HODGKINSON, EATON (1789-1861), English engineer, the son of a farmer, was born at Anderton near Northwich, Cheshire, on the 26th of February 1789. After attending school at Northwich, he began to help his widowed mother on the farm, but to escape from that uncongenial occupation he persuaded her in 1811 to remove to Manchester and start a pawnbroking business. There he made the acquaintance of John Dalton, and began those inquiries into the strength of materials which formed the work of his life. He was associated with Sir William Fairbairn in an important series of experiments on cast iron, and his help was sought by Robert Stephenson in regard to the forms and dimensions of the tubes for the Britannia bridge. A paper which he communicated to the Royal Society on “Experimental Researches on the Strength of Pillars of Cast Iron and other Materials,” in 1840 gained him a Royal medal in 1841, and he was also elected a fellow. In 1847 he was appointed professor of the mechanical principles of engineering in University College, London, and at the same time he was employed as a member of the Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the application of iron to railway structures. In 1848 he was chosen president of the Manchester Philosophical Society, of which he had been a member since 1826, and to which, both previously and subsequently, he contributed many of the more important results of his discoveries. For several years he took an active part in the discussions of the Institution of Civil Engineers, of which he was elected an honorary member in 1851. He died at Eaglesfield House, near Manchester, on the 18th of June 1861.
HODGSON, BRIAN HOUGHTON (1800-1894), English administrator, ethnologist and naturalist, was born at Lower Beech, Prestbury, Cheshire, on the 1st of February 1800. His father, Brian Hodgson, came of a family of country gentlemen, and his mother was a daughter of William Houghton of Manchester. In 1816 he obtained an East Indian writership. After passing through the usual course at Haileybury, he went out to India in 1818, and after a brief service at Kumaon as assistant-commissioner was in 1820 appointed assistant to the Resident at Katmandu, the capital of Nepal. In 1823 he obtained an under-secretaryship in the foreign department at Calcutta, but his health failed, and in 1824 he returned to Nepal, to which the whole of his life, whether in or out of India, may be said to have been thenceforth given. He devoted himself particularly to the collection of Sanskrit MSS. relating to Buddhism, and hardly less so to the natural history and antiquities of the country, and by 1839 had contributed eighty-nine papers to the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. His investigations of the ethnology of the aboriginal tribes were especially important. In 1833 he became Resident in Nepal, and passed many stormy years in conflict with the cruel and faithless court to which he was accredited. He succeeded, nevertheless, in concluding a satisfactory treaty in 1839; but in 1842 his policy, which involved an imperious attitude towards the native government, was upset by the interference of Lord Ellenborough, but just arrived in India and not unnaturally anxious to avoid trouble in Nepal during the conflict in Afghanistan. Hodgson took upon himself to disobey his instructions, a breach of discipline justified to his own mind by his superior knowledge of the situation, but which the governor-general could hardly be expected to overlook. He was, nevertheless, continued in office for a time, but was recalled in 1843, and resigned the service. In 1845 he returned to India and settled at Darjeeling, where he devoted himself entirely to his favourite pursuits, becoming the greatest authority on the Buddhist religion and on the flora of the Himalayas. It was he who early suggested the recruiting of Gurkhas for the Indian army, and who influenced Sir Jung Bahadur to lend his assistance to the British during the mutiny in 1857. In 1858 he returned to England, and lived successively in Cheshire and Gloucestershire, occupied with his studies to the last. He died at his seat at Alderley Grange in the Cotswold Hills on the 23rd of May 1894. No man has done so much to throw light on Buddhism as it exists in Nepal, and his collections of Sanskrit manuscripts, presented to the East India Office, and of natural history, presented to the British Museum, are unique as gatherings from a single country. He wrote altogether 184 philological and ethnological and 127 scientific papers, as well as some valuable pamphlets on native education, in which he took great interest. His principal work, Illustrations of the Literature and Religion of Buddhists (1841), was republished with the most important of his other writings in 1872-1880.
His life was written by Sir W. W. Hunter in 1896.
HÓDMEZÖ-VÁSÁRHELY, a town of Hungary, in the county of Csongrád, 135 m. S.E. of Budapest by rail. Pop. (1900) 60,824 of which about two-thirds are Protestants. The town, situated on Lake Hód, not far from the right bank of the Tisza, has a modern aspect. The soil of the surrounding country, of which 383 sq. m. belong to the municipality, is exceedingly fertile, the chief products being wheat, mangcorn, barley, oats, millet, maize and various descriptions of fruit, especially melons. Extensive vineyards, yielding large quantities of both white and red grapes, skirt the town, and the horned cattle and horses of Hódmezö-Vásárhely have a good reputation; sheep and pigs are also extensively reared. The commune is protected from inundations of the Tisza by an enormous dike, but the town, nevertheless, sometimes suffers considerable damage during the spring floods.
HODOGRAPH (Gr. ὁδός, a way, and γράφειν, to write), a curve of which the radius vector is proportional to the velocity of a moving particle. It appears to have been used by James Bradley, but for its practical development we are mainly indebted to Sir William Rowan Hamilton, who published an account of it in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 1846. If a point be in motion in any orbit and with any velocity, and if, at each instant, a line be drawn from a fixed point parallel and equal to the velocity of the moving point at that instant, the extremities of these lines will lie on a curve called the hodograph. Let PP1P2 be the path of the moving point, and let OT, OT1, OT2, be drawn from the fixed point O parallel and equal to the velocities at P, P1, P2 respectively, then the locus of T is the hodograph of the orbits described by P (see figure). From this definition we have the following important fundamental property which belongs to all hodographs, viz. that at any point the tangent to the hodograph is parallel to the direction, and the velocity in the hodograph equal to the magnitude of the resultant acceleration at the corresponding point of the orbit. This will be evident if we consider that, since radii vectores of the hodograph represent velocities in the orbit, the elementary arc between two consecutive radii vectores of the hodograph represents the velocity which must be compounded with the velocity of the moving point at the beginning of any short interval of time to get the velocity at the end of that interval, that is to say, represents the change of velocity for that interval. Hence the elementary arc divided by the element of time is the rate of change of velocity of the moving-point, or in other words, the velocity in the hodograph is the acceleration in the orbit.