BOWZYBEUS, hou'zi-?its. One of the hest characters in The Shepherd's Week, a series of parodies on the artificial pastoral poetry of his time, by John Gay (1714).
BOX, Ituxus (Lat. buxus, front Gk. sliEos, py.ros). A genus of plants of the natural order Euphorbiacete; evergreen shrubs or small trees, With Opposite leaves, entire at the margins, and with greenish. inconspieuous flowers in little axillary clusters, the male and female flowers distinct, hot on the same plant. The most im portant species is the common box (Busus semperrirens), which grows wild in the south of Europe, and in some parts of Asia, attaining a height of twenty or more feet; its leaves are oval, generally from half to three-quarters of an Melt in length, smooth and shining, of a deep green color, and a compact habit of growth. There are several cultivated varieties distin guished by differently variegated leaves—gold edged. silver-edged, etc. Dwarf box grows only to a height of two or three feet. and is very com monly used to form borders for garden-plots. being kept down by clipping to a height of a few inches. The box bears clipping remarkably well.
and it was much used in formal gardens for this purpose. The wood of the box is heavy, of a beautiful, pale-yellow color, remarkably hard and strong, of a fine, regular, and compact tex ture. capable of a beautiful polish, and not liable to be worm-eaten. It is much valued for the purpose of the turner and the wood-carver; is preferred to every other kind of wood for the manufacture of flutes, flageolets, and other wind instruments, as well as of mathematical instru ments, and is unrivaled for wood-engraving. (See Woon-Ema:AviNG.) Spain, Portugal, Circassia, and Georgia send into the market large quanti ties of axwood. The Minorca box, or Bale aric box balearira) a native of Minorca. Sardinia. Corsica, Turkey, etc.. is a larger tree than the common box. The wood is of a bright yellow, and inferior to the true boxwood. hut is exported in large quantities from Constantinople. The earliest known fossil forms of Buxus have been found in the Pliocene deposits of France. For illustration, see BEEcu.