William Forsell Kirby
Encyclopedia : W : WI : WIL : William Forsell Kirby
William Forsell Kirby (January 14, 1844 - 1912) was an English entomologist and folklorist.
Born in Leicester, he was educated privately, and became interested in butterflies and moths at an early age. He published a small Manual of European Butterflies in 1862.
In 1867 he became a curator in the Museum of the Royal Dublin Society, and produced a ''Synonymic Catalogue of Diurnal Lepidoptera (1871; Supplement 1877).
In 1879 Kirby joined the staff of the Natural History Museum as an Assistant after the death of Frederick Smith. He published a number of catalogues, as well as Rhopalocera Exotica (1887-1897) and an Elementary Text-book of Entomology. He retired in 1909.
Kirby had a wide range of interests, knew many languages and translated (for the first time directly from Finnish, as opposed to from another language) the Finnish epic, Kalevala, into English.
Works and Achievements
Literary works
- Manual of European Butterflies. 1862
- Synonymic Catalogue of Diurnal Lepidoptera. 1871
- Familiar butterflies and moths. 1901
- Butterflies and moths of Europe (Illustrated). 1903
- Kalevala the Land of Heroes. 1907. ISBN 0674500008
- Elementary Text-book of Entomology.
- The Hero of Esthonia? and other studies in the romantic literature of that country. 1895
- Hand-book to the order Lepidoptera. 1897
He is also credited on a few other works:
- "Illustrations of diurnal Lepidoptera." by William Chapman Hewitson 1863
- "Natural history." by Richard Lydekker 1897
External links
- The Natural History Museum at South Kensington William T. Stearn ISBN 434736007
- A handbook to the order Lepidoptera [Scanned version]
- Elementary Text-book of Entomology [Scanned version]
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.