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THE LIFE OF DEAN BUCK LAND. 

 The Life and Correspondence of William Buckland, 

 D.D., F.R.S. By his Daughter, Mrs. Gordon. 

 (London : John Murray, 1894.) 



IN the early decades of this century Geology had not 

 established for itself an acknowledged place in the 

 circle of the natural sciences. With as yet no settled 

 philosophical basis, it offered a boundless field for indul- 

 gence in the wildest conjectures and the boldest specu- 

 lation. Its votaries were, therefore, hardly regarded as 

 serious students by the scientific men of the day. On 

 the other hand, they incurred much popular odium. They 

 had drawn such strange and almost incredible pictures 

 of what they averred to have been the past history of 

 the earth, so utterly at variance with all accepted beliefs, 

 that they were looked upon with suspicion by some, 

 sneered at by others, while by a large body of blatant 

 opponents they were openly denounced as freethinkers, 

 who, under the guise of natural science, aimed at the 

 subversion of all religion. It needed some courage to 

 be a geologist in those days, and still more to be a 

 champion of the new inquiry. 



\mong the most prominent and effective of those who 

 lojd in the front of the battle and fought the hard fight 

 was William Buckland. No man did more than he to 

 raise geology from its depressed beginnings to the 

 dignity of a definite branch of natural knowledge. And his 

 name will ever be remembered with gratitude and affec- 

 tion as that of one of the clear-eyed, large-hearted fathers 

 of English geology. This proud position he gained by a 

 twofold claim. The amount, the wide range and the 

 intrinsic value of his original contributions to the science 

 would have been enough to place him in the front rank 

 of the leaders in that heroic age of geological discovery. 

 But it was not merely, perhaps not even chiefly, oy these 

 qualifications, admirable as they were, that he attained 

 to his unquestioned pre-eminence among his contem- 

 poraries. It was rather the unique personality of the man 

 which gave him his remarkable influence, irresistibly 

 engaging the sympathies and admiration of all who came 

 in contact with him, bearing down gently but firmly all 

 opposition, and gaining for him the affectionate esteem 

 even of those from whom he differed. 



His solid work remains and can be examined and 

 weighed, and its influence on the progress of his favourite 

 science can be accurately determined. But that per- 

 sonal sway passed away with him who wielded it, and is 

 now only a memory. It has not yet been adequately 

 pictured for the comprehension of those who never felt 

 it, or who coming after have only heard feeble narratives 

 of it, together, perhaps, with some of the many quaint 

 stories still in circulation that illustrate it. At the time of 

 his death numerous appreciative obituary notices of him 

 appeared, some of them by personal friends who knew 

 him well, and mourned the loss of so much that was 

 bright, inspiriting and lov.able. Some pleasant recol- 

 lections of him by his son Frank were published in the 

 NO. 1324, VOL. 51] 



last edition of Buckland's famous Bridgewater Treatise. 

 But some more detailed biography might have been 

 expected. He was a ready and copious correspondent, 

 and it might have been supposed that abundant material 

 must remain to furnish a picture of the man himself in 

 his daily life, in his family, in his lecture-room, in his 

 warm discussions with his friends, in his rambles with 

 his students, in his intercourse with farmers and masons 

 and labourers, and in his correspondence with many of 

 the most interesting men of his time. 



It was therefore with no little expectation that we 

 received the volume of which the title is placed at the 

 head of this notice. We have read it with interest and 

 pleasure, and yet, it must be frankly confessed, with some 

 measure of disappointment. Mrs. Gordon deserves the 

 thanks of all lovers of science for the filial devotion and 

 affectionate enthusiasm with which she has prepared this 

 memoir of her father. We rise, indeed, from the perusal 

 of the book with a somewhat fuller knowledge of Buck- 

 land's career, and with a little more insight into that 

 personality which gave him his charm and his influence. 

 But the information is neither of the kind nor of the 

 amount which might have been looked for from the title 

 of the volume. 



Nearly half a century has passed since Buckland was 

 stricken down by the malady which removed him from 

 active life, and after some eight years of sad seclusion 

 carried him to his grave. There can be few alive now 

 who remember him in his prime, and from whom remin- 

 iscences of the man could be obtained. Mrs. Gordon 

 appears to have done her best to procure such records 

 from surviving friends, and she has received several of 

 much interest. But it was from his own letters and 

 jottings that most of real importance was to be looked 

 for. The "correspondence," however, which appears on 

 the title-page, forms but an insignificant part of the book. 

 Long extracts are given from his lectures, his addresses 

 and his sermons. Those who want to know more of the 

 man himself would gladly exchange these citations for 

 the brief notes and the longer epistles, in which he con- 

 tinually unbosomed himself and told so graphically what 

 he was doing and thinking about from day to day. That 

 Mrs. Gordon has made such comparatively slight use of 

 such material must mean, we fear, that she has not been 

 able to recover it. In that case we must sympathise 

 with her disappointment. The task, perhaps, has been 

 too long delayed. 



In looking over the nature and amount of the work 

 done by Buckland during his busy life, one is astonished 

 at the great e.xtent of subjects which claimed his 

 attention, and in which he laboured and wrote. At one 

 time he is absorbed in the study of changes of topography, 

 whether it be the valleys of the south of England, or the 

 solution of the chalk, or the destruction of the coast by 

 landslips, or the sculpturing of the Highlands and of 

 Wales by glaciers. At other times, or even when he 

 had some of these topographical questions in hand, we 

 find him hard at work upon problems in tectonic geology 

 — British or foreign — the structure of the Alps, the 

 geology of Nice, our south-western coal-fields, or the 

 coast of Dorset. But undoubtedly it was the pateonto- 



