Southern and Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée companies. The Canal du Midi traverses the south of the department for 44 m. and terminates at Cette. The Canal des Étangs traverses the department for about 20 m., forming part of a line of communication between Cette and Aigues-Mortes. Montpellier, the capital, is the seat of a bishopric of the province of Avignon, and of a court of appeal and centre of an academic (educational division). The department belongs to the 16th military region, which has its headquarters at Montpellier. It is divided into the arrondissements of Montpellier, Béziers, Lodève and St Pons, with 36 cantons and 340 communes.
Montpellier, Béziers, Lodève, Bédarieux, Cette, Agde, Pézenas, Lamalou-les-Bains and Clermont-l’Hérault are the more noteworthy towns and receive separate treatment. Among the other interesting places in the department are St Pons, with a church of the 12th century, once a cathedral, Villemagne, which has several old houses and two ruined churches, one of the 13th, the other of the 14th century; Pignan, a medieval town, near which is the interesting abbey-church of Vignogoul in the early Gothic style; and St Guilhem-le-Désert, which has a church of the 11th and 12th centuries. Maguelonne, which in the 6th century became the seat of a bishopric transferred to Montpellier in 1536, has a cathedral of the 12th century.
HÉRAULT DE SÉCHELLES, MARIE JEAN (1759–1794),
French politician, was born at Paris on the 20th of September
1759, of a noble family connected with those of Contades and
Polignac. He made his début as a lawyer at the Châtelet, and
delivered some very successful speeches; later he was avocat
général to the parlement of Paris. His legal occupations did not
prevent him from devoting himself also to literature, and after
1789 he published an account of a visit he had made to the comte
de Buffon at Montbard. Hérault’s account is marked by a
delicate irony, and it has with some justice been called a masterpiece
of interviewing, before the day of journalists. Hérault,
who was an ardent champion of the Revolution, took part in
the taking of the Bastille, and on the 8th of December 1789
was appointed judge of the court of the first arrondissement
in the department of Paris. From the end of January to April
1791 Hérault was absent on a mission in Alsace, where he had
been sent to restore order. On his return he was appointed
commissaire du roi in the court of cassation. He was elected
as a deputy for Paris to the Legislative Assembly, where he
gravitated more and more towards the extreme left; he was a
member of several committees, and, when a member of the
diplomatic committee, presented a famous report demanding
that the nation should be declared to be in danger (11th June
1793). After the revolution of the 10th of August 1792 (see
French Revolution), he co-operated with Danton, one of the
organizers of this rising, and on the 2nd of September was
appointed president of the Legislative Assembly. He was a
deputy to the National Convention for the department of
Seine-et-Oise, and was sent on a mission to organize the new
department of Mont Blanc. He was thus absent during the
trial of Louis XVI., but he made it known that he approved
of the condemnation of the king, and would probably have
voted for the death penalty. On his return to Paris, Hérault was
several times president of the Convention, notably on the 2nd of
June 1793, the occasion of the attack on the Girondins, and
on the 10th of August 1793, on which the passing of the new
constitution was celebrated. On this occasion Hérault, as
president of the Convention, had to make several speeches. It
was he, moreover, who, on the rejection of the projected constitution
drawn up by Condorcet, was entrusted with the task of
preparing a fresh one; this work he performed within a few days,
and his plan, which, however, differed very little from that of
Condorcet, became the Constitution of 1793, which was passed,
but never applied. As a member of the Committee of Public
Safety, it was with diplomacy that Hérault was chiefly concerned,
and from October to December 1793 he was employed on a
diplomatic and military mission in Alsace. But this mission
helped to make him an object of suspicion to the other members
of the Committee of Public Safety, and especially to Robespierre,
who as a deist and a fanatical follower of the ideas of Rousseau,
hated Hérault, the follower of the naturalism of Diderot. He
was accused of treason, and after being tried before the revolutionary
tribunal, was condemned at the same time as Danton,
and executed on the 16th Germinal in the year II. (5th April
1794). He was handsome, elegant and a lover of pleasure, and
was one of the most individual figures of the Revolution.
