HERMANSTADT, a city of Hungary, in the province of Sieberbergen, the capital of a circle of the same name, which extends over 984 square miles, and contains about 60,000 inhabitants. The city is situated on the river Eidin, and is surrounded with double walls and extensive suburbs. It contains four Lutheran, three Catholic, one Reformed, and one Greek church, and is the seat of a Greek bishop, of a Lutheran lyceum with ten professors and a good library, of a Catholic orphan-house with 500 pupils, and a gymnasium or high school attached to it, and of the palaces of several of the nobles of the province. It has 2000 houses and 16,450 inhabitants. There are carried on within the city the trades of cloth and blanket-weaving, hat-making, and other manufactures. Long. 24. 3. 53. E. Lat. 45. 47. 4. N.
HERMAPHRODITE is generally understood to signify a human creature possessed of both sexes, or who has the parts of generation of both male and female. The term however is also applied to other animals, and even to plants. The word is formed from the Greek Ἑρμαφρόδιτος, a compound of Ἑρμης, Mercury, and Ἀφροδίτη, Venus; a mixture of Mercury and Venus, or of male and female. Hermaphroditus was originally a proper name applied by the heathen mythologists to a fabulous deity, whom some represent as a son of Hermes, Mercury, and Aphrodite, Venus, and who, being desperately in love with the nymph Salamis, obtained permission of the god to have his body and hers united into one. But others say, that the god Hermaphroditus was conceived as a composition of Mercury and Venus; to exhibit the union between eloquence, or rather commerce, of which Mercury was god, with pleasure, of which Venus was the proper deity. Lastly, others think this junction intended to show that Venus or pleasure was of both sexes.
In a treatise by Mr Hunter, in the sixty-ninth volume of the Philosophical Transactions, hermaphrodites are divided into natural, and unnatural or monstrous. The first belongs to the more simple orders of animals, of which there are a much greater number than of the more perfect. The unnatural takes place in every tribe of animals having distinct sexes, but is more common in some than in others. The human species, our author imagines, has the fewest; but amongst horses, sheep, and black cattle, they are very frequent.