* 



16 LIFE OF BENJAMIN SILLIMAN. 



can, whose hospitality to us is large and free, and at his 

 table we met Bishop Polk and lady, she, a Devereux. 

 She is of the North Carolina Devereuxs, and he a relative 

 of President Polk. The party, including several gentle- 

 men, was agreeable ; the bishop and lady were affable and 

 kind, and Mrs. Polk mentioned to me an amusing poetical 

 epitaph which Archbishop Whately has written upon his 

 geological friend Professor Buckland, then of the Univer- 

 sity of Oxford, and afterwards Dean of Westminster. Hav- 

 ing been a diligent student of Professor Buckland's " Re- 

 liquiae Diluvianae," and of other writings of his, and having 

 had some personal communications with him, I expressed 

 a desire to see this effusion of Bishop Whately, a gentle- 

 man justly renowned for his truly Catholic religious char- 

 acter and publications ; but I had never before heard of 

 this extra-Episcopal effusion. Mrs. Polk was so kind as to 

 say that she would send me a copy, a promise which she 

 remembered. It lies before me now. I never saw Dr. 

 Buckland, although I have interchanged works, and occa- 

 sionally letters, with him. He is represented to have been 

 one of the most joyous of men, with inexhaustible kindness 

 and wit, and social in a high degree. His faculties were in 

 various ways subjected to too severe a pressure, especially 

 after he became Dean of Westminster,, and his mind broke 

 down in 1850, six years before his death, when he was sixty- 

 six years of age. He died in 1856. 



" Bishop Polk and lady, whose home is at Thibodeaux- 

 ville, one hundred and six miles down the river, are passing 

 the winter in New Orleans, and I meet them at the houses 

 of our friends. They do me the honor to attend my lec- 

 tures ; and Mrs. Polk, at the dinner at Mr. Duncan's, said 

 to me that she did not see how the geological conclusion 

 that the death of animals had preceded man, could be rec- 

 onciled with the Scriptures, which said that " sin brought 

 death into the world and all our woe." I replied that she 

 was quoting Milton, and not the Bible; and that even 





