(Dr Joseph), an English divine of excellent parts and learning, was born at Cherington in Gloucestershire, of which place his father was rector in 1579. He was the first person chosen to the professorship of poetry founded at Oxford by Dr Pilkhead; and published his lectures under the title of Praxis Poetica, in which he laid down excellent rules for every species of poetry in very elegant Latin. He showed afterwards, however, by his translation of Virgil, that a man may be able to direct who cannot execute, and may have the critic's judgment without the poet's fire. In the early part of his life Dr Trapp is said to have been chaplain to the father of the famous Lord Bolingbroke; he obtained the living of Christ church in Newgate Street, and St Leonard's, Foster-lane, London; and his very high-church principles probably obstructed his farther preferment. He published several occasional poems, a tragedy called Alcmanus, translated Milton's Paradise Lost into Latin verse, and died in 1747.

in mineralogy, a species of siliceous earth. It is described by Dr Kirwan as nearly the same with balsites: a dark grey or black stone, generally invested with a ferruginous crust, and crystallized in opake, triangular, or polyangular columns, is called balsites; that which is amorphous, or breaks in large, thick, square pieces, is called trapp. Their constituent principles, and relation to acids and fluxes, are exactly the same. The texture of this stone is either coarse, rough, and distinct, or fine and indiscernible. It is often reddish; it is always opake, and moulders by exposure to the air; some specimens give fire with steel very difficultly, though it is always very compa; sometimes it is sprinkled over Traveller's with a few minute shining particles: its specific gravity is 300.

When heated red-hot, and quenched in water, it becomes by degrees of a reddish brown colour: it melts per se in a strong heat into a compact slag. Borax also dissolves it in fusion, but mineral alkali not entirely.

According to Mr Bergman, 100 parts of the balsites contain 52 of siliceous earth, 15 of argill, 8 of calcareous, 2 of magnesia, and 25 of iron; and with this Mr Meyer very nearly agrees.

For a more complete account of this species of stone, see M Faujas de St Fond on the Nat. Hist. of Trapp.