 Up to 1880, the editor, and author of the Foreword, was Thomas Spencer Baynes—the first English-born editor after a series of Scots—and W. Robertson Smith afterwards.An intellectual prodigy who mastered advanced scientific and mathematical topics, Smith was a professor of theology at the Free Church College in Edinburgh, and was the first contributor to the "Britannica" who addressed the historical interpretation of the Bible, a topic then already familiar on the Continent of Europe.Dr.