Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/409

 SMITH

SMITH

SMITH, Thomas Southwood, M.D., F.K.C.P., physician and reformer. B. Dec. 21, 1788. He was educated for the Non conformist ministry, and did clerical work for some years in Somersetshire. He then quitted the Church and went to Edinburgh University to study medicine. He was still at the university when he wrote his Deistic work, Divine Government (1814), which was greatly esteemed. After a few years of medical practice in Somersetshire he settled in London, and was appointed physician to the Fever Hospital in 1824. Smith was a zealous reformer of Bentham s school. He helped to found the Health of Towns Association in 1839, and the Metro politan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrial Classes in 1842. &quot;It has fallen to the lot of few to accom plish such extensive services for the public benefit as were rendered by Dr. S. Smith &quot; (Munk s Roll of the Royal College of Physi cians, iii, 236). He is regarded as the chief founder of the science of preventive medicine in England. Dr. Smith was Jeremy Bentham s physician and intimate friend, and it was he who dissected Bentham s body in 1832. His speech on that occasion fully endorses Bentham s principles. D. Dec. 10, 1861.

SMITH, Professor William Benjamin,

A.M., Ph.D., American mathematician. B. Oct. 26, 1850. Ed. Kentucky and Gottingen Universities. From 1871 to 1880 he was a teacher of science and languages. From 1881 to 1885 he was professor of mathematics, and from 1885 to 1888 of physics, at the Missouri Central College ; from 1888 to 1893 he was pro fessor of mathematics at Missouri Univer sity ; from 1893 to 1906 professor of mathematics at Tulane University ; from 1906 to 1915 professor of philosophy ; and since 1915 he has been emeritus professor. In 1908 Professor Smith was delegate of the United States Government to the first Pan-American Scientific Congress at San tiago. He is a member of the American Mathematical Society, the German Kant- 745

Gesellschaft, and the Circolo Matematico di Palermo. Besides his many mathe matical works, Professor Smith has pub lished Der Vorchristliche Jesus (1906) and Ecce Deus (1912), in which he denies the historicity of Jesus and expounds a learned theory of the growth of the Christ-myth.

SMITH, William Henry, writer. B. Jan., 1808. Ed. Eadley School and Glas gow University. He was trained as a solicitor, and was afterwards called to the bar, but he never practised law. He devoted himself to study and letters, writing chiefly in Blackwood s Magazine. A few plays and novels and some poetry of fair order were published by him, but he is chiefly remembered as the author of two &quot; philosophical dialogues &quot; (Thorndale : or the Conflict of Opinions, 1857, and Gravenhurst : or Thoughts on Good and Evil, 1861), which were widely discussed at the time. They are Theistic, but Smith had discarded orthodoxy in his early years. He was a friend of Mill and an admirer of Comte. D. Mar. 28, 1872.

SMITH, Professor William Robertson,

M.A., LL.D., D.D., orientalist. B. Nov. 8, 1846. Ed. privately, Aberdeen University, and New College. Son of a Free Church minister, Smith was himself trained in the Free Church seminary, and he spent a number of terms under distinguished teachers in various German universities. From 1868 to 1870 he assisted Professor Tait at Edinburgh, and he was then appointed professor of languages and Old Testament exegesis in the Free Church College at Aberdeen. He wrote a series of Biblical articles, of a very advanced character, in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and for these and other pronouncements the Scottish Free Church deposed him in 1881. He assisted Professor Baynes in editing the Encyclopaedia until 1888, when he was invited to occupy the chair of Arabic at Cambridge. In 1886 he became chief librarian of the Cambridge University 746