end of his life, and explains
his inability to accept the theory of unbroken descent with modification
when it was propounded by Charles Darwin and A. R. Wallace in 1858. The
influence of von Baer's discoveries has been far-reaching and abiding. Not
only was he the pioneer in that branch of biological science to which
Francis Balfour, gathering up the labours of many fellow-workers, gave
coherence in his _Comparative Embryology_ (1881), but the impetus to T. H.
Huxley's researches on the structure of the _medusae_ came from him
(_Life_, i. 163), and Herbert Spencer found in von Baer's "law of
development" the "law of all development" (_Essays_, i. 30). In 1834 von
Baer was appointed librarian of the Academy of Sciences of St Petersburg.
In 1835 he published his _Development of Fishes_, and as the result of
collection of all available information concerning the fauna and flora of
the Polar regions of the empire, he was appointed leader of an Arctic
expedition in 1837, The remainder of his active life was occupied in divers
fields of research, geological as well as biological, an outcome of the
latter being his fine monograph on the fishes of the Baltic and Caspian
Seas. One of the last works from his prolific pen was an interesting
autobiography published at the expense of the Esthonian nobles on the
celebration of the jubilee of his doctorate in 1864. Three years afterwards
he received the Copley medal. He died at Dorpat on the 28th of November
1876.

(E. CL.)

BAER, WILLIAM JACOB (1860- ), American painter, was born on the 29th of
January 1860 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He studied at Munich in 1880-1884. He had
much to do with the revival in America of the art of miniature-painting, to
which he turned in 1892, and was the first president of the Society of
Painters in Miniature, New York. Among his miniatures are "The Golden
Hour," "Daphne," "In Arcadia" and "Madonna with the Auburn Hair."

BAETYLUS (Gr. [Greek: baitulos, baitulion]), a word of Semitic origin (=
bethel) denoting a sacred stone, which was supposed to be endowed with
life. These fetish objects of worship were meteoric stones, which were
dedicated to the gods or revered as symbols of the gods themselves (Pliny,
_Nat. Hist._ xvii. 9; Photius, _Cod._ 242). [v.03 p.0192] In Greek
mythology the term was specially applied to the stone supposed to have been
swallowed by Cronus (who feared misfortune from his own children) in
mistake for his infant son Zeus, for who