Page:Men of the Time, eleventh edition.djvu/112

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BEECHER.
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during the Crimean war. Since then he has practised as a physician at Clifton, and held sundry hospital appointments. He was President of the Anthropological Society in 1869 and 1870, and he was a member of the council of the British Association for several years. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, in 1873. Dr. Beddoe has written numerous papers, medical, statistical, and anthropological, and he has largely applied the numerical method to ethnology. His principal works are, "Stature and Bulk of Man in the British Isles," 1869–70; "Origin of the English Nation" (unpublished, but took first prize, £150, of the Welsh National Eisteddfod); "Relations of Temperament and Complexion to Disease;" "On Hospital Dietaries;" and "Comparison of Mortality in England and Australia." He is joint author of the "Anthropological Instructions for Travellers" of the British Association.


BEECHER, Henry Ward, fourth son of Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote Beecher, born at Litchfield, Connecticut, June 24, 1813. He studied in public Latin schools at Boston, graduated at Amherst College, Mass., 1834, and studied theology under his father at the Lane Seminary, near Cincinnati, Ohio. He first settled as a Presbyterian minister at Laurenceburg, Indiana, in 1837, removed in 1839 to Indianapolis, and became pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church at Brooklyn, New York, in 1847. His church edifice has seating capacity for nearly 3,000 persons, and his church has a membership of over 2,000. During his whole career he has mingled to a greater extent than almost any other preacher and pastor of his denomination in matters not directly professional. For nearly a year, during his theological course, he edited the Cincinnati Journal, a religious weekly. In Indiana he was editor of the Farmer and Gardener. In Brooklyn he was soon known as an earnest opponent of slavery, and an advocate of temperance, peace, and other reforms, and very early became prominent as a platform orator and lecturer. He has always been a strong Republican, and has preached a number of political sermons from his pulpit, and has addressed a number of political meetings. From the date of the establishment of the Independent newspaper to 1858, he was a constant contributor to its columns, and from 1861 to 1863 its chief editor. In 1870 he became the editor-in-chief of the Christian Union, a weekly religious paper, a position he retained for about ten years, when he resigned it to Mr. Lyman Abbott, his associate editor. Mr. Beecher has twice visited Europe, and the last time (in 1863) addressed large audiences in the principal cities of Great Britain on the questions evolved by the civil war then raging in the United States. In 1871, Henry W. Sage, a parishioner of Mr. Beecher's, founded a lectureship of Preaching, called the "Lyman Beecher Lectureship," in the Yale College Divinity School, and the first three annual courses were delivered by Mr. Beecher. His regular weekly sermons, as taken down by stenographic reporters, have been printed since 1859. Besides these he has published "Lectures to Young Men," 1850; "Star Papers," 1855; "Plymouth Collection of Hymns and Tunes," 1855; "Life Thoughts," 1858; "Pleasant Talks about Fruits, Flowers, and Farming," 1859; "Eyes and Ears," 1862; "Freedom and War," 1863; "Royal Truths," 1864; "Aids to Prayer," 1864; "Pulpit Pungencies," 1866; "Prayers from Plymouth Pulpit," 1867; "Norwood," a novel, 1867; "Overture of Angels," 1869; "Lecture-Room Talks," 1870; "Morning and Evening Exercises," 1870; "Life of Christ" (of which only the first volume has ever been