404 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



peculiarities of each. Mr. Cooper then suggested to him to put down 

 on paper all that he had related, for publication. Frank demurred, 

 because he did not think he could write anything worth reading, but 

 finally produced the article, which was published in " Bentley's Miscel- 

 lany." This was the beginning of the series which were afterward 

 collected and published as " Curiosities of Natural History." 



He gave his first lecture in December, 1853. It was delivered at a 

 working-men's coffee-house and institute, and was on the human body, 

 or " The House we live in." Of his qualities as a lecturer we are told 

 that "he inherited from his father the faculty of investing a subject, 

 dry in other hands, with a vivid and picturesque interest, and to this 

 he added a variety of subject and a fund of droll yet apt illustration 

 peculiarly his own. * I can't get on,' he used to say, ' until I make them 

 laugh ; then we are all right.' His drollery was irresistible, yet was 

 always informing ; while his vehement earnestness, and alternation of 

 the serious with the humorous, never failed to arrest attention." 



Two or three years after entering the Life-Guards, it occurred to 

 Buckland that he was "getting too much in the natural history line," 

 and must give more attention to medical subjects. He did not, how- 

 ever, but went deeper and deeper, and with more and more interest, 

 into natural history ; and his life in this period Avas full of his observa- 

 tions and experiments and collecting, and the writing of those charm- 

 ing articles for the periodicals. He began to write regularly for the 

 " Field " newspaper in 1856, and continued to do so till 1865, or shortly 

 before he started " Land and Water." He prepared a new edition of 

 his father's " Bridgewater Treatise," receiving valuable aid in the work 

 from Professor Owen and Professor Quekett, the former of whom 

 looked upon it as "the best elementary book that a country gentleman 

 or azure lady could take up " for the sciences of geology and paleon- 

 tology. It was framed, says Mr. Bompas, Buckland's biographer, " on 

 such broad lines as to be of permanent value, notwithstanding the 

 time which has passed since it was written, and the rapid expansion 

 of geological science." 



The year 1859 was distinguished for Buckland by the search which 

 he prosecuted in person for fourteen days, in the vaults of St. Martin's- 

 in-the-Fields, for the body of John Hunter, the father of modern physi- 

 ology, which he found at last on the 22d of February. He took his 

 friends down to see it, including Professor Owen, who expressed him- 

 self much pleased. "I wish I could have made a sketch of him," he 

 writes, " with his hand on the cofiin, looking thoughtfully at it ; it 

 would have made an excellent subject," The coffin was afterward re- 

 interred in Westminster Abbey. In the same year, the idea, carried 

 out somewhat later, of forming the Acclimatization Society, was sug- 

 gested to him after eating a dinner of eland or African antelope. 



Immediately after leaving the Life-Guards he threw all his energy 

 into the promotion of fish-culture ; and his diary is full of the records 



