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THE
ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA
ELEVENTH EDITION
| FIRST | edition, | published in | three | volumes, | 1768-1771. |
| SECOND | ” | ” | ten | ” | 1777-1784. |
| THIRD | ” | ” | eighteen | ” | 1788-1797. |
| FOURTH | ” | ” | twenty | ” | 1801-1810. |
| FIFTH | ” | ” | twenty | ” | 1815-1817. |
| SIXTH | ” | ” | twenty | ” | 1823-1824. |
| SEVENTH | ” | ” | twenty-one | ” | 1830-1842. |
| EIGHTH | ” | ” | twenty-two | ” | 1853-1860. |
| NINTH | ” | ” | twenty-five | ” | 1875-1889. |
| TENTH | ” | ninth edition and eleven supplementary volumes, | 1902-1903. | ||
| ELEVENTH | ” | published in twenty-nine volumes, | 1910-1911. | ||
COPYRIGHT
in all countries subscribing to the
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by
THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS
of the
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
All rights reserved
THE
ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA
A
DICTIONARY
OF
ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE AND GENERAL
INFORMATION
ELEVENTH EDITION
VOLUME XIV
HUSBAND to ITALIC
New York
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
342 Madison Avenue
Copyright, in the United States of America, 1910,
by
The Encyclopædia Britannica Company.
VOLUME XIV SLICE I
Husband to Hydrolysis
Articles in This Slice
INITIALS USED IN VOLUME XII. TO IDENTIFY INDIVIDUAL
CONTRIBUTORS,[1] WITH THE HEADINGS OF THE
ARTICLES IN THIS VOLUME SO SIGNED.
| A. Ba. | Adolfo Bartoli (1833-1894). Formerly Professor of Literature at the Istituto di studi superiori at Florence. Author of Storia della letteratura Italiana; &c. | Italian Literature (in part). |
| A. Bo.* | Auguste Boudinhon, D.D., D.C.L. Professor of Canon Law at the Catholic University of Paris. Honorary Canon of Paris. Editor of the Canoniste contemporain. | Index Librorum Prohibitorum; Infallibility. |
| A. Cy. | Arthur Ernest Cowley, M.A., Litt.D. Sub-Librarian of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Fellow of Magdalen College. | Ibn Gabirol; Inscriptions: Semitic. |
| A. C. G. | Albert Charles Lewis Gotthilf Günther, M.A., M.D., Ph.D., F.R.S. Keeper of Zoological Department, British Museum, 1875-1895. Gold Medallist, Royal Society, 1878. Author of Catalogues of Colubrine Snakes, Batrachia Salientia, and Fishes in the British Museum; Reptiles of British India; Fishes of Zanzibar; Reports on the “Challenger” Fishes; &c. | Ichthyology (in part). |
| A. E. G.* | Rev. Alfred Ernest Garvie, M.A., D.D. Principal of New College, Hampstead. Member of the Board of Theology and the Board of Philosophy, London University. Author of Studies in the inner Life of Jesus; &c. | Immortality; Inspiration. |
| A. E. H. L. | Augustus Edward Hough Love, M.A., D.Sc., F.R.S. Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Oxford. Hon. Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford; formerly Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. Secretary to the London Mathematical Society. | Infinitesimal Calculus. |
| A. F. C. | Alexander Francis Chamberlain, A.M., Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. Member of American Antiquarian Society; Hon. Member of American Folk-lore Society. Author of The Child and Childhood in Folk Thought. | Indians, North American. |
| A. G. | Major Arthur George Frederick Griffiths (d. 1908). H.M. Inspector of Prisons, 1878-1896. Author of The Chronicles of Newgate; Secrets of the Prison House; &c. | Identification. |
| A. Ge. | Sir Archibald Geikie, LL.D. See the biographical article, [Geikie, Sir A.] | Hutton, James. |
| A. Go.* | Rev. Alexander Gordon, M.A. Lecturer on Church History in the University of Manchester. | Illuminati. |
| A. G. G. | Sir Alfred George Greenhill, M.A., F.R.S. Formerly Professor of Mathematics in the Ordnance College, Woolwich. Author of Differential and Integral Calculus with Applications; Hydrostatics; Notes on Dynamics; &c. | Hydromechanics. |
| A. H.-S. | Sir A. Houtum-Schindler, C.I.E. General in the Persian Army. Author of Eastern Persian Irak. | Isfahān (in part). |
| A. M. C. | Agnes Mary Clerke. See the biographical article, [Clerke, A. M.] | Huygens, Christiaan. |
| A. N. | Alfred Newton, F.R.S. See the biographical article, [Newton, Alfred]. | Ibis; Icterus. |
| A. So. | Albrecht Socin, Ph.D. (1844-1899). Formerly Professor of Semitic Philology in the Universities of Leipzig and Tübingen. Author of Arabische Grammatik; &c. | Irak-Arabi (in part). |
| A. S. Wo. | Arthur Smith Woodward, LL.D., F.R.S. Keeper of Geology, Natural History Museum, South Kensington. Secretary of the Geological Society, London. | Ichthyosaurus; Iguanodon. |
| A. W. H.* | Arthur William Holland. Formerly Scholar of St John’s College, Oxford. Bacon Scholar of Gray’s Inn, 1900. | Imperial Cities; Instrument of Government. |
| A. W. Po. | Alfred William Pollard, M.A. Assistant Keeper of Printed Books, British Museum. Fellow of King’s College, London. Hon. Secretary Bibliographical Society. Editor of Books about Books and Bibliographica. Joint-editor of The Library. Chief Editor of the “Globe” Chaucer. | Incunabula. |
| A. W. R. | Alexander Wood Renton, M.A., LL.B. Puisne judge of the Supreme Court of Ceylon. Editor of Encyclopaedia of the Laws of England. | Inebriety, Law of; Insanity: Law. |
| C. F. A. | Charles Francis Atkinson. Formerly Scholar of Queen’s College, Oxford. Captain, 1st City of London (Royal Fusiliers). Author of The Wilderness and Cold Harbour. | Infantry; Italian Wars. |
| C. G. | Colonel Charles Grant. Formerly Inspector of Military Education in India. | India: Costume. |
| C. H. Ha. | Carlton Huntley Hayes, A.M., Ph.D. Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, New York City. Member of the American Historical Association. | Innocent V., VIII. |
| C. Ll. M. | Conway Lloyd Morgan, LL.D., F.R.S. Professor of Psychology at the University of Bristol. Principal of University College, Bristol, 1887-1909. Author of Animal Life and Intelligence; Habit and Instinct. | Instinct; Intelligence in Animals. |
| C. R. B. | Charles Raymond Beazley, M.A., D.Litt., F.R.G.S., F.R.Hist.S. Professor of Modern History in the University of Birmingham. Formerly Fellow of Merton College, Oxford; and University Lecturer in the History of Geography. Lothian Prizeman, Oxford, 1889. Lowell Lecturer, Boston, 1908. Author of Henry the Navigator; The Dawn of Modern Geography; &c. | Ibn Batuta (in part); Idrisi. |
| C. S.* | Carlo Salvioni. Professor of Classical and Romance Languages, University of Milan. | Italian Language (in part). |
| C. T. L. | Charlton Thomas Lewis, Ph.D. (1834-1904). Formerly Lecturer on Life Insurance, Harvard and Columbia Universities, and on Principles of Insurance, Cornell University. Author of History of Germany; Essays; Addresses; &c. | Insurance (in part). |
| C. We. | Cecil Weatherly. Formerly Scholar of Queen’s College, Oxford. Barrister-at-Law, Inner Temple. | Infant Schools. |
| D. B. Ma. | Duncan Black MacDonald, M.A., D.D. Professor of Semitic Languages, Hartford Theological Seminary, U.S.A. Author of Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory; Selection from Ibn Khaldum; Religious Attitude and Life in Islam; &c. | Imām. |
| D. G. H. | David George Hogarth, M.A. Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. Fellow of the British Academy. Excavated at Paphos, 1888; Naucratis, 1899 and 1903; Ephesus, 1904-1905; Assiut, 1906-1907; Director, British School at Athens, 1897-1900; Director, Cretan Exploration Fund, 1899. | Ionia (in part); Isauria. |
| D. H. | David Hannay. Formerly British Vice-Consul at Barcelona. Author of Short History of Royal Navy, 1217-1688; Life of Emilio Castelar; &c. | Impressment. |
| D. F. T. | Donald Francis Tovey. Author of Essays in Musical Analysis; comprising The Classical Concerto, The Goldberg Variations, and analyses of many other classical works. | Instrumentation. |
| D. S. M. | Dugald Sutherland MacColl, M.A., LL.D. Keeper of the National Gallery of British Art (Tate Gallery). Lecturer on the History of Art, University College, London; Fellow of University College, London. Author of Nineteenth Century Art; &c. | Impressionism. |
| E. A. M. | Edward Alfred Minchin, M.A., F.Z.S. Professor of Protozoology in the University of London. Formerly Fellow of Merton College, Oxford; and Lecturer on Comparative Anatomy in the University of Oxford. Author of “Sponges and Sporozoa” in Lankester’s Treatise on Zoology; &c. | Hydromedusae; Hydrozoa. |
| E. Br. | Ernest Barker, M.A. Fellow and Lecturer in Modern History, St John’s College, Oxford. Formerly Fellow and Tutor of Merton College. Craven Scholar, 1895. | Imperial Chamber. |
| E. Bra. | Edwin Bramwell, M.B., F.R.C.P., F.R.S. (Edin.). Assistant Physician, Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh. | Hysteria (in part). |
| E. C. B. | Right Rev. Edward Cuthbert Butler, O.S.B., D.Litt. Abbot of Downside Abbey, Bath. Author of “The Lausiac History of Palladius” in Cambridge Texts and Studies. | Imitation of Christ. |
| E. C. Q. | Edmund Crosby Quiggin, M.A. Fellow, Lecturer in Modern History, and Monro Lecturer in Celtic, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. | Ireland: Early History. |
| E. F. S. | Edward Fairbrother Strange. Assistant Keeper, Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington. Member of Council, Japan Society. Author of numerous works on art subjects. Joint-editor of Bell’s “Cathedral” Series. | Illustration: Technical Developments. |
| E. F. S. D. | Lady Dilke. See the biographical article: [Dilke, Sir C. W., Bart.] | Ingres. |
| E. G. | Edmund Gosse, LL.D. See the biographical article, [Gosse, Edmund]. | Huygens, Sir Constantijn; Ibsen; Idyl. |
| E. Hü. | Emil Hübner. See the biographical article, [Hübner, Emil]. | Inscriptions: Latin (in part). |
| E. H. B. | Sir Edward Herbert Bunbury, Bart., M.A., F.R.G.S. (d. 1895). M.P. for Bury St Edmunds, 1847-1852. Author of a History of Ancient Geography; &c. | Ionia (in part). |
| E. H. M. | Ellis Hovell Minns, M.A. Lecturer and Assistant Librarian, and formerly Fellow, Pembroke College, Cambridge University Lecturer in Palaeography. | Iazyges; Issedones. |
| E. H. P. | Edward Henry Palmer, M.A. See the biographical article, [Palmer, E. H.] | Ibn Khaldun (in part). |
| E. K. | Edmund Knecht, Ph.D., M.Sc.Tech.(Manchester), F.I.C. Professor of Technological Chemistry, Manchester University. Head of Chemical Department, Municipal School of Technology, Manchester. Examiner in Dyeing, City and Guilds of London Institute. Author of A Manual of Dyeing; &c. Editor of Journal of the Society of Dyers and Colourists. | Indigo. |
| E. L. H. | The Right Rev. the Bishop of Lincoln (Edward Lee Hicks). Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Formerly Canon Residentiary of Manchester. Fellow and Tutor of Corpus Christi College. Author of Manual of Greek Historical Inscriptions; &c. | Inscriptions: Greek (in part). |
| Ed. M. | Eduard Meyer, Ph.D., D.Litt.(Oxon.), LL.D. Professor of Ancient History in the University of Berlin. Author of Geschichte des Alterthums; Geschichte des alten Aegyptens; Die Israeliten und ihre Nachbarstämme. | Hystaspes; Iran. |
| E. M. T. | Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, G.C.B., I.S.O., D.C.L., Litt.D., LL.D. Director and Principal Librarian, British Museum, 1898-1909. Sandars Reader in Bibliography, Cambridge, 1895-1896. Hon. Fellow of University College, Oxford. Correspondent of the Institute of France and of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences. Author of Handbook of Greek and Latin Palaeography. Editor of Chronicon Angliae. Joint-editor of publications of the Palaeographical Society, the New Palaeographical Society, and of the Facsimile of the Laurentian Sophocles. | Illuminated MSS. |
| E. O.* | Edmund Owen, M.B., F.R.C.S., LL.D., D.Sc. Consulting Surgeon to St Mary’s Hospital, London, and to the Children’s Hospital, Great Ormond Street; late Examiner in Surgery at the Universities of Cambridge, Durham and London. Author of A Manual of Anatomy for Senior Students. | Hydrocephalus. |
| F. A. F. | Frank Albert Fetter, Ph.D. Professor of Political Economy and Finance, Cornell University. Member of the State Board of Charities. Author of The Principles of Economics; &c. | Interstate Commerce. |
| F. C. C. | Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare, M.A., D.Th.(Giessen). Fellow of the British Academy. Formerly Fellow of University College, Oxford. Author of The Ancient Armenian Texts of Aristotle; Myth, Magic and Morals; &c. | Iconoclasts; Image Worship. |
| F. G. M. B. | Frederick George Meeson Beck, M.A. Fellow and Lecturer in Classics, Clare College, Cambridge. | Hwicce. |
| F. J. H. | Francis John Haverfield, M.A., LL.D., F.S.A. Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford. Fellow of Brasenose College. Fellow of the British Academy. Formerly Censor, Student, Tutor and Librarian of Christ Church, Oxford. Ford’s Lecturer, 1906-1907. Author of Monographs on Roman History, especially Roman Britain; &c. | Icknield Street. |
| F. Ll. G. | Francis Llewellyn Griffith, M.A., Ph.D., F.S.A. Reader in Egyptology, Oxford University. Editor of the Archaeological Survey and Archaeological Reports of the Egypt Exploration Fund. Fellow of Imperial German Archaeological Institute. | Hyksos; Isis. |
| F. P.* | Frederick Peterson, M.D., Ph.D. Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University. President of New York State Commission in Lunacy, 1902-1906. Author of Mental Diseases; &c. | Insanity: Hospital Treatment. |
| F. S. P. | Francis Samuel Philbrick, A.M., Ph.D. Formerly Fellow of Nebraska State University, and Scholar and Resident Fellow of Harvard University. Member of American Historical Association. | Independence, Declaration of. |
| F. Wa. | Francis Watt, M.A. Barrister-at-Law, Middle Temple. Author of Law’s Lumber Room. | Inn and Innkeeper. |
| F. W. R.* | Frederick William Rudler, I.S.O., F.G.S. Curator and Librarian of the Museum of Practical Geology, London, 1879-1902. President of the Geologists’ Association, 1887-1889. | Hyacinth; Iolite. |
| F. Y. P. | Frederick York Powell, D.C.L., LL.D. See the biographical article, [Powell, Frederick York]. | Iceland: History, and Ancient Literature. |
| G. A. B. | George A. Boulenger, F.R.S., D.Sc., Ph.D. In charge of the collections of Reptiles and Fishes, Department of Zoology, British Museum. Vice-President of the Zoological Society of London. | Ichthyology (in part). |
| G. A. Gr. | George Abraham Grierson, C.I.E., Ph.D., D.Litt.(Dublin). Member of the Indian Civil Service, 1873-1903. In charge of Linguistic Survey of India, 1898-1902. Gold Medallist, Royal Asiatic Society, 1909. Vice-President of the Royal Asiatic Society. Formerly Fellow of Calcutta University. Author of The Languages of India; &c. | Indo-Aryan Languages. |
| G. A. J. C. | Grenville Arthur James Cole. Director of the Geological Survey of Ireland. Professor of Geology, Royal College of Science for Ireland, Dublin. Author of Aids in Practical Geology; &c. | Ireland: Geology. |
| G. B. | Sir George Christopher Molesworth Birdwood, K.C.I.E. See the biographical article, [Birdwood, Sir G. C. M.] | Incense. |
| G. F. H.* | George Francis Hill, M.A. Assistant in Department of Coins and Medals, British Museum. Author of Sources for Greek History 478-431 B.C.; Handbook of Greek and Roman Coins; &c. | Inscriptions: Greek (in part). |
| G. G. Co. | George Gordon Coulton, M.A. Birkbeck Lecturer in Ecclesiastical History, Trinity College, Cambridge. Author of Medieval Studies; Chaucer and his England; &c. | Indulgence. |
| G. H. C. | George Herbert Carpenter, B.Sc. (Lond.). Professor of Zoology in the Royal College of Science, Dublin. Author of Insects: their Structure and Life. | Hymenoptera; Ichneumon-Fly; Insect. |
| G. I. A. | Graziadio I. Ascoli. Senator of the Kingdom of Italy. Professor of Comparative Grammar at the University of Milan. Author of Codice Islandese; &c. | Italian Language (in part). |
| G. J. | George Jamieson, C.M.G., M.A. Formerly Consul-General at Shanghai, and Consul and Judge of the Supreme Court, Shanghai. | Hwang Ho. |
| G. K. | Gustav Krüger, Ph.D. Professor of Church History in the University of Giessen. Author of Das Papstthum; &c. | Irenaeus. |
| G. P. M. | George Percival Mudge, A.R.C.S., F.Z.S. Lecturer on Biology, London Hospital Medical College, and London School of Medicine for Women, University of London. Author of A Text Book of Zoology; &c. | Incubation and Incubators. |
| G. W. K. | Very Rev. George William Kitchin, M.A., D.D., F.S.A. Dean of Durham, and Warden of the University of Durham. Hon. Student of Christ Church, Oxford. Fellow of King’s College, London. Dean of Winchester, 1883-1894. Author of A History of France; &c. | Hutten, Ulrich von. |
| G. W. T. | Rev. Griffithes Wheeler Thatcher, M.A., B.D. Warden of Camden College, Sydney, N.S.W. Formerly Tutor in Hebrew and Old Testament History at Mansfield College, Oxford. Author of a Commentary on Judges; An Arabic Grammar; &c. | Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi; Ibn ‘Arabi; Ibn Athīr; Ibn Duraid; Ibn Faradī; Ibn Fārid; Ibn Hazm; Ibn Hisham; Ibn Isḥaq; Ibn Jubair; Ibn Khaldūn (in part); Ibn Khallikān; Ibn Qutaiba; Ibn Ṣa‘d; Ibn Ṭufail; Ibn Usaibi‘a; Ibrahīm Al-Mauṣilī. |
| H. Ch. | Hugh Chisholm, M.A. Formerly Scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Editor the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; Co-editor of the 10th edition. | Iron Mask; Ismail. |
| H. C. R. | Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, Bart., K.C.B. See the biographical article, [Rawlinson, Sir Henry Creswicke]. | Isfahan: History. |
| H. L. H. | Harriet L. Hennessy, M.D., (Brux.) L.R.C.P.I., L.R.C.S.I. | Infancy; Intestinal Obstruction. |
| H. M. H. | Henry Marion Howe, A.M., LL.D. Professor of Metallurgy, Columbia University. Author of Metallurgy of Steel; &c. | Iron and Steel. |
| H. N. D. | Henry Newton Dickson, M.A., D.Sc., F.R.G.S. Professor of Geography, University College, Reading. Author of Elementary Meteorology; Papers on Oceanography; &c. | Indian Ocean. |
| H. O. | Hermann Oelsner, M.A., Ph.D. Taylorian Professor of the Romance Languages in University of Oxford. Member of Council of the Philological Society. Author of A History of Provencal Literature; &c. | Italian Literature (in part). |
| H. St. | Henry Sturt, M.A. Author of Idola Theatri; The Idea of a Free Church; and Personal Idealism. | Induction. |
| H. T. A. | Rev. Herbert Thomas Andrews. Professor of New Testament Exegesis, New College, London. Author of the “Commentary on Acts” in the Westminster New Testament; Handbook on the Apocryphal Books in the “Century Bible.” | Ignatius. |
| H. Y. | Sir Henry Yule, K.C.S.I., C.B. See the biographical article, [Yule, Sir Henry]. | Ibn Batuta (in part). |
| I. A. | Israel Abrahams, M.A. Reader in Talmudic and Rabbinic Literature in the University of Cambridge. Formerly President, Jewish Historical Society in England. Author of A Short History of Jewish Literature; Jewish Life in the Middle Ages; &c. | Ibn Tibbon; Immanuel Ben Solomon. |
| J. A. F. | John Ambrose Fleming, M.A., F.R.S., D.Sc. Pender Professor of Electrical Engineering in the University of London. Fellow of University College, London. Formerly Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Lecturer on Applied Mechanics in the University. Author of Magnets and Electric Currents. | Induction Coil. |
| J. Bs. | James Burgess, C.I.E., LL.D., F.R.S.(Edin.), F.R.G.S., Hon.A.R.I.B.A. Formerly Director General of Archaeological Survey of India. Author of Archaeological Survey of Western India. Editor of Fergusson’s History of Indian Architecture. | Indian Architecture. |
| J. B. T. | Sir John Batty Tuke, Kt., M.D., F.R.S.(Edin.), D.Sc., LL.D. President of the Neurological Society of the United Kingdom. Medical Director of New Saughton Hall Asylum, Edinburgh. M.P. for the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews, 1900-1910. | Hysteria (in part); Insanity: Medical. |
| J. C. H. | Right Rev. John Cuthbert Hedley, O.S.B., D.D. R.C. Bishop of Newport. Author of The Holy Eucharist; &c. | Immaculate Conception. |
| J. C. Van D. | John Charles Van Dyke. Professor of the History of Art, Rutgers College, New Brunswick, N.J. Formerly Editor of The Studio and Art Review. Author of Art for Art’s Sake; History of Painting; Old English Masters; &c. | Inness, George. |
| J. C. W. | James Claude Webster. Barrister-at-Law, Middle Temple. | Inns of Court. |
| J. D. B. | James David Bourchier, M.A., F.R.G.S. King’s College, Cambridge. Correspondent of The Times in South-Eastern Europe. Commander of the Orders of Prince Danilo of Montenegro and of the Saviour of Greece, and Officer of the Order of St Alexander of Bulgaria. | Ionian Islands. |
| J. F. F. | John Faithfull Fleet, C.I.E., Ph.D. Commissioner of Central and Southern Divisions of Bombay, 1891-1897. Author of Inscriptions of the Early Gupta Kings; &c. | Inscriptions: Indian. |
| J. F.-K. | James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, Litt.D., F.R.Hist.S. Gilmour Professor of Spanish Language and Literature, Liverpool University. Norman McColl Lecturer, Cambridge University. Fellow of the British Academy. Member of the Royal Spanish Academy. Knight Commander of the Order of Alphonso XII. Author of A History of Spanish Literature; &c. | Isla, J. F. de. |
| J. G. K. | John Graham Kerr, M.A., F.R.S. Regius Professor of Zoology in the University of Glasgow. Formerly Demonstrator in Animal Morphology in the University of Cambridge. Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, 1898-1904. Walsingham Medallist, 1898. Neill Prizeman, Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1904. | Ichthyology (in part). |
| J. G. Sc. | Sir James George Scott, K.C.I.E. Superintendent and Political Officer, Southern Shan States. Author of Burma, a Handbook; The Upper Burma Gazetteer; &c. | Irrawaddy. |
| J. H. A. H. | John Henry Arthur Hart, M.A. Fellow, Theological Lecturer and Librarian, St John’s College, Cambridge. | Hyrcanus. |
| J. H. Mu. | John Henry Muirhead, M.A., LL.D. Professor of Philosophy in the University of Birmingham. Author of Elements of Ethics; Philosophy and Life; &c. Editor of Library of Philosophy. | Idealism. |
| J. H. Be. | Very Rev. John Henry Bernard, M.A., D.D., D.C.L. Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. Archbishop King’s Professor of Divinity and formerly Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. Joint-editor of the Irish Liber Hymnorum; &c. | Ireland, Church of. |
| J. H. van’t H. | Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff, LL.D., D.Sc., D.M. See the biographical article [van’t Hoff, Jacobus Henricus]. | Isomerism. |
| J. L. M. | John Lynton Myres, M.A., F.S.A., F.R.G.S. Wykeham Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford. Formerly Gladstone Professor of Greek and Lecturer in Ancient Geography, University of Liverpool. Lecturer in Classical Archaeology in University of Oxford. | Iberians; Ionians. |
| J. Mn. | John Macpherson, M.D. Formerly Inspector-General of Hospitals, Bengal. | Insanity: Medical (in part). |
| J. M. A. de L. | Jean Marie Antoine de Lanessan. See the biographical article, [Lanessan, J. M. A. de.] | Indo-China, French (in part). |
| J. M. M. | John Malcolm Mitchell. Sometime Scholar of Queen’s College, Oxford. Lecturer in Classics, East London College (University of London). Joint-editor of Grote’s History of Greece. | Hyacinthus. |
| J. P. E. | Jean Paul Hippolyte Emmanuel Adhémar Esmein. Professor of Law in the University of Paris. Officer of the Legion of Honour. Member of the Institute of France. Author of Cours élémentaire d’histoire du droit français; &c. | Intendant. |
| J. P. Pe. | Rev. John Punnett Peters, Ph.D., D.D. Canon Residentiary, Cathedral of New York. Formerly Professor of Hebrew in the University of Pennsylvania. Director of the University Expedition to Babylonia, 1888-1895. Author of Nippur, or Explorations and Adventures on the Euphrates. | Irak-Arabi (in part). |
| J. S. Bl. | John Sutherland Black, M.A., LL.D. Assistant Editor of the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Joint-editor of the Encyclopaedia Biblica. | Huss, John. |
| J. S. Co. | James Sutherland Cotton, M.A. Editor of the Imperial Gazetteer of India. Hon. Secretary of the Egyptian Exploration Fund. Formerly Fellow and Lecturer of Queen’s College, Oxford. Author of India; &c. | India: Geography and Statistics (in part); History (in part); Indore. |
| J. S. F. | John Smith Flett, D.Sc., F.G.S. Petrographer to the Geological Survey. Formerly Lecturer on Petrology in Edinburgh University. Neill Medallist of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Bigsby Medallist of the Geological Society of London. | Itacolumite. |
| J. T. Be. | John Thomas Bealby. Joint-author of Stanford’s Europe. Formerly Editor of the Scottish Geographical Magazine. Translator of Sven Hedin’s Through Asia, Central Asia and Tibet; &c. | Irkutsk (in part). |
| J. V.* | Jules Viard. Archivist at the National Archives, Paris. Officer of Public Instruction. Author of La France sous Philippe VI. de Valois; &c. | Isabella of Bavaria. |
| Jno. W. | John Westlake, K.C., LL.D. Professor of International Law, Cambridge, 1888-1908. One of the Members for the United Kingdom of International Court of Arbitration under the Hague Convention, 1900-1906. Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn. Author of A Treatise on Private International Law, or the Conflict of Laws: Chapters on the Principles of International Law, pt. i. “Peace,” pt. ii. “War.” | International Law: Private. |
| L. | Count Lützow, Litt.D. (Oxon.), Ph.D. (Prague), F.R.G.S. Chamberlain of H.M. the Emperor of Austria, King of Bohemia. Hon. Member of the Royal Society of Literature. Member of the Bohemian Academy; &c. Author of Bohemia, a Historical Sketch; The Historians of Bohemia (Ilchester Lecture, Oxford, 1904); The Life and Times of John Hus; &c. | Hussites. |
| L. C. B. | Lewis Campbell Bruce, M.D., F.R.C.P. Author of Studies in Clinical Psychiatry. | Insanity: Medical (in part). |
| L. Ho. | Laurence Housman. See the biographical article, [Housman, L.] | Illustration (in part). |
| L. J. S. | Leonard James Spencer, M.A. Assistant in Department of Mineralogy, British Museum. Formerly Scholar of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and Harkness Scholar. Editor of the Mineralogical Magazine. | Hypersthene; Ilmenite. |
| L. T. D. | Sir Lewis Tonna Dibdin, M.A., D.C.L., F.S.A. Dean of the Arches; Master of the Faculties; and First Church Estates Commissioner. Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn. Author of Monasticism in England; &c. | Incense: Ritual Use. |
| M. Ha. | Marcus Hartog, M.A., D.Sc., F.L.S. Professor of Zoology, University College, Cork. Author of “Protozoa” in Cambridge Natural History; and papers for various scientific journals. | Infusoria. |
| M. Ja. | Morris Jastrow, Jun., Ph.D. Professor of Semitic Languages, University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A. Author of Religion of the Babylonians and Assyrians; &c. | Ishtar. |
| M. O. B. C. | Maximilian Otto Bismarck Caspari, M.A. Reader in Ancient History at London University. Lecturer in Greek at Birmingham University, 1905-1908. | Irene (752-803). |
| N. M. | Norman McLean, M.A. Fellow, Lecturer and Librarian of Christ’s College, Cambridge. University Lecturer in Aramaic. Examiner for the Oriental Languages Tripos and the Theological Tripos at Cambridge. | Isaac of Antioch. |
| O. J. R. H. | Osbert John Radcliffe Howarth, M.A. Christ Church, Oxford. Geographical Scholar, 1901. Assistant Secretary of the British Association. | Ireland: Geography. |
| P. A. | Paul Daniel Alphandéry. Professor of the History of Dogma, École pratique des hautes études, Sorbonne, Paris. Author of Les Idées morales chez les hétérodoxes latines au début du XIIIe. siècle. | Inquisition. |
| P. A. K. | Prince Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin. See the biographical article, [Kropotkin, Prince P. A.] | Irkutsk (in part). |
| P. C. M. | Peter Chalmers Mitchell, M.A., F.R.S., F.Z.S., D.Sc., LL.D. Secretary to the Zoological Society of London. University Demonstrator in Comparative Anatomy and Assistant to Linacre Professor at Oxford, 1888-1891. Examiner in Zoology to the University of London, 1903. Author of Outlines of Biology; &c. | Hybridism. |
| P. Gi. | Peter Giles, M.A., LL.D., Litt.D. Fellow and Classical Lecturer of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and University Reader in Comparative Philology. Formerly Secretary of the Cambridge Philological Society. Author of Manual of Comparative Philology; &c. | I; Indo-European Languages. |
| P. Sm. | Preserved Smith, Ph.D. Rufus B. Kellogg Fellow, Amherst College, Amherst, Mass. | Innocent I., II. |
| R. | The Right Hon. Lord Rayleigh. See the biographical article, [Rayleigh, 3rd Baron]. | Interference of Light. |
| R. A. S. M. | Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister, M.A., F.S.A. St John’s College, Cambridge. Director of Excavations for the Palestine Exploration Fund. | Idumaea. |
| R. Ba. | Richard Bagwell, M.A., LL.D. Commissioner of National Education for Ireland. Author of Ireland under the Tudors; Ireland under the Stuarts. | Ireland: Modern History. |
| R. C. J. | Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb, D.C.L., LL.D. See the biographical article, [Jebb, Sir Richard Claverhouse]. | Isaeus; Isocrates. |
| R. G. | Richard Garnett. LL.D. See the biographical article, [Garnett, Richard]. | Irving, Washington. |
| R. H. C. | Rev. Robert Henry Charles, M.A., D.D., D.Litt. Grinfield Lecturer, and Lecturer in Biblical Studies, Oxford. Fellow of the British Academy. Formerly Professor of Biblical Greek, Trinity College, Dublin. Author of Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life; Book of Jubilees; &c. | Isaiah, Ascension of. |
| R. L.* | Richard Lydekker, F.R.S., F.Z.S., F.G.S. Member of the Staff of the Geological Survey of India 1874-1882. Author of Catalogues of Fossil Mammals, Reptiles and Birds in the British Museum; The Deer of all Lands; &c. | Hyracoidea; Ibex (in part); Indri; Insectivora. |
| R. P. S. | R. Phené Spiers, F.S.A., F.R.I.B.A. Formerly Master of the Architectural School, Royal Academy, London. Past President of Architectural Association. Associate and Fellow of King’s College, London. Corresponding Member of the Institute of France. Editor of Fergusson’s History of Architecture. Author of Architecture; East and West; &c. | Hypaethros. |
| R. S. C. | Robert Seymour Conway, M.A., D.Litt.(Cantab.). Professor of Latin and Indo-European Philology in the University of Manchester. Formerly Professor of Latin in University College, Cardiff; and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Author of The Italic Dialects. | Iguvium; Iovilae. |
| S. | The Right Hon. the Earl of Selborne. See the biographical article, [Selborne, 1st Earl of]. | Hymns. |
| R. Tr. | Roland Truslove, M.A. Formerly Scholar of Christ Church, Oxford. Dean, Fellow and Lecturer in Classics at Worcester College, Oxford. | Indo-China, French (in part). |
| S. A. C. | Stanley Arthur Cook, M.A. Lecturer in Hebrew and Syriac, and formerly Fellow, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Editor for Palestine Exploration Fund. Author of Glossary of Aramaic Inscriptions; The Laws of Moses and the Code of Hammurabi; Critical Notes on Old Testament History; Religion of Ancient Palestine; &c. | Ishmael. |
| S. Bl. | Sigfus Blöndal. Librarian of the University of Copenhagen. | Iceland: Recent Literature. |
| T. As. | Thomas Ashby, M.A., D.Litt. (Oxon.). Director of British School of Archaeology at Rome. Formerly Scholar of Christ Church, Oxford. Craven Fellow, 1897. Conington Prizeman, 1906. Member of the Imperial German Archaeological Institute. | Interamna Lirenas; Ischia. |
| T. A. I. | Thomas Allan Ingram, M.A., LL.D. Trinity College, Dublin. | Illegitimacy; Insurance (in part). |
| T. Ba. | Sir Thomas Barclay, M.P. Member of the Institute of International Law. Member of the Supreme Council of the Congo Free State. Officer of the Legion of Honour. Author of Problems of International Practice and Diplomacy; &c. M.P. for Blackburn, 1910. | Immunity; International Law. |
| T. F. | Rev. Thomas Fowler, M.A., D.D., LL.D. (1832-1904). President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 1881-1904. Honorary Fellow of Lincoln College. Professor of Logic, 1873-1888. Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, 1899-1901. Author of Elements of Deductive Logic; Elements of Inductive Logic; Locke (“English Men of Letters”); Shaftesbury and Hutcheson (“English Philosophers”); &c. | Hutcheson, Francis (in part). |
| T. F. C. | Theodore Freylinghuysen Collier, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of History, Williams College, Williamstown, Mass., U.S.A. | Innocent IX.-XIII. |
| T. H. H.* | Colonel Sir Thomas Hungerford Holdich, K.C.M.G., K.C.I.E., Hon.D.Sc. Superintendent, Frontier Surveys, India, 1892-1898. Gold Medallist, R.G.S., London, 1887. Author of The Indian Borderland; The Countries of the King’s Award; India; Tibet; &c. | Indus. |
| T. K. C. | Rev. Thomas Kelly Cheyne, D.D. See the biographical article, [Cheyne, T. K.] | Isaiah. |
| Th. T. | Thorvaldur Thoroddsen. Icelandic Expert and Explorer. Honorary Professor in the University of Copenhagen. Author of History of Icelandic Geography; Geological Map of Iceland; &c. | Iceland: Geography and Statistics. |
| W. A. B. C. | Rev. William Augustus Brevoort Coolidge, M.A., F.R.G.S., Ph.D.(Bern). Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. Professor of English History, St David’s College, Lampeter, 1880-1881. Author of Guide du Haut Dauphiné; The Range of the Tödi; Guide to Grindelwald; Guide to Switzerland; The Alps in Nature and in History; &c. Editor of The Alpine Journal, 1880-1881; &c. | Hyères; Innsbruck; Interlaken; Iseo, Lake of; Isère (River); Isère (Department). |
| W. A. P. | Walter Alison Phillips, M.A. Formerly Exhibitioner of Merton College and Senior Scholar of St John’s College, Oxford. Author of Modern Europe; &c. | Innocent III., IV. |
| W. C. U. | William Cawthorne Unwin, LL.D., F.R.S., M.Inst.C.E., M.Inst.M.E.,
A.R.I.B.A. Emeritus Professor, Central Technical College, City and Guilds of London Institute. Author of Wrought Iron Bridges and Roofs; Treatise on Hydraulics; &c. | Hydraulics. |
| W. F. C. | William Feilden Craies, M.A. Barrister-at-Law, Inner Temple. Lecturer on Criminal Law, King’s College, London. Editor of Archbold’s Criminal Pleading (23rd edition). | Indictment. |
| W. F. Sh. | William Fleetwood Sheppard, M.A. Senior Examiner in the Board of Education, London. Formerly Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Senior Wrangler, 1884. | Interpolation. |
| W. G. | William Garnett, M.A., D.C.L. Educational Adviser to the London County Council. Formerly Fellow and Lecturer of St John’s College, Cambridge. Principal and Professor of Mathematics, Durham College of Science, Newcastle-on-Tyne. Author of Elementary Dynamics; &c. | Hydrometer. |
| W. Go. | William Gow, M.A., Ph.D. Secretary of the British and Foreign Marine Insurance Co. Ltd., Liverpool. Lecturer on Marine Insurance at University College, Liverpool. Author of Marine Insurance; &c. | Insurance: Marine. |
| W. H. F. | Sir William Henry Flower, F.R.S. See the biographical article, [Flower, Sir W. H.] | Ibex (in part). |
| W. H. Po. | W. Haldane Porter. Barrister-at-Law, Middle Temple. | Ireland: Statistics and Administration. |
| W. Ma. | Sir William Markby, K.C.I.E. See the biographical article, [Markby, Sir William]. | Indian Law. |
| W. McD. | William McDougall, M.A. Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy in the University of Oxford. Formerly Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. | Hypnotism. |
| W. M. L. | Wallace Martin Lindsay, M.A., Litt.D., LL.D. Professor of Humanity, University of St Andrews. Fellow of the British Academy. Formerly Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. Author of Handbook of Latin Inscriptions; The Latin Language; &c. | Inscriptions; Latin (in part). |
| W. M. Ra. | Sir William Mitchell Ramsay, Litt.D., D.C.L. See the biographical article, [Ramsay, Sir W. Mitchell]. | Iconium. |
| W. R. So. | William Ritchie Sorley, M.A., Litt.D., LL.D. Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cambridge. Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Fellow of the British Academy. Formerly Fellow of Trinity College. Author of The Ethics of Naturalism; The Interpretation of Evolution; &c. | Iamblichus. |
| W. T. T.-D. | Sir William Turner Thiselton-Dyer, F.R.S., K.C.M.G., C.I.E., D.Sc., LL.D.,
Ph.D., F.L.S. Hon. Student of Christ Church, Oxford. Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1885-1905. Botanical Adviser to Secretary of State for Colonies, 1902-1906. Joint-author of Flora of Middlesex. Editor of Flora Capenses and Flora of Tropical Africa. | Huxley. |
| W. Wn. | William Watson, D.Sc., F.R.S., A.R.C.S. Assistant Professor of Physics, Royal College of Science, London. Vice-President of the Physical Society. Author of A Text Book of Practical Physics; &c. | Inclinometer. |
| W. W. H. | Sir William Wilson Hunter. See the biographical article. [Hunter, Sir William Wilson]. | India: History (in part); Geography and Statistics (in part). |
[1] A complete list, showing all individual contributors, appears in the final volume.
