WILLIAM

See also:

• WILLIAM KIRBY (1759–1850)

KIRBY (1759–1850)  , English entomologist, was born at Witnesham in Suffolk on the 19th of September 1759 . From the village school of Witnesham he passed to Ipswich grammar school, and thence to Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1781 . Taking holy orders in 1782, he spent his entire life in the peaceful seclusion of an English country parsonage at Barham in Suffolk . His favourite study was natural history; and eventually entomology engrossed all his leisure . His first work of importance was his Monographia Apum Angliae (2 vols . 8vo, 1802), which as the first scientific treatise on its subject brought him into notice with the leading entomologists of his own and foreign countries . The practical result of a friendship formed in 1805 with William Spence, of Hull, was the jointly written Introduction to Entomology (4 vols., 1815–1826; 7th ed., ,856), one of the most popular books of science that have ever appeared . In 183o he was chosen to write one of the Bridgewater Treatises, his subject being The History, Habits, and Instincts of Animals (2 vols., 1835) . This undeniably fell short of his earlier works in point of scientific value . He died on the 4th of July 185o . Besides the books already mentioned he was the author of many papers in the Transactions of the Linnean Society, the Zoological Journal and other periodicals; Strictures on Sir James Smith's Hypothesis respecting the Lilies of the Field of our Saviour and the Acanthus of Virgil (1819); Seven Sermons on our Lord's Temptations (1829); and he wrote the sections on insects in the Account of the Animals seen by the late Northern Expedition while within the Arctic Circle (1821), and in Fauna Boreali-Americana (1837) . His Life by the Rev .

John Freeman, published in 1852, contains a list of his works .