GERHARDT, Charles Frederic, was born at Strasburg, August 21, 1816, and died there August 19, 1856. After his school years spent at home and in Carlsruhe, where his taste for chemistry was awakened, he was sent to Leipsic to learn business, but he attended Erdmann’s lectures on chemistry as well. Returning home he very soon found that a commercial life was not to his taste, so, after a sharp dispute with a disappointed father, he enlisted in a cavalry regiment. In a few months a military career also became intolerable, and, being bought off by a friend, he went to Giessen to study under Liebig. There he remained eighteen months, displaying such entire devotion to chemistry that he found himself unable to obtain the customary degree. He again thought of entering trade, but Liebig persuaded him to go to Paris, where he arrived in 1838. His good appearance and address recommended him to Dumas and other chemists, and in a short time along with Cahours, who became his intimate friend, he published an important memoir on essential oils, distinguished especially by the new views it contained. He soon after left Pans and went to Montpellier, where he was professor in the faculty of science till 1848. He then returned to Paris and opened a school for chemistry, which, however, was not commercially a success. From 1848 to 1855 he resided at Paris, and it was during this time that he published the memoirs and carried on the controversies which have been of such importance in the development of scientific chemistry. In 1855 he was appointed professor at Strasburg, his native place; but he had held the office for but a short time when he died, after two days’ illness. Gerhardt’s contributions to chemistry are less discoveries of new facts, than of new ideas which organized and ...vitalized an inert accumulation of facts. He developed the notion of types of structure and reaction; he discovered the order of organic compounds, which led him to the doctrine of homologous and other series; and on theoretical grounds he remodelled the whole character of the combining weights upon the two-volume molecular basis. The bare statement, however, of his results gives no idea of the lucidity, the wealth of thought, the grasp of the entire subject which his memoirs and his longer works display. It was by his writings especially that Gerhardt’s influence was felt. Although a thorough enthusiast in his subject, clear in his exposition, earnest in his work, weighty in his delivery, he seems to have wanted the qualities of a successful teacher. Nothing is heard of his lectures, or of his influence as a professor,—such influence as drew students round Liebig and other great masters. None the less, however, did he stir the thoughts of other chemists to the very depths; and although the unitary system has had its day, yet, in substance at least, if no longer in name, chemistry is still Gerhardt’s, and it is not impossible that chemists may return to some of his views which at present are not acceptable.
GERHARDT, Paul(c. 1606-1676), the greatest hymnwriter of Germany, if not indeed of Europe, was born of a good middle-class family at Gräfenhainichen, a small town on the railway between Halle and Wittenberg, in 1606 or 1607,∙—some authorities, indeed, give the date March 12, 1607, but neither the year nor the day is accurately known. His education appears to have been retarded by the troubles of the period, the Thirty Years’ War having begun about the time he reached his twelfth year. After completing his studies for the church he is known to have lived for some years at Berlin as tutor in the family of an advocate named Berthold, whose daughter he subsequently married, on receiving his first ecclesiastical appointment at Mittelwald (a small town in the neighbourhood of Berlin) in 1651. In 1657 he accepted an invitation as “diaconus” to the Nicolaikirche of Berlin; but, in consequence of his uncompromising Lutheranism in refusing to accept the elector Frederick William’s “syncretistic” edict of 1664, he was deprived in 1666. Though absolved from submission and restored to office early in the following year, on the petition of the citizens, his conscience did not allow him to retain a post wlιich, as it appeared to him, could only be held on condition of at least a tacit repudiation of the Formula Concordiae, and for upwards of a year he lived in Berlin without fixed employment. In 1668 he was appointed archdeacon of Lübben in the duchy of Saxe-Merseburg, where, after a somewhat sombre ministry of eight years, he died on the 7th of June 1676. Many of his best known hymns were originally published in various church hymn-books, as for example in that for Brandenburg -which appeared in 1658; others first saw the light in Johann Cruger’s Geistliche Kirchenmelodien (1649) and Praxis Pietatis Melica (1656). The first complete set of them is the Geistliche Andachten, published in 1666-67 by Ebeling, music director in Berlin. No hymn by Gerhardt of a later date than 1667 is known to exist.
The life of Gerhardt has been written by Roth (1829), by Langbecker (1841), by Schultz (1842), by Wildenhahn (1845), and by Bachmann (1863); also by Kraft in Erseh u. Gruber’s Allg. Encycl. (1855). The best modern edition of the hymns, published by Wackernagel in 1843, lias often been reprinted. There is an English translation by Kelly (Paul Gerhardts Spiritual Songs, 1867).
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