PRINCIPAL UNSIGNED ARTICLES
| Husband and Wife. Hyacinth. Hyderabad. Hydrogen. Hydropathy. Hydrophobia. Ice. Ice-Yachting. Idaho. Illinois. Illumination. Illyria. | Image. Impeachment. Income Tax. Indiana. Indian Mutiny. Indicator. Infant. Infanticide. Infinite. Influenza. Inheritance. Injunction. | Ink. Inkerman. International, The. Intestacy. Inverness-shire. Investiture. Iodine. Iowa. Ipecacuanha. Iris. Iron. Irrigation. |
HUSBAND, properly the “head of a household,” but now chiefly used in the sense of a man legally joined by marriage to a woman, his “wife”; the legal relations between them are treated below under [Husband and Wife]. The word appears in O. Eng. as húsbonda, answering to the Old Norwegian húsbóndi, and means the owner or freeholder of a hus, or house. The last part of the word still survives in “bondage” and “bondman,” and is derived from bua, to dwell, which, like Lat. colere, means also to till or cultivate, and to have a household. “Wife,” in O. Eng. wif, appears in all Teutonic languages except Gothic; cf. Ger. Weib, Dutch wijf, &c., and meant originally simply a female, “woman” itself being derived from wifman, the pronunciation of the plural wimmen still preserving the original i. Many derivations of “wife” have been given; thus it has been connected with the root of “weave,” with the Gothic waibjan, to fold or wrap up, referring to the entangling clothes worn by a woman, and also with the root of vibrare, to tremble. These are all merely guesses, and the ultimate history of the word is lost. It does not appear outside Teutonic languages. Parallel to “husband” is “housewife,” the woman managing a household. The earlier húswif was pronounced hussif, and this pronunciation survives in the application of the word to a small case containing scissors, needles and pins, cottons, &c. From this form also derives “hussy,” now only used in a depreciatory sense of a light, impertinent girl. Beyond the meaning of a husband as a married man, the word appears in connexion with agriculture, in “husbandry” and “husbandman.” According to some authorities “husbandman” meant originally in the north of England a holder of a “husbandland,” a manorial tenant who held two ox-gangs or virgates, and ranked next below the yeoman (see J. C. Atkinson in Notes and Queries, 6th series, vol. xii., and E. Bateson, History of Northumberland, ii., 1893). From the idea of the manager of a household, “husband” was in use transferred to the manager of an estate, and the title was held by certain officials, especially in the great trading companies. Thus the “husband” of the East India Company looked after the interests of the company at the custom-house. The word in this sense is practically obsolete, but it still appears in “ship’s husband,” an agent of the owners of a ship who looks to the proper equipping of the vessel, and her repairs, procures and adjusts freights, keeps the accounts, makes charter-parties and acts generally as manager of the ship’s employment. Where such an agent is himself one of the owners of the vessel, the name of “managing owner” is used. The “ship’s husband” or “managing owner” must register his name and address at the port of registry (Merchant Shipping Act 1894, § 59). From the use of “husband” for a good and thrifty manager of a household, the verb “to husband” means to economize, to lay up a store, to save.
HUSBAND AND WIFE, Law relating to. For the modes in which the relation of husband and wife may be constituted and dissolved, see [Marriage] and [Divorce]. The present article will deal only with the effect of marriage on the legal position of the spouses. The person chiefly affected is the wife, who probably in all political systems becomes subject, in consequence of marriage, to some kind of disability. The most favourable system scarcely leaves her as free as an unmarried woman; and the most unfavourable subjects her absolutely to the authority of her husband. In modern times the effect of marriage on property is perhaps the most important of its consequences, and on this point the laws of different states show wide diversity of principles.
The history of Roman law exhibits a transition from an extreme theory to its opposite. The position of the wife in the earliest Roman household was regulated by the law of Manus. She fell under the “hand” of her husband,—became one of his family, along with his sons and daughters, natural or adopted, and his slaves. The dominion which, so far as the children was concerned, was known as the patria potestas, was, with reference to the wife, called the manus. The subject members of the family, whether wife or children, had, broadly speaking, no rights of their own. If this institution implied the complete subjection of the wife to the husband, it also implied a much closer bond of union between them than we find in the later Roman law. The wife on her husband’s death succeeded, like the children, to freedom and a share of the inheritance. Manus, however, was not essential to a legal marriage; its restraints were irksome and unpopular, and in course of time it ceased to exist, leaving no equivalent protection of the stability of family life. The later Roman marriage left the spouses comparatively independent of each other. The distance between the two modes of marriage may be estimated by the fact that, while under the former the wife was one of the husband’s immediate heirs, under the latter she was called to the inheritance only after his kith and kin had been exhausted, and only in preference to the treasury. It seems doubtful how far she had, during the continuance of marriage, a legal right to enforce aliment from her husband, although if he neglected her she had the unsatisfactory remedy of an easy divorce. The law, in fact, preferred to leave the parties to arrange their mutual rights and obligations by private contracts. Hence the importance of the law of settlements (Dotes). The Dos and the Donatio ante nuptias were settlements by or on behalf of the husband or wife, during the continuance of the marriage, and the law seems to have looked with some jealousy on gifts made by one to the other in any less formal way, as possibly tainted with undue influence. During the marriage the husband had the administration of the property.
The manus of the Roman law appears to be only one instance of an institution common to all primitive societies. On the continent of Europe after many centuries, during which local usages were brought under the influence of principles derived from the Roman law, a theory of marriage became established, the leading feature of which is the community of goods between husband and wife. Describing the principle as it prevails in France, Story (Conflict of Laws, § 130) says: “This community or nuptial partnership (in the absence of any special contract) generally extends to all the movable property of the husband and wife, and to the fruits, income and revenue thereof.... It extends also to all immovable property of the husband and wife acquired during the marriage, but not to such immovable property as either possessed at the time of the marriage, or which came to them afterwards by title of succession or by gift. The property thus acquired by this nuptial partnership is liable to the debts of the parties existing at the time of the marriage; to the debts contracted by the husband during the community, or by the wife during the community with the consent of the husband; and to debts contracted for the maintenance of the family.... The husband alone is entitled to administer the property of the community, and he may alien, sell or mortgage it without the concurrence of the wife.” But he cannot dispose by will of more than his share of the common property, nor can he part with it gratuitously inter vivos. The community is dissolved by death (natural or civil), divorce, separation of body or separation of property. On separation of body or of property the wife is entitled to the full control of her movable property, but cannot alien her immovable property, without her husband’s consent or legal authority. On the death of either party the property is divided in equal moieties between the survivor and the heirs of the deceased.
Law of England.—The English common law as usual followed its own course in dealing with this subject, and in no department were its rules more entirely insular and independent. The text writers all assumed two fundamental principles, which between them established a system of rights totally unlike that just described. Husband and wife were said to be one person in the eye of the law—unica persona, quia caro una et sanguis unus. Hence a man could not grant or give anything to his wife, because she was himself, and if there were any compacts between them before marriage they were dissolved by the union of persons. Hence, too, the old rule of law, now greatly modified, that husband and wife could not be allowed to give evidence against each other, in any trial, civil or criminal. The unity, however, was one-sided only; it was the wife who was merged in the husband, not the husband in the wife. And when the theory did not apply, the disabilities of “coverture” suspended the active exercise of the wife’s legal faculties. The old technical phraseology described husband and wife as baron and feme; the rights of the husband were baronial rights. From one point of view the wife was merged in the husband, from another she was as one of his vassals. A curious example is the immunity of the wife in certain cases from punishment for crime committed in the presence and on the presumed coercion of the husband. “So great a favourite,” says Blackstone, “is the female sex of the laws of England.”
The application of these principles with reference to the property of the wife, and her capacity to contract, may now be briefly traced.
The freehold property of the wife became vested in the husband and herself during the coverture, and he had the management and the profits. If the wife had been in actual possession at any time during the marriage of an estate of inheritance, and if there had been a child of the marriage capable of inheriting, then the husband became entitled on his wife’s death to hold the estate for his own life as tenant by the curtesy of England (curialitas).[1] Beyond this, however, the husband’s rights did not extend, and the wife’s heir at last succeeded to the inheritance. The wife could not part with her real estate without the concurrence of the husband; and even so she must be examined apart from her husband, to ascertain whether she freely and voluntarily consented to the deed.
With regard to personal property, it passed absolutely at common law to the husband. Specific things in the possession of the wife (choses in possession) became the property of the husband at once; things not in possession, but due and recoverable from others (choses in action), might be recovered by the husband. A chose in action not reduced into actual possession, when the marriage was dissolved by death, reverted to the wife if she was the survivor; if the husband survived he could obtain possession by taking out letters of administration. A chose in action was to be distinguished from a specific thing which, although the property of the wife, was for the time being in the hands of another. In the latter case the property was in the wife, and passed at once to the husband; in the former the wife had a mere jus in personam, which the husband might enforce if he chose, but which was still capable of reverting to the wife if the husband died without enforcing it.
The chattels real of the wife (i.e., personal property, dependent on, and partaking of, the nature of realty, such as leaseholds) passed to the husband, subject to the wife’s right of survivorship, unless barred by the husband by some act done during his life. A disposition by will did not bar the wife’s interest; but any disposition inter vivos by the husband was valid and effective.
The courts of equity, however, greatly modified the rules of the common law by the introduction of the wife’s separate estate, i.e. property settled to the wife for her separate use, independently of her husband. The principle seems to have been originally admitted in a case of actual separation, when a fund was given for the maintenance of the wife while living apart from her husband. And the conditions under which separate estate might be enjoyed had taken the Court of Chancery many generations to develop. No particular form of words was necessary to create a separate estate, and the intervention of trustees, though common, was not necessary. A clear intention to deprive the husband of his common law rights was sufficient to do so. In such a case a married woman was entitled to deal with her property as if she was unmarried, although the earlier decisions were in favour of requiring her binding engagements to be in writing or under seal. But it was afterwards held that any engagements, clearly made with reference to the separate estate, would bind that estate, exactly as if the woman had been a feme sole. Connected with the doctrine of separate use was the equitable contrivance of restraint on anticipation with which later legislation has not interfered, whereby property might be so settled to the separate use of a married woman that she could not, during coverture, alienate it or anticipate the income. No such restraint is recognized in the ease of a man or of a feme sole, and it depends entirely on the separate estate; and the separate estate has its existence only during coverture, so that a woman to whom such an estate is given may dispose of it so long as she is unmarried, but becomes bound by the restraint as soon as she is married. In yet another way the court of Chancery interfered to protect the interests of married women. When a husband sought the aid of that court to get possession of his wife’s choses in action, he was required to make a provision for her and her children out of the fund sought to be recovered. This is called the wife’s equity to a settlement, and is said to be based on the original maxim of Chancery jurisprudence, that “he who seeks equity must do equity.” Two other property interests of minor importance are recognised. The wife’s pin-money is a provision for the purchase of clothes and ornaments suitable to her husband’s station, but it is not an absolute gift to the separate use of the wife; and a wife surviving her husband cannot claim for more than one year’s arrears of pin-money. Paraphernalia are jewels and other ornaments given to the wife by her husband for the purpose of being worn by her, but not as her separate property. The husband may dispose of them by act inter vivos but not by will, unless the will confers other benefits on the wife, in which case she must elect between the will and the paraphernalia. She may also on the death of the husband claim paraphernalia, provided all creditors have been satisfied, her right being superior to that of any legatee.
The corresponding interest of the wife in the property of the husband is much more meagre and illusory. Besides a general right to maintenance at her husband’s expense, she has at common law a right to dower (q.v.) in her husband’s lands, and to a pars rationabilis (third) of his personal estate, if he dies intestate. The former, which originally was a solid provision for widows, has by the ingenuity of conveyancers, as well as by positive enactment, been reduced to very slender dimensions. It may be destroyed by a mere declaration to that effect on the part of the husband, as well as by his conveyance of the land or by his will.
The common practice of regulating the rights of husband, wife and children by marriage settlements obviates the hardships of the common law—at least for the women of the wealthier classes. The legislature by the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870, 1874, 1882 (which repealed and consolidated the acts of 1870 and 1874), 1893 and 1907 introduced very considerable changes. The chief provisions of the Married Women’s Property Act 1882, which enormously improved the position of women unprotected by marriage settlement, are, shortly, that a married woman is capable of acquiring, holding and disposing of by will or otherwise, any real and personal property, in the same manner as if she were a feme sole, without the intervention of any trustee. The property of a woman married after the beginning of the act, whether belonging to her at the time of marriage or acquired after marriage, is held by her as a feme sole. The same is the case with property acquired after the beginning of the act by a woman married before the act. After marriage a woman remains liable for antenuptial debts and liabilities, and as between her and her husband, in the absence of contract to the contrary, her separate property is deemed primarily liable. The husband is only liable to the extent of property acquired from or through his wife. The act also contained provisions as to stock, investment, insurance, evidence and other matters. The effect of the act was to render obsolete the law as to what created a separate use or a reduction into possession of choses in action, as to equity to a settlement, as to fraud on the husband’s marital rights, and as to the inability of one of two married persons to give a gift to the other. Also, in the case of a gift to a husband and wife in terms which would make them joint tenants if unmarried, they no longer take as one person but as two. The act contained a special saving of existing and future settlements; a settlement being still necessary where it is desired to secure only the enjoyment of the income to the wife and to provide for children. The act by itself would enable the wife, without regard to family claims, instantly to part with the whole of any property which might come to her. Restraint on anticipation was preserved by the act, subject to the liability of such property for antenuptial debts, and to the power given by the Conveyancing Act 1881 to bind a married woman’s interest notwithstanding a clause of restraint. The Married Women’s Property Act of 1893 repealed two clauses in the act of 1882, the exact bearing of which had been a matter of controversy. It provided specifically that every contract thereinafter entered into by a married woman, otherwise than as an agent, should be deemed to be a contract entered into by her with respect to and be binding upon her separate property, whether she was or was not in fact possessed of or entitled to any separate property at the time when she entered into such contract, that it should bind all separate property which she might at any time or thereafter be possessed of or entitled to, and that it should be enforceable by process of law against all property which she might thereafter, while discovert, be possessed of or entitled to. The act of 1907 enabled a married woman, without her husband, to dispose of or join in disposing of, real or personal property held by her solely or jointly as trustee or personal representative, in like manner as if she were a feme sole. It also provided that a settlement or agreement for settlement whether before or after marriage, respecting the property of the woman, should not be valid unless executed by her if she was of full age or confirmed by her after she attained full age. The Married Women’s Property Act 1908 removed a curious anomaly by enacting that a married woman having separate property should be equally liable with single women and widows for the maintenance of parents who are in receipt of poor relief.
The British colonies generally have adopted the principles of the English acts of 1882 and 1893.
Law of Scotland.—The law of Scotland differs less from English law than the use of a very different terminology would lead us to suppose. The phrase communio bonorum has been employed to express the interest which the spouses have in the movable property of both, but its use has been severely censured as essentially inaccurate and misleading. It has been contended that there was no real community of goods, and no partnership or societas between the spouses. The wife’s movable property, with certain exceptions, and subject to special agreements, became as absolutely the property of the husband as it did in English law. The notion of a communio was, however, favoured by the peculiar rights of the wife and children on the dissolution of the marriage. Previous to the Intestate Movable Succession (Scotland) Act 1855 the law stood as follows. The fund formed by the movable property of both spouses may be dealt with by the husband as he pleases during life; it is increased by his acquisitions and diminished by his debts. The respective shares contributed by husband and wife return on the dissolution of the marriage to them or their representatives if the marriage be dissolved within a year and a day, and without a living child. Otherwise the division is into two or three shares, according as children are existing or not at the dissolution of the marriage. On the death of the husband, his children take one-third (called legitim), the widow takes one-third (jus relictae), and the remaining one-third (the dead part) goes according to his will or to his next of kin. If there be no children, the jus relictae and the dead’s part are each one-half. If the wife die before the husband, her representatives, whether children or not, are creditors for the value of her share. The statute above-mentioned, however, enacts that “where a wife shall predecease her husband, the next of kin, executors or other representatives of such wife, whether testate or intestate, shall have no right to any share of the goods in communion; nor shall any legacy or bequest or testamentary disposition thereof by such wife, affect or attach to the said goods or any portion thereof.” It also abolishes the rule by which the shares revert if the marriage does not subsist for a year and a day. Several later acts apply to Scotland some of the principles of the English Married Women’s Property Acts. These are the Married Women’s Property (Scotland) Act 1877, which protects the earnings, &c., of wives, and limits the husband’s liability for antenuptial debts of the wife, the Married Women’s Policies of Assurance (Scotland) Act 1880, which enables a woman to contract for a policy of assurance for her separate use, and the Married Women’s Property (Scotland) Act 1881, which abolished the jus mariti.
A wife’s heritable property does not pass to the husband on marriage, but he acquires a right to the administration and profits. His courtesy, as in English law, is also recognized. On the other hand, a widow has a terce or life-rent of a third part of the husband’s heritable estate, unless she has accepted a conventional provision.
Continental Europe.—Since 1882 English legislation in the matter of married women’s property has progressed from perhaps the most backward to the foremost place in Europe. By a curious contrast, the only two European countries where, in the absence of a settlement to the contrary, independence of the wife’s property was recognized, were Russia and Italy. But there is now a marked tendency towards contractual emancipation. Sweden adopted a law on this subject in 1874, Denmark in 1880, Norway in 1888. Germany followed, the Civil Code which came into operation in 1900 (Art. 1367) providing that the wife’s wages or earnings shall form part of her Vorbehaltsgut or separate property, which a previous article (1365) placed beyond the husband’s control. As regards property accruing to the wife in Germany by succession, will or gift inter vivos, it is only separate property where the donor has deliberately stipulated exclusion of the husband’s right.
In France it seemed as if the system of community of property was ingrained in the institutions of the country. But a law of 1907 has brought France into line with other countries. This law gives a married woman sole control over earnings from her personal work and savings therefrom. She can with such money acquire personalty or realty, over the former of which she has absolute control. But if she abuses her rights by squandering her money or administering her property badly or imprudently the husband may apply to the court to have her freedom restricted.
American Law.—In the United States, the revolt against the common law theory of husband and wife was carried farther than in England, and legislation early tended in the direction of absolute equality between the sexes. Each state has, however, taken its own way and selected its own time for introducing modifications of the existing law, so that the legislation on this subject is now exceedingly complicated and difficult. James Schouler (Law of Domestic Relations) gives an account of the general result in the different states to which reference may be made. The peculiar system of Homestead Laws in many of the states (see [Homestead] and [Exemption Laws]) constitutes an inalienable provision for the wife and family of the householder.
[1] Curtesy or courtesy has been explained by legal writers as “arising by favour of the law of England.” The word has nothing to do with courtesy in the sense of complaisance.
HUSHI (Rumanian Huşi), the capital of the department of Falciu, Rumania; on a branch of the Jassy-Galatz railway, 9 m. W. of the river Pruth and the Russian frontier. Pop. (1900) 15,404, about one-fourth being Jews. Hushi is an episcopal see. The cathedral was built in 1491 by Stephen the Great of Moldavia. There are no important manufactures, but a large fair is held annually in September for the sale of live-stock, and wine is produced in considerable quantities. Hushi is said to have been founded in the 15th century by a colony of Hussites, from whom its name is derived. The treaty of the Pruth between Russia and Turkey was signed here in 1711.
HUSKISSON, WILLIAM (1770-1830), English statesman and financier, was descended from an old Staffordshire family of moderate fortune, and was born at Birch Moreton, Worcestershire, on the 11th of March 1770. Having been placed in his fourteenth year under the charge of his maternal great-uncle Dr Gem, physician to the English embassy at Paris, in 1783 he passed his early years amidst a political fermentation which led him to take a deep interest in politics. Though he approved of the French Revolution, his sympathies were with the more moderate party, and he became a member of the “club of 1789,” instituted to support the new form of constitutional monarchy in opposition to the anarchical attempts of the Jacobins. He early displayed his mastery of the principles of finance by a Discours delivered in August 1790 before this society, in regard to the issue of assignats by the government. The Discours gained him considerable reputation, but as it failed in its purpose he withdrew from the society. In January 1793 he was appointed by Dundas to an office created to direct the execution of the Aliens Act; and in the discharge of his delicate duties he manifested such ability that in 1795 he was appointed under-secretary at war. In the following year he entered parliament as member for Morpeth, but for a considerable period he took scarcely any part in the debates. In 1800 he inherited a fortune from Dr Gem. On the retirement of Pitt in 1801 he resigned office, and after contesting Dover unsuccessfully he withdrew for a time into private life. Having in 1804 been chosen to represent Liskeard, he was on the restoration of the Pitt ministry appointed secretary of the treasury, holding office till the dissolution of the ministry after the death of Pitt in January 1806. After being elected for Harwich in 1807, he accepted the same office under the duke of Portland, but he withdrew from the ministry along with Canning in 1809. In the following year he published a pamphlet on the currency system, which confirmed his reputation as the ablest financier of his time; but his free-trade principles did not accord with those of his party. In 1812 he was returned for Chichester. When in 1814 he re-entered the public service, it was only as chief commissioner of woods and forests, but his influence was from this time very great in the commercial and financial legislation of the country. He took a prominent part in the corn-law debates of 1814 and 1815; and in 1819 he presented a memorandum to Lord Liverpool advocating a large reduction in the unfunded debt, and explaining a method for the resumption of cash payments, which was embodied in the act passed the same year. In 1821 he was a member of the committee appointed to inquire into the causes of the agricultural distress then prevailing, and the proposed relaxation of the corn laws embodied in the report was understood to have been chiefly due to his strenuous advocacy. In 1823 he was appointed president of the board of trade and treasurer of the navy, and shortly afterwards he received a seat in the cabinet. In the same year he was returned for Liverpool as successor to Canning, and as the only man who could reconcile the Tory merchants to a free trade policy. Among the more important legislative changes with which he was principally connected were a reform of the Navigation Acts, admitting other nations to a full equality and reciprocity of shipping duties; the repeal of the labour laws; the introduction of a new sinking fund; the reduction of the duties on manufactures and on the importation of foreign goods, and the repeal of the quarantine duties. In accordance with his suggestion Canning in 1827 introduced a measure on the corn laws proposing the adoption of a sliding scale to regulate the amount of duty. A misapprehension between Huskisson and the duke of Wellington led to the duke proposing an amendment, the success of which caused the abandonment of the measure by the government. After the death of Canning in the same year Huskisson accepted the secretaryship of the colonies under Lord Goderich, an office which he continued to hold in the new cabinet formed by the duke of Wellington in the following year. After succeeding with great difficulty in inducing the cabinet to agree to a compromise on the corn laws, Huskisson finally resigned office in May 1829 on account of a difference with his colleagues in regard to the disfranchisement of East Retford. On the 15th of September of the following year he was accidentally killed by a locomotive engine while present at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway.
See the Life of Huskisson, by J. Wright (London, 1831).
HUSS (or Hus), JOHN (c. 1373-1415), Bohemian reformer and martyr, was born at Hussinecz,[1] a market village at the foot of the Böhmerwald, and not far from the Bavarian frontier, between 1373 and 1375, the exact date being uncertain. His parents appear to have been well-to-do Czechs of the peasant class. Of his early life nothing is recorded except that, notwithstanding the early loss of his father, he obtained a good elementary education, first at Hussinecz, and afterwards at the neighbouring town of Prachaticz. At, or only a very little beyond, the usual age he entered the recently (1348) founded university of Prague, where he became bachelor of arts in 1393, bachelor of theology in 1394, and master of arts in 1396. In 1398 he was chosen by the Bohemian “nation” of the university to an examinership for the bachelor’s degree; in the same year he began to lecture also, and there is reason to believe that the philosophical writings of Wycliffe, with which he had been for some years acquainted, were his text-books. In October 1401 he was made dean of the philosophical faculty, and for the half-yearly period from October 1402 to April 1403 he held the office of rector of the university. In 1402 also he was made rector or curate (capellarius) of the Bethlehem chapel, which had in 1391 been erected and endowed by some zealous citizens of Prague for the purpose of providing good popular preaching in the Bohemian tongue. This appointment had a deep influence on the already vigorous religious life of Huss himself; and one of the effects of the earnest and independent study of Scripture into which it led him was a profound conviction of the great value not only of the philosophical but also of the theological writings of Wycliffe.
