Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/671

Rh W L W L 631 orders had been obeyed he turned on his side, and murmured as his last words, &quot; Now God be praised, I will die in peace.&quot; Montcalm, the French commander, was mortally wounded in the same action, and died soon after wards. By the surrender of Quebec Canada was lost to the French. See Wright, Life of Major-General James Wolfe (1864), and Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, (2 vols., 1884). WOLFENBUTTEL, a small town in the duchy of Brunswick, is situated on both banks of the Oker, 7 miles to the south of Brunswick. It contains various minor tribunals, some schools, and a small garrison ; and it carries on a few unimportant manufactures (machinery, copper goods, linen, cork, preserves, Ac.). Wolfenbiittel, in fact, may be accepted as tolerably representative of the average dull German provincial town, clinging more or less faithfully to the traditions of the period when it was the residence of the ducal family. It owes its chief interest to its connexion with Lessing, who was ducal librarian there from 1770 till his death in 1781. The old library building, designed in 1723 in imitation of the Pantheon at Home, contains a murble statue of the poet. The library, including 300,000 printed books and 7000 MSS., has, however, been transferred to a large new Renaissance edifice, opened in October 1887. It is espe cially rich in copies of the Bible and in books of the early Reformation period. Opposite the old library is the palace, occupied since 1835 by a theatre, a law court, and a seminary. The ducal burial-vault is in the church of St Mary. There are two other Evangelical churches and a Roman Catholic church in Wolfenbiittel, and perhaps the only other noteworthy building is the large prison. The ancient fortifications have been converted into pro menades, once a favourite resort of Lessing. In 1885 the population of Wolfenbiittel, including the suburbs of Auguststadt and Juliusstadt, was 13,455. The &quot; Wolfen biittel Fragments &quot; are alluded to under LESSING, vol. xiv. p. 481 ; see also REIMARUS. A castle is said to have been founded on the site of Wolfenbiittel by a margrave of Meissen about 104G. When this began in 1267 to be the residence of the early Brunswick or Wolfenbiittel line of counts, a town gradually grew up around it. In 1542 it was taken by the Saxons and Hessians, who however evacuated it five years later after the battle of Miihlberg. In the Tim ty Years War, in June 1641, the Swedish, under Wrangcl and Kbnigsmark, defeated the Austrians under the archduke Leopold at Wolfenbiittel. The town passed wholly into the possession of the Brunswick-AYolfen- biittel family in 1671, and for nearly one hundred years enjoyed the distinction of being the ducal capital. In 1754, however, Duke Charles transferred the ducal resilience to Brunswick, a blow from which Wolfenbiittel has never recovered. WOLFF, CASPAR FRIEDRICH (1733-1794), who is justly reckoned the founder of modern embryology, was born at Berlin in 1733, and studied anatomy and physiology under Meckel, and later at Halle, where he graduated in medicine in 1759, his thesis being his famous Theoria Generationis. After serving as a surgeon in the Seven Years War, he wished to lecture on anatomy and physiology in Berlin but being refused permission he accepted a call from the empress Catherine to become pro fessor of those subjects at the academy of St Petersburg, and acted in this capacity until his death in 1794. While the theory of &quot; evolution &quot; in the crude sense of a simple growth in size and unfolding of organs all previously existent in the germ was in possession of the field, his researches on the develop ment of the alimentary canal in the chick first clearly established the converse view, that of epiycnesis, i.e., of progressive formation and differentiation of organs from a germ primitively homogeneous (see EMBRYOLOGY, vol. via. p. 165). He also largely anticipated the modern conception of embryonic layers, and is said even to have foreshadowed the cell theory. It is certain that he discerned, long before Goethe, the leafy homology of the parts of flowers. WOLFF, CHRISTIAN (1679-1754), is an important figure in the history of philosophy, and his life has more dramatic interest than is usually the case with an academic teacher. He was the son of a tanner, and was born at Breslau on the 24th January 1679. His father had dedi cated him before his birth to a life of learning, having been disappointed himself in similar aspirations, and Wolff ac cordingly received a gymnasium training in Breslau, whence he proceeded in 1699 to the university of Jena. Mathe matics and physics formed at first his chief attraction, to which he soon added philosophy. He studied the Cartesian philosophy as well as the works of Grotius and Pufendorf, but was chiefly influenced by Tschirnhausen s Medicina Mentis. In 1703 he qualified as privat-docent in the university of Leipsic, where he lectured till 1706, when he was called as professor of mathematics to Halle. Before this time he had made the acquaintance of Leibnitz, of whose philosophy his own system is a modification. In Halle Wolff limited himself at first to mathematics, but on the departure of a colleague he annexed physics, and presently included in his lectures all the main philosophical disciplines. He followed the example of Thomasius in lecturing in German instead of Latin. This fact, and the remarkable clearness of his exposition, caused his class-rooms to be crowded. He also became known as a writer to a wider circle, and was made member of the Royal Society of London and the Academy of Berlin. But the claims which Wolff advanced on behalf of the philosophic reason appeared impious to his theological colleagues. Halle was the headquarters of Pietism, which, after a long struggle against the rigidity of the older Lutheran dogmatism, had itself assumed the characteristics of a new orthodoxy. This orthodoxy, represented by Joachim Lange and A. H. Francke, considered the cause of supernaturalism en dangered by a philosophy which professed by the un assisted reason to present the whole universe as a rational and necessarilydetermined system. Wolff s professed ideal was to base theological truths on evidence of mathematical certitude. Personal grounds accentuated the bitterness. Strife broke out openly in 1721, when Wolff, on the occasion of laying down the office of pro-rector, delivered an oration &quot; On the Moral Philosophy of the Chinese,&quot; in which he praised the purity of the moral precepts of Confucius, pointing to them as an evidence of the power of human reason to attain by its own efforts to moral truth. The attacks and accusations in connexion with this address were unsuccessful at the time, but Wolff con tinued to give offence to his colleagues, and to Lange in particular, by his action in the filling up of university chairs, and in 1723 a disappointed pupil, a decent in the same university, published a hostile criticism upon Wolffs system, at the instigation, it is said, of Lange. This was contrary to university etiquette and statute, and Wolff some what injudiciously appealed to the Government for an in terdict upon such attacks. He succeeded in obtaining this, but his enemies retaliated by sending to court a united representation of the dangerous character of his views. Through a worthless courtier, they gained the ear of the king, Frederick William I., by a concrete example, which touched him most nearly. If one of His Majesty s famous grenadiers at Potsdam should desert, the king would have no right, it was represented, upon the principles of Wolff, to punish the man, seeing that he only did what it was necessarily predetermined that he should do. The result of this representation was swifter and more drastic than Wolff s bitterest enemies had calculated on. On the 13th November 1723 a cabinet order arrived in Halle de posing Wolff from his office, and commanding him to leave Halle and quit Prussian territory within forty-eight hours on pain of a halter. The same day Wolff passed into Saxony, and presently proceeded to Marburg, to which university he had received a call before this crisis. The landgrave of