Howard Crosby (27 February 1826 – 29 March 1891) was an American Presbyterian preacher, scholar and professor. He was Chancellor of New York University. Biography Crosby was born in New York City in 1826 to William Bedlow Crosby and Harriet Ashton Clarkson. His ancestors included Judge Joseph Crosby of Massachusetts, Gen. William Floyd of New York, a signer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Rip Van Dam, and Matthias Nicoll. He is also the father of Ernest Howard Crosby, and a relative of Fanny Crosby. Crosby graduated in 1844 from NYU where he was one of the founding fathers of the Gamma Chapter of the Delta Phi fraternity, and became professor of Greek at NYU in 1851. In 1859, he was appointed professor of Greek at Rutgers College, New Brunswick, New Jersey, where two years later he was ordained pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of New Brunswick. From 1863 until his death he was pastor of Fourth Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York. From 1870 to 1881 Crosby was chancellor of New York University, then known as the University of the City of New York. He was one of the American revisers of the English version of the New Testament. Crosby took a prominent part in politics. He urged to excise reform and opposed total abstinence. He was one of the founders and the first president of the New York Society for the Prevention of Crime, and pleaded for better management of Indian affairs and international copyright. Among his publications are The Lands of the Moslem (1851), Bible Companion (1870), Jesus: His Life and Works (1871), True Temperance Reform (1879), True Humanity of Christ (1880), and commentaries on the book of Joshua (1875), Nehemiah (1877) and the New Testament (1885). He was also president of the American Philological Association and in 1871 gave a presidential address, excerpted in the Proceedings of the American Philological Association. "Linguistics or philology may be considered either as a science or as a philosophy. Under the first aspect we may gain some idea of its extent by thinking of the vast number of languages which are to be investigated, not only those now spoken, but also many of which we have but the fossils. It touches here psychology and history, and enables us to know the unseen. A linguistic criticism is the source of all true commentary. By philology we can reconstruct prehistoric man, and