Chapter BETEL to BEZOAR of B by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

BEWAURIS, adj. P.—H. be-waris, ‘without heir.’ Unclaimed, without heir or owner.

BEYPOOR, n.p. Properly Veppur, or Beppur, [derived from Malayal. veppu, ‘deposit,’ ur, ‘village,’ a place formed by the receding of the sea, which has been turned into the Skt. form Vayupura, ‘the town of the Wind-god’]. The terminal town of the Madras Railway on the Malabar coast. It stands north of the river; whilst the railway station is on the S. of the river—(see CHALIA). Tippoo Sahib tried to make a great port of Beypoor, and to call it Sultanpatnam. [It is one of the many places which have been suggested as the site of Ophir (Logan, Malabar, i. 246), and is probably the Belliporto of Tavernier, “where there was a fort which the Dutch had made with palms” (ed. Ball, i. 235).]

1572.—

“Chamará o Samorim mais gente nova;
Virão Reis de Bipur, e de Tanor…”

Camões, x. 14.

1727.—“About two Leagues to the Southward of Calecut, is a fine River called Bay-pore, capable to receive ships of 3 or 400 Tuns.”—A. Hamilton, i. 322.

BEZOAR, s. This word belongs, not to the A.-Indian colloquial, but to the language of old oriental trade and materia medica. The word is a corruption of the P. name of the thing, padzahr, ‘pellens venenum,’ or pazahr. The first form is given by Meninski as the etymology of the word, and this is accepted by Littré [and the N.E.D.]. The quotations of Littré from Ambrose Paré show that the word was used generically for ‘an antidote,’ and in this sense it is used habitually by Avicenna. No doubt the term came to us, with so many others, from Arab medical writers, so much studied in the Middle Ages, and this accounts for the b, as Arabic has no p, and writes bazahr. But its usual application was, and is, limited to certain hard concretions found in the bodies of animals, to which antidotal virtues were ascribed, and especially to one obtained from the stomach of a wild goat in the Persian province of Lar. Of this animal and the bezoar an account is given in Kaempfer’s Amoenitates Exoticae, pp. 398 seqq. The Bezoar was sometimes called Snake-Stone, and erroneously supposed to be found in the head of a snake. It may have been called so really because, as Ibn Baithar states, such a stone was laid upon the bite of a venomous creature (and was believed) to extract the poison. Moodeen Sheriff, in his Suppt. to the Indian Pharmacopœia, says there are various bezoars in use (in native mat. med.), distinguished according to the animal producing them, as a goat-, camel-, fish-, and snake-bezoar; the last quite distinct from Snake-Stone (q.v.).

A false Bezoar stone gave occasion for the establishment of one of the great distinctions in our Common Law, viz. between actions founded upon contract, and those founded upon wrongs: Chandelor v. Lopus was decided in 1604 (reported in 2. Croke, and in Smith’s Leading Cases). The head-note runs— “The defendant sold to the plaintiff a stone, which he affirmed to be a Bezoar stone, but which proved not to be so. No action lies against him, unless he either knew that it was not a Bezoar stone, or warranted it to be a Bezoar stone” (quoted by Gray, Pyrard de Laval, Hak. Soc. ii. 484).]

1516.—Barbosa writes pajar.

[1528.—“Near this city (Lara) in a small mountain are bred some animals of the size of a buck, in whose stomach grows a stone they call bazar.”—Tenreiro, ch. iii. p. 14.]

[1554.—Castanheda (I. ch. 46) calls the animal whence bezoar comes bagoldaf, which he considers an Indian word.]

c. 1580.—“…adeo ut ex solis Bezahar nonnulla vasa conflata viderim, maxime apud eos qui a venenis sibi cavere student.”—Prosper Alpinus, Pt. i. p. 56.

1599.—“Body o’ me, a shrewd mischance. Why, had you no unicorn’s horn, nor bezoar’s stone about you, ha?”—B. Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour, Act v. sc. 4.

[„ “Bezar sive bazar”; see quotation under MACE.]

1605.—The King of Bantam sends K. James I. “two beasar stones.”—Sainsbury, i. 143.

1610.—“The Persian calls it, par excellence, Pazahar, which is as much as to say ‘antidote’ or more strictly ‘remedy of poison or venom,’ from Zahar, which is the general name of any poison, and pá, ‘remedy’; and as the Arabic lacks the letter p, they replace it by b, or f, and so they say, instead of Pázahar, Bázahar, and we with a little additional corruption Bezar.”—P. Teixeira, Relaciones, &c., p. 157.

1613.—“.…elks, and great snakes, and apes of bazar stone, and every kind of game birds.”—Godinho de Eredia, 10v.

1617.—“…late at night I drunke a little bezas