66 THE JOURNAL OF EOTANT 



organ was under repair, but Bucknall tipped the workmen to blow 

 for him and contrived to sliow that the violinist's feat of making- 

 good music on one string could be matched in other ways. The 

 great church of Santa Maria de Mahon has a line organ with a 

 curious history of capture at sea during one of the old wars when 

 Minorca was a British possession. By permission of the officiating 

 padre, wdio, as he himself admitted, played rather as a pianist, 

 Bucknall took his place after a morning service and using every 

 resource of the splendid instrument, trumpets and all, made the old 

 w^alls resound to his improvisation. The congregation staved and 

 stared, and the padre threw up his arms in amazement when, on asking 

 whose composition it was he had listened to, he learnt that the 

 music was spontaneous. 



This serious voung graduate, permeated with the meaning and 

 significance of music, could have gone on to the higher distinction 

 easily enough had he not branched off at the critical period and 

 become absorbed in astronomy and the microscope. So, unhappily, 

 the red gown was never his. He got a big telescope, however, that 

 Avas not often used, for it could only be effectively set up out of 

 doors. There was no fact nor hypothesis affecting the heavenly host 

 that he could not explain with readiness, especially when planets and 

 constellations invited a talk in the brilliant starlight of the Alps or 

 Mediterranean. He weighed his words too carefully to be a tluent 

 speaker, nor was he a born lecturer; and it must be owned that his 

 sense of humour was not fully developed. 



By the microscope Bucknall was led to botany by way of diatoms 

 and fungi. The latter group engrossed his whole leisure for many 

 years; his "Fungi of the Bristol District" (1878-1891), published 

 in the Froceedinrjs of the Bristol Naturalists^ Society, contains 

 1-131 species with excellent drawings of the more interesting. More 

 than a hundred of these were new to Britain or to science, com- 

 prising seven Agaricini {A. Buchnalli B. & Br., A. elections 

 Bucknall, etc.) and many micro-species. Of the figures in Cooke's 

 lU list rat ions, forty-four were taken from BucknalFs coloured draw- 

 ings of Bristol specimens. When the supply of fungi failed him, 

 Bucknall turned his attention to flowering plants ; and although 

 that branch of botan}^ was comparatively new to him, his industry 

 and capacity for dealing wdth difficulties soon secured him a standing 

 among systematists. His critical "Revulsion of the Genus Sym- 

 phytum " (Journ. Linn. Soc.) and his work among the Eyebrights, 

 published as a supplement to this Journal in 1917, enhanced a repu- 

 tation already well founded ; while his discovery in the Bristol 

 district of Stacliys alpina, a plant previously unknown in Great 

 Britain, aroused keen interest among the botanists of the country. 



Painstaking and accurate in everything he did, Bucknall's jjurpose 

 was ever to reach the truth b}^ all available means. Nothing slipshod 

 could be countenanced ; he made no shots. Through his pei'tinacitj- 

 he often determined the most hopeless-looking material. Tiny scraps 

 among our gatherings in other lands, after their parts jiad been 

 dissected, sectioned, soaked or boiled, and finally taken to Kew or 

 South Kensington for comparison with books and specimens, some- 



