controversy with Robert Hooke. In an Atlas of 56 sheets, corresponding to his catalogue, and entitled Firmamentum Sobiescianum (1690), he delineated seven new constellations, still in use. Hevelius had his book printed in his own house, at lavish expense, and himself not only designed but engraved many of the plates.
See J. H. Westphal, Leben, Studien, und Schriften des Astronomen Johann Hevelius (1820); C. B. Lengnich, Anekdoten und Nachrichten (1780); Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (C. Bruhns); J. B. J. Delambre, Histoire de l’astronomie moderne, ii. 471; J. F. Weidler, Historia astronomiae, p. 486; F. Baily’s edition of the Catalogue of Hevelius, Memoirs Roy. Astr. Society, xiii. (1843); R. Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie, p. 396; J. C. Poggendorff, Biog.-lit. Handwörterbuch. For an account of the epistolary remains of Hevelius, see C. G. Hecker, Monatl. Correspondenz, viii. 30; also Astr. Nachrichten, vols. xxiii., xxiv. (A. M. C.)
HEWETT, SIR PRESCOTT GARDNER, Bart. (1812–1891),
British surgeon, was born on the 3rd of July 1812, being the son
of a Yorkshire country gentleman. He lived for some years
in early life in Paris, and started on a career as an artist, but
abandoned it for surgery. He entered St George’s Hospital,
London (where his half-brother, Dr Cornwallis Hewett, was
physician from 1825 to 1833) becoming demonstrator of anatomy
and curator of the museum. He was the pupil and intimate
friend of Sir B. C. Brodie, and helped him in much of his work.
Eventually he rose to be anatomical lecturer, assistant-surgeon
and surgeon to the hospital. In 1876 he was president of the
College of Surgeons; in 1877 he was made serjeant-surgeon
extraordinary to Queen Victoria, in 1884 serjeant-surgeon, and
in 1883 he was created a baronet. He was a very good lecturer,
but shrank from authorship; his lectures on Surgical Affections
of the Head were, however, embodied in his treatise on the subject
in Holmes’s System of Surgery. As a surgeon he was always
extremely conservative, but hesitated at no operation, however
severe, when convinced of its expediency. He was a perfect
operator, and one of the most trustworthy of counsellors. He
died on the 19th of June 1891.
HEWITT, ABRAM STEVENS (1822–1903), American manufacturer
and political leader, was born in Haverstraw, New York,
on the 31st of July 1822. His father, John, a Staffordshire man,
was one of a party of four mechanics who were sent by Boulton
and Watt to Philadelphia about 1790 to set up a steam engine
for the city water-works and who in 1793–1794 built at Belleville,
N.J., the first steam engine constructed wholly in America;
he made a fortune in the manufacture of furniture, but lost it
by the burning of his factories. The boy’s mother was of Huguenot
descent. He graduated with high rank from Columbia College
in 1842, having supported himself through his course. He
taught mathematics at Columbia, and in 1845 was admitted
to the bar, but, owing to defective eyesight, never practised.
With Edward Cooper (son of Peter Cooper, whom Hewitt
greatly assisted in organizing Cooper Union, and whose daughter
he married) he went into the manufacture of iron girders and
beams under the firm name of Cooper, Hewitt & Co. His study
of the making of gun-barrel iron in England enabled him to be
of great assistance to the United States government during the
Civil War, when he refused any profit on such orders. The men
in his works never struck—indeed in 1873–1878 his plant was
run at an annual loss of $100,000. In politics he was a Democrat.
In 1871 he was prominent in the re-organization of Tammany
after the fall of the “Tweed Ring”; from 1875 until the end
of 1886 (except in 1879–1881) he was a representative in Congress;
in 1876 he left Tammany for the County Democracy; in the
Hayes-Tilden campaign of that year he was chairman of the Democratic
National Committee, and in Congress he was one of the
House members of the joint committee which drew up the famous
Electoral Count Act providing for the Electoral Commission.
