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HUFELAND, C. W.—HUGGINS

and manuscripts, after being bequeathed to the Jesuits, were bought by the king for the royal library.

In the Huetiana (1722) of the abbé d’Olivet will be found material for arriving at an idea of his prodigious labours, exact memory and wide scholarship. Another posthumous work was his Traité philosophique de la faiblesse de l’esprit humain (Amsterdam, 1723), His autobiography, found in his Commentarius de rebus ad eum pertinentibus (Paris, 1718), has been translated into French and into English.

See de Gournay, Huet, évêque d’Avranches, sa vie et ses ouvrages (Paris, 1854).


HUFELAND, CHRISTOPH WILHELM (1762–1836), German physician, was born at Langensalza on the 12th of August 1762. His early education was carried on at Weimar, where his father held the office of court physician to the grand duchess. In 1780 he entered the university of Jena, and in the following year proceeded to Göttingen, where in 1783 he graduated in medicine. After assisting his father for some years at Weimar, he was called in 1793 to the chair of medicine at Jena, receiving at the same time the dignities of court physician and councillor at Weimar. In 1798 he was placed at the head of the medical college and generally of state medical affairs in Berlin. He filled the chair of pathology and therapeutics in the university of Berlin, founded in 1809, and in 1810 became councillor of state. He died at Berlin on the 25th of August 1836. Hufeland is celebrated as the most eminent practical physician of his time in Germany, and as the author of numerous works displaying extensive reading and cultivated and critical faculty.

The most widely known of his many writings is the treatise entitled Makrobiotik, oder die Kunst, das menschliche Leben zu verlängern (1796), which was translated into many languages. Of his practical works, the System of Practical Medicine (System der praktischen Heilkunde, 1818–1828) is the most elaborate. From 1795 to 1835 he published a Journal der praktischen Arznei und Wundarzneikunde. His autobiography was published in 1863. There are sketches of his life and labours by Augustin and Stourdza (1837).


HUFELAND, GOTTLIEB (1760–1817), German economist and jurist, was born at Dantzig on the 19th of October 1760. He was educated at the gymnasium of his native town, and completed his university studies at Leipzig and Göttingen. He graduated at Jena, and in 1788 was there appointed to an extraordinary professorship. Five years later he was made ordinary professor. His lectures on natural law, in which he developed with great acuteness and skill the formal principles of the Kantian theory of legislation, attracted a large audience, and contributed to raise to its height the fame of the university of Jena, then unusually rich in able teachers. In 1803, after the secession of many of his colleagues from Jena, Hufeland accepted a call to Würzburg, from which, after but a brief tenure of a professorial chair, he proceeded to Landshut. From 1808 to 1812 he acted as burgomaster in his native town of Dantzig. Returning to Landshut, he lived there till 1816, when he was invited to Halle, where he died on the 25th of February 1817.

Hufeland’s works on the theory of legislation—Versuch über den Grundsatz Naturrechts (1785); Lehrbuch des Naturrechts (1790); Institutionen des gesammten positiven Rechts (1798); and Lehrbuch der Geschichte und Encyclopädie aller in Deutschland geltenden positiven Rechte (1790), are distinguished by precision of statement and clearness of deduction. They form on the whole the best commentary upon Kant’s Rechtslehre, the principles of which they carry out in detail, and apply to the discussion of positive laws. In political economy Hufeland’s chief work is the Neue Grundlegung der Staatswirthschaftskunst (2 vols., 1807 and 1813), the second volume of which has the special title, Lehre vom Gelde und Geldumlaufe. The principles of this work are for the most part those of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which were then beginning to be accepted and developed in Germany; but both in his treatment of fundamental notions, such as economic good and value, and in details, such as the theory of money, Hufeland’s treatment has a certain originality. Two points in particular seem deserving of notice. Hufeland was the first among German economists to point out the profit of the entrepreneur as a distinct species of revenue with laws peculiar to itself. He also tends towards, though he does not explicitly state, the view that rent is a general term applicable to all payments resulting from differences of degree among productive forces of the same order. Thus the superior gain of a specially gifted workman or specially skilled employer is in time assimilated to the payment for a natural agency of more than the minimum efficiency.

See Roscher, Geschichte der Nationalökonomik in Deutschland, 654-662.


