Page:Imperialdictiona02eadi Brandeis.pdf/828

HAL popular, and his teaching was so successful, that the authorities at length consented to incur the expense of erecting a proper anatomical theatre. Haller's reputation had now extended beyond the limits of his native land, so that in 1736 he received an invitation to the chair of anatomy and botany from the university of Göttingen, which he accepted; and here for nearly twenty years he pursued a life of unabated industry, each successive year adding largely to his personal reputation and to the celebrity of the school with which his great name was now inseparably connected. Here, besides delivering his lectures, Haller found leisure to compose and publish some eighty-six works on various subjects of physiological, medical, and botanical science; add to this that for a long series of years he conducted the Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen, a critical periodical work appearing monthly, to which he himself contributed upwards of twelve thousand notices or reviews of books! and the prodigious industry and fertility of the man may be imagined. Haller's connection with Göttingen ceased in 1753, in so far as active duties were concerned; but he still retained his position as president of the Royal Academy of Sciences, and other honorary and more substantial distinctions, such as retired professor's pension, &c. His position at Göttingen had become disagreeable to him, through differences and disputes with his colleagues of the university. Of the nature of these disagreements we are not informed; enough that we know he felt his life at Göttingen uncomfortable, and that he had the power of escaping from his unpleasant position. He seems in the decline of his life, indeed, to have sighed for the mountains and the valleys where he had passed the first pleasant years of his existence; and his townsmen the Bernese, now fully alive to the merits of their distinguished countryman, made such handsome provision for his retirement that he had no inducement again to quit the peaceful haven in which he had at length found shelter from toil, had he been so disposed. Here, then, he struck his shattered sail. But settling at Berne to the active mind of Haller was only entering on a new sphere of usefulness and exertion. He divided his attention between the material interests of his native country and the blandishments of the muses; in the one direction improving the machinery of the salt-works of Bex and Aigle, settling the constitution of the academy of Lausanne, arranging the medical police of Berne, and playing the peacemaker in the long-standing boundary disputes between Berne and Valais. In the other direction, again, besides minor poems, he laid the plans of three political romances on the despotic, constitutionally monarchic, and republican forms of government, and kept up an incessant correspondence in the German, Latin, French, English, and Italian languages, with every notable person in every civilized country of the world. It was in the latter years of his life, too, that some of his most useful and laborious compilations—his "Elementa Physiologiæ," 8 vols. 4to, 1757-66—by far the greatest and best of his works; his "Bibliothecæ," or critical catalogues of works in botany, surgery, anatomy, and practical medicine, were given to the world. The name of Haller still lives among us as a man of great learning and rare industry. He made little or no addition to the sum of human knowledge; but he powerfully influenced other minds, and made the path of learning more easy for those who came after him. Haller, indeed, may truly be regarded as the father of modern physiology. To him are we indebted for the method now alone pursued of investigating the phenomena of the animal organism by observation and experiment, hypothesis being kept entirely in subjection to these two great principles. Since Haller appeared, and especially since his "Elementa Physiologiæ" was given to the world, the science of physiology has assumed an entirely new aspect—the influence of his precepts and example continuing to the present hour, and being destined to endure as long as the path of discovery is pursued by unfettered feet. Haller's knowledge of facts in medical science was only bounded by the state of that science in his day—he knew all that was known; but in assigning reasons for the phenomena exhibited by animal bodies, he certainly set the matter on too narrow a basis. Haller believed that the powers which governed the actions of the living body might be indicated under no more than two heads—irritability and contractility; the former being seated in the brain and nerves, the latter in muscular fibre. This hypothesis, by no means so original as is often supposed (for its germs were already extant in the writings of the English anatomist Glisson), and really unimportant in itself, was nevertheless the cause of long trains of thought, and numerous series of observations and experiments, that essentially advanced physiological science. Whytt, Cullen, the Hunters, and Bichat—leading names in physiology—were all scholars of Haller, though none of them swore by the dicta of the master. In the present day we generally limit the term contractility to designate the special property of the muscular tissue, whilst we acknowledges as many irritations, or causes of action in particular organs, as there are specific functions attached to them. In Haller's time, and in the time of his more immediate successors, the nerves of sensation were not yet distinguished from those of motion, so that Haller himself seems often at a loss to separate irritability from contractility, and to distinguish accurately between the two; and the experiments of one among his successors sometimes lead him to designate as contractility phenomena which the observations of another induce him to characterize as irritability, and vice versa. And then, it was not yet suspected that each separate sense and function had its own peculiar nerve, alive to its special and specific stimulus, but dead to every other excitement—a grand conclusion, which leads to the still wider induction, that every faculty of the mind is connected with its own peculiar bundle in the cerebral mass—a fact, if indeed it be a fact, of the importance of which to mankind in the sciences of morals, politics, and religion, the world is as yet but little aware. In the field of discovery, then, whilst it must be owned that Haller's merits are not transcendent, it is impossible to deny that by his learning and assiduity, by the example of his life and his teaching, and by the quickening influence of his theoretical views, he set his seal not only on his age, but has left it imprinted upon all time. Is there higher honour than this? With the world at large, Haller's name as a poet will probably outlast his reputation as a man of science. "The Alps," and the elegiac poems, "Die Alpen," "Die elegaische Gedichte," are still read, and an edition issues at intervals from the fertile press of Germany. Haller lived to the end of the year 1777, quitting the world only when he had completed the full tale of threescore years and ten, less regretted, we are sorry to add, than so distinguished an individual ought to have been; but the overwrought brain probably led to a haughtiness of demeanour and a state of gloomy despondency that estranged his friends and made his life unhappy. When it had come to this nature kindly interposed, and he slept in peace.—R. W.  HALLER,, the coadjutor of Zwingle and Œcolampadius in the Helvetic reformation, and the chief reformer of the city and canton of Berne, was born in 1492 at the village of Aldingen in Suabia, and received part of his education in the famous school of George Simmler at Pfortzheim, where he formed an early friendship with young Philip Schwarzerd—the future reformer Melancthon. He afterwards studied for two years in the university of Cologne, and in 1513 accepted the humble post of assistant-teacher at Berne, in the school of his friend and first master, Michael Roth. Having taken orders, he was first a chaplain in Berne, then canon of St. Vincent's, and in 1521 parish priest, in which last office he early began to imitate the example of the zealous evangelical friar, Sebastian Meyer, and to take back his parishioners to the word of God, as the only pure source of religious truth. Both his own timidity and the highly conservative temper of the Bernese imposed upon him the necessity of great caution and moderation in his attacks upon the abuses of the church; but the ultimate success of the Reformation in Berne is traced by historians to this very cause. What Luther, and Zwingle, and Calvin, it has been remarked by a recent biographer, would rather have ruined than effected, was secured by the quiet, patient working of a far less eminent man. On the 7th of January, 1528, was opened the famous conference of Berne, in which Haller took a leading part. It lasted nineteen days, and issued in the complete triumph of the Reformation in the canton. At the following Easter, Haller dispensed the sacrament to the citizens in the evangelical form; and on the day after, the new order for the government of the cantonal church was inaugurated. It was only in the Oberland that he experienced any serious resistance; everywhere else the public mind was ripe for the change, and allowed it to be carried through without tumult. He died in 1536.—P. L.  HALLER,, a German sculptor, was born at Innspruck in 1792; and studied first in the Academy of Munich, where he carried off the prize for sculpture, and afterwards at Rome. During his short life he was chiefly employed by King Ludwig of Bavaria, for whom he executed the colossal statues of 