This newly-formed sympathy with the English reformer did not, in the first instance at least, involve Huss in any conscious opposition to the established doctrines of Catholicism, or in any direct conflict with the authorities of the church; and for several years he continued to act in full accord with his archbishop (Sbynjek, or Sbynko, of Hasenburg). Thus in 1405 he, with other two masters, was commissioned to examine into certain reputed miracles at Wilsnack, near Wittenberg, which had caused that church to be made a resort of pilgrims from all parts of Europe. The result of their report was that all pilgrimage thither from the province of Bohemia was prohibited by the archbishop on pain of excommunication, while Huss, with the full sanction of his superior, gave to the world his first published writing, entitled De Omni Sanguine Christi Glorificato, in which he declaimed in no measured terms against forged miracles and ecclesiastical greed, urging Christians at the same time to desist from looking for sensible signs of Christ’s presence, but rather to seek Him in His enduring word. More than once also Huss, together with his friend Stanislaus of Znaim, was appointed to be synod preacher, and in this capacity he delivered at the provincial councils of Bohemia many faithful admonitions. As early as the 28th of May 1403, it is true, there had been held a university disputation about the new doctrines of Wycliffe, which had resulted in the condemnation of certain propositions presumed to be his; five years later (May 20, 1408) this decision had been refined into a declaration that these, forty-five in number, were not to be taught in any heretical, erroneous or offensive sense. But it was only slowly that the growing sympathy of Huss with Wycliffe unfavourably affected his relations with his colleagues in the priesthood. In 1408, however, the clergy of the city and archiepiscopal diocese of Prague laid before the archbishop a formal complaint against Huss, arising out of strong expressions with regard to clerical abuses of which he had made use in his public discourses; and the result was that, having been first deprived of his appointment as synodal preacher, he was, after a vain attempt to defend himself in writing, publicly forbidden the exercise of any priestly function throughout the diocese. Simultaneously with these proceedings in Bohemia, negotiations had been going on for the removal of the long-continued papal schism, and it had become apparent that a satisfactory solution could only be secured if, as seemed not impossible, the supporters of the rival popes, Benedict XIII. and Gregory XII., could be induced, in view of the approaching council of Pisa, to pledge themselves to a strict neutrality. With this end King Wenceslaus of Bohemia had requested the co-operation of the archbishop and his clergy, and also the support of the university, in both instances unsuccessfully, although in the case of the latter the Bohemian “nation,” with Huss at its head, had only been overborne by the votes of the Bavarians, Saxons and Poles. There followed an expression of nationalist and particularistic as opposed to ultramontane and also to German feeling, which undoubtedly was of supreme importance for the whole of the subsequent career of Huss. In compliance with this feeling a royal edict (January 18, 1409) was issued, by which, in alleged conformity with Paris usage, and with the original charter of the university, the Bohemian “nation” received three votes, while only one was allotted to the other three “nations” combined; whereupon all the foreigners, to the number of several thousands, almost immediately withdrew from Prague, an occurrence which led to the formation shortly afterwards of the university of Leipzig.
It was a dangerous triumph for Huss; for his popularity at court and in the general community had been secured only at the price of clerical antipathy everywhere and of much German ill-will. Among the first results of the changed order of things were on the one hand the election of Huss (October 1409) to be again rector of the university, but on the other hand the appointment by the archbishop of an inquisitor to inquire into charges of heretical teaching and inflammatory preaching brought against him. He had spoken disrespectfully of the church, it was said, had even hinted that Antichrist might be found to be in Rome, had fomented in his preaching the quarrel between Bohemians and Germans, and had, notwithstanding all that had passed, continued to speak of Wycliffe as both a pious man and an orthodox teacher. The direct result of this investigation is not known, but it is impossible to disconnect from it the promulgation by Pope Alexander V., on the 20th of December 1409, of a bull which ordered the abjuration of all Wycliffite heresies and the surrender of all his books, while at the same time—a measure specially levelled at the pulpit of Bethlehem chapel—all preaching was prohibited except in localities which had been by long usage set apart for that use. This decree, as soon as it was published in Prague (March 9, 1410), led to much popular agitation, and provoked an appeal by Huss to the pope’s better informed judgment; the archbishop, however, resolutely insisted on carrying out his instructions, and in the following July caused to be publicly burned, in the courtyard of his own palace, upwards of 200 volumes of the writings of Wycliffe, while he pronounced solemn sentence of excommunication against Huss and certain of his friends, who had in the meantime again protested and appealed to the new pope (John XXIII.). Again the populace rose on behalf of their hero, who, in his turn, strong in the conscientious conviction that “in the things which pertain to salvation God is to be obeyed rather than man,” continued uninterruptedly to preach in the Bethlehem chapel, and in the university began publicly to defend the so-called heretical treatises of Wycliffe, while from king and queen, nobles and burghers, a petition was sent to Rome praying that the condemnation and prohibition in the bull of Alexander V. might be quashed. Negotiations were carried on for some months, but in vain; in March 1411 the ban was anew pronounced upon Huss as a disobedient son of the church, while the magistrates and councillors of Prague who had favoured him were threatened with a similar penalty in ease of their giving him a contumacious support. Ultimately the whole city, which continued to harbour him, was laid under interdict; yet he went on preaching, and masses were celebrated as usual, so that at the date of Archbishop Sbynko’s death in September 1411, it seemed as if the efforts of ecclesiastical authority had resulted in absolute failure.
The struggle, however, entered on a new phase with the appearance at Prague in May 1412 of the papal emissary charged with the proclamation of the papal bulls by which a religious war was decreed against the excommunicated King Ladislaus of Naples, and indulgence was promised to all who should take part in it, on terms similar to those which had been enjoyed by the earlier crusaders to the Holy Land. By his bold and thorough-going opposition to this mode of procedure against Ladislaus, and still more by his doctrine that indulgence could never be sold without simony, and could not be lawfully granted by the church except on condition of genuine contrition and repentance, Huss at last isolated himself, not only from the archiepiscopal party under Albik of Unitschow, but also from the theological faculty of the university, and especially from such men as Stanislaus of Znaim and Stephen Paletz, who until then had been his chief supporters. A popular demonstration, in which the papal bulls had been paraded through the streets with circumstances of peculiar ignominy and finally burnt, led to intervention by Wenceslaus on behalf of public order; three young men, for having openly asserted the unlawfulness of the papal indulgence after silence had been enjoined, were sentenced to death (June 1412); the excommunication against Huss was renewed, and the interdict again laid on all places which should give him shelter—a measure which now began to be more strictly regarded by the clergy, so that in the following December Huss had no alternative but to yield to the express wish of the king by temporarily withdrawing from Prague. A provincial synod, held at the instance of Wenceslaus in February 1413, broke up without having reached any practical result; and a commission appointed shortly afterwards also failed to bring about a reconciliation between Huss and his adversaries. The so-called heretic meanwhile spent his time partly at Kozihradek, some 45 m. south of Prague, and partly at Krakowitz in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital, occasionally giving a course of open-air preaching, but finding his chief employment in maintaining that copious correspondence of which some precious fragments still are extant, and in the composition of the treatise, De Ecclesia, which subsequently furnished most of the material for the capital charges brought against him, and was formerly considered the most important of his works, though it is mainly a transcript of Wycliffe’s work of the same name.
During the year 1413 the arrangements for the meeting of a general council at Constance were agreed upon between Sigismund and Pope John XXIII. The objects originally contemplated had been the restoration of the unity of the church and its reform in head and members; but so great had become the prominence of Bohemian affairs that to these also a first place in the programme of the approaching oecumenical assembly required to be assigned, and for their satisfactory settlement the presence of Huss was necessary. His attendance was accordingly requested, and the invitation was willingly accepted as giving him a long-wished-for opportunity both of publicly vindicating himself from charges which he felt to be grievous, and of loyally making confession for Christ. He set out from Bohemia on the 14th of October 1414, not, however, until he had carefully ordered all his private affairs, with a presentiment, which he did not conceal, that in all probability he was going to his death. The journey, which appears to have been undertaken with the usual passport, and under the protection of several powerful Bohemian friends (John of Chlum, Wenceslaus of Duba, Henry of Chlum) who accompanied him, was a very prosperous one; and at almost all the halting-places he was received with a consideration and enthusiastic sympathy which he had hardly expected to meet with anywhere in Germany. On the 3rd of November he arrived at Constance; shortly afterwards there was put into his hands the famous imperial “safe conduct,” the promise of which had been one of his inducements to quit the comparative security he had enjoyed in Bohemia. This safe conduct, which had been frequently printed, stated that Huss should, whatever judgment might be passed on him, be allowed to return freely to Bohemia. This by no means provided for his immunity from punishment. If faith to him had not been broken he would have been sent back to Bohemia to be punished by his sovereign, the king of Bohemia. The treachery of King Sigismund is undeniable, and was indeed admitted by the king himself. The safe conduct was probably indeed given by him to entice Huss to Constance. On the 4th of December the pope appointed a commission of three bishops to investigate the case against the heretic, and to procure witnesses; to the demand of Huss that he might be permitted to employ an agent in his defence a favourable answer was at first given, but afterwards even this concession to the forms of justice was denied. While the commission was engaged in the prosecution of its enquiries, the flight of Pope John XXIII. took place on the 20th of March, an event which furnished a pretext for the removal of Huss from the Dominican convent to a more secure and more severe place of confinement under the charge of the bishop of Constance at Gottlieben on the Rhine. On the 4th of May the temper of the council on the doctrinal questions in dispute was fully revealed in its unanimous condemnation of Wycliffe, especially of the so-called “forty-five articles” as erroneous, heretical, revolutionary. It was not, however, until the 5th of June that the case of Huss came up for hearing; the meeting, which was an exceptionally full one, took place in the refectory of the Franciscan cloister. Autograph copies of his work De Ecclesia and of the controversial tracts which he had written against Paletz and Stanislaus of Znaim having been acknowledged by him, the extracted propositions on which the prosecution based their charge of heresy were read; but as soon as the accused began to enter upon his defence, he was assailed by violent outcries, amidst which it was impossible for him to be heard, so that he was compelled to bring his speech to an abrupt close, which he did with the calm remark: “In such a council as this I had expected to find more propriety, piety and order.” It was found necessary to adjourn the sitting until the 7th of June, on which occasion the outward decencies were better observed, partly no doubt from the circumstance that Sigismund was present in person. The propositions which had been extracted from the De Ecclesia were again brought up, and the relations between Wycliffe and Huss were discussed, the object of the prosecution being to fasten upon the latter the charge of having entirely adopted the doctrinal system of the former, including especially a denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation. The accused repudiated the charge of having abandoned the Catholic doctrine, while expressing hearty admiration and respect for the memory of Wycliffe. Being next asked to make an unqualified submission to the council, he expressed himself as unable to do so, while stating his willingness to amend his teaching wherever it had been shown to be false. With this the proceedings of the day were brought to a close. On the 8th of June the propositions extracted from the De Ecclesia were again taken up with some fulness of detail; some of these he repudiated as incorrectly given, others he defended; but when asked to make a general recantation he steadfastly declined, on the ground that to do so would be a dishonest admission of previous guilt. Among the propositions he could heartily abjure was that relating to transubstantiation; among those he felt constrained unflinchingly to maintain was one which had given great offence, to the effect that Christ, not Peter, is the head of the church to whom ultimate appeal must be made. The council, however, showed itself inaccessible to all his arguments and explanations, and its final resolution, as announced by Pierre d’Ailly, was threefold: first, that Huss should humbly declare that he had erred in all the articles cited against him; secondly, that he should promise on oath neither to hold nor teach them in the future; thirdly, that he should publicly recant them. On his declining to make this submission he was removed from the bar. Sigismund himself gave it as his opinion that it had been clearly proved by many witnesses that the accused had taught many pernicious heresies, and that even should he recant he ought never to be allowed to preach or teach again or to return to Bohemia, but that should he refuse recantation there was no remedy but the stake. During the next four weeks no effort was spared to shake the determination of Huss; but he steadfastly refused to swerve from the path which conscience had once made clear. “I write this,” says he, in a letter to his friends at Prague, “in prison and in chains, expecting to-morrow to receive sentence of death, full of hope in God that I shall not swerve from the truth, nor abjure errors imputed to me by false witnesses.” The sentence he expected was pronounced on the 6th of July in the presence of Sigismund and a full sitting of the council; once and again he attempted to remonstrate, but in vain, and finally he betook himself to silent prayer. After he had undergone the ceremony of degradation with all the childish formalities usual on such occasions, his soul was formally consigned by all those present to the devil, while he himself with clasped hands and uplifted eyes reverently committed it to Christ. He was then handed over to the secular arm, and immediately led to the place of execution, the council meanwhile proceeding unconcernedly with the rest of its business for the day. Many incidents recorded in the histories make manifest the meekness, fortitude and even cheerfulness with which he went to his death. After he had been tied to the stake and the faggots had been piled, he was for the last time urged to recant, but his only reply was: “God is my witness that I have never taught or preached that which false witnesses have testified against me. He knows that the great object of all my preaching and writing was to convert men from sin. In the truth of that gospel which hitherto I have written, taught and preached, I now joyfully die.” The fire was then kindled, and his voice as it audibly prayed in the words of the “Kyrie Eleison” was soon stifled in the smoke. When the flames had done their office, the ashes that were left and even the soil on which they lay were carefully removed and thrown into the Rhine.
Not many words are needed to convey a tolerably adequate estimate of the character and work of the “pale thin man in mean attire,” who in sickness and poverty thus completed the forty-sixth year of a busy life at the stake. The value of Huss as a scholar was formerly underrated. The publication of his Super IV. Sententiarum has proved that he was a man of profound learning. Yet his principal glory will always be founded on his spiritual teaching. It might not be easy to formulate precisely the doctrines for which he died, and certainly some of them, as, for example, that regarding the church, were such as many Protestants even would regard as unguarded and difficult to harmonize with the maintenance of external church order; but his is undoubtedly the honour of having been the chief intermediary in handing on from Wycliffe to Luther the torch which kindled the Reformation, and of having been one of the bravest of the martyrs who have died in the cause of honesty and freedom, of progress and of growth towards the light.
(J. S. Bl.)
The works of Huss are usually classed under four heads: the dogmatical and polemical, the homiletical, the exegetical and the epistolary. In the earlier editions of his works sufficient care was not taken to distinguish between his own writings and those of Wycliffe and others who were associated with him. In connexion with his sermons it is worthy of note that by means of them and by his public teaching generally Huss exercised a considerable influence not only on the religious life of his time, but on the literary development of his native tongue. The earliest collected edition of his works, Historia et monumenta Joannis Hus et Hieronymi Pragensis, was published at Nuremberg in 1558 and was reprinted with a considerable quantity of new matter at Frankfort in 1715. A Bohemian edition of the works has been edited by K. J. Erben (Prague, 1865-1868), and the Documenta J. Hus vitam, doctrinam, causam in Constantiensi concilio (1869), edited by F. Palacky, is very valuable. More recently Joannis Hus. Opera omnia have been edited by W. Flojšhaus (Prague, 1904 fol.). The De Ecclesia was published by Ulrich von Hutten in 1520; other controversial writings by Otto Brumfels in 1524; and Luther wrote an interesting preface to Epistolae Quaedam, which were published in 1537. These Epistolae have been translated into French by E. de Bonnechose (1846), and the letters written during his imprisonment have been edited by C. von Kügelgen (Leipzig, 1902).
The best and most easily accessible information for the English reader on Huss is found in J. A. W. Neander’s Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion und Kirche, translated by J. Torrey (1850-1858); in G. von Lechler’s Wiclif und die Vorgeschichte der Reformation, translated by P. Lorimer (1878); in H. H. Milman’s History of Latin Christianity, vol. viii. (1867); and in M. Creighton’s History of the Papacy (1897). Among the earlier authorities is the Historia Bohemica of Aeneas Sylvius (1475). The Acta of the council of Constance (published by P. Labbe in his Concilia, vol. xvi., 1731; by H. von der Haardt in his Magnum Constantiense concilium, vol. vi., 1700; and by H. Finke in his Acta concilii Constantiensis, 1896); and J. Lenfant’s Histoire de la guerre des Hussites (1731) and the same writer’s Histoire du concile de Constance (1714) should be consulted. F. Palacky’s Geschichte Böhmens (1864-1867) is also very useful. Monographs on Huss are very numerous. Among them may be mentioned J. A. von Helfert, Studien über Hus und Hieronymus (1853; this work is ultramontane in its sympathies); C. von Höfler, Hus und der Abzug der deutschen Professoren und Studenten aus Prag (1864); W. Berger, Johannes Hus und König Sigmund (1871); E. Denis, Huss et la guerre des Hussites (1878); P. Uhlmann, König Sigmunds Geleit für Hus (1894); J. Loserth, Hus und Wiclif (1884), translated into English by M. J. Evans (1884); A. Jeep, Gerson, Wiclefus, Hussus, inter se comparati (1857); and G. von Lechler, Johannes Hus (1889). See also Count Lützow, The Life and Times of John Hus (London, 1909).
[1] From which the name Huss, or more properly Hus, an abbreviation adopted by himself about 1396, is derived. Prior to that date he was invariably known as Johann Hussynecz, Hussinecz, Hussenicz or de Hussynecz.
HUSSAR, originally the name of a soldier belonging to a corps of light horse raised by Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, in 1458, to fight against the Turks. The Magyar huszar, from which the word is derived, was formerly connected with the Magyar husz, twenty, and was explained by a supposed raising of the troops by the taking of each twentieth man. According to the New English Dictionary the word is an adaptation of the Italian corsaro, corsair, a robber, and is found in 15th-century documents coupled with praedones. The hussar was the typical Hungarian cavalry soldier, and, in the absence of good light cavalry in the regular armies of central and western Europe, the name and character of the hussars gradually spread into Prussia, France, &c. Frederick the Great sent Major H. J. von Zieten to study the work of this type of cavalry in the Austrian service, and Zieten so far improved on the Austrian model that he defeated his old teacher, General Baranyai, in an encounter between the Prussian and Austrian hussars at Rothschloss in 1741. The typical uniform of the Hungarian hussar was followed with modifications in other European armies. It consisted of a busby or a high cylindrical cloth cap, jacket with heavy braiding, and a dolman or pelisse, a loose coat worn hanging from the left shoulder. The hussar regiments of the British army were converted from light dragoons at the following dates: 7th (1805), 10th and 15th (1806), 18th (1807, and again on revival after disbandment, 1858), 8th (1822), 11th (1840), 20th (late 2nd Bengal European Cavalry) (1860), 13th, 14th, and 19th (late 1st Bengal European Cavalry) (1861). The 21st Lancers were hussars from 1862 to 1897.
HUSSITES, the name given to the followers of John Huss (1369-1415), the Bohemian reformer. They were at first often called Wycliffites, as the theological theories of Huss were largely founded on the teachings of Wycliffe. Huss indeed laid more stress on church reform than on theological controversy. On such matters he always writes as a disciple of Wycliffe. The Hussite movement may be said to have sprung from three sources, which are however closely connected. Bohemia, which had first received Christianity from the East, was from geographical and other causes long but very loosely connected with the Church of Rome. The connexion became closer at the time when the schism with its violent controversies between the rival pontiffs, waged with the coarse invective customary to medieval theologians, had brought great discredit on the papacy. The terrible rapacity of its representatives in Bohemia, which increased in proportion as it became more difficult to obtain money from western countries such as England and France, caused general indignation; and this was still further intensified by the gross immorality of the Roman priests. The Hussite movement was also a democratic one, an uprising of the peasantry against the landowners at a period when a third of the soil belonged to the clergy. Finally national enthusiasm for the Slavic race contributed largely to its importance. The towns, in most cases creations of the rulers of Bohemia who had called in German immigrants, were, with the exception of the “new town” of Prague, mainly German; and in consequence of the regulations of the university, Germans also held almost all the more important ecclesiastical offices—a condition of things greatly resented by the natives of Bohemia, which at this period had reached a high degree of intellectual development.
The Hussite movement assumed a revolutionary character as soon as the news of the death of Huss reached Prague. The knights and nobles of Bohemia and Moravia, who were in favour of church reform, sent to the council at Constance (September 2nd, 1415) a protest, known as the “protestatio Bohemorum” which condemned the execution of Huss in the strongest language. The attitude of Sigismund, king of the Romans, who sent threatening letters to Bohemia declaring that he would shortly “drown all Wycliffites and Hussites,” greatly incensed the people. Troubles broke out in various parts of Bohemia, and many Romanist priests were driven from their parishes. Almost from the first the Hussites were divided into two sections, though many minor divisions also arose among them. Shortly before his death Huss had accepted a doctrine preached during his absence by his adherents at Prague, namely that of “utraquism,” i.e. the obligation of the faithful to receive communion in both kinds (sub utraque specie). This doctrine became the watchword of the moderate Hussites who were known as the Utraquists or Calixtines (calix, the chalice), in Bohemian, podoboji; while the more advanced Hussites were soon known as the Taborites, from the city of Tabor that became their centre.
Under the influence of his brother Sigismund, king of the Romans, King Wenceslaus endeavoured to stem the Hussite movement. A certain number of Hussites lead by Nicolas of Hus—no relation of John Huss—left Prague. They held meetings in various parts of Bohemia, particularly at Usti, near the spot where the town of Tabor was founded soon afterwards. At these meetings Sigismund was violently denounced, and the people everywhere prepared for war. In spite of the departure of many prominent Hussites the troubles at Prague continued. On the 30th of July 1419, when a Hussite procession headed by the priest John of Želivo (in Ger. Selau) marched through the streets of Prague, stones were thrown at the Hussites from the windows of the town-hall of the “new town.” The people, headed by John Žižka (1376-1424), threw the burgomaster and several town-councillors, who were the instigators of this outrage, from the windows and they were immediately killed by the crowd. On hearing this news King Wenceslaus was seized with an apoplectic fit, and died a few days afterwards. The death of the king resulted in renewed troubles in Prague and in almost all parts of Bohemia. Many Romanists, mostly Germans—for they had almost all remained faithful to the papal cause—were expelled from the Bohemian cities. In Prague, in November 1419, severe fighting took place between the Hussites and the mercenaries whom Queen Sophia (widow of Wenceslaus and regent after the death of her husband) had hurriedly collected. After a considerable part of the city had been destroyed a truce was concluded on the 13th of November. The nobles, who though favourable to the Hussite cause yet supported the regent, promised to act as mediators with Sigismund; while the citizens of Prague consented to restore to the royal forces the castle of Vyšehrad, which had fallen into their hands. Žižka, who disapproved of this compromise, left Prague and retired to Plzeň (Pilsen). Unable to maintain himself there he marched to southern Bohemia, and after defeating the Romanists at Sudoměř—the first pitched battle of the Hussite wars—he arrived at Usti, one of the earliest meeting-places of the Hussites. Not considering its situation sufficiently strong, he moved to the neighbouring new settlement of the Hussites, to which the biblical name of Tabor was given. Tabor soon became the centre of the advanced Hussites, who differed from the Utraquists by recognizing only two sacraments—Baptism and Communion—and by rejecting most of the ceremonial of the Roman Church. The ecclesiastical organization of Tabor had a somewhat puritanic character, and the government was established on a thoroughly democratic basis. Four captains of the people (hejtmane) were elected, one of whom was Žižka; and a very strictly military discipline was instituted.
Sigismund, king of the Romans, had, by the death of his brother Wenceslaus without issue, acquired a claim on the Bohemian crown; though it was then, and remained till much later, doubtful whether Bohemia was an hereditary or an elective monarchy. A firm adherent of the Church of Rome, Sigismund was successful in obtaining aid from the pope. Martin V. issued a bull on the 17th of March 1420 which proclaimed a crusade “for the destruction of the Wycliffites, Hussites and all other heretics in Bohemia.” The vast army of crusaders, with which were Sigismund and many German princes, and which consisted of adventurers attracted by the hope of pillage from all parts of Europe, arrived before Prague on the 30th of June and immediately began the siege of the city, which had, however, soon to be abandoned (see [Žižka, John]). Negotiations took place for a settlement of the religious differences. The united Hussites formulated their demands in a statement known as the “articles of Prague.” This document, the most important of the Hussite period, runs thus in the wording of the contemporary chronicler, Laurence of Brezova:—
I. The word of God shall be preached and made known in the kingdom of Bohemia freely and in an orderly manner by the priests of the Lord....
II. The sacrament of the most Holy Eucharist shall be freely administered in the two kinds, that is bread and wine, to all the faithful in Christ who are not precluded by mortal sin—according to the word and disposition of Our Saviour.
III. The secular power over riches and worldly goods which the clergy possesses in contradiction to Christ’s precept, to the prejudice of its office and to the detriment of the secular arm, shall be taken and withdrawn from it, and the clergy itself shall be brought back to the evangelical rule and an apostolic life such as that which Christ and his apostles led....
IV. All mortal sins, and in particular all public and other disorders, which are contrary to God’s law shall in every rank of life be duly and judiciously prohibited and destroyed by those whose office it is.
These articles, which contain the essence of the Hussite doctrine, were rejected by Sigismund, mainly through the influence of the papal legates, who considered them prejudicial to the authority of the Roman see. Hostilities therefore continued. Though Sigismund had retired from Prague, the castles of Vyšehrad and Hradčany remained in possession of his troops. The citizens of Prague laid siege to the Vyšehrad, and towards the end of October (1420) the garrison was on the point of capitulating through famine. Sigismund attempted to relieve the fortress, but was decisively defeated by the Hussites on the 1st of November near the village of Pankrác. The castles of Vyšehrad and Hradčany now capitulated, and shortly afterwards almost all Bohemia fell into the hands of the Hussites. Internal troubles prevented them from availing themselves completely of their victory. At Prague a demagogue, the priest John of Želivo, for a time obtained almost unlimited authority over the lower classes of the townsmen; and at Tabor a communistic movement (that of the so-called Adamites) was sternly suppressed by Žižka. Shortly afterwards a new crusade against the Hussites was undertaken. A large German army entered Bohemia, and in August 1421 laid siege to the town of Zatec (Saaz). The crusaders hoped to be joined in Bohemia by King Sigismund, but that prince was detained in Hungary. After an unsuccessful attempt to storm Zatec the crusaders retreated somewhat ingloriously, on hearing that the Hussite troops were approaching. Sigismund only arrived in Bohemia at the end of the year 1421. He took possession of the town of Kutna Hora (Kuttenberg), but was decisively defeated by Žižka at Německy Brod (Deutschbrod) on the 6th of January 1422. Bohemia was now again for a time free from foreign intervention, but internal discord again broke out caused partly by theological strife, partly by the ambition of agitators. John of Želivo was on the 9th of March 1422 arrested by the town council of Prague and decapitated. There were troubles at Tabor also, where a more advanced party opposed Žižka’s authority. Bohemia obtained a temporary respite when, in 1422, Prince Sigismund Korybutovič of Poland became for a short time ruler of the country. His authority was recognized by the Utraquist nobles, the citizens of Prague, and the more moderate Taborites, including Žižka. Korybutovič, however, remained but a short time in Bohemia; after his departure civil war broke out, the Taborites opposing in arms the more moderate Utraquists, who at this period are also called by the chroniclers the “Praguers,” as Prague was their principal stronghold. On the 27th of April 1423, Žižka now again leading, the Taborites defeated at Horic the Utraquist army under Čenek of Wartemberg; shortly afterwards an armistice was concluded at Konopišt.
Papal influence had meanwhile succeeded in calling forth a new crusade against Bohemia, but it resulted in complete failure. In spite of the endeavours of their rulers, the Slavs of Poland and Lithuania did not wish to attack the kindred Bohemians; the Germans were prevented by internal discord from taking joint action against the Hussites; and the king of Denmark, who had landed in Germany with a large force intending to take part in the crusade, soon returned to his own country. Free for a time from foreign aggression, the Hussites invaded Moravia, where a large part of the population favoured their creed; but, again paralysed by dissensions, soon returned to Bohemia. The city of Königgrätz (Králové Hradec), which had been under Utraquist rule, espoused the doctrine of Tabor, and called Žižka to its aid. After several military successes gained by Žižka (q.v.) in 1423 and the following year, a treaty of peace between the Hussites was concluded on the 13th of September 1424 at Liben, a village near Prague, now part of that city.
In 1426 the Hussites were again attacked by foreign enemies. In June of that year their forces, led by Prokop the Great—who took the command of the Taborites shortly after Žižka’s death in October 1424—and Sigismund Korybutovič, who had returned to Bohemia, signally defeated the Germans at Aussig (Usti nad Labem). After this great victory, and another at Tachau in 1427, the Hussites repeatedly invaded Germany, though they made no attempt to occupy permanently any part of the country.
The almost uninterrupted series of victories of the Hussites now rendered vain all hope of subduing them by force of arms. Moreover, the conspicuously democratic character of the Hussite movement caused the German princes, who were afraid that such views might extend to their own countries, to desire peace. Many Hussites, particularly the Utraquist clergy, were also in favour of peace. Negotiations for this purpose were to take place at the oecumenical council which had been summoned to meet at Basel on the 3rd of March 1431. The Roman see reluctantly consented to the presence of heretics at this council, but indignantly rejected the suggestion of the Hussites that members of the Greek Church, and representatives of all Christian creeds, should also be present. Before definitely giving its consent to peace negotiations, the Roman Church determined on making a last effort to reduce the Hussites to subjection. On the 1st of August 1431 a large army of crusaders, under Frederick, margrave of Brandenburg, whom Cardinal Cesarini accompanied as papal legate, crossed the Bohemian frontier; on the 14th of August it reached the town of Domažlice (Tauss); but on the arrival of the Hussite army under Prokop the crusaders immediately took to flight, almost without offering resistance.
On the 15th of October the members of the council, who had already assembled at Basel, issued a formal invitation to the Hussites to take part in its deliberations. Prolonged negotiations ensued; but finally a Hussite embassy, led by Prokop and including John of Rokycan, the Taborite bishop Nicolas of Pelhřimov, the “English Hussite,” Peter Payne and many others, arrived at Basel on the 4th of January 1433. It was found impossible to arrive at an agreement. Negotiations were not, however, broken off; and a change in the political situation of Bohemia finally resulted in a settlement. In 1434 war again broke out between the Utraquists and the Taborites. On the 30th of May of that year the Taborite army, led by Prokop the Great and Prokop the Less, who both fell in the battle, was totally defeated and almost annihilated at Lipan. The moderate party thus obtained the upper hand; and it formulated its demands in a document which was finally accepted by the Church of Rome in a slightly modified form, and which is known as “the compacts.” The compacts, mainly founded on the articles of Prague, declare that:—
1. The Holy Sacrament is to be given freely in both kinds to all Christians in Bohemia and Moravia, and to those elsewhere who adhere to the faith of these two countries.
2. All mortal sins shall be punished and extirpated by those whose office it is so to do.
3. The word of God is to be freely and truthfully preached by the priests of the Lord, and by worthy deacons.
4. The priests in the time of the law of grace shall claim no ownership of worldly possessions.
On the 5th of July 1436 the compacts were formally accepted and signed at Iglau, in Moravia, by King Sigismund, by the Hussite delegates, and by the representatives of the Roman Church. The last-named, however, refused to recognize as archbishop of Prague, John of Rokycan, who had been elected to that dignity by the estates of Bohemia. The Utraquist creed, frequently varying in its details, continued to be that of the established church of Bohemia till all non-Roman religious services were prohibited shortly after the battle of the White Mountain in 1620. The Taborite party never recovered from its defeat at Lipan, and after the town of Tabor had been captured by George of Poděbrad in 1452 Utraquist religious worship was established there. The Bohemian brethren, whose intellectual originator was Peter Chelčicky, but whose actual founders were Brother Gregory, a nephew of Archbishop Rokycan, and Michael, curate of Zamberk, to a certain extent continued the Taborite traditions, and in the 15th and 16th centuries included most of the strongest opponents of Rome in Bohemia. J. A. Komensky (Comenius), a member of the brotherhood, claimed for the members of his church that they were the genuine inheritors of the doctrines of Hus. After the beginning of the German Reformation many Utraquists adopted to a large extent the doctrines of Luther and Calvin; and in 1567 obtained the repeal of the compacts, which no longer seemed sufficiently far-reaching. From the end of the 16th century the inheritors of the Hussite tradition in Bohemia were included in the more general name of “Protestants” borne by the adherents of the Reformation.
All histories of Bohemia devote a large amount of space to the Hussite movement. See Count Lützow, Bohemia; an Historical Sketch (London, 1896); Palacky, Geschichte von Böhmen; Bachmann, Geschichte Böhmens; L. Krummel, Geschichte der böhmischen Reformation (Gotha, 1866) and Utraquisten und Taboriten (Gotha, 1871); Ernest Denis, Huss et la guerre des Hussites (Paris, 1878); H. Toman, Husitské Válečnictvi (Prague, 1898).
(L.)
