BOGRA, or Bagura, a town and district of British India, in the Rajshahi division of eastern Bengal and Assam. The town is situated on the right bank of the river Karatoya. Pop. (1901) 7094. The District of Bogra, which was first formed in 1821, lies west of the main channel of the Brahmaputra. It contains an area of 1359 sq. m. In 1901 the population (on a reduced area) was 854,533, showing an increase of 11% in the decade. The district stretches out in a level plain, intersected by numerous streams and dotted with patches of jungle. The Karatoya river flows from north to south, dividing it into two portions, possessing very distinct characteristics. The eastern tract consists of rich alluvial soil, well watered, and subject to fertilizing inundations, yielding heavy crops of coarse rice, oil-seeds and jute. The western portion of the district is high-lying and produces the finer qualities of rice. The principal rivers are formed by the different channels of the Brahmaputra, which river here bears the local names of the Konai, the Daokoba and the Jamuna, the last forming a portion of the eastern boundary of the district. Its bed is studded with alluvial islands. The Brahmaputra and its channels, together with three minor streams, the Bangali, Karatoya and Atrai, afford admirable facilities for commerce, and render every part of the district accessible to native cargo boats of large burden. The rivers swarm with fish. The former production of indigo is extinct, and the industry of silk-spinning is decaying. There is no town with as many as 10,000 inhabitants, trade being conducted at riverside marts. Nor are there any metalled roads. Several lines of railway (the Eastern Bengal, &c.), however, serve the district.
BOGUE, DAVID (1750-1825), British nonconformist divine, was born in the parish of Coldingham, Berwickshire. After a course of study in Edinburgh, he was licensed to preach by the Church of Scotland, but made his way to London (1721), where he taught in schools at Edmonton, Hampstead and Camberwell. He then settled as minister of the Congregational church at Gosport in Hampshire (1777), and to his pastoral duties added the charge of an institution for preparing men for the ministry. It was the age of the new-born missionary enterprise, and Bogue’s academy was in a very large measure the seed from which the London Missionary Society took its growth. Bogue himself would have gone to India in 1796 but for the opposition of the East India Company. He also had much to do with founding the British and Foreign Bible Society and the Religious Tract Society, and in conjunction with James Bennet, minister at Romsey, wrote a well-known History of Dissenters (3 vols., 1809). Another of his writings was an Essay on the Divine Authority of the New Testament. He died at Brighton on the 25th of October 1825.
BOGUS (of uncertain origin, possibly connected with the Fr. bagasse, sugar-cane refuse), a slang word, originally used in America of the apparatus employed in counterfeiting coins, and now generally of any sham or spurious transaction.
BOHEA (a word derived from the Wu-i hills in the Fuhkien province of China, b being substituted for W or V), a kind of black tea (q.v.), or, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, tea generally, as in Pope’s line, “So past her time ’twixt reading and bohea.” Later the name “bohea” has been applied to an inferior quality of tea grown late in the season.