In 1886 he was elected mayor of New York City, his nomination
having been forced upon the Democratic Party by the strength
of the other nominees, Henry George and Theodore Roosevelt;
his administration (1887–1888) was thoroughly efficient and
creditable, but he broke with Tammany, was not renominated,
ran independently for re-election, and was defeated. In 1896
and 1900 he voted the Republican ticket, but did not ally himself
with the organization. He died in New York City on the 18th of
January 1903. In Congress he was a consistent defender of
sound money and civil service reform; in municipal politics
he was in favour of business administrations and opposed to
partisan nominations. He was a leader of those who contended
for reform in municipal government, was conspicuous for his
public spirit, and exerted a great influence for good not only in
New York City but in the state and nation. His most famous
speech was that made at the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in
1883. He was a terse, able and lucid speaker, master of wit and
sarcasm, and a fearless critic. He gave liberally to Cooper
Union, of which he was trustee and secretary, and which owes
much of its success to him; was a trustee of Columbia University
from 1901 until his death, chairman of the board of trustees of
Barnard College, and was one of the original trustees, first
chairman of the board of trustees, and a member of the executive
committee of the Carnegie Institution.
HEWLETT, MAURICE HENRY (1861– ), English novelist,
was born on the 22nd of January 1861, the eldest son of Henry
Gay Hewlett, of Shaw Hall, Addington, Kent. He was educated
at the London International College, Spring Grove, Isleworth,
and was called to the bar in 1891. From 1896 to 1900 he was
keeper of the land revenue records and enrolments. He published
in 1895 two books on Italy, Earthwork out of Tuscany,
and (in verse) The Masque of Dead Florentines. Songs and
Meditations followed in 1897, and in 1898 he won an immediate
reputation by his Forest Lovers, a romance of medieval England,
full of rapid movement and passion. In the same year he printed
the pastoral and pagan drama of Pan and the Young Shepherd,
shortened for purposes of representation and produced at the
Court Theatre in March 1905, when it was followed by the
Youngest of the Angels, dramatized from a chapter in his Fool
Errant. In Little Novels of Italy (1899), a collection of brilliant
short stories, he showed again his power of literary expression
together with a close knowledge of medieval Italy. The new and
vivid portraits of Richard Cœur de Lion in his Richard Yea-and-Nay
(1900), and of Mary, queen of Scots, in The Queen’s Quair
(1904) showed the combination of fiction with real history
at its best. The New Canterbury Tales (1901) was another
volume of stories of English life, but he returned to Italian
subjects with The Road in Tuscany (1904); in Fond Adventures,
Tales of the Youth of the World (1905), two are Italian tales, and
The Fool Errant (1905) purports to be the memoirs of Francis
Antony Stretley, citizen of Lucca. Later works were the novel
The Stooping Lady (1907), and a volume of poems, Artemision
(1909).
HEXAMETER, the name of the earliest and most important
form of classical verse in dactylic rhythm. The word is due
to each line containing six feet or measures (μέτρα), the last of
which must be a spondee and the penultimate a dactyl, though
occasionally, for some special effect, a spondee may be allowed
in the fifth foot, when the line is said to be spondaic. The four
other feet may be either spondees or dactyls. All the great
heroic and epic verse of the Greek and Roman poets is in this
metre, of which the finest examples are to be found in Homer
and in Virgil. Varied cadences and varied caesura are essential
to this form of verse, otherwise the monotony is wearying to the
ear. The most usual places for the caesura are at the middle
of the third, or the middle of the fourth foot: the former is
known as the penthemimeral and the latter as hepthemimeral
caesura. There are several more or less successful examples
of English poems in this metre, for example Longfellow’s Evangeline,
Kingsley’s Andromeda and Clough’s Bothie of Tober-na-Vuoilich,
but it does not really suit the genius of the English
language. In English the lack of true spondees is severely
felt, even though the English metre depends, not, as in Greek
and Latin, on the distinction between long and short syllables,
but on that between accented and unaccented syllables. The
accent must always (or it sounds very ugly) fall on the first
syllable, whatever may have been the case in Greek and Latin—Voss,
Klopstock and Goethe have written hexameter poems
