We provide a method for constructing central idempotents in the Brauer algebra relating to the splitting of certain short exact sequences. We also determine some of the primitive central idempotents, and relate properties of the idempotents to known facts about the representation theory of the algebra.We will refer to these three cases as northern horizontal arcs, southern horizontal arcs and propagating lines respectively. This allows us to define the following subsets of J n : J n [ ] = A ∈ J n | A contains precisely components a i such that tp(a i ) = P , andIn other words J n [ ] can be thought of as the set of diagrams with precisely propagating lines, and J n ( ) as the set of diagrams with at most propagating lines.Multiplication in B n is defined by vertical concatenation of diagrams. Given A, B ∈ J n we compute AB by drawing A on top of B so that the southern nodes of A and the northern nodes Then a basis of B n over K is given byWe analogously define J n [ ] = {A | A ∈ J n [ ]}, J n ( ) = {A | A ∈ J n ( )}, and J n ( ) = B n J n ( )B n .Note that since all elements of J n [n] are generated by the σ i , we have J n [n] = J n [n].