BONSTETTEN, CHARLES VICTOR DE (1745–1832), Swiss writer, an excellent type of a liberal patrician, more French than Swiss, and a good representative of the Gallicized Bern of the 18th century. By birth a member of one of the great patrician families of Bern, he was educated in his native town, at Yverdon, and (1763–1766) at Geneva, where he came under the influence of Rousseau and of Charles Bonnet, and imbibed liberal sentiments. Recalled to Bern by his father, he was soon sent to Leiden, and then visited (1769) England, where he became a friend of the poet Gray. After his father’s death (1770) he made a long journey in Italy, and on his return to Bern (1774) entered political life, for which he was unfitted by reason of his liberal ideas, which led him to patronize and encourage Johannes Müller, the future Swiss historian. In 1779 he was named the Bernese bailiff of Saanen or Gessenay (here he wrote his Lettres pastorales sur une contrée de la Suisse, published in German in 1781), and in 1787 was transferred in a similar capacity to Nyon, from which post he had to retire after taking part (1791) in a festival to celebrate the destruction of the Bastille. From 1795 to 1797 he governed (for the Swiss Confederation) the Italian-speaking districts of Lugano, Locarno, Mendrisio and Val Maggia, of which he published (1797) a pleasing description, and into which he is said to have introduced the cultivation of the potato. The French revolution of 1798 in Switzerland drove him again into private life. He spent the years 1798 to 1801 in Denmark, with his friend Fredirika Brun, and then settled down in 1803 in Geneva for the rest of his life. There he enjoyed the society of many distinguished persons, among whom was (1809–1817) Madame de Staël. It was during this period that he published his most celebrated work, L’Homme du midi et l’homme du nord (1824), a study of the influence of climate on different nations, the north being exalted at the expense of the south. Among his other works are the Recherches sur la nature et les lois de l’imagination (1807), and the Études de l’homme, ou Recherches sur les facultés de penser et de sentir (1821), but he was better as an observer than as a philosopher.
Lives by A. Steinlen (Lausanne, 1860), by C. Morell (Winterthur, 1861), and by R. Willy (Bern, 1898). See also vol. xiv. of Sainte-Beuve’s Causeries du Lundi. (W. A. B. C.)
BONUS (a jocular application of the Lat. bonus, for bonum, “a good thing”), a sum paid to shareholders in a joint-stock company, as an addition to the ordinary dividend, and generally given out of accumulated profits, or out of profits gained from exceptional transactions. As used by insurance companies, the word denotes the addition made to the amount of a policy by a distribution pro rata of accumulated profits or surplus. In a more general sense, bonus is any payment or remuneration over and above what is due and promised.
BONZE (from Japanese bonzo, probably a mispronunciation of Chinese fan sung, “religious person”), the European name for the members of the Buddhist religious orders of Japan and China. The word is loosely used of all the Buddhist priests in those and the neighbouring countries.
BOOK, the common name for any literary production of some bulk, now applied particularly to a printed composition forming a volume, or, if in more than one volume, a single organic literary work. The word is also used descriptively for the internal divisions or sections of a comprehensive work.
The word “book” is found with variations of form and gender in all the Teutonic languages, the original form postulated for it being a strong feminine Bôks, which must have been used in the sense of a writing-tablet. The most obvious connexion of this is with the old English bóc, a beech tree, and though this is not free from philological difficulties, no probable alternative has been suggested.
As early as 2400 B.C., in Babylonia, legal decisions, revenue accounts, &c. were inscribed in cuneiform characters on clay tablets and placed in jars, arranged on shelves and labelled by clay tablets attached by straws. In the 7th century B.C. a library of literary works written on such tablets existed at Nineveh, founded by Sargan (721–705 B.C.). As in the case of the “Creation” series at the British Museum the narrative was sometimes continued from one tablet to another, and some of the tablets are inscribed with entries forming a catalogue of the library. These clay tablets are perhaps entitled to be called books, but they are out of the direct ancestry of the modern printed book with which we are here chiefly concerned. One of the earliest direct ancestors of this extant is a roll of eighteen columns in Egyptian hieratic writing of about the 25th century B.C. in the Musée de Louvre at Paris, preserving the maxims of Ptah-hetep. Papyrus, the material on which the manuscript (known as the Papyrus Prisse) is written, was made from the pith of a reed chiefly found in Egypt, and is believed to have been in use as a writing material as early as about 4000 B.C. It continued to be the usual vehicle of writing until the early centuries of the Christian era, was used for pontifical bulls until A.D. 1022, and occasionally even later; while in Coptic manuscripts, for which its use had been revived in the 7th century, it was employed as late as about A.D. 1250. It was from the name by which they called the papyrus, βύβλος or βίβλος, that the Greeks formed βιβλίον, their word for a book, the plural of which (mistaken for a feminine singular) has given us our own word Bible. In the 2nd century B.C. Eumenes II., king of Pergamus, finding papyrus hard to procure, introduced improvements into the preparations of the skins of sheep and calves for writing purposes, and was rewarded by the name of his kingdom being preserved in the word pergamentum, whence our “parchment,” by which the dressed material is known. In the 10th century the supremacy which parchment had gradually established was attacked by the introduction from the East of a new writing material made from a pulp of linen rags, and the name of the vanquished papyrus was transferred to this new rival. Paper-mills were set up in Europe in the 12th century, and the use of paper gained ground, though not very rapidly, until on the invention of printing, the demand for a cheap material for books, and the ease with which paper could be worked on a press, gave it a practical monopoly. This it preserved until nearly the end of the 19th century, when substances mainly composed of wood-pulp, esparto grass and clay largely took its place, while continuing, as in the transition from papyrus to linen-pulp, to pass under the same name (see Paper).
So long as the use of papyrus was predominant the usual form of a book was that of the volumen or roll, wound round a stick, or sticks. The modern form of book, called by the Latins codex (a word originally used for the stump of a tree, or block of wood, and thence for the three-leaved tablets into which the block was sawn) was coming into fashion in Martial’s time at Rome, and gained ground in proportion as parchment superseded papyrus. The volumen as it was unrolled revealed a series of narrow columns of writing, and the influence of this arrangement is seen in the number of columns in the earliest codices. Thus in the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus of the Bible, both of the 4th century, there are respectively four and three columns to a page; in the Codex Alexandrinus (5th century) only two; in the Codex Bezae (6th century) only one, and from this date to the invention of printing, while there were great changes in handwriting, the arrangement of books changed very little, single or double columns being used as was found convenient. In the external form of books there was much the same conservatism. In the Codex Amiatinus written in England in the 8th century one of the miniatures shows a book in a red leather cover, and the arrangement of the pattern on this curiously resembles that of the 15th-century red leather bindings predominant in the Biblioteca Laurenziana at Florence, in which the codex itself is preserved. In the same way some of the small stamps used in Oxford bindings in the 15th century are nearly indistinguishable from those used in England three centuries earlier. Much fuller details as to the history of written books in these as well as other respects will be found in the article Manuscript, to which the following account of the fortunes of books after the invention of printing must be regarded as supplementary.
Between a manuscript written in a formal book-hand and an early printed copy of the same work, printed in the same district as the manuscript had been written, the difference in general
