Robert Hunter (Encyclopædist)

Robert Hunter
Engraved illustration Benares from the Ganges in Hunter's 1863 History of India
Born	3 September 1823 Newburgh, Fife, Scotland
Died	25 February 1897 Loughton, Essex, England
Nationality	Scottish
Education	The Grammar School, Aberdeen Marischal College, University of Aberdeen
Occupation	Missionary; Encyclopædist
Employer	Free Church of Scotland
Parent(s)	John Mackenzie Hunter, Agnes Strickland

The Reverend Robert Hunter (1823–25 February 1897) was the lead editor of the Encyclopædic Dictionary, which he produced in seven volumes between 1879 and 1888. In addition, he was an ordained minister and missionary for the Free Church of Scotland, and a notable geologist, becoming a Fellow of the Geological Society.

Hunter was born in Newburgh, Fife in 1823 to John Mackenzie Hunter of Portpatrick, Wigtownshire, an excise officer, and Agnes Strickland of Ulverston, Lancashire. He was educated at the Grammar School, Aberdeen where he came first in the open exam for university bursaries and thus went to Marischal College at the University of Aberdeen. He studied Latin, Greek, Mathematics and Natural Science, frequently coming first in the exams.

His first job was as a tutor in the Bermudas, spending his free time collecting corals; in 1845 he brought home the finest preserved specimens of brain coral that professor Sir Richard Owen had ever seen.

Hunter was ordained as a minister in the Free Church of Scotland. In 1847, he went out to Nagpur, India as a missionary, to accompany the Rev. Stephen Hislop. Both men were keen geologists, and on their missionary travels they both recorded the local geology and fossils. Both of them wrote a number of geological papers, which were read in their absence at the Geological Society of London.

In 1855 Hunter was forced by ill health to return home. He wrote several articles for the British and Foreign Evangelical Review. In 1863 he published his History of India. Among his other activities, he ran services for the Presbyterian Church of England at Sewardstone,and was children's minister of the church at the Victoria Docks which was built for him by the sugar magnate, James Duncan. In England, he was a member, though never a beneficed minister, of the Presbyterian Church of England.