HUSTING (O. Eng. hústing, from Old Norwegian hústhing), the “thing” or “ting,” i.e. assembly, of the household of personal followers or retainers of a king, earl or chief, contrasted with the “folkmoot,” the assembly of the whole people. “Thing” meant an inanimate object, the ordinary meaning at the present day, also a cause or suit, and an assembly; a similar development of meaning is found in the Latin res. The word still appears in the names of the legislative assemblies of Norway, the Storthing and of Iceland, the Althing. “Husting,” or more usually in the plural “hustings,” was the name of a court of the city of London. This court was formerly the county court for the city and was held before the lord mayor, the sheriffs and aldermen, for pleas of land, common pleas and appeals from the sheriffs. It had probate jurisdiction and wills were registered. All this jurisdiction has long been obsolete, but the court still sits occasionally for registering gifts made to the city. The charter of Canute (1032) contains a reference to “hustings” weights, which points to the early establishment of the court. It is doubtful whether courts of this name were held in other towns, but John Cowell (1554-1611) in his Interpreter (1601) s.v., “Hustings,” says that according to Fleta there were such courts at Winchester, York, Lincoln, Sheppey and elsewhere, but the passage from Fleta, as the New English Dictionary points out, does not necessarily imply this (11. lv. Habet etiam Rex curiam in civitatibus ... et in locis ... sicut in Hustingis London, Winton, &c.). The ordinary use of “hustings” at the present day for the platform from which a candidate speaks at a parliamentary or other election, or more widely for a political candidate’s election campaign, is derived from the application of the word, first to the platform in the Guildhall on which the London court was held, and next to that from which the public nomination of candidates for a parliamentary election was formerly made, and from which the candidate addressed the electors. The Ballot Act of 1872 did away with this public declaration of the nomination.
HUSUM, a town in the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein, in a fertile district 21⁄2 m. inland from the North Sea, on the canalized Husumer Au, which forms its harbour and roadstead, 99 m. N.W. from Hamburg on a branch line from Tönning. Pop. (1900) 8268. It has steam communication with the North Frisian Islands (Nordstrand, Föhr and Sylt), and is a port for the cattle trade with England. Besides a ducal palace and park, it possesses an Evangelical church and a gymnasium. Cattle markets are held weekly, and in them, as also in cereals, a lively export trade is done. There are also extensive oyster fisheries, the property of the state, the yield during the season being very considerable. Husum is the birthplace of Johann Georg Forchhammer (1794-1865), the mineralogist, Peter Wilhelm Forchhammer (1801-1894), the archaeologist, and Theodore Storm (1817-1888), the poet, to the last of whom a monument has been erected here.
Husum is first mentioned in 1252, and its first church was built in 1431. Wisby rights were granted it in 1582, and in 1603 it received municipal privileges from the duke of Holstein. It suffered greatly from inundations in 1634 and 1717.
See Christiansen, Die Geschichte Husums (Husum, 1903); and Henningsen, Das Stiftungsbuch der Stadt Husum (Husum, 1904).
HUTCHESON, FRANCIS (1694-1746), English philosopher, was born on the 8th of August 1694. His birthplace was probably the townland of Drumalig, in the parish of Saintfield and county of Down, Ireland.[1] Though the family had sprung from Ayrshire, in Scotland, both his father and grandfather were ministers of dissenting congregations in the north of Ireland. Hutcheson was educated partly by his grandfather, partly at an academy, where according to his biographer, Dr Leechman, he was taught “the ordinary scholastic philosophy which was in vogue in those days.” In 1710 he entered the university of Glasgow, where he spent six years, at first in the study of philosophy, classics and general literature, and afterwards in the study of theology. On quitting the university, he returned to the north of Ireland, and received a licence to preach. When, however, he was about to enter upon the pastorate of a small dissenting congregation he changed his plans on the advice of a friend and opened a private academy in Dublin. In Dublin his literary attainments gained him the friendship of many prominent inhabitants. Among these was Archbishop King (author of the De origine mali), who resisted all attempts to prosecute Hutcheson in the archbishop’s court for keeping a school without the episcopal licence. Hutcheson’s relations with the clergy of the Established Church, especially with the archbishops of Armagh and Dublin, Hugh Boulter (1672-1742) and William King (1650-1729), seem to have been most cordial, and his biographer, in speaking of “the inclination of his friends to serve him, the schemes proposed to him for obtaining promotion,” &c., probably refers to some offers of preferment, on condition of his accepting episcopal ordination. These offers, however, were unavailing.
While residing in Dublin, Hutcheson published anonymously the four essays by which he is best known, namely, the Inquiry concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony and Design, the Inquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil, in 1725, the Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections and Illustrations upon the Moral Sense, in 1728. The alterations and additions made in the second edition of these Essays were published in a separate form in 1726. To the period of his Dublin residence are also to be referred the Thoughts on Laughter (a criticism of Hobbes) and the Observations on the Fable of the Bees, being in all six letters contributed to Hibernicus’ Letters, a periodical which appeared, in Dublin (1725-1727, 2nd ed. 1734). At the end of the same period occurred the controversy in the London Journal with Gilbert Burnet (probably the second son of Dr Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury); on the “True Foundation of Virtue or Moral Goodness.” All these letters were collected in one volume (Glasgow, 1772).
In 1729 Hutcheson succeeded his old master, Gershom Carmichael, in the chair of moral philosophy in the university of Glasgow. It is curious that up to this time all his essays and letters had been published anonymously, though their authorship appears to have been well known. In 1730 he entered on the duties of his office, delivering an inaugural lecture (afterwards published), De naturali hominum socialitate. It was a great relief to him after the drudgery of school work to secure leisure for his favourite studies; “non levi igitur laetitia commovebar cum almam matrem Academiam me, suum olim alumnum, in libertatem asseruisse audiveram.” Yet the works on which Hutcheson’s reputation rests had already been published.
The remainder of his life he devoted to his professorial duties. His reputation as a teacher attracted many young men, belonging to dissenting families, from England and Ireland, and he enjoyed a well-deserved popularity among both his pupils and his colleagues. Though somewhat quick-tempered, he was remarkable for his warm feelings and generous impulses. He was accused in 1738 before the Glasgow presbytery for “following two false and dangerous doctrines: first, that the standard of moral goodness was the promotion of the happiness of others; and second, that we could have a knowledge of good and evil without and prior to a knowledge of God” (Rae, Life of Adam Smith, 1895). The accusation seems to have had no result.
In addition to the works named, the following were published during Hutcheson’s lifetime: a pamphlet entitled Considerations on Patronage (1735); Philosophiae moralis institutio compendiaria, ethices et jurisprudentiae naturalis elementa continens, lib. iii. (Glasgow, 1742); Metaphysicae synopsis ontologiam et pneumatologiam complectens (Glasgow, 1742). The last work was published anonymously. After his death, his son, Francis Hutcheson (c. 1722-1773), author of a number of popular songs (e.g. “As Colin one evening,” “Jolly Bacchus,” “Where Weeping Yews”), published much the longest, though by no means the most interesting, of his works, A System of Moral Philosophy, in Three Books (2 vols., London, 1755). To this is prefixed a life of the author, by Dr William Leechman (1706-1785), professor of divinity in the university of Glasgow. The only remaining work assigned to Hutcheson is a small treatise on Logic (Glasgow, 1764). This compendium, together with the Compendium of Metaphysics, was republished at Strassburg in 1722.
Thus Hutcheson dealt with metaphysics, logic and ethics. His importance is, however, due almost entirely to his ethical writings, and among these primarily to the four essays and the letters published during his residence in Dublin. His standpoint has a negative and a positive aspect; he is in strong opposition to Thomas Hobbes and Bernard de Mandeville, and in fundamental agreement with Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury), whose name he very properly coupled with his own on the title-page of the first two essays. There are no two names, perhaps, in the history of English moral philosophy, which stand in a closer connexion. The analogy drawn between beauty and virtue, the functions assigned to the moral sense, the position that the benevolent feelings form an original and irreducible part of our nature, and the unhesitating adoption of the principle that the test of virtuous action is its tendency to promote the general welfare are obvious and fundamental points of agreement between the two authors.
I. Ethics.—According to Hutcheson, man has a variety of senses, internal as well as external, reflex as well as direct, the general definition of a sense being “any determination of our minds to receive ideas independently on our will, and to have perceptions of pleasure and pain” (Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, sect. 1). He does not attempt to give an exhaustive enumeration of these “senses,” but, in various parts of his works, he specifies, besides the five external senses commonly recognized (which, he rightly hints, might be added to),—(1) consciousness, by which each man has a perception of himself and of all that is going on in his own mind (Metaph. Syn. pars i. cap. 2); (2) the sense of beauty (sometimes called specifically “an internal sense”); (3) a public sense, or sensus communis, “a determination to be pleased with the happiness of others and to be uneasy at their misery”; (4) the moral sense, or “moral sense of beauty in actions and affections, by which we perceive virtue or vice, in ourselves or others”; (5) a sense of honour, or praise and blame, “which makes the approbation or gratitude of others the necessary occasion of pleasure, and their dislike, condemnation or resentment of injuries done by us the occasion of that uneasy sensation called shame”; (6) a sense of the ridiculous. It is plain, as the author confesses, that there may be “other perceptions, distinct from all these classes,” and, in fact, there seems to be no limit to the number of “senses” in which a psychological division of this kind might result.
Of these “senses” that which plays the most important part in Hutcheson’s ethical system is the “moral sense.” It is this which pronounces immediately on the character of actions and affections, approving those which are virtuous, and disapproving those which are vicious. “His principal design,” he says in the preface to the two first treatises, “is to show that human nature was not left quite indifferent in the affair of virtue, to form to itself observations concerning the advantage or disadvantage of actions, and accordingly to regulate its conduct. The weakness of our reason, and the avocations arising from the infirmity and necessities of our nature, are so great that very few men could ever have formed those long deductions of reasons which show some actions to be in the whole advantageous to the agent, and their contraries pernicious. The Author of nature has much better furnished us for a virtuous conduct than our moralists seem to imagine, by almost as quick and powerful instructions as we have for the preservation of our bodies. He has made virtue a lovely form, to excite our pursuit of it, and has given us strong affections to be the springs of each virtuous action.” Passing over the appeal to final causes involved in this and similar passages, as well as the assumption that the “moral sense” has had no growth or history, but was “implanted” in man exactly in the condition in which it is now to be found among the more civilized races, an assumption common to the systems of both Hutcheson and Butler, it may be remarked that this use of the term “sense” has a tendency to obscure the real nature of the process which goes on in an act of moral judgment. For, as is so clearly established by Hume, this act really consists of two parts: one an act of deliberation, more or less prolonged, resulting in an intellectual judgment; the other a reflex feeling, probably instantaneous, of satisfaction at actions which we denominate good, of dissatisfaction at those which we denominate bad. By the intellectual part of this process we refer the action or habit to a certain class; but no sooner is the intellectual process completed than there is excited in us a feeling similar to that which myriads of actions and habits of the same class, or deemed to be of the same class, have excited in us on former occasions. Now, supposing the latter part of this process to be instantaneous, uniform and exempt from error, the former certainly is not. All mankind may, apart from their selfish interests, approve that which is virtuous or makes for the general good, but surely they entertain the most widely divergent opinions, and, in fact, frequently arrive at directly opposite conclusions as to particular actions and habits. This obvious distinction is undoubtedly recognized by Hutcheson in his analysis of the mental process preceding moral action, nor does he invariably ignore it, even when treating of the moral approbation or disapprobation which is subsequent on action. None the less, it remains true that Hutcheson, both by his phraseology, and by the language in which he describes the process of moral approbation, has done much to favour that loose, popular view of morality which, ignoring the necessity of deliberation and reflection, encourages hasty resolves and unpremeditated judgments. The term “moral sense” (which, it may be noticed, had already been employed by Shaftesbury, not only, as Dr Whewell appears to intimate, in the margin, but also in the text of his Inquiry), if invariably coupled with the term “moral judgment,” would be open to little objection; but, taken alone, as designating the complex process of moral approbation, it is liable to lead not only to serious misapprehension but to grave practical errors. For, if each man’s decisions are solely the result of an immediate intuition of the moral sense, why be at any pains to test, correct or review them? Or why educate a faculty whose decisions are infallible? And how do we account for differences in the moral decisions of different societies, and the observable changes in a man’s own views? The expression has, in fact, the fault of most metaphorical terms: it leads to an exaggeration of the truth which it is intended to suggest.
But though Hutcheson usually describes the moral faculty as acting instinctively and immediately, he does not, like Butler, confound the moral faculty with the moral standard. The test or criterion of right action is with Hutcheson, as with Shaftesbury, its tendency to promote the general welfare of mankind. He thus anticipates the utilitarianism of Bentham—and not only in principle, but even in the use of the phrase “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” (Inquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil, sect. 3).
It is curious that Hutcheson did not realize the inconsistency of this external criterion with his fundamental ethical principle. Intuition has no possible connexion with an empirical calculation of results, and Hutcheson in adopting such a criterion practically denies his fundamental assumption.
As connected with Hutcheson’s virtual adoption of the utilitarian standard may be noticed a kind of moral algebra, proposed for the purpose of “computing the morality of actions.” This calculus occurs in the Inquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil, sect. 3.
The most distinctive of Hutcheson’s ethical doctrines still remaining to be noticed is what has been called the “benevolent theory” of morals. Hobbes had maintained that all our actions, however disguised under apparent sympathy, have their roots in Benevolence. self-love. Hutcheson not only maintains that benevolence is the sole and direct source of many of our actions, but, by a not unnatural recoil, that it is the only source of those actions of which, on reflection, we approve. Consistently with this position, actions which flow from self-love only are pronounced to be morally indifferent. But surely, by the common consent of civilized men, prudence, temperance, cleanliness, industry, self-respect and, in general, the “personal virtues,” are regarded, and rightly regarded, as fitting objects of moral approbation. This consideration could hardly escape any author, however wedded to his own system, and Hutcheson attempts to extricate himself from the difficulty by laying down the position that a man may justly regard himself as a part of the rational system, and may thus “be, in part, an object of his own benevolence” (Ibid.),—a curious abuse of terms, which really concedes the question at issue. Moreover, he acknowledges that, though self-love does not merit approbation, neither, except in its extreme forms, does it merit condemnation, indeed the satisfaction of the dictates of self-love is one of the very conditions of the preservation of society. To press home the inconsistencies involved in these various statements would be a superfluous task.
The vexed question of liberty and necessity appears to be carefully avoided in Hutcheson’s professedly ethical works. But, in the Synopsis metaphysicae, he touches on it in three places, briefly stating both sides of the question, but evidently inclining to that which he designates as the opinion of the Stoics in opposition to what he designates as the opinion of the Peripatetics. This is substantially the same as the doctrine propounded by Hobbes and Locke (to the latter of whom Hutcheson refers in a note), namely, that our will is determined by motives in conjunction with our general character and habit of mind, and that the only true liberty is the liberty of acting as we will, not the liberty of willing as we will. Though, however, his leaning is clear, he carefully avoids dogmatizing, and deprecates the angry controversies to which the speculations on this subject had given rise.
It is easy to trace the influence of Hutcheson’s ethical theories on the systems of Hume and Adam Smith. The prominence given by these writers to the analysis of moral action and moral approbation, with the attempt to discriminate the respective provinces of the reason and the emotions in these processes, is undoubtedly due to the influence of Hutcheson. To a study of the writings of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson we might, probably, in large measure, attribute the unequivocal adoption of the utilitarian standard by Hume, and, if this be the case, the name of Hutcheson connects itself, through Hume, with the names of Priestley, Paley and Bentham. Butler’s Sermons appeared in 1726, the year after the publication of Hutcheson’s two first essays, and the parallelism between the “conscience” of the one writer and the “moral sense” of the other is, at least, worthy of remark.
II. Mental Philosophy.—In the sphere of mental philosophy and logic Hutcheson’s contributions are by no means so important or original as in that of moral philosophy. They are interesting mainly as a link between Locke and the Scottish school. In the former subject the influence of Locke is apparent throughout. All the main outlines of Locke’s philosophy seem, at first sight, to be accepted as a matter of course. Thus, in stating his theory of the moral sense, Hutcheson is peculiarly careful to repudiate the doctrine of innate ideas (see, for instance, Inquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil, sect. 1 ad fin., and sect. 4; and compare Synopsis Metaphysicae, pars i. cap. 2). At the same time he shows more discrimination than does Locke in distinguishing between the two uses of this expression, and between the legitimate and illegitimate form of the doctrine (Syn. Metaph. pars i. cap. 2). All our ideas are, as by Locke, referred to external or internal sense, or, in other words, to sensation and reflection (see, for instance, Syn. Metaph. pars i. cap. 1; Logicae Compend. pars i. cap. 1; System of Moral Philosophy, bk. i. ch. 1). It is, however, a most important modification of Locke’s doctrine, and one which connects Hutcheson’s mental philosophy with that of Reid, when he states that the ideas of extension, figure, motion and rest “are more properly ideas accompanying the sensations of sight and touch than the sensations of either of these senses”; that the idea of self accompanies every thought, and that the ideas of number, duration and existence accompany every other idea whatsoever (see Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, sect. i. art. 1; Syn. Metaph. pars i. cap. 1, pars ii. cap. 1; Hamilton on Reid, p. 124, note). Other important points in which Hutcheson follows the lead of Locke are his depreciation of the importance of the so-called laws of thought, his distinction between the primary and secondary qualities of bodies, the position that we cannot know the inmost essences of things (“intimae rerum naturae sive essentiae”), though they excite various ideas in us, and the assumption that external things are known only through the medium of ideas (Syn. Metaph. pars i. cap. 1), though, at the same time, we are assured of the existence of an external world corresponding to these ideas. Hutcheson attempts to account for our assurance of the reality of an external world by referring it to a natural instinct (Syn. Metaph. pars i. cap. 1). Of the correspondence or similitude between our ideas of the primary qualities of things and the things themselves God alone can be assigned as the cause. This similitude has been effected by Him through a law of nature. “Haec prima qualitatum primariarum perceptio, sive mentis actio quaedam sive passio dicatur, non alia similitudinis aut convenientiae inter ejusmodi ideas et res ipsas causa assignari posse videtur, quam ipse Deus, qui certa naturae lege hoc efficit, ut notiones, quae rebus praesentibus excitantur, sint ipsis similes, aut saltem earum habitudines, si non veras quantitates, depingant” (pars ii. cap. 1). Locke does speak of God “annexing” certain ideas to certain motions of bodies; but nowhere does he propound a theory so definite as that here propounded by Hutcheson, which reminds us at least as much of the speculations of Malebranche as of those of Locke.
Amongst the more important points in which Hutcheson diverges from Locke is his account of the idea of personal identity, which he appears to have regarded as made known to us directly by consciousness. The distinction between body and mind, corpus or materia and res cogitans, is more emphatically accentuated by Hutcheson than by Locke. Generally, he speaks as if we had a direct consciousness of mind as distinct from body (see, for instance, Syn. Metaph. pars ii. cap. 3), though, in the posthumous work on Moral Philosophy, he expressly states that we know mind as we know body “by qualities immediately perceived though the substance of both be unknown” (bk. i. ch. 1). The distinction between perception proper and sensation proper, which occurs by implication though it is not explicitly worked out (see Hamilton’s Lectures on Metaphysics, Lect. 24; Hamilton’s edition of Dugald Stewart’s Works, v. 420), the imperfection of the ordinary division of the external senses into five classes, the limitation of consciousness to a special mental faculty (severely criticized in Sir W. Hamilton’s Lectures on Metaphysics, Lect. xii.) and the disposition to refer on disputed questions of philosophy not so much to formal arguments as to the testimony of consciousness and our natural instincts are also amongst the points in which Hutcheson supplemented or departed from the philosophy of Locke. The last point can hardly fail to suggest the “common-sense philosophy” of Reid.
Thus, in estimating Hutcheson’s position, we find that in particular questions he stands nearer to Locke, but in the general spirit of his philosophy he seems to approach more closely to his Scottish successors.
The short Compendium of Logic, which is more original than such works usually are, is remarkable chiefly for the large proportion of psychological matter which it contains. In these parts of the book Hutcheson mainly follows Locke. The technicalities of the subject are passed lightly over, and the book is readable. It may be specially noticed that he distinguishes between the mental result and its verbal expression [idea—term; judgment—proposition], that he constantly employs the word “idea,” and that he defines logical truth as “convenientia signorum cum rebus significatis” (or “propositionis convenientia cum rebus ipsis,” Syn. Metaph. pars i. cap 3), thus implicitly repudiating a merely formal view of logic.
III. Aesthetics.—Hutcheson may further be regarded as one of the earliest modern writers on aesthetics. His speculations on this subject are contained in the Inquiry concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony and Design, the first of the two treatises published in 1725. He maintains that we are endowed with a special sense by which we perceive beauty, harmony and proportion. This is a reflex sense, because it presupposes the action of the external senses of sight and hearing. It may be called an internal sense, both in order to distinguish its perceptions from the mere perceptions of sight and hearing, and because “in some other affairs, where our external senses are not much concerned, we discern a sort of beauty, very like in many respects to that observed in sensible objects, and accompanied with like pleasure” (Inquiry, &c., sect. 1). The latter reason leads him to call attention to the beauty perceived in universal truths, in the operations of general causes and in moral principles and actions. Thus, the analogy between beauty and virtue, which was so favourite a topic with Shaftesbury, is prominent in the writings of Hutcheson also. Scattered up and down the treatise there are many important and interesting observations which our limits prevent us from noticing. But to the student of mental philosophy it may be specially interesting to remark that Hutcheson both applies the principle of association to explain our ideas of beauty and also sets limits to its application, insisting on there being “a natural power of perception or sense of beauty in objects, antecedent to all custom, education or example” (see Inquiry, &c., sects. 6, 7; Hamilton’s Lectures on Metaphysics, Lect. 44 ad fin.).
Hutcheson’s writings naturally gave rise to much controversy. To say nothing of minor opponents, such as “Philaretus” (Gilbert Burnet, already alluded to), Dr John Balguy (1686-1748), prebendary of Salisbury, the author of two tracts on “The Foundation of Moral Goodness,” and Dr John Taylor (1694-1761) of Norwich, a minister of considerable reputation in his time (author of An Examination of the Scheme of Morality advanced by Dr Hutcheson), the essays appear to have suggested, by antagonism, at least two works which hold a permanent place in the literature of English ethics—Butler’s Dissertation on the Nature of Virtue, and Richard Price’s Treatise of Moral Good and Evil (1757). In this latter work the author maintains, in opposition to Hutcheson, that actions are in themselves right or wrong, that right and wrong are simple ideas incapable of analysis, and that these ideas are perceived immediately by the understanding. We thus see that, not only directly but also through the replies which it called forth, the system of Hutcheson, or at least the system of Hutcheson combined with that of Shaftesbury, contributed, in large measure, to the formation and development of some of the most important of the modern schools of ethics (see especially art. [Ethics]).
Authorities.—Notices of Hutcheson occur in most histories, both of general philosophy and of moral philosophy, as, for instance, in pt. vii. of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments; Mackintosh’s Progress of Ethical Philosophy; Cousin, Cours d’histoire de la philosophie morale du XVIIIe siècle; Whewell’s Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy in England; A. Bain’s Mental and Moral Science; Noah Porter’s Appendix to the English translation of Ueberweg’s History of Philosophy; Sir Leslie Stephen’s History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, &c. See also Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory (London, 1902); W. R. Scott, Francis Hutcheson (Cambridge, 1900); Albee, History of English Utilitarianism (London, 1902); T. Fowler, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson (London, 1882); J. McCosh, Scottish Philosophy (New York, 1874). Of Dr Leechman’s Biography of Hutcheson we have already spoken. J. Veitch gives an interesting account of his professorial work in Glasgow, Mind, ii. 209-212.
(T. F.; X.)
[1] See Belfast Magazine for August 1813.
HUTCHINSON, ANNE (c. 1600-1643), American religious enthusiast, leader of the “Antinomians” in New England, was born in Lincolnshire, England, about 1600. She was the daughter of a clergyman named Francis Marbury, and, according to tradition, was a cousin of John Dryden. She married William Hutchinson, and in 1634 emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts, as a follower and admirer of the Rev. John Cotton. Her orthodoxy was suspected and for a time she was not admitted to the church, but soon she organized meetings among the Boston women, among whom her exceptional ability and her services as a nurse had given her great influence; and at these meetings she discussed and commented upon recent sermons and gave expression to her own theological views. The meetings became increasingly popular, and were soon attended not only by the women but even by some of the ministers and magistrates, including Governor Henry Vane. At these meetings she asserted that she, Cotton and her brother-in-law, the Rev. John Wheelwright—whom she was trying to make second “teacher” in the Boston church—were under a “covenant of grace,” that they had a special inspiration, a “peculiar indwelling of the Holy Ghost,” whereas the Rev. John Wilson, the pastor of the Boston church, and the other ministers of the colony were under a “covenant of works.” Anne Hutchinson was, in fact, voicing a protest against the legalism of the Massachusetts Puritans, and was also striking at the authority of the clergy in an intensely theocratic community. In such a community a theological controversy inevitably was carried into secular politics, and the entire colony was divided into factions. Mrs Hutchinson was supported by Governor Vane, Cotton, Wheelwright and the great majority of the Boston church; opposed to her were Deputy-Governor John Winthrop, Wilson and all of the country magistrates and churches. At a general fast, held late in January 1637, Wheelwright preached a sermon which was taken as a criticism of Wilson and his friends. The strength of the parties was tested at the General Court of Election of May 1637, when Winthrop defeated Vane for the governorship. Cotton recanted, Vane returned to England in disgust, Wheelwright was tried and banished and the rank and file either followed Cotton in making submission or suffered various minor punishments. Mrs Hutchinson was tried (November 1637) by the General Court chiefly for “traducing the ministers,” and was sentenced to banishment; later, in March 1638, she was tried before the Boston church and was formally excommunicated. With William Coddington (d. 1678), John Clarke and others, she established a settlement on the island of Aquidneck (now Rhode Island) in 1638. Four years later, after the death of her husband, she settled on Long Island Sound near what is now New Rochelle, Westchester county, New York, and was killed in an Indian rising in August 1643, an event regarded in Massachusetts as a manifestation of Divine Providence. Anne Hutchinson and her followers were called “Antinomians,” probably more as a term of reproach than with any special reference to her doctrinal theories; and the controversy in which she was involved is known as the “Antinomian Controversy.”
See C. F. Adams, Antinomianism in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, vol. xiv. of the Prince Society Publications (Boston, 1894); and Three Episodes of Massachusetts History (Boston and New York, 1896).
HUTCHINSON, JOHN (1615-1664), Puritan soldier, son of Sir Thomas Hutchinson of Owthorpe, Nottinghamshire, and of Margaret, daughter of Sir John Byron of Newstead, was baptized on the 18th of September 1615. He was educated at Nottingham and Lincoln schools and at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and in 1637 he entered Lincoln’s Inn. On the outbreak of the great Rebellion he took the side of the Parliament, and was made in 1643 governor of Nottingham Castle, which he defended against external attacks and internal divisions, till the triumph of the parliamentary cause. He was chosen member for Nottinghamshire in March 1646, took the side of the Independents, opposed the offers of the king at Newport, and signed the death-warrant. Though a member at first of the council of state, he disapproved of the subsequent political conduct of Cromwell and took no further part in politics during the lifetime of the protector. He resumed his seat in the recalled Long Parliament in May 1659, and followed Monk in opposing Lambert, believing that the former intended to maintain the commonwealth. He was returned to the Convention Parliament for Nottingham but expelled on the 9th of June 1660, and while not excepted from the Act of Indemnity was declared incapable of holding public office. In October 1663, however, he was arrested upon suspicion of being concerned in the Yorkshire plot, and after a rigorous confinement in the Tower of London, of which he published an account (reprinted in the Harleian Miscellany, vol. iii.), and in Sandown Castle, Kent, he died on the 11th of September 1664. His career draws its chief interest from the Life by his wife, Lucy, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, written after the death of her husband but not published till 1806 (since often reprinted), a work not only valuable for the picture which it gives of the man and of the time in which he lived, but for the simple beauty of its style, and the naïveté with which the writer records her sentiments and opinions, and details the incidents of her private life.
See the edition of Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson by C. H. Firth (1885); Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 25,901 (a fragment of the Life), also Add. MSS. 19, 333, 36,247 f. 51; Notes and Queries, 7, ser. iii. 25, viii. 422; Monk’s Contemporaries, by Guizot.
HUTCHINSON, JOHN (1674-1737), English theological writer, was born at Spennithorne, Yorkshire, in 1674. He served as steward in several families of position, latterly in that of the duke of Somerset, who ultimately obtained for him the post of riding purveyor to the master of the horse, a sinecure worth about £200 a year. In 1700 he became acquainted with Dr John Woodward (1665-1728) physician to the duke and author of a work entitled The Natural History of the Earth, to whom he entrusted a large number of fossils of his own collecting, along with a mass of manuscript notes, for arrangement and publication. A misunderstanding as to the manner in which these should be dealt with was the immediate occasion of the publication by Hutchinson in 1724 of Moses’s Principia, part i., in which Woodward’s Natural History was bitterly ridiculed, his conduct with regard to the mineralogical specimens not obscurely characterized, and a refutation of the Newtonian doctrine of gravitation seriously attempted. It was followed by part ii. in 1727, and by various other works, including Moses’s Sine Principio, 1730; The Confusion of Tongues and Trinity of the Gentiles, 1731; Power Essential and Mechanical, or what power belongs to God and what to his creatures, in which the design of Sir I. Newton and Dr Samuel Clarke is laid open, 1732; Glory or Gravity, 1733; The Religion of Satan, or Antichrist Delineated, 1736. He taught that the Bible contained the elements not only of true religion but also of all rational philosophy. He held that the Hebrew must be read without points, and his interpretation rested largely on fanciful symbolism. Bishop George Home of Norwich was during some of his earlier years an avowed Hutchinsonian; and William Jones of Nayland continued to be so to the end of his life.
A complete edition of his publications, edited by Robert Spearman and Julius Bate, appeared in 1748 (12 vols.); an Abstract of these followed in 1753; and a Supplement, with Life by Spearman prefixed, in 1765.
HUTCHINSON, SIR JONATHAN (1828- ), English surgeon and pathologist, was born on the 23rd of July 1828 at Selby, Yorkshire, his parents belonging to the Society of Friends. He entered St Bartholomew’s Hospital, became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1850 (F.R.C.S. 1862), and rapidly gained reputation as a skilful operator and a scientific inquirer. He was president of the Hunterian Society in 1869 and 1870, professor of surgery and pathology at the College of Surgeons from 1877 to 1882, president of the Pathological Society, 1879-1880, of the Ophthalmological Society, 1883, of the Neurological Society, 1887, of the Medical Society, 1890, and of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical in 1894-1896. In 1889 he was president of the Royal College of Surgeons. He was a member of two Royal Commissions, that of 1881 to inquire into the provision for smallpox and fever cases in the London hospitals, and that of 1889-1896 on vaccination and leprosy. He also acted as honorary secretary to the Sydenham Society. His activity in the cause of scientific surgery and in advancing the study of the natural sciences was unwearying. His lectures on neuro-pathogenesis, gout, leprosy, diseases of the tongue, &c., were full of original observation; but his principal work was connected with the study of syphilis, on which he became the first living authority. He was the founder of the London Polyclinic or Postgraduate School of Medicine; and both in his native town of Selby and at Haslemere, Surrey, he started (about 1890) educational museums for popular instruction in natural history. He published several volumes on his own subjects, was editor of the quarterly Archives of Surgery, and was given the Hon. LL.D. degree by both Glasgow and Cambridge. After his retirement from active consultative work he continued to take great interest in the question of leprosy, asserting the existence of a definite connexion between this disease and the eating of salted fish. He received a knighthood in 1908.
