BAYNES, THOMAS SPENCER English editor and man of letters, the son of a Baptist minister, was born at Wellington, Somerset. At Edinburgh university he was a pupil of Sir William Hamilton, whose assistant he became, and of whose views on logic he became the authorized exponent. This teaching was embodied in his Essay on the New Analytic of Logical Forms (185o), which was followed in the next year by a translation of Arnauld's Port Royal Logic. He became editor (185o) of the Edinburgh Guardian, then (1858) assistant editor of the Daily News, and in 1864 professor of logic at St. Andrews. He took over the editorship of the 9th edition of the Encyclopcedia Britannica in 18i3, but in 1881 his health rendered it necessary to give him a coadjutor in the person of Prof. W. Robertson Smith. Baynes worked on the book until his death shortly before its completion.
See a memoir by Prof. Lewis Campbell prefixed to his Shakespeare Studies and Other Essays (2894)•