HUG, JOHANN LEONHARD (1765–1846), German Roman Catholic theologian, was born at Constance on the 1st of June 1765. In 1783 he entered the university of Freiburg, where he became a pupil in the seminary for the training of priests, and soon distinguished himself in classical and Oriental philology as well as in biblical exegesis and criticism. In 1787 he became superintendent of studies in the seminary, and held this appointment until the breaking up of the establishment in 1790. In the following year he was called to the Freiburg chair of Oriental languages and Old Testament exegesis; to the duties of this post were added in 1793 those of the professorship of New Testament exegesis. Declining calls to Breslau, Tübingen, and thrice to Bonn, Hug continued at Freiburg for upwards of thirty years, taking an occasional literary tour to Munich, Paris or Italy. In 1827 he resigned some of his professorial work, but continued in active duty until in the autumn of 1845 he was seized with a painful illness, which proved fatal on the 11th of March 1846.

Hug’s earliest publication was the first instalment of his Einleitung; in it he argued with much acuteness against J. G. Eichhorn in favour of the “borrowing hypothesis” of the origin of the synoptical gospels, maintaining the priority of Matthew, the present Greek text having been the original. His subsequent works were dissertations on the origin of alphabetical writing (Die Erfindung der Buchstabenschrift, 1801), on the antiquity of the Codex Vaticanus (1810), and on ancient mythology (Über den Mythos der alten Völker, 1812); a new interpretation of the Song of Solomon (Das hohe Lied in einer noch unversuchten Deutung, 1813), to the effect that the lover represents King Hezekiah, while by his beloved is intended the remnant left in Israel after the deportation of the ten tribes; and treatises on the indissoluble character of the matrimonial bond (De conjugii christiani vinculo indissolubili commentatio exegetica, 1816) and on the Alexandrian version of the Pentateuch (1818). His Einleitung in die Schriften des Neuen Testaments, undoubtedly his most important work, was completed in 1808 (fourth German edition, 1847; English translations by D. G. Wait, London, 1827, and by Fosdick, New York, 1836; French partial translation by J. E. Cellerier, Geneva, 1823). It is specially valuable in the portion relating to the history of the text (which up to the middle of the 3rd century he holds to have been current only in a common edition (κοινὴ ἔκδοσις), of which recensions were afterwards made by Hesychius, an Egyptian bishop, by Lucian of Antioch, and by Origen) and in its discussion of the ancient versions. The author’s intelligence and acuteness are more completely hampered by doctrinal presuppositions when he comes to treat questions relating to the history of the individual books of the New Testament canon. From 1839 to his death Hug was a regular and important contributor to the Freiburger Zeitschrift für kathol. Theologie.

See A. Maier, Gedächtnisrede auf J. L. Hug (1847); K. Werner, Geschichte der kath. Theol. in Deutschland, 527-533 (1866).


HUGGINS, SIR WILLIAM (1824–1910), English astronomer, was born in London on the 7th of February 1824, and was educated first at the City of London School and then under various private teachers. Having determined to apply himself to the study of astronomy, he built in 1856 a private observatory at Tulse Hill, in the south of London. At first he occupied himself with ordinary routine work, but being far from satisfied with the scope which this afforded, he seized eagerly upon the opportunity for novel research, offered by Kirchhoff’s discoveries in spectrum analysis. The chemical constitution of the stars was the problem to which he turned his attention, and his first results, obtained in conjunction with Professor W. A. Miller, were presented to the Royal Society In 1863, in a preliminary note on the “Lines of some of the fixed stars.” His experiments, in the same year, on the photographic registration of stellar spectra, marked an innovation of a momentous character. But the wet collodion process was then the only one available, and its inconveniences were such as to preclude its extensive employment; the real triumphs of photographic astronomy began in 1875 with Huggins’s adoption and adaptation of the gelatine dry plate. This enabled the observer to make exposures of any desired length, and, through the cumulative action of light on extremely sensitive surfaces, to obtain permanent accurate pictures of celestial objects so faint as to be completely invisible to the eye, even when aided by the most powerful telescopes. In the last quarter of the 19th century spectroscopy and photography together worked a revolution in observational astronomy, and in both branches Huggins acted as pioneer.