HUTCHINSON, THOMAS (1711-1780), the last royal governor of the province of Massachusetts, son of a wealthy merchant of Boston, Mass., was born there on the 9th of September 1711. He graduated at Harvard in 1727, then became an apprentice in his father’s counting-room, and for several years devoted himself to business. In 1737 he began his public career as a member of the Boston Board of Selectmen, and a few weeks later he was elected to the General Court of Massachusetts Bay, of which he was a member until 1740 and again from 1742 to 1749, serving as speaker in 1747, 1748 and 1749. He consistently contended for a sound financial system, and vigorously opposed the operations of the “Land Bank” and the issue of pernicious bills of credit. In 1748 he carried through the General Court a bill providing for the cancellation and redemption of the outstanding paper currency. Hutchinson went to England in 1740 as the representative of Massachusetts in a boundary dispute with New Hampshire. He was a member of the Massachusetts Council from 1749 to 1756, was appointed judge of probate in 1752 and was chief justice of the superior court of the province from 1761 to 1769, was lieutenant-governor from 1758 to 1771, acting as governor in the latter two years, and from 1771 to 1774 was governor. In 1754 he was a delegate from Massachusetts to the Albany Convention, and, with Franklin, was a member of the committee appointed to draw up a plan of union. Though he recognized the legality of the Stamp Act of 1765, he considered the measure inexpedient and impolitic and urged its repeal, but his attitude was misunderstood; he was considered by many to have instigated the passage of the Act, and in August 1765 a mob sacked his Boston residence and destroyed many valuable manuscripts and documents. He was acting governor at the time of the “Boston Massacre” in 1770, and was virtually forced by the citizens of Boston, under the leadership of Samuel Adams, to order the removal of the British troops from the town. Throughout the pre-Revolutionary disturbances in Massachusetts he was the representative of the British ministry, and though he disapproved of some of the ministerial measures he felt impelled to enforce them and necessarily incurred the hostility of the Whig or Patriot element. In 1774, upon the appointment of General Thomas Gage as military governor he went to England, and acted as an adviser to George III. and the British ministry on American affairs, uniformly counselling moderation. He died at Brompton, now part of London, on the 3rd of June 1780.
He wrote A Brief Statement of the Claim of the Colonies (1764); a Collection of Original Papers relative to the History of Massachusetts Bay (1769), reprinted as The Hutchinson Papers by the Prince Society in 1865; and a judicious, accurate and very valuable History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay (vol. i., 1764, vol. ii., 1767, and vol. iii., 1828). His Diary and Letters, with an Account of his Administration, was published at Boston in 1884-1886.
See James K. Hosmer’s Life of Thomas Hutchinson (Boston, 1896), and a biographical chapter in John Fiske’s Essays Historical and Literary (New York, 1902). For an estimate of Hutchinson as an historian, see M. C. Tyler’s Literary History of the American Revolution (New York, 1897).
HUTCHINSON, a city and the county-seat of Reno county, Kansas, U.S.A., in the broad bottom-land on the N. side of the Arkansas river. Pop. (1900) 9379, of whom 414 were foreign-born and 442 negroes; (1910 census) 16,364. It is served by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé, the Missouri Pacific and the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific railways. The principal public buildings are the Federal building and the county court house. The city has a public library, and an industrial reformatory is maintained here by the state. Hutchinson is situated in a stock-raising, fruit-growing and farming region (the principal products of which are wheat, Indian corn and fodder), with which it has a considerable wholesale trade. An enormous deposit of rock salt underlies the city and its vicinity, and Hutchinson’s principal industry is the manufacture (by the open-pan and grainer processes) and the shipping of salt; the city has one of the largest salt plants in the world. Among the other manufactures are flour, creamery products, soda-ash, straw-board, planing-mill products and packed meats. Natural gas is largely used as a factory fuel. The city’s factory product was valued at $2,031,048 in 1905, an increase of 31.8% since 1900. Hutchinson was chartered as a city In 1871.
HUTTEN, PHILIPP VON (c. 1511-1546), German knight, was a relative of Ulrich von Hutten and passed some of his early years at the court of the emperor Charles V. Later he joined the band of adventurers which under Georg Hohermuth, or George of Spires, sailed to Venezuela, or Venosala as Hutten calls it, with the object of conquering and exploiting this land in the interests of the Augsburg family of Welser. The party landed at Coro in February 1535 and Hutten accompanied Hohermuth on his long and toilsome expedition into the interior in search of treasure. After the death of Hohermuth in December 1540 he became captain-general of Venezuela. Soon after this event he vanished into the interior, returning after five years of wandering to find that a Spaniard, Juan de Caravazil, or Caravajil, had been appointed governor in his absence. With his travelling companion, Bartholomew Welser the younger, he was seized by Caravazil in April 1546 and the two were afterwards put to death.
Hutten left some letters, and also a narrative of the earlier part of his adventures, this Zeitung aus India Junkher Philipps von Hutten being published in 1785.
HUTTEN, ULRICH VON (1488-1523), was born on the 21st of April 1488, at the castle of Steckelberg, near Fulda, in Hesse. Like Erasmus or Pirckheimer, he was one of those men who form the bridge between Humanists and Reformers. He lived with both, sympathized with both, though he died before the Reformation had time fully to develop. His life may be divided into four parts:—his youth and cloister-life (1488-1504); his wanderings in pursuit of knowledge (1504-1515); his strife with Ulrich of Württemberg (1515-1519); and his connexion with the Reformation (1519-1523). Each of these periods had its own special antagonism, which coloured Hutten’s career: in the first, his horror of dull monastic routine; in the second, the ill-treatment he met with at Greifswald; in the third, the crime of Duke Ulrich; in the fourth, his disgust with Rome and with Erasmus. He was the eldest son of a poor and not undistinguished knightly family. As he was mean of stature and sickly his father destined him for the cloister, and he was sent to the Benedictine house at Fulda; the thirst for learning there seized on him, and in 1505 he fled from the monastic life, and won his freedom with the sacrifice of his worldly prospects, and at the cost of incurring his father’s undying anger. From the Fulda cloister he went first to Cologne, next to Erfurt, and then to Frankfort-on-Oder on the opening in 1506 of the new university of that town. For a time he was in Leipzig, and in 1508 we find him a shipwrecked beggar on the Pomeranian coast. In 1509 the university of Greifswald welcomed him, but here too those who at first received him kindly became his foes; the sensitive ill-regulated youth, who took the liberties of genius, wearied his burgher patrons; they could not brook the poet’s airs and vanity, and ill-timed assertions of his higher rank. Wherefore he left Greifswald, and as he went was robbed of clothes and books, his only baggage, by the servants of his late friends; in the dead of winter, half starved, frozen, penniless, he reached Rostock. Here again the Humanists received him gladly, and under their protection he wrote against his Greifswald patrons, thus beginning the long list of his satires and fierce attacks on personal or public foes. Rostock could not hold him long; he wandered on to Wittenberg and Leipzig, and thence to Vienna, where he hoped to win the emperor Maximilian’s favour by an elaborate national poem on the war with Venice. But neither Maximilian nor the university of Vienna would lift a hand for him, and he passed into Italy, where, at Pavia, he sojourned throughout 1511 and part of 1512. In the latter year his studies were interrupted by war; in the siege of Pavia by papal troops and Swiss, he was plundered by both sides, and escaped, sick and penniless, to Bologna; on his recovery he even took service as a private soldier in the emperor’s army.
This dark period lasted no long time; in 1514 he was again in Germany, where, thanks to his poetic gifts and the friendship of Eitelwolf von Stein (d. 1515), he won the favour of the elector of Mainz, Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg. Here high dreams of a learned career rose on him; Mainz should be made the metropolis of a grand Humanist movement, the centre of good style and literary form. But the murder in 1515 of his relative Hans von Hutten by Ulrich, duke of Württemberg, changed the whole course of his life; satire, chief refuge of the weak, became Hutten’s weapon; with one hand he took his part in the famous Epistolae obscurorum virorum, and with the other launched scathing letters, eloquent Ciceronian orations, or biting satires against the duke. Though the emperor was too lazy and indifferent to smite a great prince, he took Hutten under his protection and bestowed on him the honour of a laureate crown in 1517. Hutten, who had meanwhile revisited Italy, again attached himself to the electoral court at Mainz; and he was there when in 1518 his friend Pirckheimer wrote, urging him to abandon the court and dedicate himself to letters. We have the poet’s long reply, in an epistle on his “way of life,” an amusing mixture of earnestness and vanity, self-satisfaction and satire; he tells his friend that his career is just begun, that he has had twelve years of wandering, and will now enjoy himself a while in patriotic literary work; that he has by no means deserted the humaner studies, but carries with him a little library of standard books. Pirckheimer in his burgher life may have ease and even luxury; he, a knight of the empire, how can he condescend to obscurity? He must abide where he can shine.
In 1519 he issued in one volume his attacks on Duke Ulrich, and then, drawing sword, took part in the private war which overthrew that prince; in this affair he became intimate with Franz von Sickingen, the champion of the knightly order (Ritterstand). Hutten now warmly and openly espoused the Lutheran cause, but he was at the same time mixed up in the attempt of the “Ritterstand” to assert itself as the militia of the empire against the independence of the German princes. Soon after this time he discovered at Fulda a copy of the manifesto of the emperor Henry IV. against Hildebrand, and published it with comments as an attack on the papal claims over Germany. He hoped thereby to interest the new emperor Charles V., and the higher orders in the empire, in behalf of German liberties; but the appeal failed. What Luther had achieved by speaking to cities and common folk in homely phrase, because he touched heart and conscience, that the far finer weapons of Hutten failed to effect, because he tried to touch the more cultivated sympathies and dormant patriotism of princes and bishops, nobles and knights. And so he at once gained an undying name in the republic of letters and ruined his own career. He showed that the artificial verse-making of the Humanists could be connected with the new outburst of genuine German poetry. The Minnesinger was gone; the new national singer, a Luther or a Hans Sachs, was heralded by the stirring lines of Hutten’s pen. These have in them a splendid natural swing and ring, strong and patriotic, though unfortunately addressed to knight and landsknecht rather than to the German people.
The poet’s high dream of a knightly national regeneration had a rude awakening. The attack on the papacy, and Luther’s vast and sudden popularity, frightened Elector Albert, who dismissed Hutten from his court. Hoping for imperial favour, he betook himself to Charles V.; but that young prince would have none of him. So he returned to his friends, and they rejoiced greatly to see him still alive; for Pope Leo X. had ordered him to be arrested and sent to Rome, and assassins dogged his steps. He now attached himself more closely to Franz von Sickingen and the knightly movement. This also came to a disastrous end in the capture of the Ebernberg, and Sickingen’s death; the higher nobles had triumphed; the archbishops avenged themselves on Lutheranism as interpreted by the knightly order. With Sickingen Hutten also finally fell. He fled to Basel, where Erasmus refused to see him, both for fear of his loathsome diseases, and also because the beggared knight was sure to borrow money from him. A paper war consequently broke out between the two Humanists, which embittered Hutten’s last days, and stained the memory of Erasmus. From Basel Ulrich dragged himself to Mülhausen; and when the vengeance of Erasmus drove him thence, he went to Zurich. There the large heart of Zwingli welcomed him; he helped him with money, and found him a quiet refuge with the pastor of the little isle of Ufnau on the Zurich lake. There the frail and worn-out poet, writing swift satire to the end, died at the end of August or beginning of September 1523 at the age of thirty-five. He left behind him some debts due to compassionate friends; he did not even own a single book, and all his goods amounted to the clothes on his back, a bundle of letters, and that valiant pen which had fought so many a sharp battle, and had won for the poor knight-errant a sure place in the annals of literature.
Ulrich von Hutten is one of those men of genius at whom propriety is shocked, and whom the mean-spirited avoid. Yet through his short and buffeted life he was befriended, with wonderful charity and patience, by the chief leaders of the Humanist movement. For, in spite of his irritable vanity, his immoral life and habits, his odious diseases, his painful restlessness, Hutten had much in him that strong men could love. He passionately loved the truth, and was ever open to all good influences. He was a patriot, whose soul soared to ideal schemes and a grand utopian restoration of his country. In spite of all, his was a frank and noble nature; his faults chiefly the faults of genius ill-controlled, and of a life cast in the eventful changes of an age of novelty. A swarm of writings issued from his pen; at first the smooth elegance of his Latin prose and verse seemed strangely to miss his real character; he was the Cicero and Ovid of Germany before he became its Lucian.
His chief works were his Ars versificandi (1511); the Nemo (1518); a work on the Morbus Gallicus (1519); the volume of Steckelberg complaints against Duke Ulrich (including his four Ciceronian Orations, his Letters and the Phalarismus) also in 1519; the Vadismus (1520); and the controversy with Erasmus at the end of his life. Besides these were many admirable poems in Latin and German. It is not known with certainty how far Hutten was the parent of the celebrated Epistolae obscurorum virorum, that famous satire on monastic ignorance as represented by the theologians of Cologne with which the friends of Reuchlin defended him. At first the cloister-world, not discerning its irony, welcomed the work as a defence of their position; though their eyes were soon opened by the favour with which the learned world received it. The Epistolae were eagerly bought up; the first part (41 letters) appeared at the end of 1515; early in 1516 there was a second edition; later in 1516 a third, with an appendix of seven letters; in 1517 appeared the second part (62 letters), to which a fresh appendix of eight letters was subjoined soon after. In 1909 the Latin text of the Epistolae with an English translation was published by F. G. Stokes. Hutten, in a letter addressed to Robert Crocus, denied that he was the author of the book, but there is no doubt as to his connexion with it. Erasmus was of opinion that there were three authors, of whom Crotus Rubianus was the originator of the idea, and Hutten a chief contributor. D. F. Strauss, who dedicates to the subject a chapter of his admirable work on Hutten, concludes that he had no share in the first part, but that his hand is clearly visible in the second part, which he attributes in the main to him. To him is due the more serious and severe tone of that bitter portion of the satire. See W. Brecht, Die Verfasser der Epistolae obscurorum virorum (1904).
For a complete catalogue of the writings of Hutten, see E. Böcking’s Index Bibliographicus Huttenianus (1858). Böcking is also the editor of the complete edition of Hutten’s works (7 vols., 1859-1862). A selection of Hutten’s German writings, edited by G. Balke, appeared in 1891. Cp. S. Szamatolski, Huttens deutsche Schriften (1891). The best biography (though it is also somewhat of a political pamphlet) is that of D. F. Strauss (Ulrich von Hutten, 1857; 4th ed., 1878; English translation by G. Sturge, 1874), with which may be compared the older monographs by A. Wagenseil (1823), A. Bürck (1846) and J. Zeller (Paris, 1849). See also J. Deckert, Ulrich von Huttens Leben und Wirken. Eine historische Skizze (1901).
(G. W. K.)
HUTTER, LEONHARD (1563-1616), German Lutheran theologian, was born at Nellingen near Ulm in January 1563. From 1581 he studied at the universities of Strassburg, Leipzig, Heidelberg and Jena. In 1594 he began to give theological lectures at Jena, and in 1596 accepted a call as professor of theology at Wittenberg, where he died on the 23rd of October 1616. Hutter was a stern champion of Lutheran orthodoxy, as set down in the confessions and embodied in his own Compendium locorum theologicorum (1610; reprinted 1863), being so faithful to his master as to win the title of “Luther redonatus.”
In reply to Rudolf Hospinian’s Concordia discors (1607), he wrote a work, rich in historical material but one-sided in its apologetics, Concordia concors (1614), defending the formula of Concord, which he regarded as inspired. His Irenicum vere christianum is directed against David Pareus (1548-1622), professor primarius at Heidelberg, who in Irenicum sive de unione et synodo Evangelicorum (1614) had pleaded for a reconciliation of Lutheranism and Calvinism; his Calvinista aulopoliticus (1610) was written against the “damnable Calvinism” which was becoming prevalent in Holstein and Brandenburg. Another work, based on the formula of Concord, was entitled Loci communes theologici.
HUTTON, CHARLES (1737-1823), English mathematician, was born at Newcastle-on-Tyne on the 14th of August 1737. He was educated in a school at Jesmond, kept by Mr Ivison, a clergyman of the church of England. There is reason to believe, on the evidence of two pay-bills, that for a short time in 1755 and 1756 Hutton worked in Old Long Benton colliery; at any rate, on Ivison’s promotion to a living, Hutton succeeded to the Jesmond school, whence, in consequence of increasing pupils, he removed to Stote’s Hall. While he taught during the day at Stote’s Hall, he studied mathematics in the evening at a school in Newcastle. In 1760 he married, and began tuition on a larger scale in Newcastle, where he had among his pupils John Scott, afterwards Lord Eldon, chancellor of England. In 1764 he published his first work, The Schoolmaster’s Guide, or a Complete System of Practical Arithmetic, which in 1770 was followed by his Treatise on Mensuration both in Theory and Practice. In 1772 appeared a tract on The Principles of Bridges, suggested by the destruction of Newcastle bridge by a high flood on the 17th of November 1771. In 1773 he was appointed professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and in the following year he was elected F.R.S. and reported on Nevil Maskelyne’s determination of the mean density and mass of the earth from measurements taken in 1774-1776 at Mount Schiehallion in Perthshire. This account appeared in the Philosophical Transactions for 1778, was afterwards reprinted in the second volume of his Tracts on Mathematical and Philosophical Subjects, and procured for Hutton the degree of LL.D. from the university of Edinburgh. He was elected foreign secretary to the Royal Society in 1779, but his resignation in 1783 was brought about by the president Sir Joseph Banks, whose behaviour to the mathematical section of the society was somewhat high-handed (see Kippis’s Observations on the late Contests in the Royal Society, London, 1784). After his Tables of the Products and Powers of Numbers, 1781, and his Mathematical Tables, 1785, he issued, for the use of the Royal Military Academy, in 1787 Elements of Conic Sections, and in 1798 his Course of Mathematics. His Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary, a valuable contribution to scientific biography, was published in 1795 (2nd ed., 1815), and the four volumes of Recreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, mostly a translation from the French, in 1803. One of the most laborious of his works was the abridgment, in conjunction with G. Shaw and R. Pearson, of the Philosophical Transactions. This undertaking, the mathematical and scientific parts of which fell to Hutton’s share, was completed in 1809, and filled eighteen volumes quarto. His name first appears in the Ladies’ Diary (a poetical and mathematical almanac which was begun in 1704, and lasted till 1871) in 1764; ten years later he was appointed editor of the almanac, a post which he retained till 1817. Previously he had begun a small periodical, Miscellanea Mathematica, which extended only to thirteen numbers; subsequently he published in five volumes The Diarian Miscellany, which contained large extracts from the Diary. He resigned his professorship in 1807, and died on the 27th of January 1823.
See John Bruce, Charles Hutton (Newcastle, 1823).
HUTTON, JAMES (1726-1797), Scottish geologist, was born in Edinburgh on the 3rd of June 1726. Educated at the high school and university of his native city, he acquired while a student a passionate love of scientific inquiry. He was apprenticed to a lawyer, but his employer advised that a more congenial profession should be chosen for him. The young apprentice chose medicine as being nearest akin to his favourite pursuit of chemistry. He studied for three years at Edinburgh, and completed his medical education in Paris, returning by the Low Countries, and taking his degree of doctor of medicine at Leiden in 1749. Finding, however, that there seemed hardly any opening for him, he abandoned the medical profession, and, having inherited a small property in Berwickshire from his father, resolved to devote himself to agriculture. He then went to Norfolk to learn the practical work of farming, and subsequently travelled in Holland, Belgium and the north of France. During these years he began to study the surface of the earth, gradually shaping in his mind the problem to which he afterwards devoted his energies. In the summer of 1754 he established himself on his own farm in Berwickshire, where he resided for fourteen years, and where he introduced the most improved forms of husbandry. As the farm was brought into excellent order, and as its management, becoming more easy, grew less interesting, he was induced to let it, and establish himself for the rest of his life in Edinburgh. This took place about the year 1768. He was unmarried, and from this period until his death in 1797 he lived with his three sisters. Surrounded by congenial literary and scientific friends he devoted himself to research.
At that time geology in any proper sense of the term did not exist. Mineralogy, however, had made considerable progress. But Hutton had conceived larger ideas than were entertained by the mineralogists of his day. He desired to trace back the origin of the various minerals and rocks, and thus to arrive at some clear understanding of the history of the earth. For many years he continued to study the subject. At last, in the spring of the year 1785, he communicated his views to the recently established Royal Society of Edinburgh in a paper entitled Theory of the Earth, or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution and Restoration of Land upon the Globe. In this remarkable work the doctrine is expounded that geology is not cosmogony, but must confine itself to the study of the materials of the earth; that everywhere evidence may be seen that the present rocks of the earth’s surface have been in great part formed out of the waste of older rocks; that these materials having been laid down under the sea were there consolidated under great pressure, and were subsequently disrupted and upheaved by the expansive power of subterranean heat; that during these convulsions veins and masses of molten rock were injected into the rents of the dislocated strata; that every portion of the upraised land, as soon as exposed to the atmosphere, is subject to decay; and that this decay must tend to advance until the whole of the land has been worn away and laid down on the sea-floor, whence future upheavals will once more raise the consolidated sediments into new land. In some of these broad and bold generalizations Hutton was anticipated by the Italian geologists; but to him belongs the credit of having first perceived their mutual relations, and combined them in a luminous coherent theory based upon observation.
It was not merely the earth to which Hutton directed his attention. He had long studied the changes of the atmosphere. The same volume in which his Theory of the Earth appeared contained also a Theory of Rain, which was read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1784. He contended that the amount of moisture which the air can retain in solution increases with augmentation of temperature, and, therefore, that on the mixture of two masses of air of different temperatures a portion of the moisture must be condensed and appear in visible form. He investigated the available data regarding rainfall and climate in different regions of the globe, and came to the conclusion that the rainfall is everywhere regulated by the humidity of the air on the one hand, and the causes which promote mixtures of different aerial currents in the higher atmosphere on the other.
The vigour and versatility of his genius may be understood from the variety of works which, during his thirty years’ residence in Edinburgh, he gave to the world. In 1792 he published a quarto volume entitled Dissertations on different Subjects in Natural Philosophy, in which he discussed the nature of matter, fluidity, cohesion, light, heat and electricity. Some of these subjects were further illustrated by him in papers read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He did not restrain himself within the domain of physics, but boldly marched into that of metaphysics, publishing three quarto volumes with the title An Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge, and of the Progress of Reason—from Sense to Science and Philosophy. In this work he developed the idea that the external world, as conceived by us, is the creation of our own minds influenced by impressions from without, that there is no resemblance between our picture of the outer world and the reality, yet that the impressions produced upon our minds, being constant and consistent, become as much realities to us as if they precisely resembled things actually existing, and, therefore, that our moral conduct must remain the same as if our ideas perfectly corresponded to the causes producing them. His closing years were devoted to the extension and republication of his Theory of the Earth, of which two volumes appeared in 1795. A third volume, necessary to complete the work, was left by him in manuscript, and is referred to by his biographer John Playfair. A portion of the MS. of this volume, which had been given to the Geological Society of London by Leonard Horner, was published by the Society in 1899, under the editorship of Sir A. Geikie. The rest of the manuscript appears to be lost. Soon afterwards Hutton set to work to collect and systematize his numerous writings on husbandry, which he proposed to publish under the title of Elements of Agriculture. He had nearly completed this labour when an incurable disease brought his active career to a close on the 26th of March 1797.
It is by his Theory of the Earth that Hutton will be remembered with reverence while geology continues to be cultivated. The author’s style, however, being somewhat heavy and obscure, the book did not attract during his lifetime so much attention as it deserved. Happily for science Hutton numbered among his friends John Playfair (q.v.), professor of mathematics in the university of Edinburgh, whose enthusiasm for the spread of Hutton’s doctrine was combined with a rare gift of graceful and luminous exposition. Five years after Hutton’s death he published a volume, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, in which he gave an admirable summary of that theory, with numerous additional illustrations and arguments. This work is justly regarded as one of the classical contributions to geological literature. To its influence much of the sound progress of British geology must be ascribed. In the year 1805 a biographical account of Hutton, written by Playfair, was published in vol. v. of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
(A. Ge.)
HUTTON, RICHARD HOLT (1826-1897), English writer and theologian, son of Joseph Hutton, Unitarian minister at Leeds, was born at Leeds on the 2nd of June 1826. His family removed to London in 1835, and he was educated at University College School and University College, where he began a lifelong friendship with Walter Bagehot, of whose works he afterwards was the editor; he took the degree in 1845, being awarded the gold medal for philosophy. Meanwhile he had also studied for short periods at Heidelberg and Berlin, and in 1847 he entered Manchester New College with the idea of becoming a minister like his father, and studied there under James Martineau. He did not, however, succeed in obtaining a call to any church, and for some little time his future was unsettled. He married in 1851 his cousin, Anne Roscoe, and became joint-editor with J. L. Sanford of the Inquirer, the principal Unitarian organ. But his innovations and his unconventional views about stereotyped Unitarian doctrines caused alarm, and in 1853 he resigned. His health had broken down, and he visited the West Indies, where his wife died of yellow fever. In 1855 Hutton and Bagehot became joint-editors of the National Review, a new monthly, and conducted it for ten years. During this time Hutton’s theological views, influenced largely by Coleridge, and more directly by F. W. Robertson and F. D. Maurice, gradually approached more and more to those of the Church of England, which he ultimately joined. His interest in theology was profound, and he brought to it a spirituality of outlook and an aptitude for metaphysical inquiry and exposition which added a singular attraction to his writings. In 1861 he joined Meredith Townsend as joint-editor and part proprietor of the Spectator, then a well-known liberal weekly, which, however, was not remunerative from the business point of view. Hutton took charge of the literary side of the paper, and by degrees his own articles became and remained up to the last one of the best-known features of serious and thoughtful English journalism. The Spectator, which gradually became a prosperous property, was his pulpit, in which unwearyingly he gave expression to his views, particularly on literary, religious and philosophical subjects, in opposition to the agnostic and rationalistic opinions then current in intellectual circles, as popularized by Huxley. A man of fearless honesty, quick and catholic sympathies, broad culture, and many friends in intellectual and religious circles, he became one of the most influential journalists of the day, his fine character and conscience earning universal respect and confidence. He was an original member of the Metaphysical Society (1869). He was an anti-vivisectionist, and a member of the royal commission (1875) on that subject. In 1858 he had married Eliza Roscoe, a cousin of his first wife; she died early in 1897, and Hutton’s own death followed on the 9th of September of the same year.
Among his other publications may be mentioned Essays, Theological and Literary (1871; revised 1888), and Criticisms on Contemporary Thought and Thinkers (1894); and his opinions may be studied compendiously in the selections from his Spectator articles published in 1899 under the title of Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought.
HUXLEY, THOMAS HENRY (1825-1895), English biologist, was born on the 4th of May 1825 at Ealing, where his father, George Huxley, was senior assistant-master in the school of Dr Nicholas. This was an establishment of repute, and is at any rate remarkable for having produced two men with so little in common in after life as Huxley and Cardinal Newman. The cardinal’s brother, Francis William, had been “captain” of the school in 1821. Huxley was a seventh child (as his father had also been), and the youngest who survived infancy. Of Huxley’s ancestry no more is ascertainable than in the case of most middle-class families. He himself thought it sprang from the Cheshire Huxleys of Huxley Hall. Different branches migrated south, one, now extinct, reaching London, where its members were apparently engaged in commerce. They established themselves for four generations at Wyre Hall, near Edmonton, and one was knighted by Charles II. Huxley describes his paternal race as “mainly Iberian mongrels, with a good dash of Norman and a little Saxon.”[1] From his father he thought he derived little except a quick temper and the artistic faculty which proved of great service to him and reappeared in an even more striking degree in his daughter, the Hon. Mrs Collier. “Mentally and physically,” he wrote, “I am a piece of my mother.” Her maiden name was Rachel Withers. “She came of Wiltshire people,” he adds, and describes her as “a typical example of the Iberian variety.” He tells us that “her most distinguishing characteristic was rapidity of thought.... That peculiarity has been passed on to me in full strength” (Essays, i. 4). One of the not least striking facts in Huxley’s life is that of education in the formal sense he received none. “I had two years of a pandemonium of a school (between eight and ten), and after that neither help nor sympathy in any intellectual direction till I reached manhood” (Life, ii. 145). After the death of Dr Nicholas the Ealing school broke up, and Huxley’s father returned about 1835 to his native town, Coventry, where he had obtained a small appointment. Huxley was left to his own devices; few histories of boyhood could offer any parallel. At twelve he was sitting up in bed to read Hutton’s Geology. His great desire was to be a mechanical engineer; it ended in his devotion to “the mechanical engineering of living machines.” His curiosity in this direction was nearly fatal; a post-mortem he was taken to between thirteen and fourteen was followed by an illness which seems to have been the starting-point of the ill-health which pursued him all through life. At fifteen he devoured Sir William Hamilton’s Logic, and thus acquired the taste for metaphysics, which he cultivated to the end. At seventeen he came under the influence of Thomas Carlyle’s writings. Fifty years later he wrote: “To make things clear and get rid of cant and shows of all sorts. This was the lesson I learnt from Carlyle’s books when I was a boy, and it has stuck by me all my life” (Life, ii. 268). Incidentally they led him to begin to learn German; he had already acquired French. At seventeen Huxley, with his elder brother James, commenced regular medical studies at Charing Cross Hospital, where they had both obtained scholarships. He studied under Wharton Jones, a physiologist who never seems to have attained the reputation he deserved. Huxley said of him: “I do not know that I ever felt so much respect for a teacher before or since” (Life, i. 20). At twenty he passed his first M.B. examination at the University of London, winning the gold medal for anatomy and physiology; W. H. Ransom, the well-known Nottingham physician, obtaining the exhibition. In 1845 he published, at the suggestion of Wharton Jones, his first scientific paper, demonstrating the existence of a hitherto unrecognized layer in the inner sheath of hairs, a layer that has been known since as “Huxley’s layer.”
Something had to be done for a livelihood, and at the suggestion of a fellow-student, Mr (afterwards Sir Joseph) Fayrer, he applied for an appointment in the navy. He passed the necessary examination, and at the same time obtained the qualification of the Royal College of Surgeons. He was “entered on the books of Nelson’s old ship, the ‘Victory,’ for duty at Haslar Hospital.” Its chief, Sir John Richardson, who was a well-known Arctic explorer and naturalist, recognized Huxley’s ability, and procured for him the post of surgeon to H.M.S. “Rattlesnake,” about to start for surveying work in Torres Strait. The commander, Captain Owen Stanley, was a son of the bishop of Norwich and brother of Dean Stanley, and wished for an officer with some scientific knowledge. Besides Huxley the “Rattlesnake” also carried a naturalist by profession, John Macgillivray, who, however, beyond a dull narrative of the expedition, accomplished nothing. The “Rattlesnake” left England on the 3rd of December 1846, and was ordered home after the lamented death of Captain Stanley at Sydney, to be paid off at Chatham on the 9th of November 1850. The tropical seas teem with delicate surface-life, and to the study of this Huxley devoted himself with unremitting devotion. At that time no known methods existed by which it could be preserved for study in museums at home. He gathered a magnificent harvest in the almost unreaped field, and the conclusions he drew from it were the beginning of the revolution in zoological science which he lived to see accomplished.
