Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol III (1901).djvu/81

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Kingsley
67
Kingsley

several papers, and a member of the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers. He survived the completion of his history only a few months, and died on 28 Sept. 1898.

In 1848 he married Maria Margaret, daughter of William Burns Lindsay, clerk of the legislative assembly of the province of Canada. Queen Victoria bestowed on his widow a civil list pension of 100l. in recognition of his services.

[Morgan's Can. Men and Women of the Time, p. 539; Canadian Magazine, January 1899; Canadian Gazette, London, 6 July 1899; Canadian Sessional Papers, Supplementary Report on Public Works, 1890, p. 23; Wrong's Toronto Univ. Studies, i. 10, ii. 18; Bourinot's Bibliography, Roy. Soc. Canada, p. 47; Toronto Globe, 29 Sept. 1898; Parish Register, St. Lawrence Jewry. E.C.; private information.]


KINGSLEY, MARY HENRIETTA (1862–1900), traveller and writer, born in Islington on 13 Oct. 1862, was the only daughter and eldest child of Dr. George Henry Kingsley [q. v.] by his wife, Mary Bailey. Charles Kingsley [q. v.] and Henry Kingsley [q. v.] were her father's brothers, Her parents removed to Highgate in 1863, soon after her birth, and there she passed her first sixteen years. She had a somewhat irregular home-training, among books, quiet domestic duties, the care of numerous pet animals and a rambling garden, duties and interests which stayed by her through life. She was not sent to school or college, but read omnivorously, and in truth had a world of her own amid the old books of travel, natural history, or alchemy,works on science, country sport, and literature, which she found on her father's shelves. The family led a retired life, and Mary grew up a shy, rather silent girl, disliking social gatherings but eagerly benefiting by intercourse with a sympathetic friend or a scientific neighbour. Her father was an enthusiastic traveller with keen scientific interests. These his daughter fully shared. She was fond of natural history, especially of her father's favourite study of fishes and their ways. She learned German, but not French, which later she regretted.

In 1879 the household removed to Bexley in Kent; here she experimented in mechanics, studied chemistry, and, through friendship with Cromwell Fleetwood Varley [q. v.], dived into electricity. With an increasing zest for scientific studies she took up ethnography and anthropology. In the spring of 1886 another move was made to Cambridge, where her brother was just entered at Christ's College. This change had a great effect upon her, besides improving her health, which had been somewhat delicate. In the society of cultivated men and women, congenial to her father and herself, she gained confidence in her own powers, winning friends and appreciation for her own sake. About the spring of 1888 a friend took her to Paris for a week — her first taste of foreign travel. During the four years that followed she devoted herself with tender capability to nursing her mother, who had been attacked by serious illness, and during the latter part of the period she also had the care of her father, who had returned home broken in health after rheumatic fever. Dr. Kingsley died in February 1892, and his wife in April. The heavy sense of responsibility which had naturaly weighed upon Mary Kingsley was lightened, and after a trip to the Canaries in the late spring she came back restored in health and tone, with a mind full of new possibilities awakened by the incidents of her voyage. Removing with her brother to Addison Road, London, filled by the hereditary passion for travel, she renounced an intention of studying medicine in order to pursue the study, which she had already begun with her father, of early religion and law. She was resolved personally to investigate the subject in uncivilised countries; she had formerly thought of going to India for the purpose, but instead she now prepared for a voyage to tropical West Africa. Her friends, Dr. Guillemard of Cambridge and Dr. Giinther of the British Museum, encouraged her to collect beetles and freshwater fishes; she read Monteiro and other books on the West Coast; and, with a few introductions to Portuguese colonists and others, she, happy in the sense of freedom, started alone in August 1893. She sailed down the coast to St. Paul de Loanda, made her way thence by land to Ambriz, across many parts hitherto untravelled by Europeans, through great difficulties of swamp, bush, and river while gathering her collections. She also visited duringthis journey Kabinda and Matadi on the Congo river; and, returning by way of Old Calabar, reached England in January 1894. On this first journey she gained some acquaintance with the customs and fetish (i.e. religion) of the Fjort tribes in the old kingdom of Congo, which she afterwards utilised in an introduction to Mr. R. Dennet's Folk Lore of the Fjoṙt' (1898).

The collections which she brought home were of value to naturalists; and the voyage had been a foretaste of what she might do with more definite aims and a better knowledge of how to attain them. During 1894