His father was Frederick Smith, a well-known entomologist, and assistant keeper of zoology in the British Museum, Bloomsbury.

[1] Edgar Albert Smith was educated both at the North London Collegiate School and privately, being well grounded in Latin amongst other subjects, as his excellent diagnoses bear witness.

[1] He was the author of A Guide to the Shell and Starfish Galleries (London, 1901), with Francis Jeffrey Bell (1855–1924) and Randolph Kirkpatrick (1863–1950), foreword by Sir Edwin Ray Lankester.

[5] The molluscan faunas of the African Great Lakes also claimed his attention, and formed the subject of a presidential address before the Malacological Society of London, in which no support was given to the views of Mr. John Edmund Sharrock Moore, who regarded the gastropods of Lake Tanganyika as representing forms that had their origin in marine Jurassic times.

[6] His works about freshwater snails of Africa include a number of papers; new taxa described by Smith include: 1877 1880 1881 1890 1895 1899 1901 1903 1904 Mr. Smith had some slight connection with geological work, as he was appealed to on more than one occasion to determine molluscan remains found in the post-Pliocene deposits of South Africa, when the majority of the species could be referred to recent forms.

[1] He was also joint author with Richard Bullen Newton of a paper:[1] 1877 1907 1904 1907 This article incorporates public domain text from references[1][2] (in chronology order)