NATO RL: 
385 
THURSDAY, AUGUST 27, 1885 
THE LIFE OF FRANK BUCKLAND 
Life of Frank Buckland. By his Brother-in-Law, George 
Bompas. (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1885.) 
EW Englishmen were unacquainted with the central 
figure of this admirably written memoir. His 
ubiquity as a lecturer and inspector, the happy self-forget- 
fulness and adaptability of manner which associated him 
with royal princes as readily as with seaside fishermen, 
and the strong personality by which he permanently im- 
pressed all who came in contact with him, made him 
beyond all other men of his time the representative and 
the preacher of the subject to which he devoted all the 
energies of his life. That subject was natural history, a 
term not without meaning even in the present day of 
minute and subdivided scientific work, but conterminous 
with science half a century ago, when comparative 
anatomy was hardly known, when the microscope was 
costly and imperfect, when the provinces of nature had 
not been mapped nor its workers differentiated. 
Frank Buckland was born a naturalist, into a home 
crammed with animals, living, preserved, fossil ; his mother 
a woman of rare intellectual accomplishment and scientific 
taste, his father the first geologist of the age. At three years 
old he could “ go through all the natural history books in 
the Radcliffe Library”; at four we find him lispingly ex- 
plaining to a Devonshire parson who had brought with 
pride to Dr. Buckland “some very curious fossils,” that 
they were the vertebree of an Ichthyosaurus ; at five he is 
rapturous over the teleology of the “ tongue-bone” in the 
skeleton of a whale ; and in the archeology of Worcester 
Cathedral can find only one object of interest—the figure 
of a lady who had been starved by a disease in the 
throat. 
At twelve he went to Winchester, not the least bar- 
barous school of that barbarous scholastic time. He was 
“launched,” and “tin-gloved,’ and ‘“‘toe-fit-tied,” and 
“tunded,” and “clowed,” and “ watched out” at cricket, 
and “kicked in” at foot-ball, living for two or three years 
the wretched life of a college junior amid a mob of boys 
not overlooked by any master and influenced by the bad 
traditions of a savage past. He used to say that it had 
done him good, had cured him of ‘‘bumptiousness ” and 
arrogance, but he cherished painful memories of indi- 
vidual tyrants and of special acts of tyranny, and was 
wont when a senior boy to criticise with a bitterness alien 
from the ordinary conservatism of schoolboys the coarse- 
ness of a system which turned a gentleman’s son, bred in 
the refinement of a cultured home, into an abject domestic 
serf. 
Buckland’s fagging days over, he was happy, for he could 
follow his bent undisturbed, and the pages which describe 
his later Winchester life are amongst the most amusing in 
the biography. Fond of school work he was not; he 
was, in fact, looked upon as a “thick,” and his com- 
pulsory fagging experiences had given him a dislike for 
games. But he wired trout and eels in the clear Itchen 
streams, dug out mice on “ Hills,” chased badgers on 
Twyford Down, skinned and dissected cats, moles, and 
VOL. XXXII.—No. 826 
bats, articulated skeletons, baked squirrel pies, and cooked 
mice in batter. A buzzard, an owl, and a racoon tenanted 
his lockers in ‘“ Moab,” a viper lived in his “scob” 
amongst his books, his hedgehogs kept open a perpetual 
fosse at the base of the college wall, and a regiment of 
tame jackdaws looked up to him as their patron. On 
“Saints’ days” he attended the Winchester Hospital, 
bringing back gruesome fragments of humanity in his 
pocket- handkerchief, talked medical language, treated con- 
fiding boys professionally. Applying for admission to the 
sick house on behalf of a patient who had partaken too 
generously of “husked gooseberry fool,’ he informed 
the surprised second master that the invalid had a 
“stricture of the colon ;” he was wont to offer sixpence 
to any junior who would allow himself to be bled ; and he 
treated surgically a football-wounded shin with such 
results that the leg when shown eventually to a doctor 
was pronounced to be in imminent danger of ampu- 
tation. 
The Winchester life found fuller development at Oxford, 
No one who knew Frank Buckland there will forget those 
merry breakfasts in the corner of Fell’s Buildings ; Frank 
in the blue pea-jacket and the German student’s cap, 
blowing blasts out of a tremendous wooden cow-horn ; 
the various pets who made it difficult to speak or move: 
the marmots, and the dove, and the monkey, and the 
chameleon, and the snakes, and the guinea-pigs, and the 
after-breakfast visits to the eagle or the jackal or the 
bear or the pariah dog in the little yard outside. His 
Long Vacations were spent in Germany, whence he 
brought back little besides collections of red slugs and 
green frogs ; in 1848 he entered at St. George’s Hospital, 
and in 1854 was gazetted Assistant-Surgeon to the second 
Life Guards. 
The next eight years were very pleasant ones. His 
father’s position as Dean of Westminster threw open to 
him all the best society in London: we read of parties 
at Miss Burdett-Coutts’s, at the Duke of Wellington’s, at 
Chief Baron Pollock’s; microscopic evenings at Dr, 
Carpenter’s ; walks around the Abbey with Prince Albert ; 
conversations with Sir B. Brodie, Mr. Gladstone, 
Whewell, Whately, Prof. Owen, Sedgwick, Bunsen, 
Ruskin. He was beginning to feel his strength and 
strike out his line in life; in these years he wrote his 
first magazine article, delivered his first lecture, published 
his first book. In 1865 he resigned his commission, 
married, took the house in Albany Street which he has 
made historic, started Land and Water, devoted himself 
to fish culture, became Inspector of Fisheries, and worked 
in his vocation till 1880, when he died at the age of fifty- 
four, worn out by excessive overwork and by the exposure 
to wet and cold in all seasons which his professional 
duties, as he interpreted them, involved. 
His power as a lecturer was unrivalled. He could 
keep an audience in ecstasies of laughing enjoyment for 
two hours at a stretch. He had inherited his father’s 
remarkable felicity of illustration ; his own keen delight in 
his subject was contagious, his comedy incessant and irre- 
sistible. Never was a memory more stored with interesting 
facts. He was all eyes; noted everything, remembered 
everything, used everything. Through London streets, 
as he surveyed them from his favourite seat on the knife- 
board of an omnibus, on the walls of exhibitions, on sea- 
Ss 
