JEVONS, F. B. (1858–1936), was an English classical scholar. Frank Byron Jevons played a significant role in popularizing the comparative study of religion in the English-speaking world during the two decades before World War I. Jevons, who was classical tutor at the University of Durham from 1882 to 1910, joined R. R. Marett, Andrew Lang, Gilbert Murray, and other Edwardians in applying the theoretical formulas of British evolutionist anthropology to the interpretation of Greco-Roman texts.

Magic was his special area of interest; he questioned the conclusion of James G. Frazer and others that magic necessarily preceded religion along a unilineal, evolutionary pathway. As he put it in his Idea of God in Early Religions (1910), magic and religion were "two moods" that were different from the beginning. Likewise, prayers and the worship of gods were phenomena that were originally separate from (and apparently as ancient as) spells and...