at Yale, then becoming a school teacher. He joined a Connecticut regiment after the breaking out of the war, and served in the siege of Boston, being commissioned a captain at the opening of 1776. When Heath’s brigade departed for New York he went with them, and the tradition is that he was one of a small and daring band who captured an English provision sloop from under the very guns of a man-of-war. But on the 21st of September, having volunteered to enter the British lines to obtain information concerning the enemy, he was captured in his disguise of a Dutch school-teacher and on the 22nd was hanged. The penalty was in accordance with military law, but young Hale’s act was a brave one, and he has always been glorified as a martyr. Tradition attributes to him the saying that he only regretted that he had but one life to lose for his country; and it is said that his request for a Bible and the services of a minister was refused by his captors. There is a fine statue of Hale by Macmonnies in New York.
See H. P. Johnston, Nathan Hale (1901).
HALE, WILLIAM GARDNER (1849– ), American classical
scholar, was born on the 9th of February 1849 in Savannah,
Georgia. He graduated at Harvard University in 1870, and
took a post-graduate course in philosophy there in 1874–1876;
studied classical philology at Leipzig and Göttingen in 1876–1877;
was tutor in Latin at Harvard from 1877 to 1880, and
professor of Latin in Cornell University from 1880 to 1892,
when he became professor of Latin and head of the Latin department
of the University of Chicago. From 1894 to 1899 he was
chairman and in 1895–1896 first director of the American School
of Classical Studies at Rome. He is best known as an original
teacher on questions of syntax. In The Cum-Constructions:
Their History and Functions, which appeared in Cornell University
Studies in Classical Philology (1888–1889; and in
German version by Neizert in 1891), he attacked Hoffmann’s
distinction between absolute and relative temporal clauses as
published in Lateinische Zeitpartikeln (1874); Hoffmann replied
in 1891, and the best summary of the controversy is in Wetzel’s
Der Streit zwischen Hoffmann und Hale (1892). Hale wrote also
The Sequence of Tenses in Latin (1887–1888), The Anticipatory
Subjunctive in Greek and Latin (1894), and a Latin Grammar
(1903), to which the parts on sounds, inflection and word-formation
were contributed by Carl Darling Buck.
HALEBID, a village in Mysore state, southern India; pop.
(1901), 1524. The name means “old capital,” being the site of
Dorasamudra, the capital of the Hoysala dynasty founded early
in the 11th century. In 1310 and again in 1326 it was taken
and plundered by the first Mahommedan invader of southern
India. Two temples, still standing, though never completed
and greatly ruined, are regarded as the finest examples of the
elaborately carved Chalukyan style of architecture.
HALES, or Hayles, JOHN (d. 1571), English writer and
politician, was a son of Thomas Hales of Hales Place, Halden,
Kent. He wrote his Highway to Nobility about 1543, and was
the founder of a free school at Coventry for which he wrote
Introductiones ad grammaticam. In political life Hales, who was
member of parliament for Preston, was specially concerned with
opposing the enclosure of land, being the most active of the
commissioners appointed in 1548 to redress this evil; but he
failed to carry several remedial measures through parliament.
When the protector, the duke of Somerset, was deprived of his
authority in 1550, Hales left England and lived for some time
at Strassburg and Frankfort, returning to his own country on
the accession of Elizabeth. However he soon lost the royal
favour by writing a pamphlet, A Declaration of the Succession of
the Crowne Imperiall of Inglande, which declared that the recent
marriage between Lady Catherine Grey and Edward Seymour,
earl of Hertford, was legitimate, and asserted that, failing direct
heirs to Elizabeth, the English crown should come to Lady
Catherine as the descendant of Mary, daughter of Henry VII.
The author was imprisoned, but was quickly released, and died
on the 28th of December 1571. The Discourse of the Common
Weal, described as “one of the most informing documents
of the age,” and written about 1549, has been attributed
to Hales. This has been edited by E. Lamond (Cambridge,
1893).
Hales is often confused with another John Hales, who was clerk of the hanaper under Henry VIII. and his three immediate successors.
HALES, JOHN (1584–1656), English scholar, frequently
referred to as “the ever memorable,” was born at Bath on the
19th of April 1584, and was educated at Corpus Christi College,
Oxford. He was elected a fellow of Merton in 1605, and in 1612
he was appointed public lecturer on Greek. In 1613 he was
made a fellow of Eton. Five years later he went to Holland, as
chaplain to the English ambassador, Sir Dudley Carleton, who
despatched him to Dort to report upon the proceedings of the
synod then sitting. In 1619 he returned to Eton and spent his
time among his books and in the company of literary men,
among whom he was highly reputed for his common sense, his
erudition and his genial charity. Andrew Marvell called him
“one of the clearest heads and best-prepared breasts in Christendom.”
His eirenical tract entitled Schism and Schismaticks
(1636) fell into the hands of Archbishop Laud, and Hales,
hearing that he had disapproved of it, is said to have written to
the prelate a vindication of his position. This led to a meeting,
and in 1639 Hales was made one of Laud’s chaplains and also a
canon of Windsor. In 1642 he was deprived of his canonry by
the parliamentary committee, and two years later was obliged
to hide in Eton with the college documents and keys. In 1649
he refused to take the “Engagement” and was ejected from his
fellowship. He then retired to Buckinghamshire, where he found
a home with Mrs Salter, the sister of the bishop of Salisbury
(Brian Duppa), and acted as tutor to her son. The issue of the
order against harbouring malignants led him to return to Eton.
Here, having sold his valuable library at great sacrifice, he lived
in poverty until his death on the 19th of May 1656.
His collected works (3 vols.) were edited by Lord Hailes, and published in 1765.
HALES, STEPHEN (1677–1761), English physiologist, chemist
and inventor, was born at Bekesbourne in Kent on the 7th or
17th of September 1677, the fifth (or sixth) son of Thomas Hales,
whose father, Sir Robert Hales, was created a baronet by
Charles II. in 1670. In June 1696 he was entered as a pensioner
of Benet (now Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge, with the view
of taking holy orders, and in February 1703 was admitted to a
fellowship. He received the degree of master of arts in 1703
and of bachelor of divinity in 1711. One of his most intimate
friends was William Stukeley (1687–1765) with whom he studied
anatomy, chemistry, &c. In 1708–1709 Hales was presented
to the perpetual curacy of Teddington in Middlesex, where he
remained all his life, notwithstanding that he was subsequently
appointed rector of Porlock in Somerset, and later of Faringdon
in Hampshire. In 1717 he was elected fellow of the Royal
Society, which awarded him the Copley medal in 1739. In 1732
he was named one of a committee for establishing a colony in
Georgia, and the next year he received the degree of doctor of
divinity from Oxford. He was appointed almoner to the princess-dowager
of Wales in 1750. On the death of Sir Hans Sloane in
1753, Hales was chosen foreign associate of the French Academy
of Sciences. He died at Teddington on the 4th of January 1761.
Hales is best known for his Statical Essays. The first volume, Vegetable Staticks (1727), contains an account of numerous experiments in plant-physiology—the loss of water in plants by evaporation, the rate of growth of shoots and leaves, variations in root-force at different times of the day, &c. Considering it very probable that plants draw “through their leaves some part of their nourishment from the air,” he undertook experiments to show in “how great a proportion air is wrought into the composition of animal, vegetable and mineral substances”; though this “analysis of the air” did not lead him to any very clear ideas about the composition of the atmosphere, in the course of his inquiries he collected gases over water in vessels separate from those in which they were generated, and thus used what was to all intents and purposes a “pneumatic trough.” The second volume (1733) on Haemostaticks, containing experiments
