BOOS, MARTIN (1762–1825), German Roman Catholic theologian, was born at Huttenried in Bavaria on the 25th of December 1762. Orphaned at the age of four, he was reared by an uncle at Augsburg, who finally sent him to the university of Dillingen. There he laid the foundation of the modest piety by which his whole life was distinguished. After serving as priest in several Bavarian towns, he made his way in 1799 to Linz in Austria, where he was welcomed by Bishop Gall, and set to work first at Leonding and then at Waldneukirchen, becoming in 1806 pastor at Gallneukirchen. His pietistic movement won considerable way among the Catholic laity, and even attracted some fifty or sixty priests. The death of Gall and other powerful friends, however, exposed him to bitter enmity and persecution from about 1812, and he had to answer endless accusations in the consistorial courts. His enemies followed him when he returned to Bavaria, but in 1817 the Prussian government appointed him to a professorship at Düsseldorf, and in 1819 gave him the pastorate at Sayn near Neuwied. He died on the 29th of August 1825.
See Life by J. Gossner (1831).
BOOT. (1) (From the O. Eng. bót, a word common to Teutonic languages, e.g. Goth, bóta, “good, advantage,” O.H.G. Buoza, Mod. Ger. Busse, “penance, fine”; cf. “better,” the comparative of “good”), profit or advantage. The word survives in “bootless,” i.e. useless or unavailing, and in such expressions, chiefly archaistic, as “what boots it?” “Bote,” an old form, survives in some old compound legal words, such as “house-bote,” “fire-bote,” “hedge-bote,” &c., for particular rights of “estover,” the Norman French word corresponding to the Saxon “bote” (see Estovers and Commons). The same form survives also in such expressions as “thief-bote” for the Old English customary compensation paid for injuries.
(2) (A word of uncertain origin, which came into English through the O. Fr. bote, modern botte; Med. Lat. botta or bota), a covering for the foot. Properly a boot covers the whole lower part of the leg, sometimes reaching to or above the knee, but in common usage it is applied to one which reaches only above the ankle, and is thus distinguished from “shoe” (see Costume and Shoe).
The “boot” of a coach has the same derivation. It was originally applied to the fixed outside step, the French botte, then to the uncovered spaces on or beside the step on which the attendants sat facing sideways. Both senses are now obsolete, the term now being applied to the covered receptacles under the seats of the guard and coachman.
The Boot, Boots or Bootikin was an instrument of torture formerly in use to extort confessions from suspected persons, or obtain evidence from unwilling witnesses. It originated in Scotland, but the date of its first use is unknown. It was certainly frequently employed there in the latter years of the 16th century. In a case of forgery in 1579 two witnesses, a clergyman and an attorney, were so tortured. In a letter dated 1583 at the Record Office in London, Walsingham instructs the English ambassador at Edinburgh to have Father Holt, an English Jesuit, “put to the boots.” It seems to have fallen into disuse after 1630, but was revived in 1666 on the occasion of the Covenanters’ rebellion, and was employed during the reigns of Charles II. and James II. Upon the accession of William III. the Scottish convention denounced “the use of torture, without evidence and in ordinary crimes, as contrary to law.” However, a year or so later, one Neville Payne, an Englishman suspected of treasonable motives for visiting Scotland, was put to the torture under the authority of a warrant signed by the king. This is the last recorded case of its use, torture being finally abolished in Scotland in 1709. It was not used in England after 1640. The boot was made of iron or wood and iron fastened on the leg, between which and the boot wedges were driven by blows from a mallet. After each blow a question was put to the victim, and the ordeal was continued until he gave the information or fainted. The wedges were usually placed against the calf of the leg, but Bishop Burnet says that they were sometimes put against the shin-bone. A similar instrument, called “Spanish boots,” was used in Germany. There were also iron boots which were heated on the victim’s foot. A less cruel form was a boot or buskin made wet and drawn upon the legs and then dried with fire.
BOÖTES (Gr. βοώτης, a ploughman, from βοῦς, an ox), a constellation of the northern hemisphere, mentioned by Eudoxus
(4th century B.C.) and Aratus (3rd century B.C.), and perhaps alluded to in the book of Job (see Arcturus), and by Homer and Hesiod. The ancient Greeks symbolized it as a man walking, with his right hand grasping a club, and his left extending upwards and holding the leash of two dogs, which are apparently barking at the Great Bear. Ptolemy catalogues twenty-three stars, Tycho Brahe twenty-eight, Hevelius fifty-two. In addition to Arcturus, the brightest in the group, the most interesting stars of this constellation are: ε Boötis, a beautiful double star composed of a yellow star of magnitude 3, and a blue star of magnitude 612; ξ Boötis, a double star composed of a yellow star, magnitude 412, and a purple star, magnitude 612; and W. Boötis, an irregularly variable star. This constellation has been known by many other names—Arcas, Arctophylax, Arcturus minor, Bubuleus, Bubulus, Canis latrans, Clamator, Icarus, Lycaon, Philometus, Plaustri custos, Plorans, Thegnis, Vociferator; the Arabs termed it Aramech or Archamech; Hesychius named it Orion; Jules Schiller, St Sylvester; Schickard, Nimrod; and Weigelius, the Three Swedish Crowns.
BOOTH, BARTON (1681–1733), English actor, who came of a good Lancashire family, was educated at Westminster school, where his success in the Latin play Andria gave him an inclination for the stage. He was intended for the church; but in 1698 he ran away from Trinity College, Cambridge, and obtained employment in a theatrical company in Dublin, where he made his first appearance as Oroonoko. After two seasons in Ireland he returned to London, where Betterton, who on an earlier application had withheld his active aid, probably out of regard for Booth’s family, now gave him all the assistance in his power. At Lincoln’s Inn Fields (1700–1704) he first appeared as Maximus in Valentinian, and his success was immediate. He was at the Haymarket with Betterton from 1705 to 1708, and for the next twenty years at Drury Lane. Booth died on the 10th of May 1733, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His greatest parts, after the title-part of Addison’s Cato, which established his reputation as a tragedian, were probably Hotspur and Brutus. His Lear was deemed worthy of comparison with Garrick’s. As the ghost in Hamlet he is said never to have had a superior. Among his other Shakespearian rôles were Mark Antony, Timon of Athens and Othello. He also played to perfection the gay Lothario in Rowe’s Fair Penitent. Booth was twice married; his second wife, Hester Santlow, an actress of some merit, survived him.
See Cibber, Lives and Characters of the most eminent Actors and Actresses (1753); Victor, Memoirs of the Life of Barton Booth (1733).
BOOTH, CHARLES (1840– ), English sociologist, was born at Liverpool on the 30th of March 1840. In 1862 he became a partner in Alfred Booth & Company, a Liverpool firm engaged in the Brazil trade, and subsequently chairman of the Booth Steamship Company. He devoted much time, and no inconsiderable sums of money, to inquiries into the statistical aspects of social questions. The results of these are chiefly embodied in a work entitled Life and Labour of the People in London (1891–1903), of which the earlier portion appeared under the title of Life and Labour in 1889. The book is designed to show “the numerical relation which poverty, misery and depravity bear to regular earnings and comparative comfort, and to describe the general conditions under which each class lives.” It contains a most striking series of maps, in which the varying degrees of poverty are represented street by street, by shades of colour. The data for the work were derived in part from the detailed records kept by school-board “visitors,” partly from systematic inquiries directed by Mr Booth himself, supplemented by information derived from relieving officers and the Charity Organization Society. Mr Booth also paid much attention to a kindred subject—the lot of the aged poor. In 1894 he published a volume of statistics on the subject, and, in 1891
