Joseph Barsi

* Janó-Lehota, 23 February 1810 – †  Budapest, 18 February 1893 / publicist, statistician, philosophical writer, corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1870) ; ; His father, József Neumann, was a schoolmaster of Silesian origin. He started secondary school at the gymnasium in Körmöcbánya, then continued in Selmecbánya and graduated in Esztergom. He studied philosophy at the seminary in Nitra and theology at the seminary in Pest. In 1832 he became a chaplain in Dobroná, near Zólyom. In 1837 he became a camp chaplain in Milan, and from 1840 he ministered in Korpona, Koós and Bicske. In January 1849, the Austrians captured him in Buda, and because of his revolutionary poems and political writings published in the Pesti Hírlap, he was first sentenced to death, then the sentence was commuted to 20 years of imprisonment. He was imprisoned in Olmütz until 1856, when he was pardoned, returned to Hungary and lived with his younger brother in Privigyé for a while. In 1862, he converted to the Protestant faith and became a teacher at the Pest Protestant Gymnasium, where he taught German and Latin. From 1867 to 1888, he was an employee of the Statistical Office. He went blind in 1891. Several of his works, mainly on public education and statistics, prose translations, and a large number of articles in contemporary newspapers and magazines were published. He was fond of presenting foreign reform ideas in Hungarian (e.g.: The current state of the field economy. Written by Justus Liebig, 1862). In his work Journey to an Unknown Station, 1849–1856 (1890), he recalled the memories of his imprisonment in Olomouc. ; ; His Main Works: ; Statistics of Public Education in Hungary 1864/65-1867/68., 1868, ; The Population Movement, 1869, ; Statistics of Public Education, 1869, ; Higher Educational Institutions and Secondary Educational Institutions of Hungary 1870-72, 1874.