Baron Cuvier (1769-1832), whose classification still held its ground, had divided the animal kingdom into four great embranchements. Each of these corresponded to an independent archetype, of which the “idea” had existed in the mind of the Creator. There was no other connexion between these classes, and the “ideas” which animated them were, as far as one can see, arbitrary. Cuvier’s groups, without their theoretical basis, were accepted by K. E. von Baer (1792-1876). The “idea” of the group, or archetype, admitted of endless variation within it; but this was subordinate to essential conformity with the archetype, and hence Cuvier deduced the important principle of the “correlation of parts,” of which he made such conspicuous use in palaeontological reconstruction. Meanwhile the “Naturphilosophen,” with J. W. Goethe (1749-1832) and L. Oken (1779-1851), had in effect grasped the underlying principle of correlation, and so far anticipated evolution by asserting the possibility of deriving specialized from simpler structures. Though they were still hampered by idealistic conceptions, they established morphology. Cuvier’s four great groups were Vertebrata, Mollusca, Articulata and Radiata. It was amongst the members of the last class that Huxley found most material ready to his hand in the seas of the tropics. It included organisms of the most varied kind, with nothing more in common than that their parts were more or less distributed round a centre. Huxley sent home “communication after communication to the Linnean Society,” then a somewhat somnolent body, “with the same result as that obtained by Noah when he sent the raven out of the ark” (Essays, i. 13). His important paper, On the Anatomy and the Affinities of the Family of Medusae, met with a better fate. It was communicated by the bishop of Norwich to the Royal Society, and printed by it in the Philosophical Transactions in 1849. Huxley united, with the Medusae, the Hydroid and Sertularian polyps, to form a class to which he subsequently gave the name of Hydrozoa. This alone was no inconsiderable feat for a young surgeon who had only had the training of the medical school. But the ground on which it was done has led to far-reaching theoretical developments. Huxley realized that something more than superficial characters were necessary in determining the affinities of animal organisms. He found that all the members of the class consisted of two membranes enclosing a central cavity or stomach. This is characteristic of what are now called the Coelenterata. All animals higher than these have been termed Coelomata; they possess a distinct body-cavity in addition to the stomach. Huxley went further than this, and the most profound suggestion in his paper is the comparison of the two layers with those which appear in the germ of the higher animals. The consequences which have flowed from this prophetic generalization of the ectoderm and endoderm are familiar to every student of evolution. The conclusion was the more remarkable as at the time he was not merely free from any evolutionary belief, but actually rejected it. The value of Huxley’s work was immediately recognized. On returning to England in 1850 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In the following year, at the age of twenty-six, he not merely received the Royal medal, but was elected on the council. With absolutely no aid from any one he had placed himself in the front rank of English scientific men. He secured the friendship of Sir J. D. Hooker and John Tyndall, who remained his lifelong friends. The Admiralty retained him as a nominal assistant-surgeon, in order that he might work up the observations he had made during the voyage of the “Rattlesnake.” He was thus enabled to produce various important memoirs, especially those on certain Ascidians, in which he solved the problem of Appendicularia—an organism whose place in the animal kingdom Johannes Müller had found himself wholly unable to assign—and on the morphology of the Cephalous Mollusca.
Richard Owen, then the leading comparative anatomist in Great Britain, was a disciple of Cuvier, and adopted largely from him the deductive explanation of anatomical fact from idealistic conceptions. He superadded the evolutionary theories of Oken, which were equally idealistic, but were altogether repugnant to Cuvier. Huxley would have none of either. Imbued with the methods of von Baer and Johannes Müller, his methods were purely inductive. He would not hazard any statement beyond what the facts revealed. He retained, however, as has been done by his successors, the use of archetypes, though they no longer represented fundamental “ideas” but generalizations of the essential points of structure common to the individuals of each class. He had not wholly freed himself, however, from archetypal trammels. “The doctrine,” he says, “that every natural group is organized after a definite archetype ... seems to me as important for zoology as the doctrine of definite proportions for chemistry.” This was in 1853. He further stated: “There is no progression from a lower to a higher type, but merely a more or less complete evolution of one type” (Phil. Trans., 1853, p. 63). As Chalmers Mitchell points out, this statement is of great historical interest. Huxley definitely uses the word “evolution,” and admits its existence within the great groups. He had not, however, rid himself of the notion that the archetype was a property inherent in the group. Herbert Spencer, whose acquaintance he made in 1852, was unable to convert him to evolution in its widest sense (Life, i. 168). He could not bring himself to acceptance of the theory—owing, no doubt, to his rooted aversion from à priori reasoning—without a mechanical conception of its mode of operation. In his first interview with Darwin, which seems to have been about the same time, he expressed his belief “in the sharpness of the lines of demarcation between natural groups,” and was received with a humorous smile (Life, i. 169).
The naval medical service exists for practical purposes. It is not surprising, therefore, that after his three years’ nominal employment Huxley was ordered on active service. Though without private means of any kind, he resigned. The navy, however, retains the credit of having started his scientific career as well as that of Hooker and Darwin. Huxley was now thrown on his own resources, the immediate prospects of which were slender enough. As a matter of fact, he had not to wait many months. His friend, Edward Forbes, was appointed to the chair of natural history in Edinburgh, and in July 1854 he succeeded him as lecturer at the School of Mines and as naturalist to the Geological Survey in the following year. The latter post he hesitated at first to accept, as he “did not care for fossils” (Essays, i. 15). In 1855 he married Miss H. A. Heathorn, whose acquaintance he had made in Sydney. They were engaged when Huxley could offer nothing but the future promise of his ability. The confidence of his devoted helpmate was not misplaced, and her affection sustained him to the end, after she had seen him the recipient of every honour which English science could bestow. His most important research belonging to this period was the Croonian Lecture delivered before the Royal Society in 1858 on “The Theory of the Vertebrate Skull.” In this he completely and finally demolished, by applying as before the inductive method, the idealistic, if in some degree evolutionary, views of its origin which Owen had derived from Goethe and Oken. This finally disposed of the “archetype,” and may be said once for all to have liberated the English anatomical school from the deductive method.
In 1859 The Origin of Species was published. This was a momentous event in the history of science, and not least for Huxley. Hitherto he had turned a deaf ear to evolution. “I took my stand,” he says, “upon two grounds: firstly, that ... the evidence in favour of transmutation was wholly insufficient; and secondly, that no suggestion respecting the causes of the transmutation assumed, which had been made, was in any way adequate to explain the phenomena” (Life, i. 168). Huxley had studied Lamarck “attentively,” but to no purpose. Sir Charles Lyell “was the chief agent in smoothing the road for Darwin. For consistent uniformitarianism postulates evolution as much in the organic as in the inorganic world” (l.c.); and Huxley found in Darwin what he had failed to find in Lamarck, an intelligible hypothesis good enough as a working basis. Yet with the transparent candour which was characteristic of him, he never to the end of his life concealed the fact that he thought it wanting in rigorous proof. Darwin, however, was a naturalist; Huxley was not. He says: “I am afraid there is very little of the genuine naturalist in me. I never collected anything, and species-work was always a burden to me; what I cared for was the architectural and engineering part of the business” (Essays, i. 7). But the solution of the problem of organic evolution must work upwards from the initial stages, and it is precisely for the study of these that “species-work” is necessary. Darwin, by observing the peculiarities in the distribution of the plants which he had collected in the Galapagos, was started on the path that led to his theory. Anatomical research had only so far led to transcendental hypothesis, though in Huxley’s hands it had cleared the decks of that lumber. He quotes with approval Darwin’s remark that “no one has a right to examine the question of species who has not minutely described many” (Essays, ii. 283). The rigorous proof which Huxley demanded was the production of species sterile to one another by selective breeding (Life, i. 193). But this was a misconception of the question. Sterility is a physiological character, and the specific differences which the theory undertook to account for are morphological; there is no necessary nexus between the two. Huxley, however, felt that he had at last a secure grip of evolution. He warned Darwin: “I will stop at no point as long as clear reasoning will carry me further” (Life, i. 172). Owen, who had some evolutionary tendencies, was at first favourably disposed to Darwin’s theory, and even claimed that he had to some extent anticipated it in his own writings. But Darwin, though he did not thrust it into the foreground, never flinched from recognizing that man could not be excluded from his theory. “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” (Origin, ed. i. 488). Owen could not face the wrath of fashionable orthodoxy. In his Rede Lecture he endeavoured to save the position by asserting that man was clearly marked off from all other animals by the anatomical structure of his brain. This was actually inconsistent with known facts, and was effectually refuted by Huxley in various papers and lectures, summed up in 1863 in Man’s Place in Nature. This “monkey damnification” of mankind was too much even for the “veracity” of Carlyle, who is said to have never forgiven it. Huxley had not the smallest respect for authority as a basis for belief, scientific or otherwise. He held that scientific men were morally bound “to try all things and hold fast to that which is good” (Life, ii. 161). Called upon in 1862, in the absence of the president, to deliver the presidential address to the Geological Society, he disposed once for all of one of the principles accepted by geologists, that similar fossils in distinct regions indicated that the strata containing them were contemporary. All that could be concluded, he pointed out, was that the general order of succession was the same. In 1854 Huxley had refused the post of palaeontologist to the Geological Survey; but the fossils for which he then said that he “did not care” soon acquired importance in his eyes, as supplying evidence for the support of the evolutionary theory. The thirty-one years during which he occupied the chair of natural history at the School of Mines were largely occupied with palaeontological research. Numerous memoirs on fossil fishes established many far-reaching morphological facts. The study of fossil reptiles led to his demonstrating, in the course of lectures on birds, delivered at the College of Surgeons in 1867, the fundamental affinity of the two groups which he united under the title of Sauropsida. An incidental result of the same course was his proposed rearrangement of the zoological regions into which P. L. Sclater had divided the world in 1857. Huxley anticipated, to a large extent, the results at which botanists have since arrived: he proposed as primary divisions, Arctogaea—to include the land areas of the northern hemisphere—and Notogaea for the remainder. Successive waves of life originated in and spread from the northern area, the survivors of the more ancient types finding successively a refuge in the south. Though Huxley had accepted the Darwinian theory as a working hypothesis, he never succeeded in firmly grasping it in detail. He thought “evolution might conceivably have taken place without the development of groups possessing the characters of species” (Essays, v. 41). His palaeontological researches ultimately led him to dispense with Darwin. In 1892 he wrote: “The doctrine of evolution is no speculation, but a generalization of certain facts ... classed by biologists under the heads of Embryology and of Palaeontology” (Essays, v. 42). Earlier in 1881 he had asserted even more emphatically that if the hypothesis of evolution “had not existed, the palaeontologist would have had to invent it” (Essays, iv. 44).
From 1870 onwards he was more and more drawn away from scientific research by the claims of public duty. Some men yield the more readily to such demands, as their fulfilment is not unaccompanied by public esteem. But he felt, as he himself said of Joseph Priestley, “that he was a man and a citizen before he was a philosopher, and that the duties of the two former positions are at least as imperative as those of the latter” (Essays, iii. 13). From 1862 to 1884 he served on no less than ten Royal Commissions, dealing in every case with subjects of great importance, and in many with matters of the gravest moment to the community. He held and filled with invariable dignity and distinction more public positions than have perhaps ever fallen to the lot of a scientific man in England. From 1871 to 1880 he was a secretary of the Royal Society. From 1881 to 1885 he was president. For honours he cared little, though they were within his reach; it is said that he might have received a peerage. He accepted, however, in 1892, a Privy Councillorship, at once the most democratic and the most aristocratic honour accessible to an English citizen. In 1870 he was president of the British Association at Liverpool, and in the same year was elected a member of the newly constituted London School Board. He resigned the latter position in 1872, but in the brief period during which he acted, probably more than any man, he left his mark on the foundations of national elementary education. He made war on the scholastic methods which wearied the mind in merely taxing the memory; the children were to be prepared to take their place worthily in the community. Physical training was the basis; domestic economy, at any rate for girls, was insisted upon, and for all some development of the aesthetic sense by means of drawing and singing. Reading, writing and arithmetic were the indispensable tools for acquiring knowledge, and intellectual discipline was to be gained through the rudiments of physical science. He insisted on the teaching of the Bible partly as a great literary heritage, partly because he was “seriously perplexed to know by what practical measures the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion in these matters, without its use” (Essays, iii. 397). In 1872 the School of Mines was moved to South Kensington, and Huxley had, for the first time after eighteen years, those appliances for teaching beyond the lecture room, which to the lasting injury of the interests of biological science in Great Britain had been withheld from him by the short-sightedness of government. Huxley had only been able to bring his influence to bear upon his pupils by oral teaching, and had had no opportunity by personal intercourse in the laboratory of forming a school. He was now able to organize a system of instruction for classes of elementary teachers in the general principles of biology, which indirectly affected the teaching of the subject throughout the country.
The first symptoms of physical failure to meet the strain of the scientific and public duties demanded of him made some rest imperative, and he took a long holiday in Egypt. He still continued for some years to occupy himself mainly with vertebrate morphology. But he seemed to find more interest and the necessary mental stimulus to exertion in lectures, public addresses and more or less controversial writings. His health, which had for a time been fairly restored, completely broke down again in 1885. In 1890 he removed from London to Eastbourne, where after a painful illness he died on the 29th of June 1895.
The latter years of Huxley’s life were mainly occupied with contributions to periodical literature on subjects connected with philosophy and theology. The effect produced by these on popular opinion was profound. This was partly due to his position as a man of science, partly to his obvious earnestness and sincerity, but in the main to his strenuous and attractive method of exposition. Such studies were not wholly new to him, as they had more or less engaged his thoughts from his earliest days. That his views exhibit some process of development and are not wholly consistent was, therefore, to be expected, and for this reason it is not easy to summarize them as a connected body of teaching. They may be found perhaps in their most systematic form in the volume on Hume published in 1879.
Huxley’s general attitude to the problems of theology and philosophy was technically that of scepticism. “I am,” he wrote, “too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything” (Life, ii. 127). “Doubt is a beneficent demon” (Essays, ix. 56). He was anxious, nevertheless, to avoid the accusation of Pyrrhonism (Life, ii. 280), but the Agnosticism which he defined to express his position in 1869 suggests the Pyrrhonist Aphasia. The only approach to certainty which he admitted lay in the order of nature. “The conception of the constancy of the order of nature has become the dominant idea of modern thought.... Whatever may be man’s speculative doctrines, it is quite certain that every intelligent person guides his life and risks his fortune upon the belief that the order of nature is constant, and that the chain of natural causation is never broken.” He adds, however, that “it by no means necessarily follows that we are justified in expanding this generalization into the infinite past” (Essays, iv. 47, 48). This was little more than a pious reservation, as evolution implies the principle of continuity (l.c. p. 55). Later he stated his belief even more absolutely: “If there is anything in the world which I do firmly believe in, it is the universal validity of the law of causation, but that universality cannot be proved by any amount of experience” (Essays, ix. 121). The assertion that “There is only one method by which intellectual truth can be reached, whether the subject-matter of investigation belongs to the world of physics or to the world of consciousness” (Essays, ix. 126) laid him open to the charge of materialism, which he vigorously repelled. His defence, when he rested it on the imperfection of the physical analysis of matter and force (l.c. p. 131), was irrelevant; he was on sounder ground when he contended with Berkeley “that our certain knowledge does not extend beyond our states of consciousness” (l.c. p. 130). “Legitimate materialism, that is, the extension of the conceptions and of the methods of physical science to the highest as well as to the lowest phenomena of vitality, is neither more nor less than a sort of shorthand idealism” (Essays, i. 194). While “the substance of matter is a metaphysical unknown quality of the existence of which there is no proof ... the non-existence of a substance of mind is equally arguable; ... the result ... is the reduction of the All to co-existences and sequences of phenomena beneath and beyond which there is nothing cognoscible” (Essays, ix. 66). Hume had defined a miracle as a “violation of the laws of nature.” Huxley refused to accept this. While, on the one hand, he insists that “the whole fabric of practical life is built upon our faith in its continuity” (Hume, p. 129), on the other “nobody can presume to say what the order of nature must be”; this “knocks the bottom out of all a priori objections either to ordinary ‘miracles’ or to the efficacy of prayer” (Essays, v. 133). “If by the term miracles we mean only extremely wonderful events, there can be no just ground for denying the possibility of their occurrence” (Hume, p. 134). Assuming the chemical elements to be aggregates of uniform primitive matter, he saw no more theoretical difficulty in water being turned into alcohol in the miracle at Cana, than in sugar undergoing a similar conversion (Essays, v. 81). The credibility of miracles with Huxley is a question of evidence. It may be remarked that a scientific explanation is destructive of the supernatural character of a miracle, and that the demand for evidence may be so framed as to preclude the credibility of any historical event. Throughout his life theology had a strong attraction, not without elements of repulsion, for Huxley. The circumstances of his early training, when Paley was the “most interesting Sunday reading allowed him when a boy” (Life, ii. 57), probably had something to do with both. In 1860 his beliefs were apparently theistic: “Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God” (Life, i. 219). In 1885 he formulates “the perfect ideal of religion” in a passage which has become almost famous: “In the 8th century B.C. in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew prophets put forth a conception of religion which appears to be as wonderful an inspiration of genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle. ‘And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God’” (Essays, iv. 161). Two years later he was writing: “That there is no evidence of the existence of such a being as the God of the theologians is true enough” (Life, ii. 162). He insisted, however, that “atheism is on purely philosophical grounds untenable” (l.c.). His theism never really advanced beyond the recognition of “the passionless impersonality of the unknown and unknowable, which science shows everywhere underlying the thin veil of phenomena” (Life, i. 239). In other respects his personal creed was a kind of scientific Calvinism. There is an interesting passage in an essay written in 1892, “An Apologetic Eirenicon,” which has not been republished, which illustrates this: “It is the secret of the superiority of the best theological teachers to the majority of their opponents that they substantially recognize these realities of things, however strange the forms in which they clothe their conceptions. The doctrines of predestination, of original sin, of the innate depravity of man and the evil fate of the greater part of the race, of the primacy of Satan in this world, of the essential vileness of matter, of a malevolent Demiurgus subordinate to a benevolent Almighty, who has only lately revealed himself, faulty as they are, appear to me to be vastly nearer the truth than the ‘liberal’ popular illusions that babies are all born good, and that the example of a corrupt society is responsible for their failure to remain so; that it is given to everybody to reach the ethical ideal if he will only try; that all partial evil is universal good, and other optimistic figments, such as that which represents ‘Providence’ under the guise of a paternal philanthropist, and bids us believe that everything will come right (according to our notions) at last.” But his “slender definite creed,” R. H. Hutton, who was associated with him in the Metaphysical Society, thought—and no doubt rightly—in no respect “represented the cravings of his larger nature.”
From 1880 onwards till the very end of his life, Huxley was continuously occupied in a controversial campaign against orthodox beliefs. As Professor W. F. R. Weldon justly said of his earlier polemics: “They were certainly among the principal agents in winning a larger measure of toleration for the critical examination of fundamental beliefs, and for the free expression of honest reverent doubt.” He threw Christianity overboard bodily and with little appreciation of its historic effect as a civilizing agency. He thought that “the exact nature of the teachings and the convictions of Jesus is extremely uncertain” (Essays, v. 348). “What we are usually pleased to call religion nowadays is, for the most part, Hellenized Judaism” (Essays, iv. 162). His final analysis of what “since the second century, has assumed to itself the title of Orthodox Christianity” is a “varying compound of some of the best and some of the worst elements of Paganism and Judaism, moulded in practice by the innate character of certain people of the Western world” (Essays, v. 142). He concludes “That this Christianity is doomed to fall is, to my mind, beyond a doubt; but its fall will neither be sudden nor speedy” (l.c.). He did not omit, however, to do justice to “the bright side of Christianity,” and was deeply impressed with the life of Catherine of Siena. Failing Christianity, he thought that some other “hypostasis of men’s hopes” will arise (Essays, v. 254). His latest speculations on ethical problems are perhaps the least satisfactory of his writings. In 1892 he wrote: “The moral sense is a very complex affair—dependent in part upon associations of pleasure and pain, approbation and disapprobation, formed by education in early youth, but in part also on an innate sense of moral beauty and ugliness (how originated need not be discussed), which is possessed by some people in great strength, while some are totally devoid of it” (Life, ii. 305). This is an intuitional theory, and he compares the moral with the aesthetic sense, which he repeatedly declares to be intuitive; thus: “All the understanding in the world will neither increase nor diminish the force of the intuition that this is beautiful and this is ugly” (Essays, ix. 80). In the Romanes Lecture delivered in 1894, in which this passage occurs, he defines “law and morals” to be “restraints upon the struggle for existence between men in society.” It follows that “the ethical process is in opposition to the cosmic process,” to which the struggle for existence belongs (Essays, ix. 31). Apparently he thought that the moral sense in its origin was intuitional and in its development utilitarian. “Morality commenced with society” (Essays, v. 52). The “ethical process” is the “gradual strengthening of the social bond” (Essays, ix. 35). “The cosmic process has no sort of relation to moral ends” (l.c. p. 83); “of moral purpose I see no trace in nature. That is an article of exclusive human manufacture” (Life, ii. 268). The cosmic process Huxley identified with evil, and the ethical process with good; the two are in necessary conflict. “The reality at the bottom of the doctrine of original sin” is the “innate tendency to self-assertion” inherited by man from the cosmic order (Essays, ix. 27). “The actions we call sinful are part and parcel of the struggle for existence” (Life, ii. 282). “The prospect of attaining untroubled happiness” is “an illusion” (Essays, ix. 44), and the cosmic process in the long run will get the best of the contest, and “resume its sway” when evolution enters on its downward course (l.c. p. 45). This approaches pure pessimism, and though in Huxley’s view the “pessimism of Schopenhauer is a nightmare” (Essays, ix. 200), his own philosophy of life is not distinguishable, and is often expressed in the same language. The cosmic order is obviously non-moral (Essays, ix. 197). That it is, as has been said, immoral is really meaningless. Pain and suffering are affections which imply a complex nervous organization, and we are not justified in projecting them into nature external to ourselves. Darwin and A. R. Wallace disagreed with Huxley in seeing rather the joyous than the suffering side of nature. Nor can it be assumed that the descending scale of evolution will reproduce the ascent, or that man will ever be conscious of his doom.
As has been said, Huxley never thoroughly grasped the Darwinian principle. He thought “transmutation may take place without transition” (Life, i. 173). In other words, that evolution is accomplished by leaps and not by the accumulation of small variations. He recognized the “struggle for existence” but not the gradual adjustment of the organism to its environment which is implied in “natural selection.” In highly civilized societies he thought that the former was at an end (Essays, ix. 36) and had been replaced by the “struggle for enjoyment” (l.c. p. 40). But a consideration of the stationary population of France might have shown him that the effect in the one case may be as restrictive as in the other. So far from natural selection being in abeyance under modern social conditions, “it is,” as Professor Karl Pearson points out, “something we run up against at once, almost as soon as we examine a mortality table” (Biometrika, i. 76). The inevitable conclusion, whether we like it or not, is that the future evolution of humanity is as much a part of the cosmic process as its past history, and Huxley’s attempt to shut the door on it cannot be maintained scientifically.
Authorities.—Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, by his son Leonard Huxley (2 vols., 1900); Scientific Memoirs of T. H. Huxley (4 vols., 1898-1901); Collected Essays by T. H. Huxley (9 vols., 1898); Thomas Henry Huxley, a Sketch of his Life and Work, by P. Chalmers Mitchell, M.A. (Oxon., 1900); a critical study founded on careful research and of great value.
(W. T. T.-D.)
[1] Nature, lxiii. 127.
HUY (Lat. Hoium, and Flem. Hoey), a town of Belgium, on the right bank of the Meuse, at the point where it is joined by the Hoyoux. Pop. (1904), 14,164. It is 19 m. E. of Namur and a trifle less west of Liége. Huy certainly dates from the 7th century, and, according to some, was founded by the emperor Antoninus in A.D. 148. Its situation is striking, with its grey citadel crowning a grey rock, and the fine collegiate church (with a 13th-century gateway) of Notre Dame built against it. The citadel is now used partly as a depot of military equipment and partly as a prison. The ruins are still shown of the abbey of Neumoustier founded by Peter the Hermit on his return from the first crusade. He was buried there in 1115, and a statue was erected to his memory in the abbey grounds in 1858. Neumoustier was one of seventeen abbeys in this town alone dependent on the bishopric of Liége. Huy is surrounded by vineyards, and the bridge which crosses the Meuse at this point connects the fertile Hesbaye north of the river with the rocky and barren Condroz south of it.
HUYGENS, CHRISTIAAN (1629-1695), Dutch mathematician, mechanician, astronomer and physicist, was born at the Hague on the 14th of April 1629. He was the second son of Sir Constantijn Huygens. From his father he received the rudiments of his education, which was continued at Leiden under A. Vinnius and F. van Schooten, and completed in the juridical school of Breda. His mathematical bent, however, soon diverted him from legal studies, and the perusal of some of his earliest theorems enabled Descartes to predict his future greatness. In 1649 he accompanied the mission of Henry, count of Nassau, to Denmark, and in 1651 entered the lists of science as an assailant of the unsound system of quadratures adopted by Gregory of St Vincent. This first essay (Exetasis quadraturae circuli, Leiden, 1651) was quickly succeeded by his Theoremata de quadratura hyperboles, ellipsis, et circuli; while, in a treatise entitled De circuli magnitudine inventa, he made, three years later, the closest approximation so far obtained to the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle.
Another class of subjects was now to engage his attention. The improvement of the telescope was justly regarded as a sine qua non for the advancement of astronomical knowledge. But the difficulties interposed by spherical and chromatic aberration had arrested progress in that direction until, in 1655, Huygens, working with his brother Constantijn, hit upon a new method of grinding and polishing lenses. The immediate results of the clearer definition obtained were the detection of a satellite to Saturn (the sixth in order of distance from its primary), and the resolution into their true form of the abnormal appendages to that planet. Each discovery in turn was, according to the prevailing custom, announced to the learned world under the veil of an anagram—removed, in the case of the first, by the publication, early in 1656, of the little tract De Saturni luna observatio nova; but retained, as regards the second, until 1659, when in the Systema Saturnium the varying appearances of the so-called “triple planet” were clearly explained as the phases of a ring inclined at an angle of 28° to the ecliptic. Huygens was also in 1656 the first effective observer of the Orion nebula; he delineated the bright region still known by his name, and detected the multiple character of its nuclear star. His application of the pendulum to regulate the movement of clocks sprang from his experience of the need for an exact measure of time in observing the heavens. The invention dates from 1656; on the 16th of June 1657 Huygens presented his first “pendulum-clock” to the states-general; and the Horologium, containing a description of the requisite mechanism, was published in 1658.
His reputation now became cosmopolitan. As early as 1655 the university of Angers had distinguished him with an honorary degree of doctor of laws. In 1663, on the occasion of his second visit to England, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and imparted to that body in January 1669 a clear and concise statement of the laws governing the collision of elastic bodies. Although these conclusions were arrived at independently, and, as it would seem, several years previous to their publication, they were in great measure anticipated by the communications on the same subject of John Wallis and Christopher Wren, made respectively in November and December 1668.
Huygens had before this time fixed his abode in France. In 1665 Colbert made to him on behalf of Louis XIV. an offer too tempting to be refused, and between the following year and 1681 his residence in the philosophic seclusion of the Bibliothèque du Roi was only interrupted by two short visits to his native country. His magnum opus dates from this period. The Horologium oscillatorium, published with a dedication to his royal patron in 1673, contained original discoveries sufficient to have furnished materials for half a dozen striking disquisitions. His solution of the celebrated problem of the “centre of oscillation” formed in itself an important event in the history of mechanics. Assuming as an axiom that the centre of gravity of any number of interdependent bodies cannot rise higher than the point from which it fell, he arrived, by anticipating in the particular case the general principle of the conservation of vis viva, at correct although not strictly demonstrated conclusions. His treatment of the subject was the first successful attempt to deal with the dynamics of a system. The determination of the true relation between the length of a pendulum and the time of its oscillation; the invention of the theory of evolutes; the discovery, hence ensuing, that the cycloid is its own evolute, and is strictly isochronous; the ingenious although practically inoperative idea of correcting the “circular error” of the pendulum by applying cycloidal cheeks to clocks—were all contained in this remarkable treatise. The theorems on the composition of forces in circular motion with which it concluded formed the true prelude to Newton’s Principia, and would alone suffice to establish the claim of Huygens to the highest rank among mechanical inventors.
In 1681 he finally severed his French connexions, and returned to Holland. The harsher measures which about that time began to be adopted towards his co-religionists in France are usually assigned as the motive of this step. He now devoted himself during six years to the production of lenses of enormous focal distance, which, mounted on high poles, and connected with the eye-piece by means of a cord, formed what were called “aerial telescopes.” Three of his object-glasses, of respectively 123, 180 and 210 ft. focal length, are in the possession of the Royal Society. He also succeeded in constructing an almost perfectly achromatic eye-piece, still known by his name. But his researches in physical optics constitute his chief title-deed to immortality. Although Robert Hooke in 1668 and Ignace Pardies in 1672 had adopted a vibratory hypothesis of light, the conception was a mere floating possibility until Huygens provided it with a sure foundation. His powerful scientific imagination enabled him to realize that all the points of a wave-front originate partial waves, the aggregate effect of which is to reconstitute the primary disturbance at the subsequent stages of its advance, thus accomplishing its propagation; so that each primary undulation is the envelope of an indefinite number of secondary undulations. This resolution of the original wave is the well-known “Principle of Huygens,” and by its means he was enabled to prove the fundamental laws of optics, and to assign the correct construction for the direction of the extraordinary ray in uniaxial crystals. These investigations, together with his discovery of the “wonderful phenomenon” of polarization, are recorded in his Traité de la lumière, published at Leiden in 1690, but composed in 1678. In the appended treatise Sur la Cause de la pesanteur, he rejected gravitation as a universal quality of matter, although admitting the Newtonian theory of the planetary revolutions. From his views on centrifugal force he deduced the oblate figure of the earth, estimating its compression, however, at little more than one-half its actual amount.
Huygens never married. He died at the Hague on the 8th of June 1695, bequeathing his manuscripts to the university of Leiden, and his considerable property to the sons of his younger brother. In character he was as estimable as he was brilliant in intellect. Although, like most men of strong originative power, he assimilated with difficulty the ideas of others, his tardiness sprang rather from inability to depart from the track of his own methods than from reluctance to acknowledge the merits of his competitors.
In addition to the works already mentioned, his Cosmotheoros—a speculation concerning the inhabitants of the planets—was printed posthumously at the Hague in 1698, and appeared almost simultaneously in an English translation. A volume entitled Opera posthuma (Leiden, 1703) contained his “Dioptrica,” in which the ratio between the respective focal lengths of object-glass and eye-glass is given as the measure of magnifying power, together with the shorter essays De vitris figurandis, De corona et parheliis, &c. An early tract De ratiociniis in ludo aleae, printed in 1657 with Schooten’s Exercitationes mathematicae, is notable as one of the first formal treatises on the theory of probabilities; nor should his investigations of the properties of the cissoid, logarithmic and catenary curves be left unnoticed. His invention of the spiral watch-spring was explained in the Journal des savants (Feb. 25, 1675). An edition of his works was published by G. J.’s Gravesande, in four quarto volumes entitled Opera varia (Leiden, 1724) and Opera reliqua (Amsterdam, 1728). His scientific correspondence was edited by P. J. Uylenbroek from manuscripts preserved at Leiden, with the title Christiani Hugenii aliorumque seculi XVII. virorum celebrium exercitationes mathematicae et philosophicae (the Hague, 1833).
The publication of a monumental edition of the letters and works of Huygens was undertaken at the Hague by the Société Hollandaise des Sciences, with the heading Œuvres de Christian Huygens (1888), &c. Ten quarto volumes, comprising the whole of his correspondence, had already been issued in 1905. A biography of Huygens was prefixed to his Opera varia (1724); his Éloge in the character of a French academician was printed by J. A. N. Condorcet in 1773. Consult further: P. J. Uylenbroek, Oratio de fratribus Christiano atque Constantino Hugenio (Groningen, 1838); P. Harting, Christiaan Huygens in zijn Leven en Werken geschetzt (Groningen, 1868); J. B. J. Delambre, Hist. de l’astronomie moderne (ii. 549); J. E. Montucla, Hist. des mathématiques (ii. 84, 412, 549); M. Chasles, Aperçu historique sur l’origine des méthodes en géometrie, pp. 101-109; E. Dühring, Kritische Geschichte der allgemeinen Principien der Mechanik, Abschnitt (ii. 120, 163, iii. 227); A. Berry, A Short History of Astronomy, p. 200; R. Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie, passim; Houzeau, Bibliographie astronomique (ii. 169); F. Kaiser, Astr. Nach. (xxv. 245, 1847); Tijdschrift voor de Wetenschappen (i. 7, 1848); Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (M. B. Cantor); J. C. Poggendorff, Biog. lit. Handwörterbuch.
(A. M. C.)
