however, he went to Italy, and at Rome became well known as a painter. He returned to Paris in 1731 and soon became a favourite in society. His picture “Rinaldo and Armida” (1734) is now in the Louvre. He was made inspector of the Gobelins factory in 1755 and court painter in 1765, and was employed by Madame de Pompadour both to paint her portrait and to execute various decorative works. He died in 1770. His Watteau-like style and graceful voluptuousness gave him the title of the Anacreon of painting, but his repute declined until recent years. The Wallace collection, at Hertford House, has some of his finest pictures, outside the Louvre. His etchings were also numerous and masterly.
See Antoine Bret’s notice in the Nécrologe des hommes célèbres for 1771, and the monographs by the brothers de Goncourt and Paul Mantz.
BOUCHER, JONATHAN (1738–1804), English divine and philologist, was born in the hamlet of Blencogo, near Wigton, Cumberland, on the 12th of March 1738. He was educated at the Wigton grammar school, and about 1754 went to Virginia, where he became a private tutor in the families of Virginia planters. Among his charges was John Parke Custis, the step-son of George Washington, with whom he began a long and intimate friendship. Returning to England, he was ordained by the bishop of London in March 1762, and at once sailed again for America, where he remained until 1775 as rector of various Virginia and Maryland parishes, including Hanover, King George’s county, Virginia, and St Anne’s at Annapolis, Maryland. He was widely known as an eloquent preacher, and his scholarly attainments won for him the friendship and esteem of some of the ablest scholars in the colonies. During his residence in Maryland he vigorously opposed the “vestry act,” by which the powers and emoluments of the Maryland pastors were greatly diminished. When the struggle between the colonies and the mother country began, although he felt much sympathy for the former, his opposition to any form of obstruction to the Stamp Act and other measures, and his denunciation of a resort to force created a breach between him and his parish, and in a fiery farewell discourse preached after the opening of hostilities he declared that no power on earth should prevent him from praying and shouting “God save the King.” In the succeeding autumn he returned to England, where his loyalism was rewarded by a government pension. In 1784 he became vicar of Epsom in Surrey, where he continued until his death on the 27th of April 1804, becoming known as one of the most eloquent preachers of his day. He was an accomplished writer and scholar, contributed largely to William Hutchinson’s History of the County of Cumberland (2 vols., 1794 seq.), and published A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (1797), dedicated to George Washington, and consisting of thirteen discourses delivered in America between 1763 and 1775. His philological studies, to which the last fourteen years of his life were devoted, resulted in the compilation of “A Glossary of Provincial and Archaic Words,” intended as a supplement to Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, but never published except in part, which finally in 1831 passed into the hands of the English compilers of Webster’s Dictionary, by whom it was utilized.
His son, Barton Boucher (1794–1865), rector of Fonthill Bishops, Wiltshire, in 1856, was well known as the author of religious tracts, hymns and novels.
BOUCHER DE CRÈVECŒUR DE PERTHES, JACQUES (1788–1868), French geologist and antiquary, was born on the
10th of September 1788 at Rethel, Ardennes, France. He was
the eldest son of Jules Armand Guillaume Boucher de Crèvecœur,
botanist and customs officer, and of Étienne-Jeanne-Marie de
Perthes (whose surname he was authorized by royal decree in
1818 to assume in addition to his father’s). In 1802 he entered
government employ as an officer of customs. His duties kept him
for six years in Italy, whence returning (in 1811) he found rapid
promotion at home, and finally was appointed (March 1825)
to succeed his father as director of the douane at Abbeville,
where he remained for the rest of his life, being superannuated
in January 1853, and dying on the 5th of August 1868. His
leisure was chiefly devoted to the study of what was afterwards
called the Stone Age, “antediluvian man,” as he expressed it.
About the year 1830 he had found, in the gravels of the Somme
valley, flints which in his opinion bore evidence of human
handiwork; but not until many years afterwards did he make
public the important discovery of a worked flint implement
with remains of elephant, rhinoceros, &c., in the gravels of
Menchecourt. This was in 1846. A few years later he commenced
the issue of his monumental work, Antiquités celtiques et an édiluviennes (1847, 1857, 1864; 3 vols.), a work in which
he was the first to establish the existence of man in the Pleistocene
or early Quaternary period. His views met with little approval,
partly because he had previously propounded theories regarding
the antiquity of man without facts to support them, partly
because the figures in his book were badly executed and they
included drawings of flints which showed no clear sign of workmanship.
In 1855 Dr Jean Paul Rigollot (1810–1873), of Amiens,
strongly advocated the authenticity of the flint implements; but
it was not until 1858 that Hugh Falconer (q.v.) saw the collection
at Abbeville and induced Prestwich (q.v.) in the following year
to visit the locality. Prestwich then definitely agreed that the
flint implements were the work of man, and that they occurred
in undisturbed ground in association with remains of extinct
mammalia. In 1863 his discovery of a human jaw, together
with worked flints, in a gravel-pit at Moulin-Quignon near
Abbeville seemed to vindicate Boucher de Perthes entirely;
but doubt was thrown on the antiquity of the human remains
(owing to the possibility of interment), though not on the good
faith of the discoverer, who was the same year made an officer
of the Legion of Honour together with Quatrefages his
champion. Boucher de Perthes displayed activity in many
other directions. For more than thirty years he filled the
presidential chair of the Société d’Émulation at Abbeville,
to the publications of which he contributed articles on a wide
range of subjects. He was the author of several tragedies,
two books of fiction, several works of travel, and a number of
books on economic and philanthropic questions. To his scientific
books may be added De l’homme antédilumen et de ses œuvres
(Paris, 1860).
See Alcius Ledien, Boucher de Perthes; sa vie, ses œuvres, sa correspondence (Abbeville, 1885); Lady Prestwich, “Recollections of M. Boucher de Perthes” (with portrait) in Essays Descriptive and Biographical (1901).
BOUCHES-DU-RHÔNE, a maritime department of south-eastern
France situated at the mouth of the Rhone. Area, 2026
sq. m. Pop. (1906) 765,918. Formed in 1790 from western
Provence, it is bounded N. by Vaucluse, from which it is separated
by the Durance, E. by Var, W. by Card, and S. by the Mediterranean,
along which its seaboard stretches for about 120 m.
The western portion consists of the Camargue (q.v.), a low and
marshy plain enclosed between the Rhone and the Petit-Rhône,
and comprising the Rhone delta. A large portion of its surface is
covered by lagoons and pools (étangs), the largest of which is the
Étang de Vaccarès; to the east of the Camargue is situated the
remarkable stretch of country called the Crau, which is strewn
with pebbles like the sea-beach; and farther east and north
there are various ranges of mountains of moderate elevation belonging
to the Alpine system. The Étang de Berre, a lagoon
covering an area of nearly 60 sq. m., is situated near the sea
to the south-east of the Crau. A few small tributaries of the
Rhone and the Durance, a number of streams, such as the Arc
and the Touloubre, which flow into the Étang de Berre, and the
Huveaune, which finds its way directly to the sea, are the only
rivers that properly belong to the department.
Bouches-du-Rhône enjoys the beautiful climate of the Mediterranean coast, the chief drawback being the mistral, the icy north-west wind blowing from the central plateau of France. The proportion of arable land is small, though the quantity has been considerably increased by artificial irrigation and by the draining of marshland. Cereals, of which wheat and oats are the commonest, are grown in the Camargue and the plain of Aries, but they are of less importance than the olive-tree, which
