ement and petroleum refineries. The timber industry in all its
branches, with a speciality for the manufacture of the wooden bottles
largely used by the peasantry in Hungary and in the Balkan states, as
well as the dairy industry, and ham-curing are also fully developed. A
peculiarity of Brasso, which constitutes a survival of the old methods
of trade with the Balkan states, is the number of money-changers who ply
their trade at small movable tables in the market-place and in the open
street. Brasso is the most populous town of Transylvania, and its
population is composed in about equal numbers of Germans, Magyars and
Rumanians. The town, especially on market days, presents an animated and
picturesque aspect. Here are seen Germans, Szeklers, Magyars, Rumanians,
Armenians and Gipsies, each of them wearing their distinctive national
costume, and talking and bargaining in their own special idiom.

Amongst the places of interest round Brasso is the watering-place
Zaizon, 15 m. to the east, with ferruginous and iodine waters; while
about 17 m. to the south-west lies the pretty Rumanian village of
Zernest, where in 1690 the Austrian general Heussler was defeated and
taken prisoner by Imre (Emerich) Tokoly, the usurper of the
Transylvanian throne.

Brasso was founded by the Teutonic Order in 1211, and soon became a
flourishing town. Through the activity of Honterus it played a leading
part in the introduction of the Reformation in Transylvania in the 16th
century. The town was almost completely destroyed by the big fire of
1689. During the revolution of 1848-1849 it was besieged by the
Hungarians under General Bern from March to July 1849, and several
engagements between the Austrian and the Hungarian troops took place in
its neighbourhood.

BRATHWAIT, RICHARD (1588-1673), English poet, son of Thomas Brathwait,
was born in 1588 at his father's manor of Burneshead, near Kendal,
Westmorland. He entered Oriel College, Oxford, in 1604, and remained
there for some years, pursuing the study of poetry and Roman history. He
removed to Cambridge to study law and afterwards to London to the Inns
of Court. Thomas Brathwait died in 1610, and the son went down to live
on the estate he inherited from his father. In 1617 he married Frances
Lawson of Nesham, near Darlington. On the death of his elder brother,
Sir Thomas Brathwait, in 1618, Richard became the head of the family,
and an important personage in the county, being deputy-li