HUYGENS, SIR CONSTANTIJN (1596-1687), Dutch poet and diplomatist, was born at the Hague on the 4th of September 1596. His father, Christiaan Huygens, was secretary to the state council, and a man of great political importance. At the baptism of the child, the city of Breda was one of his sponsors, and the admiral Justinus van Nassau the other. He was trained in every polite accomplishment, and before he was seven could speak French with fluency. He was taught Latin by Johannes Dedelus, and soon became a master of classic versification. He developed not only extraordinary intellectual gifts but great physical beauty and strength, and was one of the most accomplished athletes and gymnasts of his age; his skill in playing the lute and in the arts of painting and engraving attracted general attention before he began to develop his genius as a writer. In 1616 he proceeded, with his elder brother, to the university of Leiden. He stayed there only one year, and in 1618 went to London with the English ambassador Dudley Carleton; he remained in London for some months, and then went to Oxford, where he studied for some time in the Bodleian Library, and to Woodstock, Windsor and Cambridge; he was introduced at the English court, and played the lute before James I. The most interesting feature of this visit was the intimacy which sprang up between the young Dutch poet and Dr Donne, for whose genius Huygens preserved through life an unbounded admiration. He returned to Holland in company with the English contingent of the synod of Dort, and in 1619 he proceeded to Venice in the diplomatic service of his country; on his return he nearly lost his life by a foolhardy exploit, namely, the scaling of the topmost spire of Strassburg cathedral. In 1621 he published one of his most weighty and popular poems, his Batava Tempe, and in the same year he proceeded again to London, as secretary to the ambassador, Wijngaerdan, but returned in three months. His third diplomatic visit to England lasted longer, from the 5th of December 1621 to the 1st of March 1623. During his absence, his volume of satires, ’t Costelick Mal, dedicated to Jacob Cats, appeared at the Hague. In the autumn of 1622 he was knighted by James I. He published a large volume of miscellaneous poems in 1625 under the title of Otiorum libri sex; and in the same year he was appointed private secretary to the stadholder. In 1627 Huygens married Susanna van Baerle, and settled at the Hague; four sons and a daughter were born to them. In 1630 Huygens was called to a seat in the privy council, and he continued to exercise political power with wisdom and vigour for many years, under the title of the lord of Zuylichem. In 1634 he is supposed to have completed his long-talked-of version of the poems of Donne, fragments of which exist. In 1637 his wife died, and he immediately began to celebrate the virtues and pleasures of their married life in the remarkable didactic poem called Dagwerck, which was not published till long afterwards. From 1639 to 1641 he occupied himself by building a magnificent house and garden outside the Hague, and by celebrating their beauties in a poem entitled Hofwijck, which was published in 1653. In 1647 he wrote his beautiful poem of Oogentroost or “Eye Consolation,” to gratify his blind friend Lucretia van Trollo. He made his solitary effort in the dramatic line in 1657, when he brought out his comedy of Trijntje Cornelis Klacht, which deals, in rather broad humour, with the adventures of the wife of a ship’s captain at Zaandam. In 1658 he rearranged his poems, and issued them with many additions, under the title of Corn Flowers. He proposed to the government that the present highway from the Hague to the sea at Scheveningen should be constructed, and during his absence on a diplomatic mission to the French court in 1666 the road was made as a compliment to the venerable statesman, who expressed his gratitude in a descriptive poem entitled Zeestraet. Huygens edited his poems for the last time in 1672, and died in his ninety-first year, on the 28th of March 1687. He was buried, with the pomp of a national funeral, in the church of St Jacob, on the 4th of April. His second son, Christiaan, the eminent astronomer, is noticed separately.
Constantijn Huygens is the most brilliant figure in Dutch literary history. Other statesmen surpassed him in political influence, and at least two other poets surpassed him in the value and originality of their writings. But his figure was more dignified and splendid, his talents were more varied, and his general accomplishments more remarkable than those of any other person of his age, the greatest age in the history of the Netherlands. Huygens is the grand seigneur of the republic, the type of aristocratic oligarchy, the jewel and ornament of Dutch liberty. When we consider his imposing character and the positive value of his writings, we may well be surprised that he has not found a modern editor. It is a disgrace to Dutch scholarship that no complete collection of the writings of Huygens exists. His autobiography, De vita propria sermonum libri duo, did not see the light until 1817, and his remarkable poem, Cluyswerck, was not printed until 1841. As a poet Huygens shows a finer sense of form than any other early Dutch writer; the language, in his hands, becomes as flexible as Italian. His epistles and lighter pieces, in particular, display his metrical ease and facility to perfection.
(E. G.)
HUYSMANS, the name of four Flemish painters who matriculated in the Antwerp gild in the 17th century. Cornelis the elder, apprenticed in 1633, passed for a mastership in 1636, and remained obscure. Jacob, apprenticed to Frans Wouters in 1650, wandered to England towards the close of the reign of Charles II., and competed with Lely as a fashionable portrait painter. He executed a portrait of the queen, Catherine of Braganza, now in the national portrait gallery, and Horace Walpole assigns to him the likeness of Lady Bellasys, catalogued at Hampton Court as a work of Lely. His portrait of Izaak Walton in the National Gallery shows a disposition to imitate the styles of Rubens and Van Dyke. According to most accounts he died in London in 1696. Jan Baptist Huysmans, born at Antwerp in 1654, matriculated in 1676-1677, and died there in 1715-1716. He was younger brother to Cornelis Huysmans the second, who was born at Antwerp in 1648, and educated by Gaspar de Wit and Jacob van Artois. Of Jan Baptist little or nothing has been preserved, except that he registered numerous apprentices at Antwerp, and painted a landscape dated 1697 now in the Brussels museum. Cornelis the second is the only master of the name of Huysmans whose talent was largely acknowledged. He received lessons from two artists, one of whom was familiar with the Roman art of the Poussins, whilst the other inherited the scenic style of the school of Rubens. He combined the two in a rich, highly coloured, and usually effective style, which, however, was not free from monotony. Seldom attempting anything but woodside views with fancy backgrounds, half Italian, half Flemish, he painted with great facility, and left numerous examples behind. At the outset of his career he practised at Malines, where he married in 1682, and there too he entered into some business connexion with van der Meulen, for whom he painted some backgrounds. In 1706 he withdrew to Antwerp, where he resided till 1717, returning then to Malines, where he died on the 1st of June 1727.
Though most of his pictures were composed for cabinets rather than churches, he sometimes emulated van Artois in the production of large sacred pieces, and for many years his “Christ on the Road to Emmaus” adorned the choir of Notre Dame of Malines. In the gallery of Nantes, where three of his small landscapes are preserved, there hangs an “Investment of Luxembourg,” by van der Meulen, of which he is known to have laid in the background. The national galleries of London and Edinburgh contain each one example of his skill. Blenheim, too, and other private galleries in England, possess one or more of his pictures. But most of his works are on the European continent.
HUYSMANS, JORIS KARL (1848-1907), French novelist, was born at Paris on the 5th of February 1848. He belonged to a family of artists of Dutch extraction; he entered the ministry of the interior, and was pensioned after thirty years’ service. His earliest venture in literature, Le Drageoir à épices (1874), contained stories and short prose poems showing the influence of Baudelaire. Marthe (1876), the life of a courtesan, was published in Brussels, and Huysmans contributed a story, “Sac au dos,” to Les Soirées de Médan, the collection of stories of the Franco-German war published by Zola. He then produced a series of novels of everyday life, including Les Sœurs Vatard (1879), En Ménage (1881), and À vau-l’eau (1882), in which he outdid Zola in minute and uncompromising realism. He was influenced, however, more directly by Flaubert and the brothers de Goncourt than by Zola. In L’Art moderne (1883) he gave a careful study of impressionism and in Certains (1889) a series of studies of contemporary artists, À Rebours (1884), the history of the morbid tastes of a decadent aristocrat, des Esseintes, created a literary sensation, its caricature of literary and artistic symbolism covering much of the real beliefs of the leaders of the aesthetic revolt. In Là-Bas Huysmans’s most characteristic hero, Durtal, makes his appearance. Durtal is occupied in writing the life of Gilles de Rais; the insight he gains into Satanism is supplemented by modern Parisian students of the black art; but already there are signs of a leaning to religion in the sympathetic figures of the religious bell-ringer of Saint Sulpice and his wife. En Route (1895) relates the strange conversion of Durtal to mysticism and Catholicism in his retreat to La Trappe. In La Cathédrale (1898), Huysmans’s symbolistic interpretation of the cathedral of Chartres, he develops his enthusiasm for the purity of Catholic ritual. The life of Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam (1901), an exposition of the value of suffering, gives further proof of his conversion; and L’Oblat (1903) describes Durtal’s retreat to the Val des Saints, where he is attached as an oblate to a Benedictine monastery. Huysmans was nominated by Edmond de Goncourt as a member of the Académie des Goncourt. He died as a devout Catholic, after a long illness of cancer in the palate on the 13th of May 1907. Before his death he destroyed his unpublished MSS. His last book was Les Foules de Lourdes (1906).
See Arthur Symons, Studies in two Literatures (1897) and The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899); Jean Lionnet in L’Évolution des idées (1903); Eugène Gilbert in France et Belgique (1905); J. Sargeret in Les Grands convertis (1906).
HUYSUM, JAN VAN (1682-1749), Dutch painter, was born at Amsterdam in 1682, and died in his native city on the 8th of February 1749. He was the son of Justus van Huysum, who is said to have been expeditious in decorating doorways, screens and vases. A picture by this artist is preserved in the gallery of Brunswick, representing Orpheus and the Beasts in a wooded landscape, and here we have some explanation of his son’s fondness for landscapes of a conventional and Arcadian kind; for Jan van Huysum, though skilled as a painter of still life, believed himself to possess the genius of a landscape painter. Half his pictures in public galleries are landscapes, views of imaginary lakes and harbours with impossible ruins and classic edifices, and woods of tall and motionless trees—the whole very glossy and smooth, and entirely lifeless. The earliest dated work of this kind is that of 1717, in the Louvre, a grove with maidens culling flowers near a tomb, ruins of a portico, and a distant palace on the shores of a lake bounded by mountains.
It is doubtful whether any artist ever surpassed van Huysum in representing fruit and flowers. It has been said that his fruit has no savour and his flowers have no perfume—in other words, that they are hard and artificial—but this is scarcely true. In substance fruit and flower are delicate and finished imitations of nature in its more subtle varieties of matter. The fruit has an incomparable blush of down, the flowers have a perfect delicacy of tissue. Van Huysum, too, shows supreme art in relieving flowers of various colours against each other, and often against a light and transparent background. He is always bright, sometimes even gaudy. Great taste and much grace and elegance are apparent in the arrangement of bouquets and fruit in vases adorned with bas reliefs or in baskets on marble tables. There is exquisite and faultless finish everywhere. But what van Huysum has not is the breadth, the bold effectiveness, and the depth of thought of de Heem, from whom he descends through Abraham Mignon.
Some of the finest of van Huysum’s fruit and flower pieces have been in English private collections: those of 1723 in the earl of Ellesmere’s gallery, others of 1730-1732 in the collections of Hope and Ashburton. One of the best examples is now in the National Gallery (1736-1737). No public museum has finer and more numerous specimens than the Louvre, which boasts of four landscapes and six panels with still life; then come Berlin and Amsterdam with four fruit and flower pieces; then St Petersburg, Munich, Hanover, Dresden, the Hague, Brunswick, Vienna, Carlsruhe and Copenhagen.
HWANG HO [Hoang Ho], the second largest river in China. It is known to foreigners as the Yellow river—a name which is a literal translation of the Chinese. It rises among the Kuenlun mountains in central Asia, its head-waters being in close proximity to those of the Yangtsze-Kiang. It has a total length of about 2400 m. and drains an area of approximately 400,000 sq. m. The main stream has its source in two lakes named Tsaring-nor and Oring-nor, lying about 35° N., 97° E., and after flowing with a south-easterly course it bends sharply to the north-west and north, entering China in the province of Kansuh in lat. 36°. After passing Lanchow-fu, the capital of this province, the river takes an immense sweep to the north and north-east, until it encounters the rugged barrier ranges that here run north and south through the provinces of Shansi and Chihli. By these ranges it is forced due south for 500 m., forming the boundary between the provinces of Shansi and Shensi, until it finds an outlet eastwards at Tung Kwan—a pass which for centuries has been renowned as the gate of Asia, being indeed the sole commercial passage between central China and the West. At Tung Kwan the river is joined by its only considerable affluent in China proper, the Wei (Wei-ho), which drains the large province of Shensi, and the combined volume of water continues its way at first east and then north-east across the great plain to the sea. At low water in the winter season the discharge is only about 36,000 cub. ft. per second, whereas during the summer flood it reaches 116,000 ft. or more. The amount of sediment carried down is very large, though no accurate observations have been made. In the account of Lord Macartney’s embassy, which crossed the Yellow river in 1792, it was calculated to be 17,520 million cub. ft. a year, but this is considered very much over the mark. Two reasons, however, combine to render it probable that the sedimentary matter is very large in proportion to the volume of water: the first being the great fall, and the consequently rapid current over two-thirds of the river’s course; the second that the drainage area is nearly all covered with deposits of loess, which, being very friable, readily gives way before the rainfall and is washed down in large quantity. The ubiquity of this loess or yellow earth, as the Chinese call it, has in fact given its name both to the river which carries it in solution and to the sea (the Yellow Sea) into which it is discharged. It is calculated by Dr Guppy (Journal of China Branch of Royal Asiatic Society, vol. xvi.) that the sediment brought down by the three northern rivers of China, viz., the Yangtsze, the Hwang-ho and the Peiho, is 24,000 million cub. ft. per annum, and is sufficient to fill up the whole of the Yellow Sea and the Gulf of Pechili in the space of about 36,000 years.
Unlike the Yangtsze, the Hwang-ho is of no practical value for navigation. The silt and sand form banks and bars at the mouth, the water is too shallow in winter and the current is too strong in summer, and, further, the bed of the river is continually shifting. It is this last feature which has earned for the river the name “China’s sorrow.” As the silt-laden waters debouch from the rocky bed of the upper reaches on to the plains, the current slackens, and the coarser detritus settles on the bottom. By degrees the bed rises, and the people build embankments to prevent the river from overflowing. As the bed rises the embankments must be raised too, until the stream is flowing many feet above the level of the surrounding country. As time goes on the situation becomes more and more dangerous; finally, a breach occurs, and the whole river pours over the country, carrying destruction and ruin with it. If the breach cannot be repaired the river leaves its old channel entirely and finds a new exit to the sea along the line of least resistance. Such in brief has been the story of the river since the dawn of Chinese history. At various times it has discharged its waters alternately on one side or the other of the great mass of mountains forming the promontory of Shantung, and by mouths as far apart from each other as 500 m. At each change it has worked havoc and disaster by covering the cultivated fields with 2 or 3 ft. of sand and mud.
A great change in the river’s course occurred in 1851, when a breach was made in the north embankment near Kaifengfu in Honan. At this point the river bed was some 25 ft. above the plain; the water consequently forsook the old channel entirely and poured over the level country, finally seizing on the bed of a small river called the Tsing, and thereby finding an exit to the sea. Since that time the new channel thus carved out has remained the proper course of the river, the old or southerly channel being left quite dry. It required some fifteen or more years to repair damages from this outbreak, and to confine the stream by new embankments. After that there was for a time comparative immunity from inundations, but in 1882 fresh outbursts again began. The most serious of all took place in 1887, when it appeared probable that there would be again a permanent change in the river’s course. By dint of great exertions, however, the government succeeded in closing the breach, though not till January 1889, and not until there had been immense destruction of life and property. The outbreak on this occasion occurred, as all the more serious outbreaks have done, in Honan, a few miles west of the city of Kaifengfu. The stream poured itself over the level and fertile country to the southwards, sweeping whole villages before it, and converting the plain into one vast lake. The area affected was not less than 50,000 sq. m. and the loss of life was computed at over one million. Since 1887 there have been a series of smaller outbreaks, mostly at points lower down and in the neighbourhood of Chinanfu, the capital of Shantung. These perpetually occurring disasters entail a heavy expense on the government; and from the mere pecuniary point of view it would well repay them to call in the best foreign engineering skill available, an expedient, however, which has not commended itself to the Chinese authorities.
(G. J.)
HWICCE, one of the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon Britain. Its exact dimensions are unknown; they probably coincided with those of the old diocese of Worcester, the early bishops of which bore the title “Episcopus Hwicciorum.” It would therefore include Worcestershire, Gloucestershire except the Forest of Dean, the southern half of Warwickshire, and the neighbourhood of Bath. The name Hwicce survives in Wychwood in Oxfordshire and Whichford in Warwickshire. These districts, or at all events the southern portion of them, were according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 577, originally conquered by the West Saxons under Ceawlin. In later times, however, the kingdom of the Hwicce appears to have been always subject to Mercian supremacy, and possibly it was separated from Wessex in the time of Edwin. The first kings of whom we read were two brothers, Eanhere and Eanfrith, probably contemporaries of Wulfhere. They were followed by a king named Osric, a contemporary of Æthelred, and he by a king Oshere. Oshere had three sons who reigned after him, Æthelheard, Æthelweard and Æthelric. The two last named appear to have been reigning in the year 706. At the beginning of Offa’s reign we again find the kingdom ruled by three brothers, named Eanberht, Uhtred and Aldred, the two latter of whom lived until about 780. After them the title of king seems to have been given up. Their successor Æthelmund, who was killed in a campaign against Wessex in 802, is described only as an earl. The district remained in possession of the rulers of Mercia until the fall of that kingdom. Together with the rest of English Mercia it submitted to King Alfred about 877-883 under Earl Æthelred, who possibly himself belonged to the Hwicce. No genealogy or list of kings has been preserved, and we do not know whether the dynasty was connected with that of Wessex or Mercia.
See Bede, Historia eccles. (edited by C. Plummer) iv. 13 (Oxford, 1896); W. de G. Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum, 43, 51, 76, 85, 116, 117, 122, 163, 187, 232, 233, 238 (Oxford, 1885-1889).
(F. G. M. B.)
HYACINTH (Gr. hyakinthos), also called Jacinth (through Ital. giacinto), one of the most popular of spring garden flowers. It was in cultivation prior to 1597, at which date it is mentioned by Gerard. Rea in 1665 mentions several single and double varieties as being then in English gardens, and Justice in 1754 describes upwards of fifty single-flowered varieties, and nearly one hundred double-flowered ones, as a selection of the best from the catalogues of two then celebrated Dutch growers. One of the Dutch sorts, called La Reine de Femmes, a single white, is said to have produced from thirty-four to thirty-eight flowers in a spike, and on its first appearance to have sold for 50 guilders a bulb; while one called Overwinnaar, or Conqueror, a double blue, sold at first for 100 guilders, Gloria Mundi for 500 guilders, and Koning Saloman for 600 guilders. Several sorts are at that date mentioned as blooming well in water-glasses. Justice relates that he himself raised several very valuable double-flowered kinds from seeds, which many of the sorts he describes are noted for producing freely.
The original of the cultivated hyacinth, Hyacinthus orientalis, a native of Greece and Asia Minor, is by comparison an insignificant plant, bearing on a spike only a few small, narrow-lobed, washy blue flowers, resembling in form those of our common blue-bell. So great has been the improvement effected by the florists, and chiefly by the Dutch, that the modern hyacinth would scarcely be recognized as the descendant of the type above referred to, the spikes being long and dense, composed of a large number of flowers; the spikes produced by strong bulbs not unfrequently measure 6 to 9 in. in length and from 7 to 9 in. in circumference, with the flowers closely set on from bottom to top. Of late years much improvement has been effected in the size of the individual flowers and the breadth of their recurving lobes, as well as in securing increased brilliancy and depth of colour.
The peculiarities of the soil and climate of Holland are so very favourable to their production that Dutch florists have made a specialty of the growth of those and other bulbous-rooted flowers. Hundreds of acres are devoted to the growth of hyacinths in the vicinity of Haarlem, and bring in a revenue of several hundreds of thousands of pounds. Some notion of the vast number imported into England annually may be formed from the fact that, for the supply of flowering plants to Covent Garden, one market grower alone produces from 60,000 to 70,000 in pots under glass, their blooming period being accelerated by artificial heat, and extending from Christmas onwards until they bloom naturally in the open ground.
In the spring flower garden few plants make a more effective display than the hyacinth. Dotted in clumps in the flower borders, and arranged in masses of well-contrasted colours In beds in the flower garden, there are no flowers which impart during their season—March and April—a gayer tone to the parterre. The bulbs are rarely grown a second time, either for indoor or outdoor culture, though with care they might be utilized for the latter purpose; and hence the enormous numbers which are procured each recurring year from Holland.
The first hyacinths were single-flowered, but towards the close of the 17th century double-flowered ones began to appear, and till a recent period these bulbs were the most esteemed. At the present time, however, the single-flowered sorts are in the ascendant, as they produce more regular and symmetrical spikes of blossom, the flowers being closely set and more or less horizontal in direction, while most of the double sorts have the bells distant and dependent, so that the spike is loose and by comparison ineffective. For pot culture, and for growth in water-glasses especially, the single-flowered sorts are greatly to be preferred. Few if any of the original kinds are now in cultivation, a succession of new and improved varieties having been raised, the demand for which is regulated in some respects by fashion.
The hyacinth delights in a rich light sandy soil. The Dutch incorporate freely with their naturally light soil a compost consisting of one-third coarse sea or river sand, one-third rotten cow dung without litter and one-third leaf-mould. The soil thus renovated retains its qualities for six or seven years, but hyacinths are not planted upon the same place for two years successively, intermediary crops of narcissus, crocus or tulips being taken. A good compost for hyacinths is sandy loam, decayed leaf-mould, rotten cow dung and sharp sand in equal parts, the whole being collected and laid up in a heap and turned over occasionally. Well-drained beds made up of this soil, and refreshed with a portion of new compost annually, would grow the hyacinth to perfection. The best time to plant the bulbs is towards the end of September and during October; they should be arranged in rows, 6 to 8 in. asunder, there being four rows in each bed. The bulbs should be sunk about 4 to 6 in. deep, with a small quantity of clean sand placed below and around each of them. The beds should be covered with decayed tan-bark, coco-nut fibre or half-rotten dung litter. As the flower-stems appear, they are tied to rigid but slender stakes to preserve them from accident. If the bulbs are at all prized, the stems should be broken off as soon as the flowering is over, so as not to exhaust the bulbs; the leaves, however, must be allowed to grow on till matured, but as soon as they assume a yellow colour, the bulbs are taken up, the leaves cut off near their base, and the bulbs laid out in a dry, airy, shady place to ripen, after which they are cleaned of loose earth and skin, ready for storing. It is the practice in Holland, about a month after the bloom, or when the tips of the leaves assume a withered appearance, to take up the bulbs, and to lay them sideways on the ground, covering them with an inch or two of earth. About three weeks later they are again taken up and cleaned. In the store-room they should be kept dry, well-aired and apart from each other.
Few plants are better adapted than the hyacinth for pot culture as greenhouse decorative plants; and by the aid of forcing they may be had in bloom as early as Christmas. They flower fairly well in 5-in. pots, the stronger bulbs in 6-in. pots. To bloom at Christmas, they should be potted early in September, in a compost resembling that already recommended for the open-air beds; and, to keep up a succession of bloom, others should be potted at intervals of a few weeks till the middle or end of November. The tops of the bulbs should be about level with the soil, and if a little sand is put immediately around them so much the better. The pots should be set in an open place on a dry hard bed of ashes, and be covered over to a depth of 6 or 8 in. with the same material or with fibre or soil; and when the roots are well developed, which will take from six to eight weeks, they may be removed to a frame, and gradually exposed to light, and then placed in a forcing pit in a heat of from 60 to 70°. When the flowers are fairly open, they may be removed to the greenhouse or conservatory.
The hyacinth may be very successfully grown in glasses for ornament in dwelling-houses. The glasses are filled to the neck with rain or even tap water, a few lumps of charcoal being dropped into them. The bulbs are placed in the hollow provided for them, so that their base just touches the water. This may be done in September or October. They are then set in a dark cupboard for a few weeks till roots are freely produced, and then gradually exposed to light. The early-flowering single white Roman hyacinth, a small-growing pure white variety, remarkable for its fragrance, is well adapted for forcing, as it can be had in bloom if required by November. For windows it grows well in the small glasses commonly used for crocuses; and for decorative purposes should be planted about five bulbs in a 5-in. pot, or in pans holding a dozen each. If grown for cut flowers it can be planted thickly in boxes of any convenient size. It is highly esteemed during the winter months by florists.
The Spanish hyacinth (H. amethystinus) and H. azureus are charming little bulbs for growing in masses in the rock garden or front of the flower border. The older botanists included in the genus Hyacinthus species of Muscari, Scilla and other genera of bulbous Liliaceae, and the name of hyacinth is still popularly applied to several other bulbous plants. Thus Muscari botryoides is the grape hyacinth, 6 in., blue or white, the handsomest; M. moschatum, the musk hyacinth, 10 in., has peculiar livid greenish-yellow flowers and a strong musky odour; M. comosum var. monstrosum, the feather hyacinth, bears sterile flowers broken up into a featherlike mass; M. racemosum, the starch hyacinth, is a native with deep blue plum-scented flowers. The Cape hyacinth is Galtonia candicans, a magnificent border plant, 3-4 ft. high, with large drooping white bell-shaped flowers; the star hyacinth, Scilla amoena; the Peruvian hyacinth or Cuban lily, S. peruviana, a native of the Mediterranean region, to which Linnaeus gave the species name peruviana on a mistaken assumption of its origin; the wild hyacinth or blue-bell, known variously as Endymion nonscriptum, Hyacinthus nonscriptus or Scilla nutans; the wild hyacinth of western North America, Camassia esculenta. They all flourish in good garden soil of a gritty nature.
HYACINTH, or Jacinth, in mineralogy, a variety of zircon (q.v.) of yellowish red colour, used as a gem-stone. The hyacinthus of ancient writers must have been our sapphire, or blue corundum, while the hyacinth of modern mineralogists may have been the stone known as lyncurium (λυγκούριον). The Hebrew word leshem, translated ligure in the Authorized Version (Ex. xxviii. 19), from the λιγύριον of the Septuagint, appears in the Revised Version as jacinth, but with a marginal alternative of amber. Both jacinth and amber may be reddish yellow, but their identification is doubtful. As our jacinth (zircon) is not known in ancient Egyptian work, Professor Flinders Petrie has suggested that the leshem may have been a yellow quartz, or perhaps agate. Some old English writers describe the jacinth as yellow, whilst others refer to it as a blue stone, and the hyacinthus of some authorities seems undoubtedly to have been our sapphire. In Rev. xx. 20 the Revised Version retains the word jacinth, but gives sapphire as an alternative.
Most of the gems known in trade as hyacinth are only garnets—generally the deep orange-brown hessonite or cinnamon-stone—and many of the antique engraved stones reputed to be hyacinth are probably garnets. The difference may be detected optically, since the garnet is singly and the hyacinth doubly refracting; moreover the specific gravity affords a simple means of diagnosis, that of garnet being only about 3.7, whilst hyacinth may have a density as high as 4.7. Again, it was shown many years ago by Sir A. H. Church that most hyacinths, when examined by the spectroscope, show a series of dark absorption bands, due perhaps to the presence of some rare element such as uranium or erbium.
Hyacinth is not a common mineral. It occurs, with other zircons, in the gem-gravels of Ceylon, and very fine stones have been found as pebbles at Mudgee in New South Wales. Crystals of zircon, with all the typical characters of hyacinth, occur at Expailly, Le Puy-en-Velay, in Central France, but they are not large enough for cutting. The stones which have been called Compostella hyacinths are simply ferruginous quartz from Santiago de Compostella in Spain.
(F. W. R.*)
HYACINTHUS,[1] in Greek mythology, the youngest son of the Spartan king Amyclas, who reigned at Amyclae (so Pausanias iii. 1. 3, iii. 19. 5; and Apollodorus i. 3. 3, iii. 10. 3). Other stories make him son of Oebalus, of Eurotas, or of Pierus and the nymph Clio (see Hyginus, Fabulae, 271; Lucian, De saltatione, 45, and Dial. deor. 14). According to the general story, which is probably late and composite, his great beauty attracted the love of Apollo, who killed him accidentally when teaching him to throw the discus (quoit); others say that Zephyrus (or Boreas) out of jealousy deflected the quoit so that it hit Hyacinthus on the head and killed him. According to the representation on the tomb at Amyclae (Pausanias, loc. cit.) Hyacinthus was translated into heaven with his virgin sister Polyboea. Out of his blood there grew the flower known as the hyacinth, the petals of which were marked with the mournful exclamation AI, AI, “alas” (cf. “that sanguine flower inscribed with woe”). This Greek hyacinth cannot have been the flower which now bears the name: it has been identified with a species of iris and with the larkspur (Delphinium Aiacis), which appear to have the markings described. The Greek hyacinth was also said to have sprung from the blood of Ajax. Evidently the Greek authorities confused both the flowers and the traditions.
The death of Hyacinthus was celebrated at Amyclae by the second most important of Spartan festivals, the Hyacinthia, which took place in the Spartan month Hecatombeus. What month this was is not certain. Arguing from Xenophon (Hell. iv. 5) we get May; assuming that the Spartan Hecatombeus is the Attic Hecatombaion, we get July; or again it may be the Attic Scirophorion, June. At all events the Hyacinthia was an early summer festival. It lasted three days, and the rites gradually passed from mourning for Hyacinthus to rejoicings in the majesty of Apollo, the god of light and warmth, and giver of the ripe fruits of the earth (see a passage from Polycrates, Laconica, quoted by Athenaeus 139 d; criticized by L. R. Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, iv. 266 foll.). This festival is clearly connected with vegetation, and marks the passage from the youthful verdure of spring to the dry heat of summer and the ripening of the corn.
The precise relation which Apollo bears to Hyacinthus is obscure. The fact that at Tarentum a Hyacinthus tomb is ascribed by Polybius to Apollo Hyacinthus (not Hyacinthius) has led some to think that the personalities are one, and that the hero is merely an emanation from the god; confirmation is sought in the Apolline appellation τετράχειρ, alleged by Hesychius to have been used in Laconia, and assumed to describe a composite figure of Apollo-Hyacinthus. Against this theory is the essential difference between the two figures. Hyacinthus is a chthonian vegetation god whose worshippers are afflicted and sorrowful; Apollo, though interested in vegetation, is never regarded as inhabiting the lower world, his death is not celebrated in any ritual, his worship is joyous and triumphant, and finally the Amyclean Apollo is specifically the god of war and song. Moreover, Pausanias describes the monument at Amyclae as consisting of a rude figure of Apollo standing on an altar-shaped base which formed the tomb of Hyacinthus. Into the latter offerings were put for the hero before gifts were made to the god.
On the whole it is probable that Hyacinthus belongs originally to the pre-Dorian period, and that his story was appropriated and woven into their own Apollo myth by the conquering Dorians. Possibly he may be the apotheosis of a pre-Dorian king of Amyclae. J. G. Frazer further suggests that he may have been regarded as spending the winter months in the underworld and returning to earth in the spring when the “hyacinth” blooms. In this case his festival represents perhaps both the Dorian conquest of Amyclae and the death of spring before the ardent heat of the summer sun, typified as usual by the discus (quoit) with which Apollo is said to have slain him. With the growth of the hyacinth from his blood should be compared the oriental stories of violets springing from the blood of Attis, and roses and anemones from that of Adonis. As a youthful vegetation god, Hyacinthus may be compared with Linus and Scephrus, both of whom are connected with Apollo Agyieus.
See L. R. Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, vol. iv. (1907), pp. 125 foll., 264 foll.; J. G. Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris (1906), bk. ii. ch. 7; S. Wide, Lakonische Kulte, p. 290; E. Rhode, Psyche, 3rd ed. i. 137 foll.; Roscher, Lexikon d. griech. u. röm. Myth., s.v. “Hyakinthos” (Greve); L. Preller, Griechische Mythol. 4th ed. i. 248 foll.
(J. M. M.)
[1] The word is probably derived from an Indo-European root, meaning “youthful,” found in Latin, Greek, English and Sanskrit. Some have suggested that the first two letters are from ὕειν, to rain, (cf. Hyades).
