820 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the guard of the train. His nature was so simple and generous that 

 he did not even then seem to realize that he had done an exceptionally 

 kind action. 



A volume might perhaps be filled with an account of Mr. Buck- 

 land's eccentricities. When he was studying oysters, he would never 

 allow any one to speak ; the oysters, he said, overheard the conversa- 

 tion, and shut up their shells. More inanimate objects than oysters 

 were endowed by him wdth sense. He had almost persuaded himself 

 that inanimate things could be spiteful ; and he used to say that he 

 would write a book on their spitefulness. If a railway-lamp did not 

 burn properly, he would declare it was sulky, and throw it out of 

 window to see if it could find a better master. He punished his port- 

 manteau on one occasion by knocking it dow^n, and the portmanteau 

 naturally revenged itself by breaking all the bottles of specimens 

 w hich it contained, and emptying their contents on its master's shirts. 

 To provide himself against possible disasters, he used to carry with 

 him an armory of implements. On the herring inquiry he went to 

 Scotland with six boxes of cigars, four dozen pencils, five knives, and 

 three thermometers. On his return, three weeks afterward, he pro- 

 duced one solitary pencil, the remnant of all this property. The 

 knives were lost, the cigars were smoked ; one thermometer had lost 

 its temper, and been thrown out of window ; another had been drowned 

 in the Pentland Frith, and a third had beaten out its own brains 

 against the bottom of a gunboat. No human being could have told 

 the fate of the pencils. 



Such w^ere some of the eccentricities of a man who will, it may be 

 hoped, be recollected by the public for the work which he did, and by 

 his friends for his kindliness, his humor, and his worth. As he lived, 

 so he died. Throughout a long and painful illness his spirits never 

 failed, and his love of fun never ceased. " I wish to be present at this 

 operation," was his quaint reply to the proposal of his surgeon that he 

 should take chloroform, and his wonderful vitality enabled him to sur- 

 vive for months under sufferings which would have crushed other 

 men. He is gone : his work is of the past ; and posterity will coldly 

 examine its merits. But his friends will not patiently wait the verdict 

 of posterity. When they recollect his rare powers of observation, his 

 capacity of expressing his ideas, his quaint humor, his kindly heart, 

 and open hand, they will say with the writer, we shall not soon look 

 on his like again. Macmillan^s Magazine. 



