Sophocles; Oedipus Coloneus, Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone (in
the Bibliotheca Classica, 1859); Philoctetes (1870), Trachiniae (1871),
Electra (1873), Ajax (1875), Antigone (1905); Aeschylus: Agamemnon
(1898), Choephori (1899), Eumenides (1900), Adversaria Critica in
Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (1890); in Tragicorum Graec.
Frag. (1894), in Aeschylum (1895), in Varios Poetas Graecos et
Latinos (1898), in Aristophanem (1899), in Sophoclem (1899), in
Euripidem (1901), in Herodotum (1901); Analecta Comica Graeca
(1905); Analecta Tragica Graeca (1906).
BLAYDON, an urban district in the Chester-le-Street parliamentary
division of Durham, England, on the Tyne, 4 m. W. of
Newcastle by a branch of the North-Eastern railway. Pop. (1881)
10,687; (1901) 19,617. The chief industries are coal-mining,
iron-founding, pipe, fire-brick, chemical manure and bottle
manufactures. In the vicinity is the beautiful old mansion of
Stella, and below it Stellaheugh, to which the victorious Scottish
army crossed from Newburn on the Northumberland bank in
1640, after which they occupied Newcastle.
BLAYE-ET-STE LUCE, a town of south-western France,
capital of an arrondissement in the department of Gironde, on
the right bank of the Gironde (here over 2 m. wide), 35 m. N. of
Bordeaux by rail. Pop. (1906) of the town, 3423; of the commune,
4890. The town has a citadel built by Vauban on a rock
beside the river, and embracing in its enceinte ruins of an old
Gothic château. The latter contains the tomb of Caribert, king
of Toulouse, and son of Clotaire II. Blaye is also defended by
the Fort Pâté on an island in the river and the Fort Médoc on its
left bank, both of the 17th century. The town is the seat of a
sub-prefect, and has tribunals of first instance and of commerce
and a communal college. It has a small river-port, and carries
on trade in wine, brandy, grain, fruit and timber. The industries
include the building of small vessels, distilling, flour-milling, and
the manufacture of oil and candles. Fine red wine is produced
in the district.
In ancient times Blaye (Blavia) was a port of the Santones. Tradition states that the hero Roland was buried in its basilica, which was on the site of the citadel. It was early an important stronghold which played an important part in the wars against the English and the Religious Wars. The duchess of Berry was imprisoned in its fortress in 1832–1833.
BLAZE (A.-S. blaese, a torch), a fire or bright flame; more
nearly akin to the Ger. blass, pale or shining white, is the use
of the word for the white mark on the face of a horse or cow,
and the American use for a mark made on a tree by cutting off
a piece of the bark. The word “to blaze,” in the sense of to
noise abroad, comes from the A.-S. blaesan, to blow, cf. the Ger.
blasen; in sense, if not in origin, it is confused with “blazon”
in heraldry.
BLAZON, a heraldic shield, a coat of arms properly “described”
according to the rules of heraldry, hence a proper
heraldic description of such a coat. The O. Fr. blason seems
originally to have meant simply a shield as a means of defence
and not a shield-shaped surface for the display of armorial
bearings, but this is difficult to reconcile with the generally
accepted derivation from the Ger. blasen, to blow, proclaim,
English “blaze,” to noise abroad, to declare. In the 16th
century the heraldic term, and “blaze” and “blazon” in the
sense of proclaim, had much influence on each other.
BLEACHING, the process of whitening or depriving objects
of colour, an operation incessantly in activity in nature by the
influence of light, air and moisture. The art of bleaching, of
which we have here to treat, consists in inducing the rapid
operation of whitening agencies, and as an industry it is mostly
directed to cotton, linen, silk, wool and other textile fibres, but
it is also applied to the whitening of paper-pulp, bees’-wax and
some oils and other substances. The term bleaching is derived
from the A.-S. blaecan, to bleach, or to fade, from which also
comes the cognate German word bleichen, to whiten or render
pale. Bleachers, down to the end of the 18th century, were
known in England as “whitsters,” a name obviously derived
from the nature of their calling.
