BOULAY DE LA MEURTHE, ANTOINE JACQUES CLAUDE JOSEPH, Comte (1761-1840), French politician and magistrate, son of an agricultural labourer, was born at Chamousey (Vosges) on the 19th of February 1761. Called to the bar at Nancy in 1783, he presently went to Paris, where he rapidly acquired a reputation as a lawyer and a speaker. He supported the revolutionary cause in Lorraine, and fought at Valmy (1792) and Wissembourg (1793) in the republican army. But his moderate principles brought suspicion on him, and during the Terror he had to go into hiding. He represented La Meurthe in the Council of Five Hundred, of which he was twice president, but his views developed steadily in the conservative direction. Fearing a possible renewal of the Terror, he became an active member of the plot for the overthrow of the Directory in November 1799. He was rewarded by the presidency of the legislative commission formed by Napoleon to draw up the new constitution; and as president of the legislative section of the council of state he examined and revised the draft of the civil code. In eight years of hard work as director of a special land commission he settled the titles of land acquired by the French nation at the Revolution, and placed on an unassailable basis the rights of the proprietors who had bought this land from the government. He received the grand cross of the Legion of Honour and the title of count, was a member of Napoleon’s privy council, but was never in high favour at court. After Waterloo he tried to obtain the recognition of Napoleon II. He was placed under surveillance at Nancy, and later at Halberstadt and Frankfort-on-Main. He was allowed to return to France in 1819, but took no further active part in politics, although he presented himself unsuccessfully for parliamentary election in 1824 and 1827. He died in Paris on the 4th of February 1840. He published two books on English history—Essai sur les causes qui, en 1649, amenèrent en Angleterre l’établissement de la république (Paris, 1799), and Tableau politique des regnes de Charles II et Jacques II, derniers rois de la maison de Stuart (The Hague, 1818)—which contained much indirect criticism of the Directory and the Restoration governments. He devoted the last years of his life to writing his memoirs, which, with the exception of a fragment on the Théorie constitutionnelle de Sieyès (1836), remained unpublished.
His elder son, Comte Henri Georges Boulay de la Meurthe (1797-1858), was a constant Bonapartist, and after the election of Louis Napoleon to the presidency, was named (January 1849) vice-president of the republic. He zealously promoted popular education, and became in 1842 president of the society for elementary instruction.
BOULDER, a city and the county-seat of Boulder county, Colorado, U.S.A., about 30 m. N.W. of Denver. Pop. (1890) 3330; (1900) 6150 (693 foreign-born); (1910) 9539. It is served by the Union Pacific, the Colorado & Southern, and the Denver, Boulder & Western railways; the last connects with the neighbouring mining camps, and affords fine views of mountain scenery. Boulder lies about 5300 ft. above the sea on Middle Boulder Creek, a branch of the St Vrain river about 30 m. from its confluence with the Platte, and has a beautiful situation in the valley at the foot of the mountains. The state university of Colorado, established at Boulder by an act of 1861, was opened in 1877; it includes a college of liberal arts, school of medicine (1883), school of law (1892), college of engineering (1893), graduate school, college of commerce (1906), college of education (1908), and a summer school (1904), and has a library of about 42,000 volumes. There are a fine park of 2840 acres, the property of the city, and three beautiful cañons near Boulder. At the southern limits, in a beautiful situation 400 ft. above the city, are the grounds of an annual summer school, the Colorado Chautauqua. The climate is beneficial for those afflicted with bronchial and pulmonary troubles; the average mean annual temperature for eleven years ending with 1907 was 51° F. There are medicinal springs in the vicinity. The water-works are owned and operated by the city, the water being obtained from lakes at the foot of the Arapahoe Peak glacier in the Snowy Range, 20 m. from the city. The surrounding country is irrigated, and successfully combines agriculture and mining. There are ore sampling works and brick-making establishments. Oil and natural gas abound in the vicinity; there are oil refineries in the city; and in Boulder county, especially at Nederland, 18 m. south-west, and at Eldora, about 22 m. south-west of the city, has been obtained since 1900 most of the tungsten mined in the United States; the output in 1907 was valued at about $520,000. The first settlement near the site of Boulder was made in the autumn of 1858. Placer gold was discovered on an affluent of Boulder Creek in January 1859. The town was laid out and organized in February 1859, and a city charter was secured in 1871 and another in 1882.
BOULDER (short for “boulder-stone,” of uncertain origin; cf. Swed. bullersten, a large stone which causes a noise of rippling water in a stream, from bullra, to make a loud noise), a large stone, weathered or water-worn; especially a geological term for a large mass of rock transported to a distance from the formation to which it belongs. Similarly, in mining, a mass of ore found at a distance from the lode.
BOULDER CLAY, in geology, a deposit of clay, often full of boulders, which is formed in and beneath glaciers and ice-sheets wherever they are found, but is in a special sense the typical deposit of the Glacial Period in northern Europe and America. Boulder clay is variously known as “till” or “ground moraine” (Ger. Blocklehme, Geschiebsmergel or Grundmoräne; Fr. argile à blocaux, moraine profonde; Swed. Krosstenslera). It is usually a stiff, tough clay devoid of stratification; though some varieties are distinctly laminated. Occasionally, within the boulder clay, there are irregular lenticular masses of more or less stratified sand, gravel or loam. As the boulder clay is the result of the abrasion (direct or indirect) of the older rocks over which the ice has travelled, it takes its colour from them; thus, in Britain, over Triassic and Old Red Sandstone areas the clay is red, over Carboniferous rocks it is often black, over Silurian rock it may be buff or grey, and where the ice has passed over chalk the clay may be quite white and chalky (chalky boulder clay). Much boulder clay is of a bluish-grey colour where unexposed, but it becomes brown upon being weathered.
The boulders are held within the clay in an irregular manner, and they vary in size from mere pellets up to masses many tons in weight. Usually they are somewhat oblong, and often they possess a flat side or “sole”; they may be angular, sub-angular, or well rounded, and, if they are hard rocks, they frequently bear grooves and scratches caused by contact with other rocks while held firmly in the moving ice. Like the clay in which they are borne, the boulders belong to districts over which the ice has travelled; in some regions they are mainly limestones or sandstones; in others they are granite, basalts, gneisses, &c.; indeed, they may consist of any hard rock. By the nature of the contained boulders it is often possible to trace the path along which a vanished ice-sheet moved; thus in the Glacial drift of the east coast of England many Scandinavian rocks can be recognized.
With the exception of foraminifera which have been found in the boulder clay of widely separated regions, fossils are practically unknown; but in some maritime districts marine shells have been incorporated with the clay. See [Glacial Period]; and [Glacier].