The writings of Edward Burnett Tylor, "founder of modern anthropology," are classics of Victorian social science and of "the warfare between science and religion." Even though much of its evolutionary framework was discarded by later anthropologists, Tylor's greatest work, Primitive Culture (1871), established many of the themes of the modern "human sciences," including folklore and comparative religion as well as anthropology, and influenced the work of Andrew Lang, James Frazer, and Franz Boas, among others.

The son of Harriet Skipper Tylor and Joseph Tylor, a prosperous Quaker industrialist who owned a brass foundry in London, Tylor was educated at Grove House, a private school run by the Society of Friends. Because of his family's Nonconformism, he was unable to attend Oxford or Cambridge, though years later he became the first professor of anthropology at Oxford. At sixteen he went to work in his father's business, but six years later...