Author Kirby William Forsell

William Forsell Kirby (January 14, 1844 - November 20, 1912[1]) was an English entomologist and folklorist. Born in Leicester, the eldest son of Samuel Kirby, a banker, he was educated privately, and became interested in butterflies and moths at an early age. The family had moved to Brighton and here he became acquainted with Henry Cooke, Frederick Merrifield and J N Winter.[2] 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 langua