BONZE, an Indian priest, who wears a chaplet of beads about his neck, and carries a staff, having a wooden bird at one end. The bonzes of China are the priests of the Fohists, or sects of Fohi ; and it is one of their established tenets, that there are rewards allotted for the righteous, and punishments for the wick ed, in the other world; and that there are various mansions, in which the souls of men will reside, according to their different degrees of merit. The number of bonzes in China is estimated at fifty thousand, and they are represented as idle, dissolute men.
1300K, a literary composition, designed to communicate something which the au thor has invented, experienced, or eel lected. to the public, and thence to Ns teP•ity ; being printed, bound in a volume, and published for that purpose.—The five books of Moses are doubtless the oldest books now extant ; and there aro none in profane history extant anterior to Ho mer's poems. A great variety of mate rials were formerly used in making books : plates of lead and copper, the bark of trees, bricks, stone, and wood, were among the first material-a employed to engrave such things upon, as men were desirous to transmit to posterity. Jo sephits speaks of two columns, the one of stone, the other of brick, on which the children of Seth wrote their inventions and astronomical discoveries : Porphyry makes mention of some pillars, preserved in Crete, on which the ceremonies prac tised by the Corybantes in their sacrifices, were recorded : Ilesiod's works were ori ginally written upon tables of lead, and deposited in the temple of the Muses, in Bceotia : the ten commandments, deliv ered to Moses, were written upon stone ; and Solon's laws upon wooden planks.
Tables of wood, box, and ivory, were com mon among the ancients: when of wood they were frequently covered with wax, that people might write on them with more ease, or blot out what they had written. The leaves of the palm-tree were afterwards used instead of wooden planks, and the finest and thinnest part of the hark of such trees, as the lime, the ash, the maple and the elm ; from hence comes the word fiber, which signifies the inner bark of the trees : and as these barks were rolled up, in order to be re moved with greater ease, these rolls were called ro/umen, a volume ; a name after wards given to the like rolls of paper or parchment. With regard to the use of books, it is indisputable that they make one of the chief instruments of acquiring knowledge ; they are the repositories of the law, and vehicles of learning of every kind ; our religion itself is founded on. books, and "without them, (says Bartho lin) God is silent, justice dormant, physic at a stand, philosophy lame, letters dumb, and all things involved in Cimmerian darkness." Yet, wills all the well-merited eulogies that have been bestowed on them, we cannot overlook the fact that many are frivolous, and some pernicious. It will therefore be well to bear in mind the opinion of the learned &hien, who says that the characteristics of a good book are solidity, perspicuity, and brev ity.