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 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.

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–&emsp;&emsp;), 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, 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 