THE NEWCASTLE MEETING 35 
[On the 24th.] The Medical section was wretched ; when 
1 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 Carlisle 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 
public meeting, when it was resolved that a Botanical Garden 
be estabhshed 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 agremens 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. 
2 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 Bridgewater Treatise of 1836 
was another buttress of science as applied to contemporary theology. His 
drollery and quaint stories were famous. 
