BLOOD-MONEY, colloquially, the reward for betraying a criminal to justice. More strictly it is used of the money-penalty paid in old days by a murderer to the kinsfolk of his victim. These fines completely protected the offender from the vengeance of the injured family. The system was common among the Scandinavian and Teutonic races previous to the introduction of Christianity, and a scale of payments, graduated according to the heinousness of the crime, was fixed by laws, which further settled who could exact the blood-money, and who were entitled to share it. Homicide was not the only crime thus expiable: blood-money could be exacted for all crimes of violence. Some acts, such as killing any one in a church or while asleep, or within the precincts of the royal palace, were “bot-less”; and the death penalty was inflicted. Such a criminal was outlawed, and his enemies could kill him wherever they found him.
BLOODSTONE, the popular name of the mineral heliotrope, which is a variety of dark green chalcedony or plasma, with bright red spots, splashes and streaks. The green colour is due to a chloritic mineral; the red to haematite. Some coarse kinds are opaque, resembling in this respect jasper, and some writers have sought to restrict the name “bloodstone” to green jasper, with red markings, thus making heliotrope a translucent and bloodstone an opaque stone, but, though convenient, such a distinction is not generally recognized. A good deal of bloodstone comes from India, where it occurs in the Deccan traps, and is cut and polished at Cambay. The stone is used for seals, knife-handles and various trivial ornaments. Bloodstone is not very widely distributed, but is found in the basaltic rocks of the Isle of Rum in the west of Scotland, and in a few other localities. Haematite (Gr. αἷμα, blood), or native peroxide of iron, is also sometimes called “bloodstone.”
BLOOM (from A.S. blôma, a flower), the blossom of flowering plants, or the powdery film on the skin of fresh-picked fruit; hence applied to the surface of newly-minted coins or to a cloudy appearance on the varnish of painting due to moisture; also, in metallurgy, a term used of the rough billets of iron and steel, which have undergone a preliminary hammering or rolling, and are ready for further working.
BLOOMER, AMELIA JENKS (1818-1894), American dress-reformer and women’s rights advocate, was born at Homer, New York, on the 27th of May 1818. After her marriage in 1840 she established a periodical called The Lily, which had some success. In 1849 she took up the idea—previously originated by Mrs Elizabeth Smith Miller—of a reform in woman’s dress, and the wearing of a short skirt, with loose trousers, gathered round the ankles. The name of “bloomers” gradually became popularly attached to any divided-skirt or knickerbocker dress for women. Until her death on the 30th of December 1894 Mrs Bloomer took a prominent part in the temperance campaign and in that for woman’s suffrage.
BLOOMFIELD, MAURICE (1855- ), American Sanskrit scholar, was born on the 23rd of February 1855, in Bielitz, Austrian Silesia. He went to the United States in 1867, and ten years later graduated from Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina. He then studied Sanskrit at Yale, under W.D. Whitney, and at Johns Hopkins, to which university he returned as associate professor in 1881 after a stay of two years in Berlin and Leipzig, and soon afterwards was promoted professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology. His papers in the American Journal of Philology number a few in comparative linguistics, such as those on assimilation and adaptation in congeneric classes of words, and many valuable “Contributions to the Interpretation of the Vedas,” and he is best known as a student of the Vedas. He translated, for Max-Müller’s Sacred Books of the East, the Hymns of the Atharva-Veda (1897); contributed to the Bühler-Kielhorn Grundriss der indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde the section “The Atharva-Veda and the Gopatha Brahmana” (1899); was first to edit the Kauçika-Sutra (1890), and in 1907 published, in the Harvard Oriental series, A Vedic Concordance. In 1905 he published Cerberus, the Dog of Hades, a study in comparative mythology.