Jul}-, 1918, The Irish Naturalist. c^j 



WILLIAM FRANCIS DE VISMES KANE. 



By the death of W. F. de Vismes Kane, who passed away 

 suddenly at his country house, Drumreaske, near Monaghan, 

 on April i8th, at the age of seventy-eight, we lose the last of 

 that generation of Irish naturalists to whom most of those 

 now working looked for help and guidance in their early 

 studies. Unhappily no life-long comrade of our departed 

 friend can be asked to place on record the facts and lessons 

 of his career, but we had the privilege of association with 

 him at different times during the last thirty years, and his 

 daughter, Miss Rhoda de Vismes Kane, has kindly furnished 

 many interesting details from family records, including an 

 unfinished autobiographical sketch of his own. 



Kane was born at Withycombe, near Exmouth, Devon, 

 in the year 1840. His father, Joseph Kane, the eldest 

 son of Colonel Nathaniel Kane, a Dublin man, had migrated, 

 on account of delicacy, to the south-western district of 

 England, where he met and married the onl}^ daughter of the 

 Comte de Vismes, a French nobleman resident in England, 

 whose wife was a sister of Dr. Salt, British consul-general in 

 Egypt, well known as a traveller and a collector of Egyptian 

 antiquities. Sprung thus from a strain in which Irish, 

 French and English lines were blended, Kane passed his 

 .early boyhood in a district of great scenic beauty with 

 abundant opportunity for natural history studies ; while 

 still quite young he began to make collections of shells and 

 insects and to accompan}^ the south Devon fishermen when 

 they put to sea. 



After his father's death Kane Vv'ent to a small boarding- 

 school in London, " where he was badly fed and taught and 

 was very miserable." A clergyman's house in Gloucester- 

 shire, where a few private pupils were taken, provided a 

 more satisfactory educational environment ; thence he 

 passed to Cheltenham College, and later took his Universit}^ 

 courses in arts and engineering at Trinity College, Dublin, 

 his home after his settlement in his father's native country 

 being the house of his uncle, John Kane, in Co. Leitrim. 



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