BATHURST, a city of Bathurst county, New South Wales, Australia, 144 m. by rail W.N.W. of Sydney on the Great Western railway. Pop. (1901) 9223. It is situated on the south bank of the Macquarie river, at an elevation of 2153 ft., in a fertile undulating plain on the west side of the Blue Mountains. Bathurst has broad streets,, crossing one another at right angles, with a handsome park in the centre of the town, while many of the public buildings, specially the town hall, government buildings, and Anglican and Roman Catholic cathedrals, are noteworthy. Bathurst is the centre of the chief wheat-growing district of New South Wales, while gold, copper and silver are extensively mined in its vicinity. There are railway works, coach factories, tanneries, breweries, flour-mills and manufactures of boots and shoes and other commodities. The town was founded in 1815 by Governor Macquarie, taking its name from the 3rd Earl Bathurst, then secretary of state for the colonies, and it has been a municipality since 1862.
BATHVILLITE, a naturally occurring organic substance. It is an amorphous, opaque, and very friable material of fawn-brown colour, filling cavities in the torbanite or Boghead coal of Bathville, Scotland. It has a specific gravity of 1.01, and is insoluble in benzene.
BATHYBIUS (βαθύς, deep, and βίος, life), a slimy substance at one time supposed to exist in great masses in the depths of the ocean and to consist of undifferentiated protoplasm. Regarding it as an organism which represented the simplest form of life, Huxley about 1868 named it Bathybius Haeckelii. But investigations carried out in connexion with the “Challenger” expedition indicated that it was an artificial product, composed of a flocculent precipitate of gypsum thrown down from sea-water by alcohol, and the hypothesis of its organic character was abandoned by most biologists, Huxley included.
BATHYCLES, an Ionian sculptor of Magnesia, was commissioned by the Spartans to make a marble throne for the statue of Apollo at Amyclae, about 550 B.C. Pausanias (iii. 18) gives us a detailed description of this monument, which is of the greatest value to us, showing the character of Ionic art at the time. It was adorned with scenes from mythology in relief and supporting figures in the round.
For a reconstruction, see Furtwängler, Meisterwerke der griech Plastik, p. 706.