Daniel Garrison Brinton

Daniel Garrison Brinton (1837 to 1899) was an American archaeologist, ethnologist and surgeon. Born in Thornbury Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, he graduated from Yale University in 1858, studied at Jefferson Medical College, Paris and Heidelberg, and served as a Union army surgeon from 1862 to 1865. He edited the Medical and Surgical Reporter in Philadelphia from 1874 to 1887, became professor of ethnology and archeology at the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1884, and from 1886 until his death was professor of American linguistics and archeology at the University of Pennsylvania. He served as president of the American Folklore Society, the American Philosophical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His books include The Myths of the New World (1868), The Religious Sentiment (1876), American Hero Myths (1882), Races and Peoples (1890) and Religions of Primitive People (1897), and he edited the eight volume Library of Aboriginal American Literature. In his 1895 presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science he advocated the theories of scientific racism that were pervasive at the time, and in his last years he was an anarchist.