BEDARESI, YEDAIAH (1270-1340), Jewish poet, physician and philosopher of Provence. His most successful work was an ethical treatise, Behinath ‘Olam (Examination of the World), a didactic poem in thirty-seven short sections. The work is still very popular. It was translated into English by Tobias Goodman.
BÉDARIEUX, a town of southern France, in the department of Hérault, on the Orb, 27 m. N.N.W. of Béziers by rail. Pop. (1906) 5594. The town has a 16th-century church, a board of trade arbitration, a chamber of arts and manufactures, a communal college and a school of drawing. Bédarieux was at one time a notable manufacturing centre. Its cloth-weaving industry, carried on under a special royal privilege from the end of the 17th century to the Revolution, employed in 1789 as many as 5000 workmen, while some thousand more were occupied in wool and cotton spinning, &c. In spite of the introduction of modern machinery from England, the industries of the place declined, mainly owing to the loss of the trade with the Levant; but of late years they have somewhat revived, owing partly to the opening up of coal mines in the neighbourhood. Besides cloth factories and wool-spinning mills, there are now numerous tanneries and leather-dressing works. There is some trade in timber, wool and agricultural produce.
BEDDGELERT (“Gelert’s grave”), a village in Carnarvonshire, North Wales, at the foot of Snowdon. The tradition of Gelert, Llewelyn’s hound, being buried there is old in Wales; and common to it and India is the legend of a dog (or ichneumon) saving a child from a beast of prey (or reptile), and being killed by the child’s father under the delusion that the animal had slain the infant. The English poet, W.R. Spencer, has versified the tale of Llewelyn, king of Wales, leaving Gelert and the baby prince at home, returning to find Gelert stained with the blood of a wolf, and killing the hound because he thought his child was slain. Sir W. Jones, the Welsh philologist and linguist, gives the Indian equivalent (Lord Teignmouth’s Life of Jones, ed. Rev. S.C. Wilkes, editor’s supplement). A Brahmin, leaving home, left his daughter in charge of an ichneumon, which he had long cherished. A black snake came up and was killed by the ichneumon, mistakenly killed, in its turn, by the Brahmin on his coming back. Another version is the medieval romance in The Seven Wise Masters of Rome. In the edition printed by Wynkyn de Worde it is told by “the first master”—a knight had one son, a greyhound and a falcon; the knight went to a tourney, a snake attacked the son, the falcon roused the hound, which killed the serpent, lay down by the cradle, and was killed by the knight, who discovered his error, like Llewelyn, and similarly repented (Villon Society, British Museum reprint, by Gomme and Wheatley).
On the west of Beddgelert is Moel Hebog (Bare-hill of the falcon), a hiding-place of Owen Glendower. Here, in 1784, was found a brass Roman shield. Near is the famous Aberglaslyn Pass, dividing Carnarvon and Merioneth. In the centre is Cadair Rhys Goch o’r Eryri, a rock named as the chair of Rhys Goch, a bard contemporary with Glendower (died traditionally, 1429). Not far hence passed the Roman road from Uriconium to Segontium (see [Carnarvon]).
BEDDOES, THOMAS (1760-1808), English physician and scientific writer, was born at Shiffnall in Shropshire on the 13th of April 1760. After being educated at Bridgnorth grammar school and at Pembroke College, Oxford, he studied medicine in London under John Sheldon (1752-1808). In 1784 he published a translation of L. Spallanzani’s Dissertations on Natural History, and in 1785 produced a translation, with original notes, of T.O. Bergman’s Essays on Elective Attractions. He took his degree of doctor of medicine at Oxford in 1786, and, after visiting Paris, where he became acquainted with Lavoisier, was appointed reader in chemistry at Oxford University in 1788. His lectures attracted large and appreciative audiences; but his sympathy with the French Revolution exciting a clamour against him, he resigned his readership in 1792. In the following year he published Observations on the Nature of Demonstrative Evidence, and the History of Isaac Jenkins, a story which powerfully exhibits the evils of drunkenness, and of which 40,000 copies are reported to have been sold. About the same time he began to work at his project for the establishment of a “Pneumatic Institution” for treating disease by the inhalation of different gases. In this he was assisted by Richard Lovell Edgeworth, whose daughter, Anna, became his wife in 1794. In 1798 the institution was established at Clifton, its first superintendent being Humphry Davy, who investigated the properties of nitrous oxide in its laboratory. The original aim of the institution was gradually abandoned; it became an ordinary sick-hospital, and was relinquished by its projector in the year before his death, which occurred on the 24th of December 1808. Beddoes was a man of great powers and wide acquirements, which he directed to noble and philanthropic purposes. He strove to effect social good by popularizing medical knowledge, a work for which his vivid imagination and glowing eloquence eminently fitted him. Besides the writings mentioned above, he was the author of Political Pamphlets (1795-1797), a popular Essay on Consumption (1799), which won the admiration of Kant, an Essay on Fever (1807), and Hygeia, or Essays Moral and Medical (1807). He also edited John Brown’s Elements of Medicine (1795), and Contributions to Physical and Medical Knowledge, principally from the West of England (1799).
A life of Beddoes by Dr John E. Stock was published in 1810.