and that he had
been the ringleader of the youth of Elstow in all manner of vice. But when
those who wished him ill accused him of licentious amours, he called on God
and the angels to attest his purity. No woman, he said, in heaven, earth or
hell, could charge him with having ever made any improper advances to her.
Not only had he been strictly faithful to his wife; but he had, even before
his marriage, been perfectly spotless. It does not appear from his own
confessions, or from the railings of his enemies, that he ever was drunk in
his life. One bad habit he contracted, that of using profane language; but
he tells us that a single reproof cured him so effectually that he never
offended again. The worst that can be laid to his charge is that he had a
great liking for some diversions, quite harmless in themselves, but
condemned by the rigid precisians among whom he lived, and for whose
opinion he had a great respect. The four chief sins of which he was guilty
were dancing, ringing the bells of the parish church, playing at tipcat and
reading the history of Sir Bevis of Southampton. A rector of the school of
Laud would have held such a young man up to the whole parish as a model.
But Bunyan's notions of good and evil had been learned in a very different
school; and he was made miserable by the conflict between his tastes and
his scruples.

When he was about seventeen the ordinary course of his life was interrupted
by an event which gave a lasting colour to his thoughts. He enlisted in the
Parliamentary army,[2] and served during the Decisive campaign of 1645. All
that we know of his military career is, that, at the siege of some town,[3]
one of his comrades, who had marched with the besieging army instead of
him, was killed by a shot. Bunyan ever after considered himself as having
been saved from death by the special interference of Providence. It may be
observed that his imagination was strongly impressed by the glimpse which
he had caught of the pomp of war. To the last he loved to draw his
illustrations of sacred things from camps and fortresses, from guns, drums,
trumpets, flags of truce, and regiments arrayed each under its own banner.
His Greatheart, his Captain Boanerges and his Captain Credence are
evidently portraits, of which the originals were among those martial saints
who fought and expounded in Fairfax's army.

In 1646 Bunyan returned home and married about two years later. His wife
had some pious relations, and brought him as her only portion some pious
books. His mind, excitable by nature, very imperfectly disciplined by
education, and exposed to the enthusiasm which was then epidemic in
England, began to be fearfully disordered. The story of the struggle is
told in Bunyan's _Grace Abounding_.

In outward things he soon became a strict Pharisee. He was constant in
attendance at prayers and sermons. His favourite amusements were, one after
another, relinquished, though not without many painful struggles. In the
middle of a game at tipcat he paused, and stood staring wildly upwards with
his stick in his hand. He had heard a voice asking him whether he would
leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep his sins and go to hell; and he
had seen an awful countenance frowning on him from the sky. The odious vice
of bell-ringing he renounced; but he still for a time ventured to go to the
church tower and look on while others pulled the ropes. But soon the
thought struck him that, if he persisted in such wickedness, the steeple
would fall on his head; and he fled in terror from the accursed place. To
give up dancing on the village green was still harder; and some months
elapsed before he had the fortitude to part with his darling sin. When this
last sacrifice had been made, he was, even when tried by the maxims of that
austere time, faultless. All Elstow talked of him as an eminently pious
youth. But his own mind was more unquiet than ever. Having nothing more to
do in the way of visible reformation, yet finding in religion no pleasures
to supply the place of the juvenile amusements which he had relinquished,
he began to apprehend that he lay under some special malediction; and he
was tormented by a succession of fantasies which seemed likely to drive him
to suicide or to Bedlam. At one time he took it into his head that all
persons of Israelite blood would be saved, and tried to make out that he
partook of that blood; but his hopes were speedily destroyed by his father,
who seems to have had no ambition to be regarded as a Jew. At another time
Bunyan was disturbed by a strange dilemma: "If I have not faith, I am lost;
if I have faith, I can work miracles." He was tempted to cry to the puddles
between Elstow and Bedford, "Be ye dry," and to stake his eternal hopes on
the event. Then he took up a notion that the day of grace for Bedford and
the neighbouring villages was past; that all who were to be saved in that
part of England were already converted; and that he had begun to pray and
strive some months too late. Then he was harassed by doubts whether the
Turks were not in the right and the Christians in the wrong. Then he was
troubled by a maniacal impulse which prompted him to pray to the trees, to
a broomstick, to the parish bull.

