68 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society voi. viii 



The Rector of Barham and His Times. 



By R. P. Dow, Brooklyn, N. Y. 



Blessed is the novelist who in drawing a character gives to 

 the world a type which, mutato nomine, might be any one of many 

 actual personages. A reader of Anthony Trollope especially, 

 of George Eliot or Jane Austen knows necessarily many English 

 country clergymen of a century or two ago and pictures clearly 

 their whole environment. Trollope 's favorite clergyman is born 

 rather above the middle class, attends the University, stands 

 well in his classes, after taking a degree gets a curacy on very 

 small pay, marries, works hard, preaches two sermons every 

 Sunday, visits his parishioners, ministers to the sick and needy, 

 and finds time to carry on some scholarly hobby. If fortunate, 

 he is promoted to a good living and a rectorship. After that 

 there are fewer sermons to preach, fewer parochial visits, more 

 time to pursue one's hobby, more opportunity for an occasional 

 run down to London, more correspondence with the outside 

 world. The life he leads is a healthy one and generally his old age 

 is peaceful and prolonged. He is charitable of opinion and mild 

 of temper, his wildest outburst probably over some tract in 

 ecclesiastical polemics. Precisely such was the Rector of Barham, 

 a village in Suffolk, five miles from the large town of Ipswich, 

 a day's walk from the seashore, and seventy miles from London. 



William Kirby was bom in 1759, came to Barham on his 

 ordination and worked in the parish seventy years until his 

 death in 1850. During that time he never failed (verbally or 

 mentally) to chastise a dissenter, observe a flower or regard an 

 insect. He was the typical country collector in all orders. He 

 never walked without a bottle of gin in his hip pocket, but not 

 for drinking purposes. A glass or two of ale was refreshment 

 enough for the parson himself. The gin bottle was the reposi- 

 tory of the hapless beetles. In Kirby 's day there was no dena- 

 tured alcohol at 2s. a gallon, no cyanide bottles, no steel entomo- 

 logical pins, no patent cork sheets, no Schmitt boxes. Bruised 

 laurel leaves in a bottle gave a slow euthanasia to captured but- 

 terflies. There was no fast train to the meeting place of the 

 entomological society in the metropolis. There was the slow 

 coach and the day's journey. 



