KIPPER, properly the name by which the male salmon is known at some period of the breeding season. At the approach of this season the male fish develops a sharp cartilaginous beak, known as the “kip,” from which the name “kipper” is said to be derived. The earliest uses of the word (in Old English cypera and Middle English kypre) seem to include salmon of both sexes, and there is no certainty as to the etymology. Skeat derives it from the Old English kippian, “to spawn.” The term has been applied by various writers to salmon both during and after milting; early quotations leave the precise meaning of the word obscure, but generally refer to the unwholesomeness of the fish as food during the whole breeding season. It has been usually accepted, without much direct evidence, that from the practice of rendering the breeding (i.e. “kipper”) salmon fit for food by splitting, salting and smoke-drying them, the term “kipper” is also used of other fish, particularly herrings cured in the same way. The “bloater” as distinct from the “kipper” is a herring cured whole without being split open.
KIPPIS, ANDREW (1725-1795), English nonconformist divine and biographer, son of Robert Kippis, a silk-hosier, was born at Nottingham on the 28th of March 1725. From school at Sleaford in Lincolnshire he passed at the age of sixteen to the nonconformist academy at Northampton, of which Dr Doddridge was then president. In 1746 Kippis became minister of a church at Boston; in 1750 he removed to Dorking in Surrey; and in 1753 he became pastor of a Presbyterian congregation at Westminster, where he remained till his death on the 8th of October 1795. Kippis took a prominent part in the affairs of his church. From 1763 till 1784 he was classical and philological tutor in Coward’s training college at Hoxton; and subsequently for some years at another institution of the same kind at Hackney. In 1778 he was elected a fellow of the Antiquarian Society, and a fellow of the Royal Society in 1779.
Kippis was a very voluminous writer. He contributed largely to The Gentleman’s Magazine, The Monthly Review and The Library; and he had a good deal to do with the establishment and conduct of The New Annual Register. He published also a number of sermons and occasional pamphlets; and he prefixed a life of the author to a collected edition of Dr Nathaniel Lardner’s Works (1788). He wrote a life of Dr Doddridge, which is prefixed to Doddridge’s Exposition of the New Testament (1792). His chief work is his edition of the Biographia Britannica, of which, however, he only lived to publish 5 vols. (folio, 1778-1793). In this work he had the assistance of Dr Towers. See notice by A. Rees, D.D., in The New Annual Register for 1795.
KIRBY, WILLIAM (1759-1850), English entomologist, was born at Witnesham in Suffolk on the 19th of September 1759. From the village school of Witnesham he passed to Ipswich grammar school, and thence to Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1781. Taking holy orders in 1782, he spent his entire life in the peaceful seclusion of an English country parsonage at Barham in Suffolk. His favourite study was natural history; and eventually entomology engrossed all his leisure. His first work of importance was his Monographia Apum Angliae (2 vols. 8vo, 1802), which as the first scientific treatise on its subject brought him into notice with the leading entomologists of his own and foreign countries. The practical result of a friendship formed in 1805 with William Spence, of Hull, was the jointly written Introduction to Entomology (4 vols., 1815-1826; 7th ed., 1856), one of the most popular books of science that have ever appeared. In 1830 he was chosen to write one of the Bridgewater Treatises, his subject being The History, Habits, and Instincts of Animals (2 vols., 1835). This undeniably fell short of his earlier works in point of scientific value. He died on the 4th of July 1850.
Besides the books already mentioned he was the author of many papers in the Transactions of the Linnean Society, the Zoological Journal and other periodicals; Strictures on Sir James Smith’s Hypothesis respecting the Lilies of the Field of our Saviour and the Acanthus of Virgil (1819); Seven Sermons on our Lord’s Temptations (1829); and he wrote the sections on insects in the Account of the Animals seen by the late Northern Expedition while within the Arctic Circle (1821), and in Fauna Boreali-Americana (1837). His Life by the Rev. John Freeman, published in 1852, contains a list of his works.