HYADES (“the rainy ones”), in Greek mythology, the daughters of Atlas and Aethra; their number varies between two and seven. As a reward for having brought up Zeus at Dodona and taken care of the infant Dionysus Hyes, whom they conveyed to Ino (sister of his mother Semele) at Thebes when his life was threatened by Lycurgus, they were translated to heaven and placed among the stars (Hyginus, Poët. astron. ii. 21). Another form of the story combines them with the Pleiades. According to this they were twelve (or fifteen) sisters, whose brother Hyas was killed by a snake while hunting in Libya (Ovid, Fasti, v. 165; Hyginus, Fab. 192). They lamented him so bitterly that Zeus, out of compassion, changed them into stars—five into the Hyades, at the head of the constellation of the Bull, the remainder into the Pleiades. Their name is derived from the fact that the rainy season commenced when they rose at the same time as the sun (May 7-21); the original conception of them is that of the fertilizing principle of moisture. The Romans derived the name from ὗς (pig), and translated it by Suculae (Cicero, De nat. deorum, ii. 43).
HYATT, ALPHEUS (1838-1902), American naturalist, was born at Washington, D.C., on the 5th of April 1838. From 1858 to 1862 he studied at Harvard, where he had Louis Agassiz for his master, and in 1863 he served as a volunteer in the Civil War, attaining the rank of captain. In 1867 he was appointed curator of the Essex Institute at Salem, and in 1870 became professor of zoology and palaeontology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (resigned 1888), and custodian of the Boston Society of Natural History (curator in 1881). In 1886 he was appointed assistant for palaeontology in the Cambridge museum of comparative anatomy, and in 1889 was attached to the United States Geological Survey as palaeontologist for the Trias and Jura. He was the chief founder of the American Society of Naturalists, of which he acted as first president in 1883, and he also took a leading part in establishing the marine biological laboratories at Annisquam and Woods Hole, Mass. He died at Cambridge on the 15th of January 1902.
His works include Observations on Fresh-water Polyzoa (1866); Fossil Cephalopods of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (1872); Revision of North American Porifera (1875-1877); Genera of Fossil Cephalopoda (1883); Larval Theory of the Origin of Cellular Tissue (1884); Genesis of the Arietidae (1889); and Phylogeny of an acquired characteristic (1894). He wrote the section on Cephalopoda in Karl von Zittel’s Paläontologie (1900), and his well-known study on the fossil pond snails of Steinheim (“The Genesis of the Tertiary Species of Planorbis at Steinheim”) appeared in the Memoirs of the Boston Natural History Society in 1880. He was one of the founders and editors of the American Naturalist.
HYBLA, the name of several cities In Sicily. The best known historically, though its exact site is uncertain, is Hybla Major, near (or by some supposed to be identical with) Megara Hyblaea (q.v.): another Hybla, known as Hybla Minor or Galeatis, is represented by the modern Paternò; while the site of Hybla Heraea is to be sought near Ragusa.
HYBRIDISM. The Latin word hybrida, hibrida or ibrida has been assumed to be derived from the Greek ὕβρις, an insult or outrage, and a hybrid or mongrel has been supposed to be an outrage on nature, an unnatural product. As a general rule animals and plants belonging to distinct species do not produce offspring when crossed with each other, and the term hybrid has been employed for the result of a fertile cross between individuals of different species, the word mongrel for the more common result of the crossing of distinct varieties. A closer scrutiny of the facts, however, makes the term hybridism less isolated and more vague. The words species and genus, and still more subspecies and variety, do not correspond with clearly marked and sharply defined zoological categories, and no exact line can be drawn between the various kinds of crossings from those between individuals apparently identical to those belonging to genera universally recognized as distinct. Hybridism therefore grades into mongrelism, mongrelism into cross-breeding, and cross-breeding into normal pairing, and we can say little more than that the success of the union is the more unlikely or more unnatural the further apart the parents are in natural affinity.
The interest in hybridism was for a long time chiefly of a practical nature, and was due to the fact that hybrids are often found to present characters somewhat different from those of either parent. The leading facts have been known in the case of the horse and ass from time immemorial. The earliest recorded observation of a hybrid plant is by J. G. Gmelin towards the end of the 17th century; the next is that of Thomas Fairchild, who in the second decade of the 18th century, produced the cross which is still grown in gardens under the name of “Fairchild’s Sweet William.” Linnaeus made many experiments in the cross-fertilization of plants and produced several hybrids, but Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter (1733-1806) laid the first real foundation of our scientific knowledge of the subject. Later on Thomas Andrew Knight, a celebrated English horticulturist, devoted much successful labour to the improvement of fruit trees and vegetables by crossing. In the second quarter of the 19th century C. F. Gärtner made and published the results of a number of experiments that had not been equalled by any earlier worker. Next came Charles Darwin, who first in the Origin of Species, and later in Cross and Self-Fertilization of Plants, subjected the whole question to a critical examination, reviewed the known facts and added many to them.
Darwin’s conclusions were summed up by G. J. Romanes in the 9th edition of this Encyclopaedia as follows:—
1. The laws governing the production of hybrids are identical, or nearly identical, in the animal and vegetable kingdoms.
2. The sterility which so generally attends the crossing of two specific forms is to be distinguished as of two kinds, which, although often confounded by naturalists, are in reality quite distinct. For the sterility may obtain between the two parent species when first crossed, or it may first assert itself in their hybrid progeny. In the latter case the hybrids, although possibly produced without any appearance of infertility on the part of their parent species, nevertheless prove more or less infertile among themselves, and also with members of either parent species.
3. The degree of both kinds of infertility varies in the case of different species, and in that of their hybrid progeny, from absolute sterility up to complete fertility. Thus, to take the case of plants, “when pollen from a plant of one family is placed on the stigma of a plant of a distinct family, it exerts no more influence than so much inorganic dust. From this absolute zero of fertility, the pollen of different species, applied to the stigma of some one species of the same genus, yields a perfect gradation in the number of seeds produced, up to nearly complete, or even quite complete, fertility; so, in hybrids themselves, there are some which never have produced, and probably never would produce, even with the pollen of the pure parents, a single fertile seed; but in some of these cases a first trace of fertility may be detected, by the pollen of one of the pure parent species causing the flower of the hybrid to wither earlier than it otherwise would have done; and the early withering of the flower is well known to be a sign of incipient fertilization. From this extreme degree of sterility we have self-fertilized hybrids producing a greater and greater number of seeds up to perfect fertility.”
4. Although there is, as a rule, a certain parallelism, there is no fixed relation between the degree of sterility manifested by the parent species when crossed and that which is manifested by their hybrid progeny. There are many cases in which two pure species can be crossed with unusual facility, while the resulting hybrids are remarkably sterile; and, contrariwise, there are species which can only be crossed with extreme difficulty, though the hybrids, when produced, are very fertile. Even within the limits of the same genus, these two opposite cases may occur.
5. When two species are reciprocally crossed, i.e. male A with female B, and male B with female A, the degree of sterility often differs greatly in the two cases. The sterility of the resulting hybrids may differ likewise.
6. The degree of sterility of first crosses and of hybrids runs, to a certain extent, parallel with the systematic affinity of the forms which are united. “For species belonging to distinct genera can rarely, and those belonging to distinct families can never, be crossed. The parallelism, however, is far from complete; for a multitude of closely allied species will not unite, or unite with extreme difficulty, whilst other species, widely different from each other, can be crossed with perfect facility. Nor does the difficulty depend on ordinary constitutional differences; for annual and perennial plants, deciduous and evergreen trees, plants flowering at different seasons, inhabiting different stations, and naturally living under the most opposite climates, can often be crossed with ease. The difficulty or facility apparently depends exclusively on the sexual constitution of the species which are crossed, or on their sexual elective affinity.”
There are many new records as to the production of hybrids. Horticulturists have been extremely active and successful in their attempts to produce new flowers or new varieties of vegetables by seminal or graft-hybrids, and any florist’s catalogue or the account of any special plant, such as is to be found in Foster-Melliar’s Book of the Rose, is in great part a history of successful hybridization. Much special experimental work has been done by botanists, notably by de Vries, to the results of whose experiments we shall recur. Experiments show clearly that the obtaining of hybrids is in many cases merely a matter of taking sufficient trouble, and the successful crossing of genera is not infrequent.
Focke, for instance, cites cases where hybrids were obtained between Brassica and Raphanus, Galium and Asperula, Campanula and Phyteuma, Verbascum and Celsia. Among animals, new records and new experiments are almost equally numerous. Boveri has crossed Echinus microtuberculatus with Sphaerechinus granularis. Thomas Hunt Morgan even obtained hybrids between Asterias, a starfish, and Arbacia, a sea-urchin, a cross as remote as would be that between a fish and a mammal. Vernon got many hybrids by fertilizing the eggs of Strongylocentrotus lividus with the sperm of Sphaerechinus granularis. Standfuss has carried on an enormous series of experiments with Lepidopterous insects, and has obtained a very large series of hybrids, of which he has kept careful record. Lepidopterists generally begin to suspect that many curious forms offered by dealers as new species are products got by crossing known species. Apellö has succeeded with Teleostean fish; Gebhardt and others with Amphibia. Elliot and Suchetet have studied carefully the question of hybridization occurring normally among birds, and have got together a very large body of evidence. Among the cases cited by Elliot the most striking are that of the hybrid between Colaptes cafer and C. auratus, which occurs over a very wide area of North America and is known as C. hybridus, and the hybrid between Euplocamus lineatus and E. horsfieldi, which appears to be common in Assam. St M. Podmore has produced successful crosses between the wood-pigeon (Columba palumbus) and a domesticated variety of the rock pigeon (C. livia). Among mammals noteworthy results have been obtained by Professor Cossar Ewart, who has bred nine zebra hybrids by crossing mares of various sizes with a zebra stallion, and who has studied in addition three hybrids out of zebra mares, one sired by a donkey, the others by ponies. Crosses have been made between the common rabbit (Lepus cuniculus) and the guinea-pig (Cavia cobaya), and examples of the results have been exhibited in the Zoological Gardens of Sydney, New South Wales. The Carnivora generally are very easy to hybridize, and many successful experiments have been made with animals in captivity. Karl Hagenbeck of Hamburg has produced crosses between the lion (Felis leo) and the tiger (F. tigris). What was probably a “tri-hybrid” in which lion, leopard and jaguar were mingled was exhibited by a London showman in 1908. Crosses between various species of the smaller cats have been fertile on many occasions. The black bear (Ursus americanus) and the European brown bear (U. arctos) bred in the London Zoological Gardens in 1859, but the three cubs did not reach maturity. Hybrids between the brown bear and the grizzly-bear (U. horribilis) have been produced in Cologne, whilst at Halle since 1874 a series of successful matings of polar (U. maritimus) and brown bears have been made. Examples of these hybrid bears have been exhibited by the London Zoological Society. The London Zoological Society has also successfully mated several species of antelopes, for instance, the water-bucks Kobus ellipsiprymnus and K. unctuosus, and Selous’s antelope Limnotragus selousi with L. gratus.
The causes militating against the production of hybrids have also received considerable attention. Delage, discussing the question, states that there is a general proportion between sexual attraction and zoological affinity, and in many cases hybrids are not naturally produced simply from absence of the stimulus to sexual mating, or because of preferential mating within the species or variety. In addition to differences of habit, temperament, time of maturity, and so forth, gross structural differences may make mating impossible. Thus Escherick contends that among insects the peculiar structure of the genital appendages makes cross-impregnation impossible, and there is reason to believe that the specific peculiarities of the modified sexual palps in male spiders have a similar result.
The difficulties, however, may not exist, or may be overcome by experiment, and frequently it is only careful management that is required to produce crossing. Thus it has been found that when the pollen of one species does not succeed in fertilizing the ovules of another species, yet the reciprocal cross may be successful; that is to say, the pollen of the second species may fertilize the ovules of the first. H. M. Vernon, working with sea-urchins, found that the obtaining of hybrids depended on the relative maturity of the sexual products. The difficulties in crossing apparently may extend to the chemiotaxic processes of the actual sexual cells. Thus when the spermatozoa of an urchin were placed in a drop of seawater containing ripe eggs of an urchin and of a starfish, the former eggs became surrounded by clusters of the male cells, while the latter appeared to exert little attraction for the alien germ-cells. Finally, when the actual impregnation of the egg is possible naturally, or has been secured by artificial means, the development of the hybrid may stop at an early stage. Thus hybrids between the urchin and the starfish, animals belonging to different classes, reached only the stage of the pluteus larva. A. D. Apellö, experimenting with Teleostean fish, found that very often impregnation and segmentation occurred, but that the development broke down immediately afterwards. W. Gebhardt, crossing Rana esculenta with R. arvalis, found that the cleavage of the ovum was normal, but that abnormality began with the gastrula, and that development soon stopped. In a very general fashion there appears to be a parallel between the zoological affinity and the extent to which the incomplete development of the hybrid proceeds.
As to the sterility of hybrids inter se, or with either of the parent forms, information is still wanted. Delage, summing up the evidence in a general way, states that mongrels are more fertile and stronger than their parents, while hybrids are at least equally hardy but less fertile. While many of the hybrid products of horticulturists are certainly infertile, others appear to be indefinitely fertile.
Focke, it is true, states that the hybrids between Primula auricula and P. hirsuta are fertile for many generations, but not indefinitely so; but, while this may be true for the particular case, there seems no reason to doubt that many plant hybrids are quite fertile. In the case of animals the evidence is rather against fertility. Standfuss, who has made experiments lasting over many years, and who has dealt with many genera of Lepidoptera, obtained no fertile hybrid females, although he found that hybrid males paired readily and successfully with pure-bred females of the parent races. Elliot, dealing with birds, concluded that no hybrids were fertile with one another beyond the second generation, but thought that they were fertile with members of the parent races. Wallace, on the other hand, cites from Quatrefages the case of hybrids between the moths Bombyx cynthia and B. arrindia, which were stated to be fertile inter se for eight generations. He also states that hybrids between the sheep and goat have a limited fertility inter se. Charles Darwin, however, had evidence that some hybrid pheasants were completely fertile, and he himself interbred the progeny of crosses between the common and Chinese geese, whilst there appears to be no doubt as to the complete fertility of the crosses between many species of ducks, J. L. Bonhote having interbred in various crosses for several generations the mallard (Anas boschas), the Indian spot-bill duck (A. poecilorhyncha), the New Zealand grey duck (A. superciliosa) and the pin-tail (Dafila acuta). Podmore’s pigeon hybrids were fertile inter se, a specimen having been exhibited at the London Zoological Gardens. The hybrids between the brown and polar bears bred at Halle proved to be fertile, both with one of the parent species and with one another.
Cornevin and Lesbre state that in 1873 an Arab mule was fertilized in Africa by a stallion, and gave birth to female offspring which she suckled. All three were brought to the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris, and there the mule had a second female colt to the same father, and subsequently two male colts in succession to an ass and to a stallion. The female progeny were fertilized, but their offspring were feeble and died at birth. Cossar Ewart gives an account of a recent Indian case in which a female mule gave birth to a male colt. He points out, however, that many mistakes have been made about the breeding of hybrids, and is not altogether inclined to accept this supposed case. Very little has been published with regard to the most important question, as to the actual condition of the sexual organs and cells in hybrids. There does not appear to be gross anatomical defect to account for the infertility of hybrids, but microscopical examination in a large number of cases is wanted. Cossar Ewart, to whom indeed much of the most interesting recent work on hybrids is due, states that in male zebra-hybrids the sexual cells were immature, the tails of the spermatozoa being much shorter than those of the similar cells in stallions and zebras. He adds, however, that the male hybrids he examined were young, and might not have been sexually mature. He examined microscopically the ovary of a female zebra-hybrid and found one large and several small Graafian follicles, in all respects similar to those in a normal mare or female zebra. A careful study of the sexual organs in animal and plant hybrids is very much to be desired, but it may be said that so far as our present knowledge goes there is not to be expected any obvious microscopical cause of the relative infertility of hybrids.
The relative variability of hybrids has received considerable attention from many writers. Horticulturists, as Bateson has written, are “aware of the great and striking variations which occur in so many orders of plants when hybridization is effected.” The phrase has been used “breaking the constitution of a plant” to indicate the effect produced in the offspring of a hybrid union, and the device is frequently used by those who are seeking for novelties to introduce on the market. It may be said generally that hybrids are variable, and that the products of hybrids are still more variable. J. L. Bonhote found extreme variations amongst his hybrid ducks. Y. Delage states that in reciprocal crosses there is always a marked tendency for the offspring to resemble the male parents; he quotes from Huxley that the mule, whose male parent is an ass, is more like the ass, and that the hinny, whose male parent is a horse, is more like the horse. Standfuss found among Lepidoptera that males were produced much more often than females, and that these males paired readily. The freshly hatched larvae closely resembled the larvae of the female parent, but in the course of growth the resemblance to the male increased, the extent of the final approximation to the male depending on the relative phylogenetic age of the two parents, the parent of the older species being prepotent. In reciprocal pairing, he found that the male was able to transmit the characters of the parents in a higher degree. Cossar Ewart, in relation to zebra hybrids, has discussed the matter of resemblance to parents in very great detail, and fuller information must be sought in his writings. He shows that the wild parent is not necessarily prepotent, although many writers have urged that view. He described three hybrids bred out of a zebra mare by different horses, and found in all cases that the resemblance to the male or horse parent was more profound. Similarly, zebra-donkey hybrids out of zebra mares bred in France and in Australia were in characters and disposition far more like the donkey parents. The results which he obtained in the hybrids which he bred from a zebra stallion and different mothers were more variable, but there was rather a balance in favour of zebra disposition and against zebra shape and marking.
“Of the nine zebra-horse hybrids I have bred,” he says, “only two in their make and disposition take decidedly after the wild parent. As explained fully below, all the hybrids differ profoundly in the plan of their markings from the zebra, while in their ground colour they take after their respective dams or the ancestors of their dams far more than after the zebra—the hybrid out of the yellow and white Iceland pony, e.g. instead of being light in colour, as I anticipated, is for the most part of a dark dun colour, with but indistinct stripes. The hoofs, mane and tail of the hybrids are at the most intermediate, but this is perhaps partly owing to reversion towards the ancestors of these respective dams. In their disposition and habits they all undoubtedly agree more with the wild sire.”
Ewart’s experiments and his discussion of them also throw important light on the general relation of hybrids to their parents. He found that the coloration and pattern of his zebra hybrids resembled far more those of the Somali or Grévy’s zebra than those of their sire—a Burchell’s zebra. In a general discussion of the stripings of horses, asses and zebras, he came to the conclusion that the Somali zebra represented the older type, and that therefore his zebra hybrids furnished important evidence of the effect of crossing in producing reversion to ancestral type. The same subject has of course been discussed at length by Darwin, in relation to the cross-breeding of varieties of pigeons; but the modern experimentalists who are following the work of Mendel interpret reversion differently (see [Mendelism]).
Graft-Hybridism.—It is well known that, when two varieties or allied species are grafted together, each retains its distinctive characters. But to this general, if not universal, rule there are on record several alleged exceptions, in which either the scion is said to have partaken of the qualities of the stock, the stock of the scion, or each to have affected the other. Supposing any of these influences to have been exerted, the resulting product would deserve to be called a graft-hybrid. It is clearly a matter of great interest to ascertain whether such formation of hybrids by grafting is really possible; for, if even one instance of such formation could be unequivocally proved, it would show that sexual and asexual reproduction are essentially identical.
The cases of alleged graft-hybridism are exceedingly few, considering the enormous number of grafts that are made every year by horticulturists, and have been so made for centuries. Of these cases the most celebrated are those of Adam’s laburnum (Cytisus Adami) and the bizzarria orange. Adam’s laburnum is now flourishing in numerous places throughout Europe, all the trees having been raised as cuttings from the original graft, which was made by inserting a bud of the purple laburnum into a stock of the yellow. M. Adam, who made the graft, has left on record that from it there sprang the existing hybrid. There can be no question as to the truly hybrid character of the latter—all the peculiarities of both parent species being often blended in the same raceme, flower or even petal; but until the experiment shall have been successfully repeated there must always remain a strong suspicion that, notwithstanding the assertion and doubtless the belief of M. Adam, the hybrid arose as a cross in the ordinary way of seminal reproduction. Similarly, the bizzarria orange, which is unquestionably a hybrid between the bitter orange and the citron—since it presents the remarkable spectacle of these two different fruits blended into one—is stated by the gardener who first succeeded in producing it to have arisen as a graft-hybrid; but here again a similar doubt, similarly due to the need of corroboration, attaches to the statement. And the same remark applies to the still more wonderful case of the so-called trifacial orange, which blends three distinct kinds of fruit in one, and which is said to have been produced by artificially splitting and uniting the seeds taken from the three distinct species, the fruits of which now occur blended in the triple hybrid.
The other instances of alleged graft-hybridism are too numerous to be here noticed in detail; they refer to jessamine, ash, hazel, vine, hyacinth, potato, beet and rose. Of these the cases of the vine, beet and rose are the strongest as evidence of graft-hybridization, from the fact that some of them were produced as the result of careful experiments made by very competent experimentalists. On the whole, the results of some of these experiments, although so few in number, must be regarded as making out a strong case in favour of the possibility of graft-hybridism. For it must always be remembered that, in experiments of this kind, negative evidence, however great in amount, may be logically dissipated by a single positive result.
Theory of Hybridism.—Charles Darwin was interested in hybridism as an experimental side of biology, but still more from the bearing of the facts on the theory of the origin of species. It is obvious that although hybridism is occasionally possible as an exception to the general infertility of species inter se, the exception is still more minimized when it is remembered that the hybrid progeny usually display some degree of sterility. The main facts of hybridism appear to lend support to the old doctrine that there are placed between all species the barriers of mutual sterility. The argument for the fixity of species appears still stronger when the general infertility of species crossing is contrasted with the general fertility of the crossing of natural and artificial varieties. Darwin himself, and afterwards G. J. Romanes, showed, however, that the theory of natural selection did not require the possibility of the commingling of specific types, and that there was no reason to suppose that the mutation of species should depend upon their mutual crossing. There existed more than enough evidence, and this has been added to since, to show that infertility with other species is no criterion of a species, and that there is no exact parallel between the degree of affinity between forms and their readiness to cross. The problem of hybridism is no more than the explanation of the generally reduced fertility of remoter crosses as compared with the generally increased fertility of crosses between organisms slightly different. Darwin considered and rejected the view that the inter-sterility of species could have been the result of natural selection.
“At one time it appeared to me probable,” he wrote (Origin of Species, 6th ed. p. 247), “as it has to others, that the sterility of first crosses and of hybrids might have been slowly acquired through the natural selection of slightly lessened degrees of fertility, which, like any other variation, spontaneously appeared in certain individuals of one variety when crossed with those of another variety. For it would clearly be advantageous to two varieties or incipient species if they could be kept from blending, on the same principle that, when man is selecting at the same time two varieties, it is necessary that he should keep them separate. In the first place, it may be remarked that species inhabiting distinct regions are often sterile when crossed; now it could clearly have been of no advantage to such separated species to have been rendered mutually sterile and, consequently, this could not have been effected through natural selection; but it may perhaps be argued that, if a species were rendered sterile with some one compatriot, sterility with other species would follow as a necessary contingency. In the second place, it is almost as much opposed to the theory of natural selection as to that of special creation, that in reciprocal crosses the male element of one form should have been rendered utterly impotent on a second form, whilst at the same time the male element of this second form is enabled freely to fertilize the first form; for this peculiar state of the reproductive system could hardly have been advantageous to either species.”
Darwin came to the conclusion that the sterility of crossed species must be due to some principle quite independent of natural selection. In his search for such a principle he brought together much evidence as to the instability of the reproductive system, pointing out in particular how frequently wild animals in captivity fail to breed, whereas some domesticated races have been so modified by confinement as to be fertile together although they are descended from species probably mutually infertile. He was disposed to regard the phenomena of differential sterility as, so to speak, by-products of the process of evolution. G. J. Romanes afterwards developed his theory of physiological selection, in which he supposed that the appearance of differential fertility within a species was the starting-point of new species; certain individuals by becoming fertile only inter se proceeded along lines of modification diverging from the lines followed by other members of the species. Physiological selection in fact would operate in the same fashion as geographical isolation; if a portion of a species separated on an island tends to become a new species, so also a portion separated by infertility with the others would tend to form a new species. According to Romanes, therefore, mutual infertility was the starting-point, not the result, of specific modification. Romanes, however, did not associate his interesting theory with a sufficient number of facts, and it has left little mark on the history of the subject. A. R. Wallace, on the other hand, has argued that sterility between incipient species may have been increased by natural selection in the same fashion as other favourable variations are supposed to have been accumulated. He thought that “some slight degree of infertility was a not infrequent accompaniment of the external differences which always arise in a state of nature between varieties and incipient species.”
Weismann concluded, from an examination of a series of plant hybrids, that from the same cross hybrids of different character may be obtained, but that the characters are determined at the moment of fertilization; for he found that all the flowers on the same hybrid plant resembled one another in the minutest details of colour and pattern. Darwin already had pointed to the act of fertilization as the determining point, and it is in this direction that the theory of hybridism has made the greatest advance.
The starting-point of the modern views comes from the experiments and conclusions on plant hybrids made by Gregor Mendel and published in 1865. It is uncertain if Darwin had paid attention to this work; Romanes, writing in the 9th edition of this Encyclopaedia, cited it without comment. First H. de Vries, then W. Bateson and a series of observers returned to the work of Mendel (see [Mendelism]), and made it the foundation of much experimental work and still more theory. It is still too soon to decide if the confident predictions of the Mendelians are justified, but it seems clear that a combination of Mendel’s numerical results with Weismann’s (see [Heredity]) conception of the particulate character of the germ-plasm, or hereditary material, is at the root of the phenomena of hybridism, and that Darwin was justified in supposing it to lie outside the sphere of natural selection and to be a fundamental fact of living matter.
Authorities.—Apellö, “Über einige Resultate der Kreuzbefruchtung bei Knochenfischen,” Bergens mus. aarbog (1894); Bateson, “Hybridization and Cross-breeding,” Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society (1900); J. L. Bonhote, “Hybrid Ducks,” Proc. Zool. Soc. of London (1905), p. 147; Boveri, article “Befruchtung,” in Ergebnisse der Anatomie und Entwickelungsgeschichte von Merkel und Bonnet, i. 385-485; Cornevin et Lesbre, “Étude sur un hybride issu d’une mule féconde et d’un cheval,” Rev. Sci. li. 144; Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (1859), The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom (1878); Delage, La Structure du protoplasma et les théories sur l’hérédité (1895, with a literature); de Vries, “The Law of Disjunction of Hybrids,” Comptes rendus (1900), p. 845; Elliot, Hybridism; Escherick, “Die biologische Bedeutung der Genitalabhänge der Insecten,” Verh. z. B. Wien, xlii. 225; Ewart, The Penycuik Experiments (1899); Focke, Die Pflanzen-Mischlinge (1881); Foster-Melliar, The Book of the Rose (1894); C. F. Gaertner, various papers in Flora, 1828, 1831, 1832, 1833, 1836, 1847, on “Bastard-Pflanzen”; Gebhardt, “Über die Bastardirung von Rana esculenta mit R. arvalis,” Inaug. Dissert. (Breslau, 1894); G. Mendel, “Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden,” Verh. Natur. Vereins in Brünn (1865), pp. 1-52; Morgan, “Experimental Studies,” Anat. Anz. (1893), p. 141; id. p. 803; G. J. Romanes, “Physiological Selection,” Jour. Linn. Soc. xix. 337; H. Scherren, “Notes on Hybrid Bears,” Proc. Zool. Soc. of London (1907), p. 431; Saunders, Proc. Roy. Soc. (1897), lxii. 11; Standfuss, “Études de zoologie expérimentale,” Arch. Sci. Nat. vi. 495; Suchetet, “Les Oiseaux hybrides rencontrés à l’état sauvage,” Mém. Soc. Zool. v. 253-525, and vi. 26-45; Vernon, “The Relation between the Hybrid and Parent Forms of Echinoid Larvae,” Proc. Roy. Soc. lxv. 350; Wallace, Darwinism (1889); Weismann, The Germ-Plasm (1893).
(P. C. M)
HYDANTOIN (glycolyl urea), C3H4N2O2 or
the ureïde of glycollic acid, may be obtained by heating allantoin or alloxan with hydriodic acid, or by heating bromacetyl urea with alcoholic ammonia. It crystallizes in needles, melting at 216° C.
When hydrolysed with baryta water yields hydantoic (glycoluric)acid, H2N·CO·NH·CH2·CO2H, which is readily soluble in hot water, and on heating with hydriodic acid decomposes into ammonia, carbon dioxide and glycocoll, CH2·NH2·CO2·H. Many substituted hydantoins are known; the α-alkyl hydantoins are formed on fusion of aldehyde- or ketone-cyanhydrins with urea, the β-alkyl hydantoins from the fusion of mono-alkyl glycocolls with urea, and the γ-alkyl hydantoins from the action of alkalis and alkyl iodides on the α-compounds. γ-Methyl hydantoin has been obtained as a splitting product of caffeine (E. Fischer, Ann., 1882, 215, p. 253).
HYDE, the name of an English family distinguished in the 17th century. Robert Hyde of Norbury, Cheshire, had several sons, of whom the third was Lawrence Hyde of Gussage St Michael, Dorsetshire. Lawrence’s son Henry was father of Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon (q.v.), whose second son by his second wife was Lawrence, earl of Rochester (q.v.); another son was Sir Lawrence Hyde, attorney-general to Anne of Denmark, James I.’s consort; and a third son was Sir Nicholas Hyde (d. 1631), chief-justice of England. Sir Nicholas entered parliament in 1601 and soon became prominent as an opponent of the court, though he does not appear to have distinguished himself in the law. Before long, however, he deserted the popular party, and in 1626 he was employed by the duke of Buckingham in his defence to impeachment by the Commons; and in the following year he was appointed chief-justice of the king’s bench, in which office it fell to him to give judgment in the celebrated case of Sir Thomas Darnell and others who had been committed to prison on warrants signed by members of the privy council, which contained no statement of the nature of the charge against the prisoners. In answer to the writ of habeas corpus the attorney-general relied on the prerogative of the crown, supported by a precedent of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Hyde, three other judges concurring, decided in favour of the crown, but without going so far as to declare the right of the crown to refuse indefinitely to show cause against the discharge of the prisoners. In 1629 Hyde was one of the judges who condemned Eliot, Holles and Valentine for conspiracy in parliament to resist the king’s orders; refusing to admit their plea that they could not be called upon to answer out of parliament for acts done in parliament. Sir Nicholas Hyde died in August 1631.
Sir Lawrence Hyde, attorney-general to Anne of Denmark, had eleven sons, four of whom were men of some mark. Henry was an ardent royalist who accompanied Charles II. to the continent, and returning to England was beheaded in 1650; Alexander (1598-1667) became bishop of Salisbury in 1665; Edward (1607-1659) was a royalist divine who was nominated dean of Windsor in 1658, but died before taking up the appointment, and who was the author of many controversial works in Anglican theology; and Robert (1595-1665) became recorder of Salisbury and represented that borough in the Long Parliament, in which he professed royalist principles, voting against the attainder of Strafford. Having been imprisoned and deprived of his recordership by the parliament in 1645/6, Robert Hyde gave refuge to Charles II. on his flight from Worcester in 1651, and on the Restoration he was knighted and made a judge of the common pleas. He died in 1665. Henry Hyde (1672-1753), only son of Lawrence, earl of Rochester, became 4th earl of Clarendon and 2nd earl of Rochester, both of which titles became extinct at his death. He was in no way distinguished, but his wife Jane Hyde, countess of Clarendon and Rochester (d. 1725), was a famous beauty celebrated by the homage of Swift, Prior and Pope, and by the groundless scandal of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Two of her daughters, Jane, countess of Essex, and Catherine, duchess of Queensberry, were also famous beauties of the reign of Queen Anne. Her son, Henry Hyde (1710-1753), known as Viscount Cornbury, was a Tory and Jacobite member of parliament, and an intimate friend of Bolingbroke, who addressed to him his Letters on the Study and Use of History, and On the Spirit of Patriotism. In 1750 Lord Cornbury was created Baron Hyde of Hindon, but, as he predeceased his father, this title reverted to the latter and became extinct at his death. Lord Cornbury was celebrated as a wit and a conversationalist. By his will he bequeathed the papers of his great-grandfather, Lord Clarendon, the historian, to the Bodleian Library at Oxford.