See the Voyage à Montbard, published by A. Aulard (Paris, 1890); A. Aulard, Les Orateurs de la Législative et de la Convention, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1906); J. Claretie, Camille Desmoulins ... étude sur les Dantonistes (Paris, 1875); Dr Robinet, Le Procès des Dantonistes (Paris, 1879); “Hérault de Séchelles, sa première mission en Alsace” in the review La Révolution Française, tome 22; E. Daudet, Le Roman d’un conventionnel. Hérault de Séchelles et les dames de Bellegarde (1904). His Œuvres littéraires were edited (Paris, 1907) by E. Dard. (R. A.*)
HERB (Lat. herba, grass, food for cattle, generally taken to
represent the Old Lat. forbea, Gr. φορβή, pasture, φέρβειν, to feed,
Sans. bharb, to eat), in botany, the name given to those plants
whose stem or stalk dies entirely or down to the root each year,
and does not become, as in shrubs or trees, woody or permanent,
such plants are also called “herbaceous.” The term “herb”
is also used of those herbaceous plants, which possess certain
properties, and are used for medicinal purposes, for flavouring
or garnishing in cooking, and also for perfumes (see Horticulture
and Pharmacology).
HERBARIUM, or Hortus Siccus, a collection of plants so
dried and preserved as to illustrate as far as possible their
characters. Since the same plant, owing to peculiarities of climate,
soil and situation, degree of exposure to light and other influences
may vary greatly according to the locality in which it occurs,
it is only by gathering together for comparison and study a
large series of examples of each species that the flora of different
regions can be satisfactorily represented. Even in the best
equipped botanical garden it is impossible to have, at one and
the same time, more than a very small percentage of the representatives
of the flora of any given region or of any large group
of plants. Hence a good herbarium forms an indispensable part
of a botanical museum or institution. There are large herbaria
at the British Museum and at the Royal Gardens, Kew, and
smaller collections at the botanical institutions at the principal
British universities. The original herbarium of Linnaeus is in
the possession of the Linnaean Society of London. It was
purchased from the widow of Linnaeus by Dr (afterwards Sir)
J. E. Smith, one of the founders of the Linnaean Society, and
after his death was purchased by the society. Herbaria are also
associated with the more important botanic gardens and museums
in other countries. The value of a herbarium is much enhanced
by the possession of “types,” that is, the original specimens
on the study of which a species was founded. Thus the herbarium
at the British Museum, which is especially rich in the earlier
collections made in the 18th and early 19th centuries, contains
the types of many species founded by the earlier workers in
botany. It is also rich in the types of Australian plants in the
collections of Sir Joseph Banks and Robert Brown, and contains
in addition many valuable modern collections. The Kew
herbarium, founded by Sir William Hooker and greatly increased
by his son Sir Joseph Hooker, is also very rich in types, especially
those of plants described in the Flora of British India and
various colonial floras. The collection of Dillenius is deposited
at Oxford, and that of Professor W. H. Harvey at Trinity
College, Dublin. The collections of Antoine Laurent de Jussieu,
his son Adrien, and of Auguste de St Hilaire, are included in the
large herbarium of the Jardin des Plantes at Paris, and in the
same city is the extensive private collection of Dr Ernest Cosson.
At Geneva are three large collections—Augustin Pyrame de
Candolle’s, containing the typical specimens of the Prodromus,
a large series of monographs of the families of flowering plants,
Benjamin Delessert’s fine series at the Botanic Garden, and the
Boissier Herbarium, which is rich in Mediterranean and Oriental
plants. The university of Göttingen has had bequeathed to it
the largest collection (exceeding 40,000 specimens) ever made
by a single individual—that of Professor Grisebach. At the
