Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/238

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

KINGSLEY


KLEIST


sities. Son of the elder Eev. Charles Kingsley, and brother of the more famous Canon Kingsley, he showed from his youth a strong and adventurous character which had little affinity with Church ideals. He was at Paris during the Revolution of 1848, and he enthusiastically lent a hand at the barricades and received a musket-ball. At the close of his very thorough medical training he chose to travel with private patients, and he thus visited most parts of the world. From 1867 to 1870 he was in Polynesia with the Earl of Pembroke, and they described their experiences in South Sea Bubbles (1872). Kingsley was a keen sportsman as well as a naturalist, a man of wide culture and strong personality. In an excellent memoir one of her best pieces of work prefixed to his Notes on Sport and Travel (1900), his daughter, Mary Kingsley, gives a fine sketch of his character, and the letters she includes have constant expres sions of his Rationalism. Chapter iii (" Musings on Manning s Old New Zea land ") is severe on the Churches, espe cially the " foul brutality and baseness " of the Roman Church (p. 326). He seems from her description to have been an Agnostic and the first inspirer of her own scepticism. D. Feb. 5, 1892.

KINGSLEY, Mary Henrietta, traveller and writer, daughter of the preceding. B. Oct. 13, 1862. Ed. " mostly by herself " (she says). Miss Kingsley was from her early years an omnivorous reader, and she attained a very wide knowledge of science and literature. She lived at Cambridge after 1886, and found herself in the large and stimulating circle of her father s friends. Travel especially interested her, on account of his rich experience, and she began with him the study of comparative religion. After his death she got commis sions from Cambridge University and the British Museum, and made adventurous journeys through Africa (1893 and 1895). She passed through a good deal of country in which no European had yet set foot, but her relations with the natives were 403


made easy by mutual respect. In part she paid her way by trading in rubber and oil, and her collections proved very useful to science. Her works and lectures on Africa were greatly esteemed, and did much for the cultivation of proper feeling towards the natives. Miss Kingsley was a woman of great tenderness and refine ment, as well as virile intelligence and healthy humour. In a letter which Mr. Clodd reproduces in his Memories (p. 79) she tells him that she is, like him, an Agnostic. She went to South Africa to nurse the wounded Boers in 1900, and she contracted enteric fever. D. June 3, 1900.

KLAATSCH, Professor Hermann, M.D.,

German anthropologist. B. Mar. 10, 1863. Ed. Heidelberg and Berlin Universities. He was appointed assistant to Waldeyer in 1885, teacher in 1890, and professor of anatomy at Heidelberg in 1895. From 1904 to 1907 he travelled in Australia on behalf of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and on his return he was appointed pro fessor of anatomy and anthropology at the Berlin Medical Faculty and Curator of the Royal Anatomical Institute. Klaatsch was one of the leading German authorities on primitive man and a distinguished anthro pologist generally. He was a Monist, and contributed occasionally to the organ of the League, Das Monistische Jahrhundert. D. Jan. 5, 1916.

KLEIST, Heinrich von, German poet and dramatist. B. Oct. 18, 1777. Kleist served in the army against the French from 1795 to 1799, but the military life was distasteful to him, and he got per mission to retire to Frankfort University, where for two years he studied mathematics and philosophy. He again discovered that he had chosen a wrong course, and he buried himself in Switzerland for two years (1801-1802) and began to compose tragedies. They were of high quality, but unsuccessful, and he tried story-writing, returning later to tragedy. It is now 404