GERHARD, FRIEDRICH WILHELM EDUARD (1795-1867), German archaeologist, was born at Posen on the 29th of November 1795, and was educated at Breslau and Berlin. The reputation he acquired by his Lectiones Apollonianae (1816) led soon afterwards to his being appointed professor at the gymnasium of Posen. On resigning that office in 1819, on account of weakness of the eyes, he went in 1822 to Rome, where he remained for fifteen years. He contributed to Platner’s Beschreibung der Stadt Rom, then under the direction of Bunsen, and was one of the principal originators and during his residence in Italy director of the Instituto di corrispondenza archeologica, founded at Rome in 1828. Returning to Germany in 1837 he was appointed archaeologist at the Royal Museum of Berlin, and in 1844 was chosen a member of the Academy of Sciences, and a professor in the university. He died at Berlin on the 12th of May 1867.
Besides a large number of archaeological papers in periodicals, in the Annali of the Institute of Rome, and in the Transactions of the Berlin Academy, and several illustrated catalogues of Greek, Roman and other antiquities in the Berlin, Naples and Vatican Museums, Gerhard was the author of the following works: Antike Bildwerke (Stuttgart, 1827-1844); Auserlesene griech. Vasenbilder (1839-1858); Etruskische Spiegel (1839-1865); Hyperboreisch-röm. Studien (vol. i., 1833; vol. ii., 1852); Prodromus mytholog. Kunsterklärung (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1828); and Griech. Mythologie (1854-1855). His Gesammelte akademische Abhandlungen und kleine Schriften were published posthumously in 2 vols., Berlin, 1867.
GERHARD, JOHANN (1582-1637), Lutheran divine, was born in Quedlinburg on the 17th of October 1582. In his fifteenth year, during a dangerous illness, he came under the personal influence of Johann Arndt, author of Das wahre Christenthum, and resolved to study for the church. He entered the university of Wittenberg in 1599, and first studied philosophy. He also attended lectures in theology, but, a relative having persuaded him to change his subject, he studied medicine for two years. In 1603, however, he resumed his theological reading at Jena, and in the following year received a new impulse from J.W. Winckelmann (1551-1626) and Balthasar Mentzer (1565-1627) at Marburg. Having graduated and begun to give lectures at Jena in 1605, he in 1606 accepted the invitation of John Casimir, duke of Coburg, to the superintendency of Heldburg and mastership of the gymnasium; soon afterwards he became general superintendent of the duchy, in which capacity he was engaged in the practical work of ecclesiastical organization until 1616, when he became theological professor at Jena, where the remainder of his life was spent. Here, with Johann Major and Johann Himmel, he formed the “Trias Johannea.” Though still comparatively young, Gerhard had already come to be regarded as the greatest living theologian of Protestant Germany; in the numerous “disputations” of the period he was always protagonist, while on all public and domestic questions touching on religion or morals his advice was widely sought. It is recorded that during the course of his lifetime he had received repeated calls to almost every university in Germany (e.g. Giessen, Altdorf, Helmstädt, Jena, Wittenberg), as well as to Upsala in Sweden. He died in Jena on the 20th of August 1637.
His writings are numerous, alike in exegetical, polemical, dogmatic and practical theology. To the first category belong the Commentarius in harmoniam historiae evangelicae de passione Christi (1617), the Comment, super priorem D. Petri epistolam (1641), and also his commentaries on Genesis (1637) and on Deuteronomy (1658). Of a controversial character are the Confessio Catholica (1633-1637), an extensive work which seeks to prove the evangelical and catholic character of the doctrine of the Augsburg Confession from the writings of approved Roman Catholic authors; and the Loci communes theologici (1610-1622), his principal contribution to science, in which Lutheranism is expounded “nervose, solide, et copiose,” in fact with a fulness of learning, a force of logic and a minuteness of detail that had never before been approached. The Meditationes sacrae (1606), a work expressly devoted to the uses of Christian edification, has been frequently reprinted in Latin and has been translated into most of the European languages, including Greek. The English translation by R. Winterton (1631) has passed through at least nineteen editions. There is also an edition by W. Papillon in English blank verse (1801). His life, Vita Joh. Gerhardi, was published by E.R. Fischer in 1723, and by C.J. Böttcher, Das Leben Dr Johann Gerhards, in 1858. See also W. Gass, Geschichte der protestantischen Dogmatik (1854-1867), and the article in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.
