i 



SKETCH OF FRANK BUCKLAND. 401 



SKETCH OF FRANK BUCKLAXD. 



FRANCIS TREVELYAN BUCKLAND, who was almost univer- 

 sally known as Frank Buckland, was the eldest son of Canon Will- 

 iam Buckland, of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, afterward Dean 

 of Westminster, and author of the " Buckland Bridgewater Treatise," 

 and was born in Oxford, December 17, 1826. He attended school at 

 Cotterstock, in Northamptonshire, and spent two years with his uncle, 

 the Rev. John Buckland, at Laleham School, near Chertsey ; attended 

 Winchester College, where Dr. Moberley, afterward Bishop of Salis- 

 bury, was head-master, from 1839 to 1844 ; and in the latter year en- 

 tered Christ Church College, Oxford, where he took his bachelor's 

 degree in 1848. He then entered upon the study of surgery at St. 

 George's Hospital ; passed the College of Surgeons in 1851 ; and be- 

 came house-surgeon at that institution in May, 1852, In 1854 he was 

 gazetted assistant-surgeon to the Second Life-Guards. In 1860 he ap- 

 plied for promotion to a full surgeoncy ; but a rule was adopted, dif- 

 ferent from the old tradition of the Guards, that medical officers should 

 be promoted as vacancies occurred in the same regiment, by which pro- 

 motion was made to go by seniority in the brigade or at the discretion 

 of the colonel ; and the preference was given to an assistant-surgeon of 

 older standing from another regiment. Disappointed by this action, 

 and encouraged by the growing success of his literary and scientific 

 career, Buckland resigned his commission in 1863, and devoted himself 

 with ardor to what was to be his life-work in natural history and litera- 

 ture. " Fish-culture was henceforward his chief pursuit, and his life 

 became one of incessant activity, bodily and mental"; but every fact 

 connected with nature was interesting to him, and was held worthy to 

 be communicated to others. He had begun to write in 1852, for peri- 

 odicals, those articles which were afterward published collectively in his 

 " Curiosities of Natural History." In 1866 a third series of this work 

 M'as published, and Buckland, associated with some friends, started the 

 periodical " Land and Water," of which he was the inspiring genius 

 till the time of his death. In 1867 he was appointed one of the two 

 Inspectors of Fisheries for England and Wales, succeeding Mr. Freder- 

 ick Eden, one of the inspectors originally appointed under the Salmon- 

 Fisheries Act of 1861. This position he held and worked in for the 

 remainder of his life He shunned no exposure in the execution of 

 his favorite pursuits, but rather courted it, and professed to enjoy get- 

 ting wet, whether by being rained upon, or by wading up to his neck 

 in water while searching for eggs. Too many of these exposures, and 

 carelessness in indulging in them, brought on the illness which proved 

 fatal to him. He died, of disease which had begun with an inflamma- 

 tion of the lungs nearly two years before, on the 19th of December, 

 1880. 



TOL. XXTIII. 25 



