Under British control Berar rapidly recovered its prosperity. Thousands of cultivators who had emigrated across the Wardha to the peshwa's dominions, in order to escape the ruinous fiscal system of the nizam's government, now returned; the American Civil War gave an immense stimulus to the cotton trade; the laying of a line of railway across the province provided yet further employment, and the people rapidly became prosperous and contented.
See _Imperial Gazetteer of India_ (Oxford, 1908), and authorities there quoted.
BÉRARD, JOSEPH FRÉDÉRIC (1789-1828), French physician and philosopher, was born at Montpellier. Educated at the medical school of that town, he afterwards went to Paris, where he was employed in connexion with the _Dictionnaire des sciences médicales_. He returned in 1816, and published a work, _Doctrine médicale de l'école de Montpellier_ (1819), which is indispensable to a proper understanding of the principles of the Vitalistic school. In 1823 he was called to a chair of medicine at Paris, which he held for three years; he was then nominated professor of hygiene at Montpellier. His health gave way under his labours, and he died in 1828. His most important book is his _Doctrines des rapports du physique et du moral_ (Paris, 1823). He held that consciousness or internal perception reveals to us the existence of an immaterial, thinking, feeling and willing subject, the self or soul. Alongside of this there is the vital force, the nutritive power, which uses the physical frame as its organ. The soul and the principle of life are in constant reciprocal action, and the first owes to the second, not the formation of its faculties, but the conditions under which they are evolved. He showed himself unable to understand the points of view of those whom he criticized, and yet his own theories, midway between vitalism and animism, are entirely destitute of originality.
To the _Esprit des doctrines médicales de Montpellier_, published posthumously (Paris, 1830), the editor, H. Pétiot, prefixed an account of his life and works; see also Damiron, _Phil. en France au XIX^e siècle_ (Paris, 1834); C.J. Tissot, _Anthropologie générale_ (1843).
BERAT (Slav. _Byelgorod_; Turk. _Arnaut-Beligradi_), the capital of a sanjak in the vilayet of Iannina, southern Albania, Turkey; on the river Ergene, Ergeni or Osum, a left-hand tributary of the Semeni. Pop. (1900) about 15,000. Berat is a fortified town, situated in a fertile valley, which produces wine, olive-oil, fruit and grain. It is the see of an Orthodox metropolitan, and the inhabitants, of whom two-thirds are Albanian and the remainder principally Greek, are equally divided in religion between Christianity and Islam.