1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Field, Henry Martyn

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
4819071911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 10 — Field, Henry Martyn

FIELD, HENRY MARTYN (1822–1907), American author and clergyman, brother of Cyrus Field, was born at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on the 3rd of April 1822; he graduated at Williams College in 1838, and was pastor of a Presbyterian church in St Louis, Missouri, from 1842 to 1847, and of a Congregational church in West Springfield, Massachusetts, from 1850 to 1854. The interval between his two pastorates he spent in Europe. From 1854 to 1898 he was editor and for many years he was also sole proprietor of The Evangelist, a New York periodical devoted to the interests of the Presbyterian church. He spent the last years of his life in retirement at Stockbridge, Mass., where he died on the 26th of January 1907. He was the author of a series of books of travel, which achieved unusual popularity. His two volumes descriptive of a trip round the world in 1875–1876, entitled From the Lakes of Killarney to the Golden Horn (1876) and From Egypt to Japan (1877), are almost classic in their way, and have passed through more than twenty editions. Among his other publications are The Irish Confederates and the Rebellion of 1798 (1850), The History of the Atlantic Telegraph (1866), Faith or Agnosticism? the Field-Ingersoll Discussion (1888), Old Spain and New Spain (1888), and Life of David Dudley Field (1898).

He is not to be confused with another Henry Martyn Field, the gynaecologist, who was born in 1837 at Brighton, Mass., and graduated at Harvard in 1859 and at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City in 1862; he was professor of Materia Medica and therapeutics at Dartmouth from 1871 to 1887 and of therapeutics from 1887 to 1893.