BENCH-MARK, a surveyor’s mark cut in stone or some durable material, to indicate a point in a line of levels for the determination of altitudes over a given district. The name is taken from the “angle-iron” which is inserted in the horizontal incision as a “bench” or support for the levelling staff. The mark of the “broad-arrow” is generally incised with the bench-mark so that the horizontal bar passes through its apex.
BENCH TABLE (Fr. banc; Ital. sedile; Ger. Bank), the stone seat which runs round the walls of large churches, and sometimes round the piers; it very generally is placed in the porches.
BEND, (1) (From Old Eng. bendan), a bending or curvature, as in “the bend of a river,” or technically the ribs or “wales” of a ship. (2) (From Old Eng. bindan, to bind), a nautical term for a knot, the “cable bend,” the “fisherman’s bend.” (3) (From the Old Fr. bende, a ribbon), a term of heraldry, signifying a diagonal band or stripe across a shield from the dexter chief to the sinister base; also in tanning, the half of a hide from which the thinner parts have been trimmed away, “bend-leather” being the thickest and best sole-leather.
BENDA, the name of a family of German musicians, of whom the most important is Georg (d. 1795), who was a pupil of his elder brother Franz (1709-1786), Concertmeister in Berlin. Georg Benda was a famous clavier player and oboist, but his chief interest for modern musical history lies in his melodramas. Being a far more solid musician than Rousseau he earns the title of the musical pioneer of that art-form (i.e. the accompaniment of spoken words by illustrative music) in a sense which cannot be claimed for Rousseau’s earlier Pygmalion. Benda’s first melodrama, Ariadne auf Naxos, was written in 1774 after his return from a visit to Italy. He was a voluminous composer, whose works (instrumental and dramatic) were enthusiastically taken up by the aristocracy in the time of Mozart. Mozart’s imagination was much fired by Benda’s new vehicle for dramatic expression, and in 1778 he wrote to his father with the greatest enthusiasm about a project for composing a duodrama on the model of Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Medea, both of which he considered excellent and always carried about with him. He concluded at the time that that was the way the problems of operatic recitative should be solved, or rather shelved, but the only specimen he has himself produced is the wonderful melodrama in his unfinished operetta, Zaide, written in 1780.
BENDER (more correctly Bendery), a town of Russia, in the government of Bessarabia, on the right bank of the Dniester, 37 m. by rail S.E. of Kishinev. It possesses a tobacco factory, candle-works and brick-kilns, and is an important river port, vessels discharging here their cargoes of corn, wine, wool, cattle, flour and tallow, to be conveyed by land to Odessa and to Yassy in Rumania. Timber also is floated down the Dniester. The citadel was dismantled in 1897. The town had in 1867 a population of 24,443, and in 1900 of 33,741, the greater proportion being Jews. As early as the 12th century the Genoese had a settlement on the site of Bender. In 1709 Charles XII., after the defeat of Poltava, collected his forces here in a camp which they called New Stockholm, and continued there till 1713. Bender was taken by the Russians in 1770, in 1789 and in 1806, but it was not held permanently by Russia till 1812.