Page:Men of the Time, eleventh edition.djvu/171

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154
BOUVERIE—BOWEN.

M. Boussingault, having nothing better to do, entered the ranks of the insurrectionary army, and was attached to Gen. Bolivar's staff, more, however, as a savant than a soldier, and passed through Bolivia, Venezuela, and the countries situated between Carthagena and the mouth of the Orinoco. Soon after his return to France, he was appointed to a professorship of chemistry at Lyons. In 1839 he was elected into the Academy of Sciences, and going to Paris, obtained a chair of Agriculture in the Conservatory of Arts and Trades. Chemistry, applied to agriculture and the rearing of cattle, owes much to the labours of M. Boussingault, especially his indications as to the quality of manures, and on the nutritive properties of the aliments destined for herbivorous animals. He has contributed several valuable articles on such subjects to the French scientific journals, and some of these have been collected and published under the title, "Mémoires de Chimie Agricole et de Physiologie" (Paris, 1854). He is also the author of an excellent "Traité d'Économie Rurale" (2 vols. 1844), re-published under the title of "Agronomie, Chimie Agricole et Physiologie" (5 vols. 1860–74); and of "Études sur la Transformation du Fer en Acier" (1875). M. Boussingault, who was returned to the Constituent Assembly, and was a member of tho Council of State until the 2nd of Dec. 1851, withdrew from politics, and devoted himself to his favourite studies. He was made Commander of the Legion of Honour, March 14, 1857, and promoted to the rank of Grand Officer of that Order, Aug. 23, 1876.

BOUVERIE, The Right Hon. Edward Pleydell, second son of the 3rd Earl of Radnor, born in 1818, and educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated M.A. in 1838, entered Parliament in 1844 as M.P. for Kilmarnock, which he continued to represent, in the Liberal interest, till the general election of Feb. 1874, when he was defeated by "a thorough Liberal," Mr. J. F. Harrison. He was Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department from July, 1850, till March, 1852, and was Chairman of Committees of the House of Commons from April, 1853, to March, 1855, when he was made Vice-President of the Board of Trade, Paymaster-General in August of that year, and President of the Poor-Law Board, which post he held till the retirement of the Palmerston Administration in March, 1858. Lord Palmerston nominated him the second Church Estates Commissioner in Aug. 1859, and he discharged the duties of this office till Nov. 1865. In 1862 he introduced, though unsuccessfully, a measure for the relief of certain disabilities which affected such of the clergy as, owing to a change in their opinions, desired to withdraw from the service of the Established Church. Mr. Bouverie was appointed a member of the Ecclesiastical Commission in 1869.

BOWEN, The Right Hon. Sir Charles Synge Christopher, one of the Lords Justices in the Court of Appeal, is a son of the Rev. Christopher Bowen, of Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, formerly rector of St. Thomas's, Winchester, by Catharine Emily, daughter of Sir Richard Steele, Bart. He was born at Wollaston, Gloucestershire, in 1835, and educated at Rugby and at Balliol College, Oxford. He carried off three of the great University prizes, including the Hertford and Ireland scholarships, and, together with several distinguished contemporaries, he was placed, in 1858, in the first class in classical honours. Called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1861, he joined the Western circuit. He was senior member of the "Truck Commission" in 1870, was appointed Junior Standing Counsel to the Treasury, in 1872, and Recorder of Pen-