CHILD, FRANCIS JAMES American scholar and educator, was born in Boston (Mass.), Feb. 1, 1825. He graduated at Harvard in 1846, taking the highest rank in his class; was a tutor in various subjects, and after two years of study in Europe succeeded Edward T. Charming in 1851 as Boyl ston professor of rhetoric, oratory and elocution, and in 1876 became professor of English. Child studied the English drama and Germanic philology, the latter at Berlin and Gottingen during a leave of absence, ; and he took general editorial super vision of a large collection of the British poets. He edited Spenser (5 vols., 1855), and published an important treatise in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for 1863, entitled "Observations on the Language of Chaucer's Can terbury Tales." His largest undertaking, however, grew out of an original collection of English and Scottish Ballads (8 vols., He accumulated, in the university library, one of the largest folk-lore collections in existence, studied manuscript rather than printed sources, and carried his investigations into the ballads of all other tongues, meanwhile giving a sedulous but conservative hearing to popular versions still surviving. His final collection was published as The English and Scottish Pop ular Ballads, first in ten parts (1882-98), and then in five quarto volumes, which remain the authoritative treasury of their subject. Professor Child worked—and overworked—to the last, dying in Boston Sept. 11, 1896, having completed his task save for a general introduction and bibliography. A sympathetic biograph ical sketch was prefixed to the work by his pupil and successor George L. Kittredge. (See also F. P. Stearns, Cambridge Sketches, 1905.)