GRIFFIS, WILLIAM ELLIOT (1843— ). An American clergyman, educator, and author, born in Philadelphia. He served with the Forty-fourth Pennsylvania Regiment in the Civil War, and then entered Rutgers College, where he gradu ated in 1869. After one year of study at the Dutch Reformed Theological Seminary at New Brunswick, N. J., he-ateepted an appointment to organize schools on the American model in Japan, and was the first American teacher in regions be yond the open ports. On the fall of the feudal system and the unification of the Empire, he was appointed professor of the physical sciences in the Imperial University of Tokio. He prepared the New Japan Series of reading and spelling books and primers for Japanese students in the English language, and contributed to the Japan ese press, and to newspapers and magazines in the United States numerous papers of impor tance on Japanese affairs. In 1874 he returned to New York, where he finished his theological studies at the Union Theological Seminary; and in 1877 was made pastor of the First Reformed Church in Schenectady, N. Y.; in 1886, of the
Shawmut Congregational Church in Boston; and in 1893 of the Congregational Church in Ithaca, N. Y. He is the author of: The Mikado's Empire (1876) ; Japanese Fairy'World (1880) ; Asiatic History (1881) ; Corea, the Hermit Nation (1882) ; Sir William Johnson and the Six Na tions (1891) ; Matthew Galbraith Perry (1887) ; The Lily Among Thorns (1889) ; Honda, the Samurai (1890) ; Japan: in History, Folklore, and Art (1892) ; Brave Little Holland, and What She Taught Us (1894) ; The Religions of Japan (1895) ; Townsend Harris, First American Envoy to Japan (1895) ; The Pilgrims in Their Three Homes—England, Holland, and America (1898) ; America in the East (1899) ; The American in Holland (1899) ; Verbeck in Japan (1900) ; The Pathfinders of the Revolution (1900) ; and re vised, with additional matter, Bayard Taylor's Japan in Our Way (1902).