monastic life gives due prominence to secular affairs. He writes as a Saxon, proud of the history of his race and an admirer of Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great.
Three manuscripts exist of the Res gestae, one of which is in the British Museum, and the book was first published at Basel in 1532. The best edition is that edited by G. Waitz in the Monumenta Germaniae historica. Scriptores, Band iii. (Hanover and Berlin, 1826). A good edition published at Hanover and Leipzig in 1904 contains an introduction by K. A. Kehr.
See R. Köpke, Widukind von Corvey (Berlin, 1867); J. Raase, Widukind von Korvei (Rostock, 1880); and B. Simson, “Zur Kritik des Widukind” in the Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichte, Band xii. (Hanover, 1876). (A. W. H.*)
WIDUKIND, or Wittekind (d. c. 807), leader of the Saxons during the earlier part of their resistance to Charlemagne, belonged to a noble Westphalian family, and is first mentioned in 777 when his absence from an assembly of the Saxons held by the Frankish king of Paderborn was a matter for remark. It is inferred with considerable probability that he had taken a leading part in the attacks on two Frankish garrisons in 776, and possibly had shared in earlier fights against the Franks, and so feared to meet the king. In 778 he returned from exile in Denmark to lead a fresh rising, and in 782 the Saxons at his instigation drove out the Frankish priests, and plundered the border territories. It is uncertain whether Widukind shared in the Saxon victory at the Süntel mountains, or what part he took in the risings of 783 and 784. In 785 Charlemagne, leading an expedition towards the mouth of the Elbe, learned that Widukind was in the land of the Nordalbingians, on the right bank of the river. Negotiations were begun, and the Saxon chief, assured of his personal safety, appeared at the Frankish court at Attigny. There he was baptized, the king acting as his sponsor and loading him with gifts. The details of his later life are unknown. He probably returned to Saxony and occupied there an influential position, as in 922 the inheritance of the “old count or duke Widukind” is referred to. Many legends have gathered around his memory, and he was long regarded as a national hero by the Saxons. He is reported to have been duke of Engria, to have been a devoted Christian and a builder of churches, and to have fallen in battle in 807. Kingly and princely houses have sought to establish their descent from him, but except in the case of Matilda, wife of the German king, Henry I. the Fowler, without any success.
See W. Diekamp, Widukind der Sachsenführer nach Geschichte und Sage (Munster, 1877); J. Dettmer, Der Sachsenführer Widukind nach Geschichte und Sage (Würzburg, 1879).
WIEDEMANN, GUSTAV HEINRICH (1826-1899), German physicist, was born at Berlin on the 2nd of October 1826. After attending the Cologne gymnasium, he entered the university of Berlin in 1844, and took his doctor's degree there three years later. His thesis on that occasion was devoted to a question in organic chemistry, for he held the opinion that the study of chemistry is an indispensable preliminary to the pursuit of physics, which was his ultimate aim. In Berlin he made the acquaintance of H. von Helmholtz at the house of H. G. Magnus, and was one of the founders of the Berlin Physical Society. In 1854 he left Berlin to become professor of physics in Basel University, removing nine years afterwards to Brunswick Polytechnic, and in 1866 to Karlsruhe Polytechnic. In 1871 he accepted the chair of physical chemistry at Leipzig. The attention he had paid to chemistry in the earlier part of his career enabled him to hold his own in this position, but he found his work more congenial when in 1887 he was transferred to the professorship of physics. He died at Leipzig on the 24th of March 1899. His name is probably most widely known for his literary work. In 1877 he undertook the editorship of the Annalen der Physik und Chemie in succession to J. C. Poggendorff, thus starting the series of that scientific periodical which is familiarly cited as Wied. Ann. Another monumental work for which he was responsible was Die Lehre von der Elektricität, or, as it was called in the first instance, Lehre von Galvanismus und Elektromagnetismus, a book that is unsurpassed for accuracy and comprehensiveness. He produced the first edition in 1861, and a fourth, revised and enlarged, was only completed a short time before his death. But his original work was also important. His data for the thermal conductivity of various metals were for long the most trustworthy at the disposal of physicists, and his determination of the ohm in terms of the specific resistance of mercury showed remarkable skill in quantitative research. He carried out a number of magnetic investigations which resulted in the discovery of many interesting phenomena, some of which have been rediscovered by others; they related among other things to the effect of mechanical strain on the magnetic properties of the magnetic metals, to the relation between the chemical composition of compound bodies and their magnetic properties, and to a curious parallelism between the laws of torsion and of magnetism. He also investigated electrical endosmosis and the electrical resistance of electrolytes. His eldest son, Eilhard Ernst Gustav, born at Berlin on the 1st of August 1852, became professor of physics at Erlangen in 1886, and his younger son, Alfred, born at Berlin on the 18th of July 1856, was appointed to the extraordinary professorship of Egyptology at Bonn in 1892.
