Under British control Berar rapidly recovered its prosperity. Thousands of cultivators who had emigrated across the Wardha to the peshwa’s dominions, in order to escape the ruinous fiscal system of the nizam’s government, now returned; the American Civil War gave an immense stimulus to the cotton trade; the laying of a line of railway across the province provided yet further employment, and the people rapidly became prosperous and contented.
See Imperial Gazetteer of India (Oxford, 1908), and authorities there quoted.
BÉRARD, JOSEPH FRÉDÉRIC (1789-1828), French physician and philosopher, was born at Montpellier. Educated at the medical school of that town, he afterwards went to Paris, where he was employed in connexion with the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales. He returned in 1816, and published a work, Doctrine médicale de l’école de Montpellier (1819), which is indispensable to a proper understanding of the principles of the Vitalistic school. In 1823 he was called to a chair of medicine at Paris, which he held for three years; he was then nominated professor of hygiene at Montpellier. His health gave way under his labours, and he died in 1828. His most important book is his Doctrines des rapports du physique et du moral (Paris, 1823). He held that consciousness or internal perception reveals to us the existence of an immaterial, thinking, feeling and willing subject, the self or soul. Alongside of this there is the vital force, the nutritive power, which uses the physical frame as its organ. The soul and the principle of life are in constant reciprocal action, and the first owes to the second, not the formation of its faculties, but the conditions under which they are evolved. He showed himself unable to understand the points of view of those whom he criticized, and yet his own theories, midway between vitalism and animism, are entirely destitute of originality.
To the Esprit des doctrines médicales de Montpellier, published posthumously (Paris, 1830), the editor, H. Pétiot, prefixed an account of his life and works; see also Damiron, Phil. en France au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1834); C.J. Tissot, Anthropologie générale (1843).
BERAT (Slav. Byelgorod; Turk. Arnaut-Beligradi), the capital of a sanjak in the vilayet of Iannina, southern Albania, Turkey; on the river Ergene, Ergeni or Osum, a left-hand tributary of the Semeni. Pop. (1900) about 15,000. Berat is a fortified town, situated in a fertile valley, which produces wine, olive-oil, fruit and grain. It is the see of an Orthodox metropolitan, and the inhabitants, of whom two-thirds are Albanian and the remainder principally Greek, are equally divided in religion between Christianity and Islam.
BERAUN (Czech Beroun), a town of Bohemia, Austria, 27 m. S.W. of Prague by rail. Pop. (1900) 9693, mostly Czech. It is situated at the confluence of the Beraun with the Litawa river, and is the seat of important textile industry, sugar-refining, corn-milling and brewing. Lime-kilns and the manufacture of cement, and smelting and iron works are carried on in the environs. Beraun is a place of immemorial antiquity. It was originally called na Brodě (by the ford), and received the name of Bern, Berun or Verona in the 13th century, when it obtained the privileges of a city from the emperor Charles IV., who was specially attached to the place, calling it “Verona mea.” Under his patronage the town rapidly prospered. In 1421 Zizka stormed the town, which later on was retaken and devastated by the troops of Duke Leopold, bishop of Passau. During the Thirty Years’ War it was sacked by the Imperialists, the Saxons and the Swedes in turn; and in the first Silesian war the same fate befell it at the hands of the French and Bavarians.