Gneist
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
HEINRICH RUDOLF HERMANN FRIEDRICH VON (nist), a German jurist; born in Berlin, Aug. 13, 1816. He entered official life as assessor in the Superior Court (Kammergericht) in 1841, and was successively assistantjudge of the same court and of the supreme tribunal, till in 1850 he resigned this position in order to devote himself exclusively to teaching; for since 1844 he had held the chair of jurisprudence in Berlin University. From 1858 he sat in the Prussian Lower House as a National Liberal, and was also elected to the Imperial Parliament, of which he was a conservative member until 1884. He wrote: "Organization of the German Jury" (1849); "Nobility and Knighthood in England" (1853); "Present English Constitutional and Administrative Law" (3d edition, 1876-1884), his masterpiece; "Government of the City of London" (1867); "History of the English System of Government" (1882); "The English Parliament" (1886); etc. He was ennobled in 1888, and died July 21, 1895. GNESEN (gnā'zen) (Polish Gniezno), a Polish town, in a region of hills and lakes, 31 miles E. N. E. of Posen. It has a Catholic cathedral, dating from 965, and till 1320 was the coronation place of the Polish kings. It passed to Prussia in 1814 and was ceded to Poland in 1920. GNETACEÆ (nē-tā'se-ē), in botany, joint-firs; an order of gymnogens, with repeatedly-branched jointed stems and simple net-veined leaves, opposite and entire, sometimes very minute and scaleshaped; flowers in catkins, or heads; the males with a one-leaved calyx, transversely slit at the end; a monadelphous filament, with one-celled anthers opening by pores; females, altogether naked or sheltered by a false calyx, consisting of two scales, each surrounding two flowers; ovary, none; ovule with a style-like process. Known genera, two-viz., GNETUM and EPHEDRA; species, 15, scattered over the world. GNETUM (nē'-) (Corrupted from gnemon, the name given to the plant in the island of Ternate), in botany, the typical genus of the order. Gnetaceæ (q. v.). The species are found in the hottest parts of India and Guiana. In Amboyna the seeds of G gnemon are eaten boiled, roasted, or fried, and the green leaves, though tasteless, are used as spinach.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's wrote this in 1921, twenty-six years after Gneist's death, and the biographical facts still stand as given. What the entry leaves out is the reach of his teaching beyond Prussia: when Ito Hirobumi's mission came to Europe in 1882 to study constitutions, it studied under Gneist in Berlin and Lorenz von Stein in Vienna, and his conservative, administration-centred reading of constitutional government left its mark on the Meiji constitution of 1889. His masterpiece, the study of English constitutional and administrative law, is now read chiefly as a document of nineteenth-century German liberalism rather than as a guide to England, since later English scholars judged his account of self-government to reflect Prussian preoccupations more than English practice. On the same page, Gnesen is now Gniezno in Poland, German-occupied from 1939 to 1945 but Polish since.
Written for this edition, 2026.