Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Karl Gustav Homeyer

HOMEYER, Karl Gustav (1795–1874), was born August 13, 1795, at Wolgast, a small town in Pomerania, which at that time was still Swedish territory. After a four years stay in Sweden, whither his father, a merchant, had taken him in 1806, and where he may have laid the foundation of that knowledge of the languages and laws of the North which is so conspicuous in his later works, he was in 1810 received into the house of his uncle Rühs, the learned historian, who had just been called to the professorship of history at the newly-founded university of Berlin. He subsequently went through the course of law study at the universities of Berlin, Göttingen, and Heidelberg (1813-1817). It was in Berlin especially that he was introduced to the principles of the so-called historical school of the science of law by Savigny and Eichhorn, who were his principal teachers. In 1821 he settled as a privat-docent at the university of Berlin, where he was promoted to an extraordinary professorship in 1824, and to the ordinary German law chair in 1827. His principal works are his edition of the Sachsenspiegel (in 3 vols., containing also some other important sources of Saxon or Low German law), which is still unsurpassed in accuracy and sagacity of research, and his book on Die Haus- und Hofmarken (1870), in which he has given a history of the use of trademarks among all the Teutonic nations of Europe, and which is full of important elucidations of the history of law and also contains valuable contributions to the history of art and civilization. In 1850 Homeyer was elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, in the Transactions of which he published various papers exhibiting profound learning (“Ueber die Heimath,” 1852; “Genealogie der Handschriften des Sachsenspiegels,” 1859; “Die Stadtbücher des Mittelalters,” 1860; “Der Dreissigste,” 1864, &c.). He died October 20, 1874.