BRIGADE, a tactical body, composed of two or more regiments of cavalry or infantry, under the command of a general officer of the lowest grade. The term brigade is also applied to from four to eight batteries of artillery working together, and to the small detachments (eight or nine men) of engineers employed in excavating saps in siege operations. Two or more brigades constitute a division, two or more divisions a corps d’armée, two or more corps d’armée an army.

BRIGADE-MAJOR, a third-class staff officer, appointed by the brigadier to assist him in the management of his brigade.

BRIGADIER, a general officer of the lowest grade, next in rank above a colonel, who is intrusted with the command of a brigade.

BRIGGS, Henry, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 16th century, was born in 1556 at Warley Wood near Halifax, in Yorkshire. He studied at St John’s College, Cambridge, graduated in 1581, and obtained a fellowship in 1588. In 1592 he was made reader of the physical lecture founded by Dr Linacre, and in 1596 first professor of geometry in Gresham House (afterwards College), London. In his lectures at Gresham House he proposed the alteration of the scale of logarithms from the hyperbolic form which Napier had given them, to that in which unity is assumed as the logarithm of the ratio of ten to one; and soon afterwards he wrote to the inventor on the subject. In 1616 he paid a visit to Napier at Edinburgh in order to discuss the suggested change; and next year he repeated his visit for a similar purpose. During these conferences the alteration proposed,'by Briggs was agreed upon; and on his return from his second visit to Edinburgh in 1617 he accordingly published the first chiliad of his logarithms. In 1619 he was appointed Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford, and resigned his professorship of Gresham College on the 25th of July 1620. Soon after his settlement at Oxford he was incorporated master of arts in that university, where he continued a laborious and studious life, employed partly in discharging the duties of his office, and partly in the computation of logarithms and in other useful works. In 1622 he published a small tract on the North-West Passage to the South Seas, through the Continent of Virginia and Hudson's Bay; and in 1624 he printed at London his Arithmetica Logarithmica, in folio, a work containing the logarithms of thirty thousand natural numbers to fourteen places of figures besides the index. He also completed a table of logarithmic ...