Cold branding or branding with cold irons became in the 18th century the mode of nominally inflicting the punishment on prisoners of higher rank. “When Charles Moritz, a young German, visited England in 1782 he was much surprised at this custom, and in his diary mentioned the case of a clergyman who had fought a duel and killed his man in Hyde Park. Found guilty of manslaughter he was burnt in the hand, if that could be called burning which was done with a cold iron” (Markham’s Ancient Punishments of Northants, 1886). Such cases led to branding becoming obsolete, and it was abolished in 1829 except in the case of deserters from the army. These were marked with the letter D, not with hot irons but by tattooing with ink or gunpowder. Notoriously bad soldiers were also branded with BC (bad character). By the British Mutiny Act of 1858 it was enacted that the court-martial, in addition to any other penalty, may order deserters to be marked on the left side, 2 in. below the armpit, with the letter D, such letter to be not less than 1 in. long. In 1879 this was abolished.
See W. Andrews, Old Time Punishments (Hull, 1890); A.M. Earle, Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (London, 1896).
BRANDIS, CHRISTIAN AUGUST (1790-1867), German philologist and historian of philosophy, was born at Hildesheim and educated at Kiel University. In 1812 he graduated at Copenhagen, with a thesis Commentationes Eleaticae (a collection of fragments from Xenophanes, Parmenides and Melissus). For a time he studied at Göttingen, and in 1815 presented as his inaugural dissertation at Berlin his essay Von dem Begriff der Geschichte der Philosophie. In 1816 he refused an extraordinary professorship at Heidelberg in order to accompany B.G. Niebuhr to Italy as secretary to the Prussian embassy. Subsequently he assisted I. Bekker in the preparation of his edition of Aristotle. In 1821 he became professor of philosophy in the newly founded university of Bonn, and in 1823 published his Aristotelius et Theophrasti Metaphysica. With Boeckh and Niebuhr he edited the Rheinisches Museum, to which he contributed important articles on Socrates (1827, 1829). In 1836-1839 he was tutor to the young king Otho of Greece. His great work, the Handbuch der Geschichte der griechisch-röm. Philos. (1835-1866; republished in a smaller and more systematic form, Gesch. d. Entwickelungen d. griech. Philos., 1862-1866), is characterized by sound criticism. Brandis died on the 21st of July 1867.
See Trendelenburg, Zur Erinnerung an C. A. B. (Berlin, 1868).
BRANDON, a city and port of entry of Manitoba, Canada, on the Assiniboine river, and the Canadian Pacific and Canadian Northern railways, situated 132 m. W. of Winnipeg, 1184 ft. above the sea. Pop. (1891) 3778; (1907) 12,519. It is in one of the finest agricultural sections and contains a government experimental farm, grain elevators, saw and grist mills. It was first settled in 1881, and incorporated as a city in 1882.
BRANDON, a market town in the Stowmarket parliamentary division of Suffolk, England, on the Little Ouse or Brandon river, 86½ m. N.N.E. from London by the Ely-Norwich line of the Great Eastern railway. Pop. (1901) 2327. The church of St Peter is Early English with earlier portions; there is a free grammar school founded in 1646; and the town has some carrying trade by the Little Ouse in corn, coal and timber. Rabbit skins of fine texture are dressed and exported. Extensive deposits of flint are worked in the neighbourhood, and the work of the “flint-knappers” has had its counterpart here from the earliest eras of man. Close to Brandon, but in Norfolk across the river, at the village of Weeting, are the so-called Grimes’ Graves, which, long supposed to show the foundations of a British village, and probably so occupied, were proved by excavation to have been actually neolithic flint workings. The pits, though almost completely filled up (probably as they became exhausted), were sunk through the overlying chalk to the depth of 20 to 60 ft., and numbered 254 in all. Passages branched out from them, and among other remains picks of deer-horn were discovered, one actually bearing in the chalk which coated it the print of the workman’s hand.