re,
his early education was devoted to civil engineering and such
natural sciences as chemistry, geography, geology, and mineralogy.
Unfortunately, in his sixteenth year, chronic and functional heart
disease developed, which intermittently affected him through life
and deterred him from the profession of an engineer. Applying
himself to medicine, he graduated therein in 1842 at the University
of Pennsylvania, in the meantime having served as a resident
physician of the Pennsylvania Hospital. His inaugural medical
thesis, based on personal experiments and observations, gave him a
reputation which augured professional prominence. In 1843 he was
appointed physician to the United States embassy to China, under
Caleb Cushing, who was charged with the negotiation of a treaty with
that country. At the way ports and during the tedious intervals of
the treaty negotiations, Kane lost no opportunity of travel and
adventure. With Baron Loee he visited the Philippine Islands and the
volcano of Tael. Not content with the usual point of view, and
despite the protestations of the native guides, he was lowered two
hundred feet in the crater, whence he scrambled downward to the
smoking sulphur lake and dipped his specimen bottles into its
steaming waters. In his ascent the loose, heated ashes charred his
boots and gave way under his feet, the sulphur vapors nearly
asphyxiated him, he fell repeatedly, and was barely able to tie the
bamboo rope around him. Drawn up in an exhausted condition, and
carried to a neighboring hermitage, he barely escaped violence at
the hands of the offended natives, who considered his rash feat a
sacrilege.

Resigning his appointment with the legation, Kane established
himself as a physician at Whampoa, on the Canton River, where
illness shortly broke up his professional practice. Fortunately for
his future fame he was unsuccessful in his application to the
Spanish Government for permission to practise medicine at Manilla,
and Kane returned to the United States by the way of Singapore,
India, Egypt, and Europe, his journey marked by adventure and
danger. In these, as in all other sea voyages, he suffered
excessively from sea-sickness, which required all of his indomitable
will to endure with equanimity.

In 1846 he was commissioned assistant surgeon in the United States
Navy; his first sea duty took him to the west coast of Africa, where
coast fever invalided him within ten months. His desire for active
se