Page:Men of the Time, eleventh edition.djvu/141

124 elected an Associate of the Royal Academy April 23, 1880.

 BIRCH,, B.D., eldest son of the Rev. Henry Rous Birch, of Southwold, Suffolk, born about 1820, was educated on the foundation at Eton, and proceeded in due course to King's College, Cambridge, where he succeeded to a Fellowship, and graduated B.A. in 1843, having obtained the Craven Scholarship, and other university distinctions. He afterwards went to Eton as one of the assistant-masters, and whilst there was selected as tutor to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. Having resigned his post and taken orders, he was appointed, in 1852, rector of Prestwich, near Manchester. He is chaplain to the Queen and to the Prince of Wales, and was appointed by the Crown to a canonry in Ripon Cathedral, vacant by the promotion of Dr. Atlay to the see of Hereford, in May, 1868. He was elected Proctor in Convocation for the Dean and Chapter of Ripon, in 1868, and again in 1874. Mr. Birch was some time honorary canon of Manchester Cathedral.

 BIRCH,, LL.D., F.S.A., eldest son of the late Rev. Samuel Birch, D.D., rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, London, and vicar of Little Marlow, Bucks, born in London, Nov. 3, 1813, was educated at private schools at Greenwich and Blackheath, and afterwards at Merchant Taylors' School, which he left in 1831. He was employed under the Commissioners of Public Records in 1834, and in 1836 was appointed assistant in the department of Antiquities of the British Museum, from which he rose to be assistant-keeper in 1844, on the retirement of Mr. Barnewell, and on the new organization of the department in 1861, he was appointed keeper of the Oriental, Mediæval, and British Antiquities and Ethnographical Collections. In 1846 Mr. Birch visited Italy by order of the trustees to examine the Anastasi collection of Egyptian antiquities at that time at Leghorn, and to see the collections of Rome and other cities. In 1856 he was again sent to Rome by Sir G. Cornewall Lewis, Chancellor of the Exchequer, to examine and value, in conjunction with Mr. Newton, the Campana collection, which had been offered to the British Government for purchase. In 1863 the description which he drew up of a papyrus belonging to the Prince of Wales was printed for private circulation by His Royal Highness. In 1839 he was elected corresponding member of the Archæological Institute of Rome; in 1851, of the Academy of Berlin; in 1852, of Herculaneum; and in 1861, of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres of the French Institute. The honorary degree of LL.D. was conferred upon him by the University of St. Andrews in 1862. He is an honorary member of the Royal Society of Literature, of the Society of Antiquaries, of the Oriental Society of France, and of the Ethnological Society of America, and is one of the direction of the Archæological Institute of Rome. At an early period of his career he paid particular attention to the study of Egyptian hieroglyphics, and his researches attracted the notice and secured him the lasting friendship of the late Baron Bunsen, with whose labours he was associated in his work on Egypt, Mr. Birch having contributed the philological portions relating to the hieroglyphics. One of the last requests of Boron Bunsen was that he should undertake the revision of future editions of this work. Accordingly, in 1867, after the Baron's death, he published the fifth and concluding volume, four-fifths of which is the composition of Dr. Birch himself. His labours extend over most branches of antiquities, he having, besides his researches in hieroglyphics, published memoirs