The Hague wood has been described as the city’s finest ornament. It is composed chiefly of oaks and alders and magnificent avenues of gigantic beech-trees. Together with the Haarlem wood it is thought to be a remnant of the immense forest which once extended along the coast. At the end of one of the avenues which penetrates into it from the town is the large summer club-house of the Witte Societeit, under whose auspices concerts are given here in summer. Farther into the wood are some pretty little lakes, and the famous royal villa called the Huis ten Bosch, or “house in the wood.” This villa was built by Pieter Post for the Princess Amelia of Solms, in memory of her husband the stadtholder, Frederick Henry of Orange (d. 1647), and wings were added to it by Prince William IV. in 1748. The chief room is the Orange Saloon, an octagonal hall 50 ft. high, covered with paintings by Dutch and Flemish artists, chiefly of incidents in the life of Prince Frederick. In this room the International Peace Conference had its sittings in the summer of 1899. The collections in the Chinese and Japanese rooms, and the grisailles in the dining-room painted by Jacobus de Wit (1695-1754), are also noteworthy.
The history of the Hague is in some respects singular. In the 13th century it was no more than a hunting-lodge of the counts of Holland, and though Count Floris V. (b. 1254-1296) made it his residence and it thus became the seat of the supreme court of justice of Holland and the centre of the administration, and from the time of William of Orange onward the meeting-place of the states-general, it only received the status of a town, from King Louis Bonaparte, early in the 19th century.
In the latter part of the 17th and the first half of the 18th century the Hague was the centre of European diplomacy. Among the many treaties and conventions signed here may be mentioned the treaty of the Triple Alliance (January 23, 1688) between England, Sweden and the Netherlands; the concert of the Hague (March 31, 1710) between the Emperor, England and Holland, for the maintenance of the neutrality of the Swedish provinces in Germany during the war of the northern powers against Sweden; the Triple Alliance (January 4, 1717) between France, England and Holland for the guarantee of the treaty of Utrecht; the treaty of peace (Feb. 17, 1717) between Spain, Savoy and Austria, by which the first-named acceded to the principles of the Triple Alliance; the treaty of peace between Holland and France (May 16, 1795); the first “Hague Convention,” the outcome of the “peace conference” assembled on the initiative of the emperor Nicholas II. of Russia (July 27, 1899), and the series of conventions, the results of the second peace conference (June 15-October 18, 1907). The International court of arbitration or Hague Tribunal was established in 1899 (see [Europe]: History; [Arbitration, International]). The Palace of Peace designed to be completed in 1913 as the seat of the tribunal, on the Scheveningen avenue, is by a French architect, L. M. Cordonnier, and A. Carnegie contributed £300,000 towards its cost.
HAHN, AUGUST (1792-1863), German Protestant theologian, was born on the 27th of March 1792 at Grossosterhausen near Eisleben, and studied theology at the university of Leipzig. In 1819 he was nominated professor extraordinarius of theology and pastor of Altstadt in Königsberg, and in 1820 received a superintendency in that city. In 1822 he became professor ordinarius. In 1826 he removed as professor of theology to Leipzig, where, hitherto distinguished only as editor of Bardesanes, Marcion (Marcion’s Evangelium in seiner ursprünglichen Gestalt, 1823), and Ephraem Syrus, and the joint editor of a Syrische Chrestomathie (1824), he came into great prominence as the author of a treatise, De rationalismi qui dicitur vera indole et qua cum naturalismo contineatur ratione (1827), and also of an Offene Erklärung an die Evangelische Kirche zunächst in Sachsen u. Preussen (1827), in which, as a member of the school of E. W. Hengstenberg, he endeavoured to convince the rationalists that it was their duty voluntarily and at once to withdraw from the national church. In 1833 Hahn’s pamphlet against K. G. Bretschneider (Über die Lage des Christenthums in unserer Zeit, 1832) having attracted the notice of Friedrich Wilhelm III., he was called to Breslau as theological professor and consistorial councillor, and in 1843 became “general superintendent” of the province of Silesia. He died at Breslau on the 13th of May 1863. Though uncompromising in his “supra-naturalism,” he did not altogether satisfy the men of his own school by his own doctrinal system. The first edition of his Lehrbuch des christlichen Glaubens (1828) was freely characterized as lacking in consistency and as detracting from the strength of the old positions in many important points. Many of these defects, however, he is considered to have remedied in his second edition (1857). Among his other works are his edition of the Hebrew Bible (1833), his Bibliothek der Symbole und Glaubensregeln der apostolisch-katholischen Kirche (1842; 2nd ed. 1877) and Predigten (1852).
His eldest son, Heinrich August Hahn (1821-1861), after studying theology at Breslau and Berlin, became successively Privatdozent at Breslau (1845), professor ad interim (1846) at Königsberg on the death of Heinrich Hävernick, professor extraordinarius (1851) and professor ordinarius (1860) at Greifswald. Amongst his published works were a commentary on the Book of Job (1850), a translation of the Song of Songs (1852), an exposition of Isaiah xl.-lxvi. (1857) and a commentary on the Book of Ecclesiastes (1860).
See the articles in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie, and the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.
HAHNEMANN, SAMUEL CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH (1755-1843), German physician and founder of “homoeopathy,” was born at Meissen in Saxony on the 10th of April 1755. He was educated at the “elector’s school” of Meissen, and studied medicine at Leipzig and Vienna, taking the degree of M.D. at Erlangen in 1779. After practising in various places, he settled in Dresden in 1784, and thence removed to Leipzig in 1789. In the following year, while translating W. Cullen’s Materia medica into German, he was struck by the fact that the symptoms produced by quinine on the healthy body were similar to those of the disordered states it was used to cure. He had previously felt dissatisfied with the state of the science of medicine, and this observation led him to assert the truth of the “law of similars,” similia similibus curantur or curentur—i.e. diseases are cured (or should be treated) by those drugs which produce symptoms similar to them in the healthy. He promulgated his new principle in a paper published in 1796 in C. W. Hufeland’s Journal, and four years later, convinced that drugs in much smaller doses than were generally employed effectually exerted their curative powers, he advanced his doctrine of their potentization or dynamization. In 1810 he published his chief work, Organon der rationellen Heilkunde, containing an exposition of his system, which he called homoeopathy (q.v.), and in the following years appeared the six volumes of his Reine Arzneimittellehre, which detailed the symptoms produced by “proving” a large number of drugs, i.e. by systematically administering them to healthy subjects. In 1821 the hostility of established interests, and especially of the apothecaries, whose services were not required under his system, forced him to leave Leipzig, and at the invitation of the grand-duke of Anhalt-Cöthen he went to live at Cöthen. Fourteen years later he removed to Paris, where he practised with great success until his death on the 2nd of July 1843. Statues were erected to his memory at Leipzig in 1851 and at Cöthen in 1855. He also wrote, in addition to the works already mentioned, Fragmenta de viribus medicamentorum positivis (1805) and Die chronischen Krankheiten (1828-1830).
See the article [Homoeopathy]; also Albrecht, Hahnemann’s Leben und Werken (Leipzig, 1875); Bradford, Hahnemann’s Life and Letters (Philadelphia, 1895).