See Watt, Dictionary of the Economic Products of India.
HEMSTERHUIS, FRANÇOIS (1721-1790), Dutch writer on aesthetics and moral philosophy, son of Tiberius Hemsterhuis, was born at Franeker in Holland, on the 27th of December 1721. He was educated at the university of Leiden, where he studied Plato. Failing to obtain a professorship, he entered the service of the state, and for many years acted as secretary to the state council of the United Provinces. He died at the Hague on the 7th of July 1790. Through his philosophical writings he became acquainted with many distinguished persons—Goethe, Herder, Princess Amalia of Gallitzin, and especially Jacobi, with whom he had much in common. Both were idealists, and their works suffer from a similar lack of arrangement, although distinguished by elegance of form and refined sentiment. His most valuable contributions are in the department of aesthetics or the general analysis of feeling. His philosophy has been characterized as Socratic in content and Platonic in form. Its foundation was the desire for self-knowledge and truth, untrammelled by the rigid bonds of any particular system.
His most important works, all of which were written in French, are: Lettre sur la sculpture (1769), in which occurs the well-known definition of the Beautiful as “that which gives us the greatest number of ideas in the shortest space of time”; its continuation, Lettre sur les désirs (1770); Lettre sur l’homme et ses rapports (1772), in which the “moral organ” and the theory of knowledge are discussed; Sopyle (1778), a dialogue on the relation between the soul and the body, and also an attack on materialism; Aristée (1779), the “theodicy” of Hemsterhuis, discussing the existence of God and his relation to man; Simon (1787), on the four faculties of the soul, which are the will, the imagination, the moral principle (which is both passive and active); Alexis (1787), an attempt to prove that there are three golden ages, the last being the life beyond the grave; Lettre sur l’athéisme (1787).
The best collected edition of his works is by P. S. Meijboom (1846-1850); see also S. A. Gronemann, F. Hemsterhuis, de Nederlandische Wijsgeer (Utrecht, 1867); E. Grucker, François Hemsterhuis, sa vie et ses œuvres (Paris, 1866); E. Meyer, Der Philosoph Franz Hemsterhuis (Breslau, 1893), with bibliographical notice.
HEMSTERHUIS, TIBERIUS (1685-1766), Dutch philologist and critic, was born on the 9th of January 1685 at Groningen in Holland. His father, a learned physician, gave him so good an early education that, when he entered the university of his native town in his fifteenth year, he speedily proved himself to be the best student of mathematics. After a year or two at Groningen, he was attracted to the university of Leiden by the fame of Perizonius; and while there he was entrusted with the duty of arranging the manuscripts in the library. Though he accepted an appointment as professor of mathematics and philosophy at Amsterdam in his twentieth year, he had already directed his attention to the study of the ancient languages. In 1706 he completed the edition of Pollux’s Onomasticon begun by Lederlin; but the praise he received from his countrymen was more than counterbalanced by two letters of criticism from Bentley, which mortified him so keenly that for two months he refused to open a Greek book. In 1717 Hemsterhuis was appointed professor of Greek at Franeker, but he did not enter on his duties there till 1720. In 1738 he became professor of national history also. Two years afterwards he was called to teach the same subjects at Leiden, where he died on the 7th of April 1766. Hemsterhuis was the founder of a laborious and useful Dutch school of criticism, which had famous disciples in Valckenaer, Lennep and Ruhnken.
His chief writings are the following: Luciani colloquia et Timon (1708); Aristophanis Plutus (1744); Notae, &c., ad Xenophontem Ephesium in the Miscellanea critica of Amsterdam, vols. iii. and iv.; Observationes ad Chrysostomi homilias; Orationes (1784); a Latin translation of the Birds of Aristophanes, in Küster’s edition; notes to Bernard’s Thomas Magister, to Alberti’s Hesychius, to Ernesti’s Callimachus and to Burmann’s Propertius. See Elogium T. Hemsterhusii (with Bentley’s letters) by Ruhnken (1789), and Supplementa annotationis ad elogium T. Hemsterhusii, &c. (Leiden, 1874); also J. E. Sandys’ Hist. Class. Scholarship, ii. (1908).
HEMY, CHARLES NAPIER (1841- ), British painter, born at Newcastle-on-Tyne, was trained in the Newcastle school of art, in the Antwerp academy and in the studio of Baron Leys. He has produced some figure subjects and landscapes, but is best known by his admirable marine paintings. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1898, associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1890 and member in 1897. Two of his paintings, “Pilchards” (1897) and “London River” (1904), are in the National Gallery of British Art.