Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/572

554 regularity for upwards of thirty years, the only interruptions indeed being that of 1813–14, occasioned by the war of liberation, during which the university was closed, anl those occasioned by two prolonged literary tours, ﬁrvt in 1820 to France and England in the sOeicty of his col- league Thilo for the examination of rare Oriental manu- scripts, and afterwards in 1835 to England and Holland in connexion with his Phoenician studies. At a very early period he became the most popular teacher of Hebrew and of Old Testament introduction and exegesis in Germany; and during his later years the annual number of students attending his lectures on these and kindred subjects, such as church history and Biblical archteology, amounted to nearly 500. Of his pupils many have risen to great eminence in the departments he specially cultivated; among these the names of You Bohlcn, Hoﬂ‘mann, Hupfeld, todiger, Tuch, Vatke, and Benfey may be mentioned. In 1827 Gesenius was made a consistorialrath; but, unless account be taken of the violent attacks to which he, along with his friend and colleague Wegscheidcr, was in 1830 subjected by Hengstcnberg and his party in the Evcmgelischc It'irchenzeitzmg, there are few noteworthy occurrences to be recorded in his biography. His death took place at Ilalle, October 23, 1842. It would be difﬁcult to overestimate the services rendered by Gesenius to Semitic philology. To him belongs in a large measure the credit of having freed it from the trammels of theological and religious pre- possession by which it had previously been hampered, and of inaugurating the strictly scientiﬁc method which has since been so fruitful in valuable results. Nor can it be doubted that as an exegetc he has exercised a powerful, and on the whole a beneﬁcial, influence on the tendencies of modern theological investigation.

1em  GESNER, (1691–1761), a distinguished German classical scholar, was born at Roth near Ansbach, 9th April 1691. He studied at the university of Jena, and in 1714 published a work on the I’hz'lopatris ascribed to Lucian. In 1715 he became librarian and conrector at Weimar, in 1729 rector of the gymnasium at Ansbach, and in 1730 rector of the Thomas school at Leipsic, where he had for colleagues Joh. A. Ernesti and J oh. Sebastian Bach. On the foundation of the university of Go‘ttingen he became professor of rhetoric and subse- quently librarian also. He died at Go'ttingen 3d August 1761. His special merit as a classicist is the attention he devoted to the explanation and illustration of the subjctt matttr of the classical authors.

1em  GESNER, or, (–), a very famous naturalist and author, surnamcd the German and literarmn miraculum on account of his vast erudition, was born of poor parents at Ziirieh, 26th March. He received the ﬁrst elements of education from Chaplain F rick, his maternal uncle ; and it was while gathering plants in his rclative’s garden that he became imbued with that enthusiastic love of science which remained with him through life. In he went to Strasburg, then to Bourges, and in  to Paris, studying at all those places with characteristic passionate zeal. In we ﬁnd him again in Ziirich, where he married somewhat imprudently, for he was very poor, and had no immediate prospect of bettering his condition. His whole day was occupied in teaching, but at least the night was his own, and too great. a portion of the time that others give to rest was occupied by Gcsner in adding to his already great stock of erudition. In he was appointed professor of Greek at Lausanne, and in  professor of physics and natural history at Ziirich. But in neither of these ofﬁces was be well paid, and during those years he wrote a large number of books, partly to support himself, partly from the interest he felt in their subjects. He wrote several works on ancient medicine and on botany, and a treatise on milk (in which he described the rural economy of Switzerland), translated into Latin a Greek logical manual and some works on the moral interpretation of Homer, carefully edited a new edition of Johamzis Stobcei Smtentz'a: (Ziirich, ) and an expurgated edition of Martial, pre- pared a new edition of the Latin dictionary of Ambrosius Calepinus (Basel, ), and wrote besides some lesser dis- sertations and translations. All this, however, was only mere side work, for in he issued at Ziirich the ﬁrst part of his justly renowned Bibliotheca Uni-versulis, a cata- logue of all the works in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, extant and not extant, published or as yet unpublished. Under each important name there was given a vast mass of biblio- graphical information and criticism, original and selected. Three years later the second part of this stupendous work appeared, likewise at Ziirich, under the title of I’cmdcctarum sire partitionum, universalium ('onradi Gesneri 1 33/1171): i Libri XXI. Only nineteen of these books then appeared; the twenty-ﬁrst, which was a theological encyclopa-dia, was published in, but the twentieth, which was to contain the medical writings, and which he intended should repre- sent the quintessencc of the labours of a lifetime, was never ﬁnished and never published. The next few years were spent in writing small treatises, and in the preparation of another magnum opus, a zoological work entitled IIistoria Animalz'um, which was published in six books (the last of these unﬁnished) at Ziirich between and. To prepare himself for the worthy execution of this undertaking he read 250 authors, travelled over nearly all Europe, received hints from hosts of learned friends, and did not disdain the information which he obtained from hunters and shepherds. He also made himself a proﬁcient artist, in order that he might by drawings assist his labours. This work contained the names of all known animals in the ancient and modern languages, a description of each as to every important particular, and a mass of interesting literary information, embracing facts