BOSC, Louis Augustine Guillaume, French naturalist, was born at Paris on the 29th January 1759. He was educated at the college of Dijon, and attended the lectures of Durande on botany, which inspired him with a passion for natural history. He followed up his studies at Paris, and was a constant auditor at the Jardin des Plantes. Even when closely occupied in official work, he managed to find time for his favourite researches and contributed many valuable papers to various scientific transactions and reviews. At the age of eighteen he had obtained an appointment under Government, and he rose to be one of the chief officials in the postal department. Under the ministry of Roland he also held the post of superintendent of prisons, but the violent outbreaks of 1793 drove him from office, and compelled him to take refuge in flight. For some months he lay concealed in the forest of Montmorency, barely subsisting on roots and vegetables. He was enabled to return to Paris on the fall of Robespierre, and soon after set out for America, resolving to explore the natural riches of that country. The immense materials he gathered were never published in a complete form, but much went to enrich the works of Lacépède, Latreille, and others. After his return, on the establishment of the Directory, he was reinstated in his old office. Of this he was again deprived by the coup d'état of 1799, and for a time he was in great destitution. He set resolutely to work, however, and by his copious contributions to scientific literature, contrived to support himself and to lay the foundations of a solid reputation. He was engaged on the Supplement to Rozier’s Dictionary, on the new Dictionnaire d’histoire naturelle, and on the Encyclopédie Méthodique. He edited the Dictionnaire raisonné ...

BOSCAN, Juan, a Spanish poet, celebrated as the introducer of Italian measures into Spanish literature, was born about the close of the 15th century. The exact date is unknown, but it was probably a few years before 1500. He was of patrician birth and appears to have passed some years in military service. He died in 1540 at Perpignan, where he was residing with the duke of Alva. His poems were published in 1543 at Barcelona by his widow. They are divided into four books which mark out distinctly the stages of Boscan’s poetical history. The first book contains light poems in the Old Castilian metres, resembling the Cancioneros. These were written in his youth, before 1526, in which year he became acquainted with Andrea Navagiero, ambassador from Venice. Navagiero urged him to adopt some of the Italian measures, and his advice gave a new turn to Boscan’s activity. The second and third books contain a number of pieces in Italian metres, sonnets, canzones, and poems in blank verse, terza rima, and octaves. The longest of these poems is the Hero and Leander, in blank verse. The fourth book contains his best effort, the Allegory, written in the maturity of his powers, and exhibiting great delicacy of imagination and skilful verse composition. He also published, in 1534, a translation of Balthasar Castiglione’s Italian poem The Courtier. Boscan’s greatest follower in the endeavour to mould Spanish poetry after Italian models was Garcilassa de la Vega, whois more celebrated than his master.

See Bouterwek, Spanish Literature, vol. i.; Ticknor, History oj Spanish Literature, vol. i.

BOSCAWEN, Edward, British admiral, was born August 19, 1711. He was the third son of Hugh, Lord Viscount Falmouth. He early entered the navy, and in 1740 distinguished himself at the taking of Porto Bello. At the siege of Carthagena, in March 1741, at the head of a party of seamen, he took a battery of fifteen 24-pounders, while exposed to the fire of another fort. On his return to England in the following year he married, and entered parliament as member for Truro. In 1744 he captured the “Medea,” a French man-of-war, commanded by Μ. de Hocquart, the first ship taken in the war. In May 1747 he signalized himself in the engagement off Cape Finisterre, and was wounded in the shoulder with a musket-ball. Hocquart again became his prisoner, and the French ships, ten in number, were taken. On the 15th July, he was made rear-admiral and commander-in-chief of the expedition to the East Indies. On the 29th July 1748 he arrived off Fort St David’s, and soon after laid siege to Pondicherry; but the sickness of his men and the approach of the monsoons led to the raising of the siege. Soon afterwards he received news of the peace, and Madras was delivered up to him by the French. In April 1750 ho arrived in England, and was the next year made one of the lords of the Admiralty, and chosen an elder brother of the Trinity House. In February 1755 he was appointed vice-admiral, and in April he intercepted the French squadron bound to North America, and took the “Alcide” and “Lys” of sixty-four guns each. Hocquart became his prisoner for the third time, and Boscawen returned to Spithead with his prizes and 1500 prisoners. For this exploit he received the thanks of Parliament. In 1758 he was appointed admiral of the blue and commander-in chief of the expedition to Cape ...

BOSCOVICH, Roger Joseph, a distinguished Italian mathematician and natural philosopher, and one of the earliest of foreign savants to adopt the theory of Newton, was born at Ragusa in Dalmatia, May 18, 1711, according to the usual aecount, but ten years earlier according to Lalande (Éloge, 1792). In his fifteenth year, after passing through the usual elementary studies, he entered the society of Jesus. On completing his noviciate, which was spent at Rome, he studied mathematics and physics at the Collegium Romanum; and so brilliant was his progress in these sciences that in 1740 he obtained the appointment of professor of mathematics in the college. For this post he was especially fitted by his large acquaintance with modern advances in science and by his skill in a classical severity of demonstration, acquired by a thorough study of the works of the Greek geometricians. Several years before this appointment he had made himself a name by an elegant solution of the problem to find the sun’s equator and determine the period of his rotation by observation of the spots on his surface. Notwithstanding the arduous duties of his professorship he found time for investigation in all the fields of physical science; and he published a very large number of dissertations, some of them of considerable length, on a wide variety of subjects. Among these subjects were the transit of Mercury, the Aurora Borealis, the figure of the earth, the observation of the fixed stars, the inequalities in terrestrial gravitation, the application of mathematics to the theory of the telescope, the limits of certainty in astronomical observations, the solid of greatest attraction, the cycloid, the logistic curve lines, the theory of comets, the tides, the law of continuity, the double refraction ...