I 



THE NEWCASTLE MEETING 85 



[On the 24th.] The Medical section was wretched ; when 

 I went in Dr. Bowring^ was reading a violently radical 

 paper condemning Quarantine laws and the Government 

 which allows them. 



On the 27th, at the Anniversary dinner of the Literary 

 and Philosophical Society of Newcastle, 



the Bishop of Carhsle was in the Chair and proposed several 

 toasts, among others the Universities of Great Britain, with 

 a long speech, which Buckland ^ answered to ; but neither of 

 them seemed to remember that there was such a place as 

 Glasgow, or Edinburgh either, which much offended me and 

 T. Thomson ; I thought it an especial bad compliment to 

 Dr. Graham, who was sitting at the same table as the 

 speakers. 



The botanist in him was also up in arms next day at a 

 pubHc meeting, when it was resolved that a Botanical Garden 

 be established in Newcastle, provided that it be united to a 

 Zoological one ; whereupon ' proposed that it should be called 

 a Zoological and Botanical Garden, and agreed to ; I wondered 

 why it should not be called the Botanical and Zoological 

 Gardens.' 



The minor agr^mens of the meeting included the usual 

 dinners and fetes; the botanical excursion headed by Dr. 



^ Sir John Bowring (1792-1872), merchant, linguist, traveller, diplomatist, 

 financial reformer, and man of letters. Among his varied activities he was 

 editor of the Westminster Review on its foundation by Jeremy Bentham ; M.P. 

 for the Clyde Burghs 1835-7, and for Bolton 1841 ; an original founder of the 

 Anti-Corn Law League with Cobden, and plenipotentiary in China during the 

 troubled times from 1854. Having newly returned in 1838 from a Govern- 

 ment commercial mission through Egypt, Syria, and Turkey, he was fresh from 

 the exasperating methods of quarantine in the East, which took shape in the 

 Observations on Oriental Plague and Quarantines which startled the youthful 

 Hooker. 



' William Buckland (1784-1856), wit, geologist, and divine, who was 

 Professor of Mineralogy, 1813, and Reader in Geology, 1819, at Oxford, Presi- 

 dent of the Geological Society, 1824, and Dean of Westminster, 1845. His 

 work, which was valuable and suggestive, included the proof that the ' dressed 

 rocks ' of this country were the result of planing by glacial ice-sheet ; never- 

 theless orthodoxy, alarmed at the claims of other geologists, smiled upon him, 

 for in his inaugural address he calmed these fears, and in his 'Reliquiae 

 Diluvianae ' (1823) he employed his great knowledge and intuition to correlate 

 the cave remains with the deluge. His famous Bridge water Treatise of 1836 

 was another buttress of science as applied to contemporary theology. His 

 drollery and quaint stories were famous. 



