HEAD, SIR FRANCIS BOND (1793-1875).—­Traveller, essayist, and biographer, served in the Engineers, went to South America as manager of a mining company, which failed, and then turned to literature, and made considerable reputation by a book of travels, Rapid Journeys across the Pampas and among the Andes (1827), which was followed by Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau (1834).  He was Governor of Upper Canada 1835-37, but was not a great success.  Thereafter he contributed to the Quarterly Review, and repub. his articles as Stokers and Pokers—­Highways and Byways, and wrote a Life of Bruce, the Abyssinian traveller.  He was made a Baronet in 1836.

HEARN, LAFCADIO (1850-1906).—­Journalist and writer on Japan, s. of an Irish Army surgeon and of a Greek lady, b. in Leucadia, Ionian Islands, lost his parents early, and was sent home to be taken charge of by an aunt in Wales, a Roman Catholic.  On her death, when he was still a boy, he was left penniless, delicate, and half blind, and after experiencing great hardships, in spite of which he ed. himself, he took to journalism.  Going to New Orleans he attained a considerable reputation as a writer with a distinctly individual style.  He came under the influence of Herbert Spencer, and devoted himself largely to the study of social questions.  After spending three years in the French West Indies, he was in 1890 sent by a publisher to Japan to write a book on that country, and there he remained, becoming a naturalised subject, taking the name of Yakomo Koizumi, and marrying a Japanese lady.  He lectured on English literature in the Imperial Univ. at Tokio.  Though getting nearer than, perhaps, any other Western to an understanding of the Japanese, he felt himself to the end to be still an alien.  Among his writings, which are distinguished by acute observation, imagination, and descriptive power of a high order, are Stray Leaves from Strange Literature (1884), Some Chinese Ghosts (1887), Gleanings in Buddha Fields (1897), Ghostly Japan, Kokoro, Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, etc.  He was also an admirable letter-writer.

HEARNE, THOMAS (1678-1735).—­Antiquary, b. at White Waltham., Berkshire, and ed. at Oxf., where in 1712 he became second keeper of the Bodleian Library.  A strong Jacobite, he was deprived of his post in 1716, and afterwards he refused, on political grounds, the chief librarianship.  He pub. a large number of antiquarian works, including Reliquiae Bodleianae (1703), and ed. of Leland’s Itinerary and Collectanea, Camden’s Annals, and Fordun’s Scotochronicon.  Some of his own collections were pub. posthumously.