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HÄLLEFLINTA—HALLER, A. VON
855

replace him, Major-General Halleck becoming chief of staff at Washington. This post he occupied with credit until the end of the war. In April 1865 he held the command of the military division of the James and in August of the same year of the military division of the Pacific, which he retained till June 1869, when he was transferred to that of the South, a position he held till his death at Louisville, Ky., on the 9th of January 1872. Halleck’s position as a soldier is easily defined by his uniform success as an administrative official, his equally uniform want of success as an officer at the head of large armies in the field, and the popularity of his theoretical writings on war. His influence, for good or evil, on the course of the greatest war of modern times was greater than that of any soldier on either side save Grant and Lee, and whilst his interference with the dispositions of the commanders in the field was often disastrous, his services in organizing and instructing the Union forces were always of the highest value, and in this respect he was indispensable.

Besides Military Art and Science, Halleck wrote Bitumen, its Varieties, Properties and Uses (1841); The Mining Laws of Spain and Mexico (1859); International Law (1861; new edition, 1908); and Treatise on International Law and the Laws of War, prepared for the use of Schools and Colleges, abridged from the larger work. He translated Jomini’s Vie politique et militaire de Napoléon (1864) and de Fooz On the Law of Mines (1860). The works on international law mentioned above entitle General Halleck to be considered as one of the great jurists of the 19th century.


HÄLLEFLINTA (a Swedish word meaning rock-flint), a white, grey, yellow, greenish or pink, fine-grained rock consisting of an intimate mixture of quartz and felspar. Many examples are banded or striated; others contain porphyritic crystals of quartz which resemble those of the felsites and porphyries. Mica, iron oxides, apatite, zircon, epidote and hornblende may also be present in small amount. The more micaceous varieties form transitions to granulite and gneiss. Hälleflinta under the microscope is very finely crystalline, or even cryptocrystalline, resembling the felsitic matrix of many acid rocks. It is essentially metamorphic and occurs with gneisses, schists and granulites, especially in the Scandinavian peninsula, where it is regarded as being very characteristic of certain horizons. Of its original nature there is some doubt, but its chemical composition and the occasional presence of porphyritic crystals indicate that it has affinities to the fine-grained acid intrusive rocks. In this group there may also have been placed metamorphosed acid tuffs and a certain number of adinoles (shales, contact altered by intrusions of diabase). The assemblage is not a perfectly homogeneous one but includes both igneous and sedimentary rocks, but the former preponderate. Rocks very similar to the typical Swedish hälleflintas occur in Tirol, in Galicia and eastern Bohemia.


HALLEL (Heb. הַלֵּל a Mishnic derivative from הִלֵּל hillēl, “to praise”), a term in synagogal liturgy for (a) Psalms cxiii.-cxviii., often called “the Egyptian Hallel” because of its recitation during the paschal meal on the night of the Passover, (b) Psalm cxxxvi. “the Great Hallel.” C. A. Briggs[1] points out that the term “Hallelujah” (Praise ye Yah) is found at the close of Pss. civ., cv., cxv., cxvi., cxvii., at the beginning of Pss. cxi., cxii. and at both ends of Pss. cvi., cxiii., cxxxv., cxlvi. to cl. The Septuagint also gives it at the beginning of Pss. cv., cvii., cxiv., cxvi. to cxix., cxxxvi. There are thus four groups of Hallel psalms:—civ.-cvii. (a tetralogy on creation, the patriarchal age, the Exodus, and the Restoration); cxi.-cxvii. which includes most of the “Egyptian Hallel”; cxxxv.-cxxxvi.; cxlvi.-cl. All of these Hallels (except cxlvii. and cxlix. which are Maccabean) belong to the Greek period, forming a collection of sixteen psalms composed for public use by the choirs, especially at the great feasts. Their distribution into four groups was the work of the final editor of the psalter. Later liturgical use regarded Pss. cxviii. and even cxix. as Hallels, as well as Pss. cxx. to cxxxiv.

