Cox, SIR GEORGE, an eminent mythologist, was born in 1827, and educated at Rugby and Trinity College, Oxford. He took orders in 1850, and after holding curacies in Devonshire, and an assistant-mastership at Cheltenham, became vicar of Bekesbourne in Kent, and afterwards rector of Scrayingham, York. In 1877 he succeeded to his uncle's baronetcy. An industrious man of letters, he has written much on ancient history and on mythology. His Tales of Ancient Greece (1868) was a collected edition of several admirable earlier volumes of Greek history. His most important work, The Mythology of the Aryan Nations (2 vols. 1870), was an uncompromising development of the solar and nebular hypothesis as the key to all mythologies. It is learned, lucid, and courageous; but the extreme to which a serviceable enough theory has been pushed in an attempt to account for the unaccountable, and to reconcile the irreconcilable, has exposed its real weakness. His History of Greece (2 vols. 1874) was a work of great learning, and his Introduction to the Science of Comparative Mythology and Folklore (1881) showed its author's old ingenuity and erudition, but none the less the singular limitation of his knowledge. Other works are Latin and Teutonic Christianity (1870), The Crusades (1874), History of British Rule in India (1881), and Lives of Greek Statesmen (2 vols. 1886), and concise History of England (1887). With W. T. Brande he edited the useful Dictionary of Science, Literature, and
Art (3 vols. 1865-67). His Life of Bishop Colenso appeared in 1888.