ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XXVll 



William Buckland was the eldest son of the Rev. Charles Buck- 

 land, Elector of Templeton and Trusham, in the county of Devon ; 

 he was bom at Axminster, March 12th, 1784, and in 1797 was at 

 the ancient grammar-school founded by Blundel, a cloth manufac- 

 turer at Tiverton*, in the 17th century; in 1798 he entered St. 

 Mary's College, Winchester, and in 1801 Corpus Christi College, 

 Oxford, as a Scholar on the Exeter Foundation. In 1805 he took 

 his degree of B.A., and in 1808 was elected a Fellow of his College. 

 At this time the lectures of Dr. Kidd, Professor of Mineralogy, began 

 to draw attention to the study of geology, then first assuming in 

 England the aspect of a regular science through the labours of the 

 Founders of the Geological Society ; and it was only natural that 

 one who as a boy had manifested a strong bias towards the study 

 of natural history, having commenced when at Winchester a collec- 

 tion of chalk fossils, should have eagerly listened to his teaching, and 

 continued at Oxford amongst the shells of the Oolite his habit of col- 

 lecting. His associate in such researches was Mr. Broderip of Oriel 

 College, who had acquired much knowledge of these subjects from 

 the Rev. J. Townsend, the friend and fellow-labourer of William 

 Smith ; and it is said that the fruits of the first geological walk up 

 Shotover Hill formed the nucleus of that large collection which forty 

 years afterwards Dr. Buckland placed in the Oxford Museum. From 

 1808 to 1812 he traversed on horseback a large part of the south- 

 west districts, collecting from those tracts, which had been the scene 

 of the earlier labours of Smith, materials for forming sections of the 

 strata and grouping together their organic remains. In 1813 he was 

 appointed Professor of Mineralogy at Oxford, on the resignation of 

 Dr. Kidd, and became a Fellow of the Geological Society. 



Ranking now amongst the most eminent inquirers into the physical 

 history of the earth, he embraced, as Dr. Kidd had done, geology as 

 well as mineralogy in his lectures, and quickly awakened in the Uni- 

 versity that admiration for, and interest in geology, which doubtless 

 led to its public recognition as a science by the endowment, in 1819, 

 of a Readeiship for Geology, a stipend having been allotted from the 

 Treasury, at the instigation of His Royal Highness the Prince Regent, 

 for the delivery of an annual course of lectures on Geology ; and to 

 this new ofiice Dr. Buckland was appointed. The Inaugural Address 

 which, on this occasion. Dr. Buckland delivered, on the loth May, 

 1819, before the University deserves especial notice, as it expressed 

 not only his own views upon questions then warmly discussed, but 

 those of a large portion of men of science, including the great Cmaer. 

 It was only naturui that the discoveries then beginning to be made 

 in geology should have alarmed some pious but rather narrow-minded 

 persons who thought that they were at variance with the Mosaic ac- 

 count of the creation ; but the objections they urged were met in a 

 frank and manly spirit by Dr. Buckland, who quoted in support of 

 his own opinions the following passage from the 'Records of Creation' 

 by Sumner : — " According to the Mosaic history we are bound to 

 admit, that only one general destruction or revolution of the globe 



* The second centenary was celebrated on the day I joined this school. — J.E.P. 



