FRANCIS

See also:

• ANDREW (Gr. 'AvBp4as, manly)
• ANDREW, JOHN ALBION (1818-1867)

ANDREW

See also:

• MARCH
• MARCH (1) (from Fr. marcher, to walk; the earliest sense in French appears to be " to trample," and the origin has usually been found in the Lat. marcus, hammer; Low Lat. marcare, to hammer; hence to beat the road with the regular tread of a soldier: cf.
• MARCH, AUZIAS (c. "1395-1458)
• MARCH, EARLS OF
• FRANCIS ANDREW MARCH (1825– )

MARCH (1825– )  , American philologist and educationalist, was born on the 25th of October 1825 in Millbury, Massachusetts . He graduated in 1845 at Amherst, where his attention was turned to the study of Anglo-Saxon by Noah Webster . He was a teacher at Swanzey, New Hampshire, and at the Leicester Academy, Massachusetts, in 1845-1847, and attempted the philological method of teaching English " like Latin and Greek," later described in his Method of Philological Study of the English Language (1865); at Amherst in 1847-1849; at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1852-1855; and in 1855 became a tutor at Lafayette College, where he became adjunct professor of belles-lettres and English literature in 1856, and professor of English language and comparative philology—the first chair of the kind established—in 1857 . He lectured on constitutional and public law and Roman law in 1875-1877, and also taughtsubjects as diverse as botany and political economy . In 1907 he became professor emeritus . At Lafayette he introduced the first carefully scientific study of English in any American college, and in 1870 published A Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Language, in which its Forms are Illustrated by Those of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Old Saxon, Old Friesic, Old Norse and Old High German, and An Anglo-Saxon Reader; he 'vas editor of the " Douglass Series of Christian Greek and Latin Classics," to which he contributed Latin Hymns (1874); he was chairman of the Commission of the State of Pennsylvania on Amended Orthography; and was consulting editor of the Standard Dictionary, and in 1879-1882 was director of the American readers for the Philological Society's (New Oxford) Dictionary . He was president of the American Philological Association in 1873-1874 and in 1895-1896, of the Spelling Reform Association after 1876, and of the Modern Language Association in 1891-1893 . Among American linguistic scholars March ranks with Whitney, Child and Gildersleeve; and his studies in English, though practically pioneer work in America, are of undoubted value . His article " On Recent Discussions of Grimm's Law " in the Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association for 1873 in large part anticipated Verner's law . With his son, Francis Andrew March, jun . (b . 1863), adjunct-professor of modern languages in 1884-1891 and subsequently professor of English literature at Lafayette, he edited A Thesaurus Dictionary of the English Language (1903) .

See Addresses in Honor of Professor Francis A . March, LL.D., L.H.D., delivered at

Easton, Pennsylvania, on the 24th of October 1895 .