a person whose occupation or business it is to bake bread. There is considerable doubt as to the time when baking first became a particular profession, and bakers were introduced. It is, however, generally agreed that they had their rise in the East, and passed from Greece to Italy about the year B.C. 173. Till that time every housewife was her own baker; for the word pistor, which we find in Roman authors before this period, signified, as Varro justly observes, a person who ground or pounded the grain in a mill or mortar to prepare it for baking. According to Athe- naeus, the Cappadocians were the most approved bakers; after them the Lydians; and then the Phoenicians. To the foreign bakers brought into Rome were added a number of freemen, who were incorporated into a body, or, as they termed it, a college; from which neither they nor their children were ever allowed to withdraw. They held their effects in common, and could not dispose of any part of them. Every bakehouse had a patronus intrusted with the superintendence of it; and these patroni again elected one of their number every year, who had superintendence over all the rest, and the care of the college. Out of the body of the bakers one was every now and then admitted among the senators; and, to preserve honour and honesty in the college, they were expressly prohibited all alliance with comedians and gladiators. Every one had his own shop or bakehouse, and they were distributed into fourteen regions or wards of the city. They were excused from guardian- ships and other offices which might divert them from their employment. By British statutes bakers are declared not to be handicraftsmen. No man for using the mysteries or sciences of baking, brewing, surgery, or writing, shall be in- terpreted a handicraftsman. The bakers were a brother- hood in England before the year 1155, in the reign of King Henry II., although the white bakers were not incorporated till 1407, and the brown bakers not till 1621. The French had ancienly a great baker, grand panetier de France, who had the superintendence of all the bakers of Paris.

Baker, Henry, an ingenious and diligent naturalist, was born in Fleet Street, London, either near the end of the seventeenth, or very early in the beginning of the eighteenth century. His father's profession is not known, but his mother was in her time a midwife of great practice. He was brought up under an eminent bookseller, who preceded the elder Dodslay, to the business of a bookseller; in which, how- ever, he appears not to have engaged at all after his ap- prenticeship, or if he did, it was soon relinquished by him; for although it was in his power to have drawn away many of his master's customers, he would not set up against him. Mr Baker being of a philosophical turn of mind, and having diligently attended to the methods which might be practi- cable and useful in the cure of stammering, especially in teaching deaf and dumb persons to speak, made this the employment of his life. In the prosecution of so valuable and difficult an undertaking he was very successful, and several of his pupils have borne testimony to the ability and good effect of his instructions. He married Sophia, youngest daughter of the famous Daniel Defoe, who brought him two sons, both of whom he survived. On the 29th of January 1740 Mr Baker was elected a fellow of the Society of An- titquaries, and on the 12th of March following the same honour was conferred upon him by the Royal Society. In 1744 Sir Godfrey Copley's gold medal was bestowed upon him, for having, by his microscopical experiments on the crystallizations and configuration of saline particles, produced the most extraordinary discovery during that year. Having led a very useful and honourable life, he died at his apartments in the Strand on the 25th of November 1774, being then above seventy years of age. Several of Mr Baker's communications are printed in the Philosophical Transactions; and he was the means, by his extensive correspondence, of conveying to the society much useful intelligence. He was one of the earliest members of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, and contributed in no small degree to its rise and establishment. His principal publications are, The Microscope made Easy, and Employment for the Microscope. The first of these was published in 1742 or 1743. The second edition of the other appeared in 1764. These treatises, especially the latter, contain the most curious and important of the observations and experiments which Mr Baker either laid before the Royal Society or published separately. His memory is perpetuated by the Bakerian Lecture of the Royal Society, for the foundation of which he left by will the sum of L100.

