active 1883-1912 James Weir

Born in Owensboro, Kentucky, and identified in public-domain library records as James Weir Jr. (1856–1906), he wrote as both a doctor and a science-minded essayist. Surviving bibliographic records link him to works including The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire (1897) and The Dawn of Reason; or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals (1899).

His nonfiction ranges widely but keeps returning to one big question: how much of human thought and feeling grows out of biology. In The Dawn of Reason, he argued for continuity between human and animal minds, while his other work took on more controversial subjects in psychology and religion.

Because the surviving online record is fairly thin, some biographical details are unclear. What can be confirmed is that he was an American zoological and physiological writer as well as a physician, and that his work was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.