GERHARDT, CHARLES FRÉDÉRIC (1816-1856), French chemist, was born at Strassburg on the 21st of August 1816. After attending the gymnasium at Strassburg and the polytechnic at Karlsruhe, he was sent to the school of commerce at Leipzig, where he studied chemistry under Otto Erdmann. Returning home in 1834 he entered his father’s white lead factory, but soon found that business was not to his liking, and after a sharp disagreement with his father enlisted in a cavalry regiment. In a few months military life became equally distasteful, and he purchased his discharge with the assistance of Liebig, with whom, after a short interval at Dresden, he went to study at Giessen in 1836. But his stay at Giessen was also short, and in 1837 he re-entered the factory. Again, however, he quarrelled with his father, and in 1838 went to Paris with introductions from Liebig. There he attended Jean Baptiste Dumas’ lectures and worked with Auguste Cahours (1813-1891) on essential oils, especially cumin, in Michel Eugéne Chevreul’s laboratory, while he earned a precarious living by teaching and making translations of some of Liebig’s writings. In 1841, by the influence of Dumas, he was charged with the duties of the chair of chemistry at the Montpellier faculty of sciences, becoming titular professor in 1844. In 1842 he annoyed his friends in Paris by the matter and manner of a paper on the classification of organic compounds, and in 1845 he and his opinions were the subject of an attack by Liebig, unjustifiable in its personalities but not altogether surprising in view of his wayward disregard of his patron’s advice. The two were reconciled in 1850, but his faculty for disagreeing with his friends did not make it easier for him to get another appointment after resigning the chair at Montpellier in 1851, especially as he was unwilling to go into the provinces. He obtained leave of absence from Montpellier in 1848 and from that year till 1855 resided in Paris. During that period he established an “École de chimie pratique” of which he had great hopes; but these were disappointed, and in 1855, after refusing the offer of a chair of chemistry at the new Zürich Polytechnic in 1854, he accepted the professorships of chemistry at the Faculty of Sciences and the École Polytechnique at Strassburg, where he died on the 19th of August in the following year. Although Gerhardt did some noteworthy experimental work—for instance, his preparation of acid anhydrides in 1852—his contributions to chemistry consist not so much in the discovery of new facts as in the introduction of new ideas that vitalized and organized an inert accumulation of old facts. In particular, with his fellow-worker Auguste Laurent (1807-1853), he did much to reform the methods of chemical formulation by insisting on the distinction between atoms, molecules and equivalents; and in his unitary system, directly opposed to the dualistic doctrines of Berzelius, he combined Dumas’ substitution theory with the old radicle theory and greatly extended the notion of types of structure. His chief works were Précis de chimie organique (1844-1845), and Traité de chimie organique (1853-1856).
See Charles Gerhardt, sa vie, son œuvre, sa correspondance, by his son, Charles Gerhardt, and E. Grimaux (Paris, 1900).
GERHARDT, PAUL (c. 1606-1676), German hymn-writer, was born of a good middle-class family at Gräfenhainichen, a small town on the railway between Halle and Wittenberg, in 1606 or 1607—some authorities, indeed, give the date March 12, 1607, but neither the year nor the day is accurately known. His education appears to have been retarded by the troubles of the period, the Thirty Years’ War having begun about the time he reached his twelfth year. After completing his studies for the church he is known to have lived for some years at Berlin as tutor in the family of an advocate named Berthold, whose daughter he subsequently married, on receiving his first ecclesiastical appointment at Mittelwald (a small town in the neighbourhood of Berlin) in 1651. In 1657 he accepted an invitation as “diaconus” to the Nicolaikirche of Berlin; but, in consequence of his uncompromising Lutheranism in refusing to accept the elector Frederick William’s “syncretistic” edict of 1664, he was deprived in 1666. Though absolved from submission and restored to office early in the following year, on the petition of the citizens, his conscience did not allow him to retain a post which, as it appeared to him, could only be held on condition of at least a tacit repudiation of the Formula Concordiae, and for upwards of a year he lived in Berlin without fixed employment. In 1668 he was appointed archdeacon of Lübben in the duchy of Saxe-Merseburg, where, after a somewhat sombre ministry of eight years, he died on the 7th of June 1676. Gerhardt is the greatest hymn-writer of Germany, if not indeed of Europe. Many of his best-known hymns were originally published in various church hymn-books, as for example in that for Brandenburg, which appeared in 1658; others first saw the light in Johann Crüger’s Geistliche Kirchenmelodien (1649) and Praxis pietatis melica (1656). The first complete set of them is the Geistliche Andachten, published in 1666-1667 by Ebeling, music director in Berlin. No hymn by Gerhardt of a later date than 1667 is known to exist.