nflammation, by
the application of mustard, of various kinds of fly (see CANTHARIDES)
and of other vesicatories. Similar small swellings, filled with fluid or
air, on plants and on the surface of steel or paint, &c., are also
called "blisters."

BLIZZARD (origin probably onomatopoeic, cf. "blast," "bluster"), a
furious wind driving fine particles of choking, blinding snow whirling
in icy clouds. The conditions to which the name was originally given
occur with the northerly winds in rear of the cyclones crossing the
eastern states of America during winter.

BLOCK, MARK ELIEZER (c. 1723-1799), German naturalist, was born at
Ansbach, of poor Jewish parents, about 1723. After taking his degree as
doctor at Frankfort-on-Oder he established himself as a physician at
Berlin. His first scientific work of importance was an essay on
intestinal worms, which gained a prize from the Academy of Copenhagen,
but he is best known by his important work on fishes (see ICHTHYOLOGY).
Bloch was fifty-six when he began to write on ichthyological subjects.
To begin at his time of life a work in which he intended not only to
give full descriptions of the species known to him from specimens or
drawings, but also to illustrate each species in a style truly
magnificent for his time, was an undertaking the execution of which most
men would have despaired of. Yet he accomplished not only this task, but
even more than he at first contemplated. He died at Carlsbad on the 6th
of August 1799.

BLOCK, MAURICE (1816-1901), French statistician, was born in Berlin of
Jewish parents on the 18th of February 1816. He studied at Bonn and
Giessen, but settled in Paris, becoming naturalized there. In 1844 he
entered the French ministry of agriculture, becoming in 1852 one of the
heads of the statistical department. He retired in 1862, and thenceforth
devoted himself entirely to statistical studies, which have gained for
him a wide reputation. He was elected a member of the Academie des
Sciences Morales et Politiques in 1880. He died in Paris on the 9th of
January 1901. His principal works are: _Dictionnaire de l'administration
francaise_ (1856); _Statistique de la France_ (1860); _Dictionnaire
general de la politique_ (1862); _L'Europe polilique et sociale_ (1869);
_Traite theorique et pratique de statistique_ (1878); Les Progres de
l'economie politique depuis Adam Smith_ (1890); he also edited from 1856
_L'Annuaire de l'economie politique et