HITCHCOCK, ROSWELL DWIGHT (1817-1887), American divine, was born at East Machias, Maine, on the 15th of August 1817, graduated at Amherst College in 1836, and later studied at Andover Theological Seminary, Mass. After a visit to Germany he was a tutor at Amherst in 1839-1842, and was minister of the First (Congregational) Church, Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1845-1852. He became professor of natural and revealed religion in Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, in 1852, and in 1855 professor of church history in the Union Theological Seminary in New York, of which he was president in 1880-1887. He died at Somerset, Mass., on the 16th of June 1887. Among his works are: _Life of Edward Robinson_ (1863); _Socialism_ (1879); _Carmina Sanctorum_ (with Z. Eddy and L. W. Mudge, 1885); and _Eternal Atonement_ (1888). HITCHIN, a market town in the Hitchin parliamentary division of Hertfordshire, England, on the small river Hiz, 32 m. N. from London by the Great Northern railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 10,072. It is the junction of the main line with the Cambridge branch, and with a branch of the Midland railway to Bedford. The church of St Mary is Perpendicular, with a fine porch, a painting of the Adoration of the Magi, attributed to Rubens, a small crypt said to have been used by Cromwell as a prison for the Royalists, and many interesting monuments. Hitchin Priory is a mansion on the site of a Carmelite foundation of the early 14th century. A Gilbertine nunnery, founded later in the same century, stood adjacent to the church, and portions of the buildings appear in an existing block of almshouses. The grammar school (1632) was reconstituted in 1889 for boys and girls. Straw-plaiting, malting, brewing, and the cultivation and distillation of lavender and peppermint are carried on. HITTITES, an ancient people, alluded to frequently in the earlier records of Israel, and also, under slightly variant names, in Egyptian records of the XVIIIth, XIXth and XXth Dynasties, and in Assyrian from about 1100 to 700 B.C. They appear also in the Vannic cuneiform texts, and are believed to be the authors of a class of monuments bearing inscriptions in a peculiar pictographic character, and widely distributed over Asia Minor and N. Syria, around which much controversy has raged during the past thirty years.