Alexander Hay Japp

Alexander Hay Japp (26 December 1836 – 29 September 1905) was a Scottish author, journalist and publisher.

Life Born at Dun, Angus, on 26 December 1836, he was youngest son of Alexander Japp, a carpenter, by his wife Agnes Hay. After his father's early death, the mother and her family moved to Montrose, where he was educated at Milne's school. At seventeen Japp became a book-keeper with Messrs. Christie and Sons, tailors, at Edinburgh. Three years later he moved to London, and for two years was employed in the East India department of Smith, Elder and Co.

Returning to Scotland in poor health, he worked for Messrs. Grieve and Oliver, Edinburgh hatters, and in his leisure in 1860–1 attended classes at the university in metaphysics, logic, and moral philosophy. He became a double prizeman in rhetoric, and received from Professor William Edmondstoune Aytoun a special certificate of distinction; but he did not graduate. 2nd edit. 1879, revised edit. in one vol. 1890).

Japp tried many genres. Under a double pseudonym he issued in 1878 Lights on the Way (by "the late J. H. Alexander, B.A.", with explanatory note by "H. A. Page"), which was semi-autobiographical fiction. There followed:

German Life and Literature (1880; studies of Lessing, Goethe, Moses Mendelssohn, Herder, Novalis, and other writers); Hours in my Garden, and Other Nature-Sketches (1893) three volumes of verse: The Circle of the Year: a Sonnet Sequence with Proem and Envoi (privately printed, 1893); Dramatic Pictures, English Rispetti, Sonnets and other Verses (1894); Adam and Lilith: a Poem in Four Parts (1899; by "A. F. Scot"); Animal Anecdotes arranged on a New Principle (by "H. A. Page") (1887); it attempted to show that the faculties of certain animals differ in degree rather than in kind from those of men; Offering and Sacrifice: an Essay in Comparative Customs and Religious Development by "A. F. Scot" (1899); Some Heresies in Ethnology and Anthropology dealt with under his own name (1899); More Loose Links in the Darwinian Armour (1900); Our Common Cuckoo and Other Cuckoos and Parasitical Birds (1899), a criticism of the Darwinian view of parasitism; and Darwin Considered Mainly as Ethical Thinker (1901), criticism of the hypothesis of natural selection.

Family Japp married twice:

in 1863 Elizabeth Paul Falconer (died 1888), daughter of John Falconer of Laurencekirk in Kincardineshire; Eliza Love, of Scottish descent.

There were seven children of the first marriage.