It will be observed that the extent of the official Hallel varied from time to time. It would appear that in the time of Gamaliel (Pesahim x. 5) the custom of its recitation at the paschal meal was still of recent innovation. While the school of Shammai advised only Ps. cxiii., the school of Hillel favoured Pss. cxiii. and cxiv.[2] The further extension so as to include Pss. cxv. to cxviii. probably dates from the first half of the 2nd century A.D., and these four psalms were recited after the pouring out of the fourth cup, the two earlier ones being taken at the beginning of the meal. From the 3rd century the use of the Hallel was extended to other occasions, and was gradually incorporated into the liturgy of eighteen festal days.

The “Great Hallel” (Ps. cxxxvi. and its later extension to cxx.-cxxxvi.) always served the wider purpose of a more general thanksgiving. According to Rabbi Johanan it derived its name from the allusion in v. 25 to the Holy One who sits in heaven and thence distributes food to all his creatures.


HALLER, ALBRECHT VON (1708–1777), Swiss anatomist and physiologist, was born of an old Swiss family at Bern, on the 16th of October 1708. Prevented by long-continued ill-health from taking part in boyish sports, he had the more opportunity for the development of his precocious mind. At the age of four, it is said, he used to read and expound the Bible to his father’s servants; before he was ten he had sketched a Chaldee grammar, prepared a Greek and a Hebrew vocabulary, compiled a collection of two thousand biographies of famous men and women on the model of the great works of Bayle and Moreri, and written in Latin verse a satire on his tutor, who had warned him against a too great excursiveness. When still hardly fifteen he was already the author of numerous metrical translations from Ovid, Horace and Virgil, as well as of original lyrics, dramas, and an epic of four thousand lines on the origin of the Swiss confederations, writings which he is said on one occasion to have rescued from a fire at the risk of his life, only, however, to burn them a little later (1729) with his own hand. Haller’s attention had been directed to the profession of medicine while he was residing in the house of a physician at Biel after his father’s death in 1721; and, following the choice then made, he while still a sickly and excessively shy youth went in his sixteenth year to the university of Tübingen (December 1723), where he studied under Camerarius and Duvernoy. Dissatisfied with his progress, he in 1725 exchanged Tübingen for Leiden, where Boerhaave was in the zenith of his fame, and where Albinus had already begun to lecture in anatomy. At that university he graduated in May 1727, undertaking successfully in his thesis to prove that the so-called salivary duct, claimed as a recent discovery by Coschwitz, was nothing more than a blood-vessel. Haller then visited London, making the acquaintance of Sir Hans Sloane, Cheselden, Pringle, Douglas and other scientific men; next, after a short stay in Oxford, he visited Paris, where he studied under Ledran and Winslöw; and in 1728 he proceeded to Basel, where he devoted himself to the study of the higher mathematics under John Bernoulli. It was during his stay there also that his first great interest in botany was awakened; and, in the course of a tour (July-August, 1828), through Savoy, Baden and several of the Swiss cantons, he began a collection of plants which was afterwards the basis of his great work on the flora of Switzerland. From a literary point of view the main result of this, the first of his many journeys through the Alps, was his poem entitled Die Alpen, which was finished in March 1729, and appeared in the first edition (1732) of his Gedichte. This poem of 490 hexameters is historically important as one of the earliest signs of the awakening appreciation of the mountains (hitherto generally regarded as horrible monstrosities), though it is chiefly designed to contrast the simple and idyllic life of the inhabitants of the Alps with the corrupt and decadent existence of the dwellers in the plains.

In 1729 he returned to Bern and began to practise as a physician; his best energies, however, were devoted to the botanical and anatomical researches which rapidly gave him a European reputation, and procured for him from George II.

  1. International Critical Commentary, “Psalms,” Intro. lxxviii.
  2. The reference to a hymn at the institution of the Eucharist (Matt. xxvi. 30, Mark xiv. 26) must be interpreted in the light of this inceptive stage of the Hallel.