HILL (O. Eng. hyll; cf. Low Ger. hull, Mid. Dutch hul, allied to Lat. celsus, high, collis, hill, &c.), a natural elevation of the earth’s surface. The term is now usually confined to elevations lower than a mountain, but formerly was used for all such elevations, high or low.
HILLAH, a town of Asiatic Turkey, in the pashalik of Bagdad, 60 m. S. of the city of Bagdad, in 32° 2′ 35″ N., 44° 48′ 40½″ E., formerly the capital of a sanjak and the residence of a mutasserif, who in 1893 was transferred to Diwanieh. It is situated on both banks of the Euphrates, the two parts of the town being connected by a floating bridge, 450 ft. in length, in the midst of a very fertile district. The estimated population, which includes a large number of Jews, varies from 6000 to 12,000. The town has suffered much from the periodical breaking of the Hindieh dam and the consequent deflection of the waters of the Euphrates to the westward, as a result of which at times the Euphrates at this point has been entirely dry. This deflection of water has also seriously interfered with the palm groves, the cultivation of which constitutes a large part of the industry of the surrounding country along the river. The bazaars of Hillah are relatively large and well supplied. Many of the houses in the town are built of brick, not a few bearing an inscription of Nebuchadrezzar, obtained from the ruins of Babylon, which lie less than an hour away to the north.
Bibliography.—C. J. Rich, Babylon and Persepolis (1839); J. R. Peters, Nippur (1857); H. Rassam, Asshur and the Land of Nimrod (1897); H. V. Geere, By Nile and Euphrates (1904).
(J. P. Pe.)
HILLARD, GEORGE STILLMAN (1808-1879), American lawyer and author, was born at Machias, Maine, on the 22nd of September 1808. After graduating at Harvard College in 1828, he taught in the Round Hill School at Northampton, Massachusetts. He graduated at the Harvard Law School in 1832, and in 1833 he was admitted to the bar in Boston, where he entered into partnership with Charles Sumner. He was a member of the state House of Representatives in 1836, of the state Senate in 1850, and of the state constitutional convention of 1853, and in 1866-70 was United States district attorney for Massachusetts. He devoted a large portion of his time to literature. He became a member of the editorial staff of the Christian Register, a Unitarian weekly, in 1833; in 1834 he became editor of The American Jurist (1829-1843), a legal journal to which Sumner, Simon Greenleaf and Theron Metcalf contributed; and from 1856 to 1861 he was an associate editor of the Boston Courier. His publications include an edition of Edmund Spenser’s works (in 5 vols., 1839); Selections from the Writings of Walter Savage Landor (1856); Six Months in Italy (2 vols., 1853); Life and Campaigns of George B. McClellan (1864); a part of the Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor (1876); besides a series of school readers and many articles in periodicals and encyclopaedias. He died in Boston on the 21st of January 1879.
HILLEBRAND, KARL (1829-1884), German author, was born at Giessen on the 17th of September 1829, his father Joseph Hillebrand (1788-1871) being a literary historian and writer on philosophic subjects. Karl Hillebrand became involved, as a student in Heidelberg, in the Baden revolutionary movement, and was imprisoned in Rastatt. He succeeded in escaping and lived for a time in Strassburg, Paris—where for several months he was Heine’s secretary—and Bordeaux. He continued his studies, and after obtaining the doctor’s degree at the Sorbonne, he was appointed teacher of German in the École militaire at St Cyr, and shortly afterwards, professor of foreign literatures at Douai. On the outbreak of the Franco-German War he resigned his professorship and acted for a time as correspondent to The Times in Italy. He then settled in Florence, where he died on the 19th of October 1884. Hillebrand wrote with facility and elegance in French, English and Italian, besides his own language. His essays, collected under the title Zeiten, Völker und Menschen (Berlin, 1874-1885), show clear discernment, a finely balanced cosmopolitan judgment and grace of style. He undertook to write the Geschichte Frankreichs von der Thronbesteigung Ludwig Philipps bis zum Fall Napoleons III., but only two volumes were completed (to 1848) (2nd ed., 1881-1882). In French he published Des conditions de la bonne comédie (1863), La Prusse contemporaine (1867), Études italiennes (1868), and a translation of O. Müller’s Griechische Literaturgeschichte (3rd ed., 1883). In English he published his Royal Institution Lectures on German Thought during the Last Two Hundred Years (1880). He also edited a collection of essays dealing with Italy, under the title Italia (4 vols., Leipzig, 1824-1877).
See H. Homberger, Karl Hillebrand (Berlin, 1884).