ERLANGEN  , a

town of Germany, in the kingdom of Bavaria, on a fertile plain, at the confluence of the Schwabach and the Regnitz, r r m . N.W. of Nuremberg, on the railway from Munich to Bamberg . Pop . (1905) 23,720 . It is divided into an old and a new town, the latter consisting of wide, straight and well-built streets . The market place is a fine square . Upon it stand the town-hall and the former palace of the margraves of Bayreuth,, now the main building of the university . The latter was founded by the margrave Frederick (d . 1763), who, in 1742, established a university at Bayreuth, but in 1743 removed it to Erlangen . A statue of the founder, erected in 1843 by King Louis I. of Bavaria, stands in the centre of the square and faces the university buildings . The university has faculties of philosophy, law, medicine and Protestant theology . Connected with it are a library of over 200,000 volumes, geological, anatomical and mineralogical institutions, a hospital, several clinical establishments, laboratories and a botanical garden .

Among the churches of the town (six Protestant and one

Roman Catholic), only the new town church, with a spire 220 ft. high, is remarkable . The chief industries of Erlangen are spinning and weaving, and the manufacture of glass, paper, brushes and gloves . The brewing industry is also important, the beer of Erlangen being famous throughout Germany and large quantities being exported . Erlangen owes the foundation of its prosperity chiefly to the French Protestant refugees who settled here on the revocation of the edict of Nantes and introduced various manufactures . In Io17 the place was transferred from'the bishopric of Wurzburg to that of Bamberg; in 1361 it was sold to the king of Bohemia . It became a town in 1398 and passed into the hands of the Hohenzollerns, burgraves of Nuremberg, in 1416 . There for nearly three centuries it was the property of the margraves of Bayreuth, being ceded with the rest of Bayreuth to Prussia in 1791 . In 1810 it came into the possession of Bavaria . Erlangen was for many years the residence of the poet Friedrich Ruckert, and of the philosophers Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm von Schnelling . See Stein and Miller, Die Geschichte von Erlangen (1898) .