BUSSU PALM, Manicaria saceifera, a South American palm, growing in the tidal swamps of the Amazon, the only known species of its genus. The stein is only 10 to 15 ft. high, curved or crooked, and deeply ringed. The leaves are simple or undivided, and are the largest of the kind produced by any known palm, being often 30 ft. long, and 4 or 5 ft. wide. They are simply branched, drooping, and the fruit is of an olive color, large, hard, and three-seeded. The leaves make excellent and durable thatch, being split down the midrib, and laid obliquely on the rafters, so that the furrows formed by the veins lie in a nearly vertical direction, and serve as so many little gutters to carry off the water. The spathe, taken off entire, is used by the Indians as a bag, or • I.
the larger ones are stretched out to make caps.
BUST (Ital. busto; Fr. buste), in plastic art, the name given to a sculptural representa tion of the head and upper part of time human body. The earliest busts formed by the ancients were probably those heads of Mercury which, when elevated on tall square blocks of stone, received the name of hermie (q.v.). These hermie were afterwards fre quently surmounted by representations of other divinities, such as Minerva; and as they gradually assumed more and more of the human form, they passed into busts, which were made of marble, bronze, etc. But it was not till very late in the history of art that busts, in the sense of portraits of individuals, 'came to be used, either in Greece or Rome: and it is remarkable that neither Greeks nor Romans designated them by any special name, for the Latin word bustum had a quite different meaning. It was not till Alexander's time that busts were used for purposes of portraiture in Greece; and most of the Roman busts which we possess belong to the period of the emperors. During the learned period of Greece, which commenced with Aristotle, portraits of men of letters formed an important department of art; and it became an object with the founders of museums and libraries to procure complete sets of them. The artists of this period exhib
ited remarkable ability in expressing the characters of the individuals whom they repre sented. In this way we have well-anthenticated busts of Socrates, Plato, Zeno the Stoic, and other philosophers; of poets and orators, such as Isocrates and Demosthenes; of Athenian statesmen and distinguished women. In Rome, representations of the kings, and persons of distinction belonging to the earlier period, were probably made from the imagines majorum which every patrician preserved in his atrium, and which were com monly made of wax. These, no doubt, were often merely fanciful representations, partly taken, it may be, from the more prominent features which belonged to the existing members of the family. The earliest well-authenticated Roman B. which we possess, is probably that of Scipio Africanus the elder. During the empire, busts for the most part were accurate portraits, and still furnish us with the means of becoming acquainted with the features, not only of the emperors themselves, but of most other persons of dis tinction. Busts of poets and men of letters are far less frequently met with amongst the Romans than amongst the Greeks. The chief marks of the authenticity in these busts are the names which very frequently are inscribed on them, and, where these are not found, the comparison which we are enabled to make between them and coins. Private collectors of busts were not unknown in antiquity, as, for example, M. Terentius Varro and Pomponius Atticus. In our own time, king Louis I. of Bavaria made, in his cele brated Valhalla, the most remarkable collection of busts which perhaps anywhere exists. The first complete collection of engravings from antique busts was made by Fulvius Ursinius in his Plustrium Imagines (Rome, 1569. and Antwerp, 1606). Recently, we have been indebted to Visconti's Iconographie Grecque (Paris, 1811) and Iconographie Romaine (Paris, 1817) for a similar collection.