WIELAND, CHRISTOPH MARTIN (1733-1813), German poet and man of letters, was born at Oberholzheim, a village near Biberach in Württemberg, on the 5th of September 1733. His father, who was pastor in Oberholzheim, and subsequently in Biberach, took great pains with the child's education, and from the town school of Biberach he passed on, before he had reached his fourteenth year, to the gymnasium at Klosterberge, near Magdeburg. He was a precocious child, and when he left school in 1749 was widely read in the Latin classics and the leading contemporary French writers; amongst German poets his favourites were Brockes and Klopstock. While at home in the summer of 1750, he fell in love with a kinswoman, Sophie Gutermann, and this love affair seems to have acted as an incentive to poetic composition; under this inspiration he planned his first ambitious work, Die Natur der Dinge (1752), a didactic poem in six books. In 1750 he went to the university of Tübingen as a student of law, but his time was mainly taken up with literary studies. The poems he wrote at the university—Hermann, an epic (published by F. Muncker, 1886), Zwölf moralische Briefe in Versen (1752), Anti-Ovid (1752)—are pietistic in tone and dominated by the influence of Klopstock. They attracted the attention of the Swiss literary reformer, J. J. Bodmer, who invited Wieland to visit him in Zürich in the summer of 1752. After a few months, however, Bodmer felt himself as little in sympathy with Wieland as, two years earlier, he had felt himself with Klopstock, and the friends parted; but Wieland remained in Switzerland until 1760, residing, in the last year, at Bern where he obtained a position as private tutor. Here he stood in intimate relations with Rousseau's friend Julie de Bondeli. Meanwhile a change had come over Wieland's tastes; the writings of his early Swiss years—Der geprüfte Abraham (1753), Sympathien (1756), Empfindungen eines Christen (1757)—were still in the manner of his earlier writings, but with the tragedies, Lady Johanna Gray (1758), and Clementina von Porretta (1760)—the latter based on Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison—the epic fragment Cyrus (1759), and the “moral story in dialogues,” Araspes und Panthea (1760), Wieland, as Lessing said, “forsook the ethereal spheres to wander again among the sons of men.”
Wieland's conversion was completed at Biberach, whither he had returned in 1760, as director of the chancery. The dullness and monotony of his life here was relieved by the friendship of a Count Stadion, whose library in the castle of Warthausen, not far from Biberach, was well stocked with French and English literature. Here, too, Wieland met again his early love Sophie Gutermann, who had meanwhile become the wife of Hofrat La Roche, then manager of Count Stadion's estates. The former poet of an austere pietism now became the advocate of a light-hearted philosophy, from which frivolity and sensuality were not excluded. In Don Sylvia von Rosalva (1764), a romance in imitation of Don Quixote, he held up to ridicule his earlier faith and in the Komische Erzählungen (1765) he gave his extravagant imagination only too free a rein. More important is the novel Geschichte des Agathon (1766-1767), in which, under the guise of