As yet, however, he was only entering the valley of the shadow of death.
Soon the darkness grew thicker. Hideous forms floated before him. Sounds of
cursing and wailing were in his ears. His way ran through stench and fire,
close to the mouth of the bottomless pit. He began to be haunted by a
strange curiosity about the unpardonable sin, and by a morbid longing to
commit it. But the most frightful of all the forms which [v.04 p.0804] his
disease took was a propensity to utter blasphemy, and especially to
renounce his share in the benefits of the redemption. Night and day, in
bed, at table, at work, evil spirits, as he imagined, were repeating close
to his ear the words, "Sell him, sell him." He struck at the hobgoblins; he
pushed them from him; but still they were ever at his side. He cried out in
answer to them, hour after hour, "Never, never; not for thousands of
worlds; not for thousands." At length, worn out by this long agony, he
suffered the fatal words to escape him, "Let him go if he will." Then his
misery became more fearful than ever. He had done what could not be
forgiven. He had forfeited his part of the great sacrifice. Like Esau, he
had sold his birthright; and there was no longer any place for repentance.
"None," he afterwards wrote, "knows the terrors of those days but myself."
He has described his sufferings with singular energy, simplicity and
pathos. He envied the brutes; he envied the very stones on the street, and
the tiles on the houses. The sun seemed to withhold its light and warmth
from him. His body, though cast in a sturdy mould, and though still in the
highest vigour of youth, trembled whole days together with the fear of
death and judgment. He fancied that this trembling was the sign set on the
worst reprobates, the sign which God had put on Cain. The unhappy man's
emotion destroyed his power of digestion. He had such pains that he
expected to burst asunder like Judas, whom he regarded as his prototype.

Neither the books which Bunyan read, nor the advisers whom he consulted,
were likely to do much good in a case like his. His small library had
received a most unseasonable addition, the account of the lamentable end of
Francis Spira. One ancient man of high repute for piety, whom the sufferer
consulted, gave an opinion which might well have produced fatal
consequences. "I am afraid," said Bunyan, "that I have committed the sin
against the Holy Ghost." "Indeed," said the old fanatic, "I am afraid that
you have."

At length the clouds broke; the light became clearer and clearer; and the
enthusiast who had imagined that he was branded with the mark of the first
murderer, and destined to the end of the arch-traitor, enjoyed peace and a
cheerful confidence in the mercy of God. Years elapsed, however, before his
nerves, which had been so perilously overstrained, recovered their tone.
When he had joined a Baptist society at Bedford, and was for the first time
admitted to partake of the eucharist, it was with difficulty that he could
refrain from imprecating destruction on his brethren while the cup was
passing from hand to hand. After he had been some time a member of the
congregation he began to preach; and his sermons produced a powerful
effect. He was indeed illiterate; but he spoke to illiterate men. The
severe training through which he had passed had given him such an
experimental knowledge of all the modes of religious melancholy as he could
never have gathered from books; and his vigorous genius, animated by a
fervent spirit of devotion, enabled him not only to exercise a great
influence over the vulgar, but even to extort the half-contemptuous
admiration of scholars. Yet it was long before he ceased to be tormented by
an impulse which urged him to utter words of horrible impiety in the
pulpit.[4] Bunyan was finally relieved from the internal sufferings which
had embittered his life by sharp persecution from without. He had been five
years a preacher when the Restoration put it in the power of the Cavalier
gentlemen and clergymen all over the country to oppress the dissenters. In
November 1660 he was flung into Bedford gaol; and there he remained, with
some intervals of partial and precarious liberty, during twelve years. The
authorities tried to extort from him a promise that he would abstain from
preaching; but he was convinced that he was divinely set apart and
commissioned to be a teacher of righteousness, and he was fully determined
to obey God rather than man. He was brought before several tribunals,
laughed at, caressed, reviled, menaced, but in vain. He was facetiously
told that he was quite right in thinking that he ought not to hide his
gift; but that his real gift was skill in repairing old kettles. He was
compared to Alexander the coppersmith. He was told that if he would give up
preaching he should be instantly liberated. He was warned that if he
persisted in disobeying the law he would be liable to banishment, and that
if he were found in England after a certain time his neck would be
stretched. His answer was, "If you let me out to-day, I will preach again
to-morrow." Year after year he lay patiently in a dungeon, compared with
which the worst prison now to be found in the island is a palace.[5] His
fortitude is the more extraordinary because his domestic feelings were
unusually strong. Indeed, he was considered by his stern brethren as
somewhat too fond and indulgent a parent. He had four small children, and
among them a daughter who was blind, and whom he loved with peculiar
tenderness. He could not, he said, bear even to let the wind blow on her;
and now she must suffer cold and hunger; she must beg; she must be beaten;
"yet," he added, "I must, I must do it."

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