Baker, Sir Richard, author of the Chronicle of the Kings of England, was born at Sissingherst, in Kent, about the year 1568. After going through the usual course at Hart Hall, Oxford, he travelled abroad. Upon his return he took his degree as master of arts, and in 1603 received the honour of knighthood. In 1620 he was made high sheriff of Oxfordshire: but having engaged to pay some debts of his wife's family, he was reduced to poverty, and obliged to betake himself for shelter to the Fleet prison, where he died, February 18, 1645. During his confinement, he composed numerous works, historical, poetical, and miscellaneous. Amongst these are Meditations and Disquisitions on the Lord's Prayer; Meditations, &c., on several of the Psalms of David; Meditations and Prayers upon the Seven Days of the Week; Cato Variegatus, or Cato's Moral Distichs; Theatrus Triumphans, or Theatrus Redivivus, being a reply to Prynne's Histriomastix, &c. His principal work, the Chronicle of the Kings of England, long maintained its reputation among the less critical class of readers, but is now in little esteem. The author seems to have been sometimes more studious to please than to inform, and with that view to have sacrificed even chronology itself to method. In 1658, Edward Phillips, nephew to Milton, published a third edition of this work, with the addition of the reign of Charles I. Sir Richard also translated several works from the French and Italian.

Baker, Thomas, an eminent mathematician, was born at Ilton in Somersetshire about the year 1625, and entered at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in 1640. He became vicar of Bishop's-Nymmet, in Devonshire, where he wrote The Geometrical Key, or the Gate of Equations unlocked, London, 1684. He died at Bishop's-Nymnet on the 5th of June 1690.

Baker, Thomas, a very ingenious and learned antiquary, descended from an ancient family distinguished by its loyalty, was born at Crook in 1656. He was educated at the free school at Durham, and thence removed, in 1674, to St John's College, Cambridge, where he took his degree of A.M. in 1681, and afterwards was elected fellow. Lord Crew, bishop of Durham, collated him to the rectory of Long-Newton in his diocese, in 1687; and further intended to give him that of Sedgefield, with a golden prebend, had he not incurred his lordship's displeasure for refusing to read King James II.'s declaration for liberty of conscience. The bishop, who disgraced him for this refusal, and was excepted out of King William's pardon, took the oaths to that king, and kept his bishopric till his death. Baker resigned Long-Newton on the 1st of August 1690, refusing to take the oaths; and retired to St John's, in which he was protected till the 20th of January 1716-17, when he, with one-and-twenty others, was deprived of his fellowship. After the passing of the Registering Act in 1723, he was desired to register his annuity of L40, which the last act required before it was amended and explained. Though this annuity, left him by his father for his fortune, with L20 per annum out of his collieries by his elder brother, was now his whole subsistence, he could not be prevailed on to secure himself against the act. He retained a lively resentment of his deprivations; and wrote himself in all his books, as well as in those which he gave to the college library, socius ejectus, and in some rector ejectus. He continued to reside in the college as common-master till his death, which happened on the 2d of July 1740, in consequence of a paralytic stroke.

Having been appointed one of the executors of his elder brother's will, by which a large sum was bequeathed to pious uses, he prevailed on the other two executors, who were his younger brother Francis and the Hon. Charles Montagu, to lay out L1310 of the money upon an estate to be settled upon St John's College for six exhibitors. He likewise gave to the college L100 for the consideration of L6 a-year, then only legal interest, during his life; and to the library several choice books, both printed and in manuscript, with medals and coins; besides what he left to it by his will viz. "all such books, printed and manuscript, as he had, and were wanting there." All that he ever published were, Reflections on Learning, shewing the Insufficiency thereof in its several particulars, in order to evince the usefulness and necessity of Revelation, Lond. 1709-10; and the preface to Bishop Fisher's Funeral Sermon for Margaret Countess of Richmond and Derby, 1708; both without his name. His manuscript collections relative to the history and antiquities of the university of Cambridge, amounting to forty-nine volumes in folio and three in quarto, are divided between the British Museum and the public library at Cambridge: the former possesses twenty-three volumes, the latter sixteen in folio and three in quarto. Dr Knight styles him "the greatest master of the antiquities of this our university;" and Hearne says, "Optandum est ut sua quoque collectanea de antiquitatibus Cantabrigiensibus juris faciat publici Cl. Bakerus, quippe qui eruditione summa jusdiscoique acri et subacto pollet." He had intended something like an Athene Cantabrigiensis, on the plan of the Athene Oxoniensis. The life of Baker has been written by Robert Martin, 8vo, 1784; and by Horace Walpole, in the quarto edition of his works.