English anthropologist, born at Margate on the 1st of July 1840, and educated at Aldeburgh grammar school. At the age of fifteen he became a clerk and seven years later entered the London Joint Stock Bank, Ltd., where he rose by 1872 to the post of secretary. He interested himself in questions of the descent of man and the origins of religion, and early became known as a rationalist thinker.
Amongst his writings are The Childhood of the World (1872); The Childhood of Religions (1875); Myths and Dreams (1885); Story of Primitive Man (1895); Animism or the Seed of Religion (1906); Magic in Names (1920), and biographies of Huxley and Grant Allen, as well as a volume of Memories (1916) and a discussion of the possibility of human survival after death, entitled The Question (1917). See also The Story of Creation. (See authored article: Karl Ernst von Baer.)
