seat, originally acquired by the state in 1795. Louis Bonaparte, king of Holland, who was very fond of the spot, formed a zoological collection here which was removed to Amsterdam in 1809. In 1816 the estate was presented by the nation to the prince of Orange (afterwards King William II.) in recognition of his services at the battle of Quatre Bras. Since then the palace and grounds have been considerably enlarged and beautified. Close to Baarn in the south-west were formerly situated the ancient castles of Drakenburg and Drakenstein, and at Vuursche there is a remarkable dolmen.
BABADAG, or Babatag, a town in the department of Tulcea, Rumania; situated on a small lake formed by the river Taitza among the densely wooded highlands of the northern Dobrudja. Pop. (1900) about 3500. The Taitza lake is divided only by a strip of marshland from Lake Razim, a broad landlocked sheet of water which opens on the Black Sea. Babadag is a market for the wool and mutton of the Dobrudja. It was founded by Bayezid I., sultan of the Turks from 1389 to 1403. It occasionally served as the winter headquarters of the Turks in their wars with Russia, and was bombarded by the Russians in 1854.
BABBAGE, CHARLES (1792–1871), English mathematician and mechanician, was born on the 26th of December 1792 at Teignmouth in Devonshire. He was educated at a private school, and afterwards entered St Peter’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1814. Though he did not compete in the mathematical tripos, he acquired a great reputation at the university. In the years 1815–1817 he contributed three papers on the “Calculus of Functions” to the Philosophical Transactions, and in 1816 was made a fellow of the Royal Society. Along with Sir John Herschel and George Peacock he laboured to raise the standard of mathematical instruction in England, and especially endeavoured to supersede the Newtonian by the Leibnitzian notation in the infinitesimal calculus. Babbage’s attention seems to have been very early drawn to the number and importance of the errors introduced into astronomical and other calculations through inaccuracies in the computation of tables. He contributed to the Royal Society some notices on the relation between notation and mechanism; and in 1822, in a letter to Sir H. Davy on the application of machinery to the calculation and printing of mathematical tables, he discussed the principles of a calculating engine, to the construction of which he devoted many years of his life. Government was induced to grant its aid, and the inventor himself spent a portion of his private fortune in the prosecution of his undertaking. He travelled through several of the countries of Europe, examining different systems of machinery; and some of the results of his investigations were published in the admirable little work, Economy of Machines and Manufactures (1834). The great calculating engine was never completed; the constructor apparently desired to adopt a new principle when the first specimen was nearly complete, to make it not a difference but an analytical engine, and the government declined to accept the further risk (see Calculating Machines). From 1828 to 1839 Babbage was Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge. He contributed largely to several scientific periodicals, and was instrumental in founding the Astronomical (1820) and Statistical (1834) Societies. He only once endeavoured to enter public life, when, in 1832, he stood unsuccessfully for the borough of Finsbury. During the later years of his life he resided in London, devoting himself to the construction of machines capable of performing arithmetical and even algebraical calculations. He died at London on the 18th of October 1871. He gives a few biographical details in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), a work which throws considerable light upon his somewhat peculiar character. His works, pamphlets and papers were very numerous; in the Passages he enumerates eighty separate writings. Of these the most important, besides the few already mentioned, are Tables of Logarithms (1826); Comparative View of the Various Institutions for the Assurance of Lives (1826); Decline of Science in England (1830); Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837); The Exposition of 1851 (1851).
See Monthly Notices, Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 32.
BABEL, the native name of the city called Babylon (q.v.) by the Greeks, the modern Hillah. It means “gate of the god,” not “gate of the gods,” corresponding to the Assyrian Bāb-ili. According to Gen. xi 1-9 (J), mankind, after the deluge, travelled from the mountain of the East, where the ark had rested, and settled in Shinar. Here they attempted to build a city and a tower whose top might reach unto heaven, but were miraculously prevented by their language being confounded. In this way the diversity of human speech and the dispersion of mankind were accounted for; and in Gen. xi. 9 (J) an etymology was found for the name of Babylon in the Hebrew verb bālal, “to confuse or confound,” Babel being regarded as a contraction of Balbel. In Gen. x. 10 it is said to have formed part of the kingdom of Nimrod.
The origin of the story has not been found in Babylonia. The tower was no doubt suggested by one of the temple towers of Babylon. W. A. Bennet (Genesis, p. 169; cf. Hommel in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible) suggests E-Saggila, the great temple of Merodach (Marduk). The variety of languages and the dispersion of mankind were regarded as a curse, and it is probable that, as Prof. Cheyne (Encyclopaedia Biblica, col. 411) says, there was an ancient North Semitic myth to explain it. The event was afterwards localized in Babylon. The myth, as it appears in Genesis, is quite polytheistic and anthropomorphic. According to Cornelius Alexander (frag. 10) and Abydenus (frags. 5 and 6) the tower was overthrown by the winds; according to Yaqut (i. 448 f.) and the Lisan el-ʽArab (xiii. 72) mankind were swept together by winds into the plain afterwards called “Babil,” and were scattered again in the same way (see further D. B. Macdonald in the Jewish Encyclopaedia). A tradition similar to that of the tower of Babel is found in Central America. Xelhua, one of the seven giants rescued from the deluge, built the great pyramid of Cholula in order to storm heaven. The gods, however, destroyed it with fire and confounded the language of the builders. Traces of a somewhat similar story have also been met with among the Mongolian Tharus in northern India (Report of the Census of Bengal, 1872, p. 160), and, according to Dr Livingstone, among the Africans of Lake Ngami. The Esthonian myth of “the Cooking of Languages” (Kohl, Reisen in die Ostseeprovinzen, ii. 251-255) may also be compared, as well as the Australian legend of the origin of the diversity of speech (Gerstäcker, Reisen, vol. iv. pp. 381 seq.).
BAB-EL-MANDEB (Arab, for “The Gate of Tears”), the strait between Arabia and Africa which connects the Red Sea (q.v.) with the Indian Ocean. It derives its name from the dangers attending its navigation, or, according to an Arabic legend, from the numbers who were drowned by the earthquake which separated Asia and Africa. The distance across is about 20 m. from Ras Menheli on the Arabian coast to Ras Siyan on the African. The island of Perim (q.v.), a British possession, divides the strait into two channels, of which the eastern, known as the Bab Iskender (Alexander’s Strait), is 2 m. wide and 16 fathoms deep, while the western, or Dact-el-Mayun, has a width of about 16 m. and a depth of 170 fathoms. Near the African coast lies a group of smaller islands known as the “Seven Brothers.” There is a surface current inwards in the eastern channel, but a strong under-current outwards in the western channel.
BABENBERG, the name of a Franconian family which held the duchy of Austria before the rise of the house of Habsburg. Its earliest known ancestor was one Poppo, who early in the 9th century was count in Grapfeld. One of his sons, Henry, called margrave and duke in Franconia, fell fighting against the Normans in 886; another, Poppo, was margrave in Thuringia from 880 to 892, when he was deposed by the German king Arnulf. The family had been favoured by the emperor Charles the Fat, but Arnulf reversed this policy in favour of the rival family of the Conradines. The leaders of the Babenbergs were the three sons of Duke Henry, who called themselves after their castle of Babenberg on the upper Main, round which their possessions centred. The rivalry between the two families was intensified by their efforts to extend their authority in the region of the middle Main, and this quarrel, known as the “Babenberg feud,” came to a head at the beginning of the 10th century during the