The operation of bleaching must from its very nature be of the same antiquity as the work of washing textures of linen, cotton or other vegetable fibres. Clothing repeatedly washed, and exposed in the open air to dry, gradually assumes a whiter and whiter hue, and our ancestors cannot have failed to notice and take advantage of this fact. Scarcely anything is known with certainty of the art of bleaching as practised by the nations of antiquity. Egypt in early ages was the great centre of textile manufactures, and her white and coloured linens were in high repute among contemporary nations. As a uniformly well-bleached basis is necessary for the production of a satisfactory dye on cloth, it may be assumed that the Egyptians were fairly proficient in bleaching, and that still more so were the Phoenicians with their brilliant and famous purple dyes. We learn, from Pliny, that different plants, and likewise the ashes of plants, which no doubt contained alkali, were employed as detergents. He mentions particularly the Struthium as much used for bleaching in Greece, a plant which has been identified by some with Gypsophila Struthium. But as it does not appear from John Sibthorp’s Flora Graeca, edited by Sir James Smith, that this species is a native of Greece, Dr Sibthorp’s conjecture that the Struthium of the ancients was the Saponaria officinalis, a plant common in Greece, is certainly more probable.
In modern times, down to the middle of the 18th century, the Dutch possessed almost a monopoly of the bleaching trade although we find mention of bleach-works at Southwark near London as early as the middle of the 17th century. It was customary to send all the brown linen, then largely manufactured in Scotland, to Holland to be bleached. It was sent away in the month of March, and not returned till the end of October, being thus out of the hands of the merchant more than half a year.
The Dutch mode of bleaching, which was mostly conducted in the neighbourhood of Haarlem, was to steep the linen first in a waste lye, and then for about a week in a potash lye poured over it boiling hot. The cloth being taken out of this lye and washed, was next put into wooden vessels containing buttermilk, in which it lay under a pressure for five or six days. After this it was spread upon the grass, and kept wet for several months, exposed to the sunshine of summer.
In 1728 James Adair from Belfast proposed to the Scottish Board of Manufactures to establish a bleachfield in Galloway; this proposal the board approved of, and in the same year resolved to devote £2000 as premiums for the establishment of bleachfields throughout the country. In 1732 a method of bleaching with kelp, introduced by R. Holden, also from Ireland, was submitted to the board; and with their assistance Holden established a bleachfield for prosecuting his process at Pitkerro, near Dundee.
The bleaching process, as at that time performed, was very tedious, occupying a complete summer. It consisted in steeping the cloth in alkaline lyes for several days, washing it clean, and spreading it upon the grass for some weeks. The steeping in alkaline lyes, called bucking, and the bleaching on the grass, called crofting, were repeated alternately for five or six times. The cloth was then steeped for some days in sour milk, washed clean and crofted. These processes were repeated, diminishing every time the strength of the alkaline lye, till the linen had acquired the requisite whiteness.
For the first improvement in this tedious process, which was faithfully copied from the Dutch bleachfields, manufacturers were indebted to Dr Francis Home of Edinburgh, to whom the Board of Trustees paid £100 for his experiments in bleaching. He proposed to substitute water acidulated with sulphuric acid for the sour milk previously employed, a suggestion made in consequence of the new mode of preparing sulphuric acid, contrived some time before by Dr John Roebuck, which reduced the price of that acid to less than one-third of what it had formerly been. When this change was first adopted by the bleachers, there was the same outcry against its corrosive effects as arose when chlorine was substituted for crofting. A great advantage was found to result from the use of sulphuric acid, which was that a souring with sulphuric acid required at the longest only twenty-four hours, and often not more than twelve; whereas, when sour milk was employed, six weeks, or even two
