Frederic Meyer Bird
Frederic Meyer Bird [1]
a Presbyterian and eventually an Episcopalian minister, was born in Philadelphia, June 28, 1838; graduated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1857, and Union Theological Seminary in 1860; became a Lutheran minister in the same year; all army chaplain in 1862-63; and entered the Episcopal ministry in 1868. He became professor at Lehigh University in 1881, teaching psychology, Christian evidences, and rhetoric. He died in 1890. He gave special attention to the study of hymnology, and his library on the subject, numbering about 4000 volumes, is now in Union Theological Seminary. He edited, Charles Wesley as Seen in his Finer and Less Familiar Hymns (1867) with Dr. B. M. Smucker, the Lutheran Pennsylvania ministerium Hymns (1865), now used as the Lutheran General Council Church-book: and with bishop Odenheimer, Songs of the Spirit (1871). He also wrote most of the hymnological articles in the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia, and most of the American matter in Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology.
