1784-1808.] 
EARLY LIFE. 
5 
he will probably make a better return for any extraordinary 
expense you may incur on this occasion.” To his uncle's 
judicious care and assistance Dr. Buckland doubtless 
owed much in his progress through life. A sagacious, 
energetic, stern-minded man, he was ever at his nephew’s 
elbow, urging him to renewed efforts with encouragement, 
rebuke, and assistance. 
As a boy at Winchester he became familiar, as he 
himself states, “ with the chalk formation, from the fact of 
the pathway to the playground on St. Catherine’s Hill pass¬ 
ing close to large chalk pits, which abounded with sponges 
and other fossils, and from the practice of digging field 
mice from their holes in the surface of the chalk.” Even 
in his schoolboy days he had already begun to collect 
objects of natural history, and was eager in the pursuit, 
or observation of the habits, of the mole-crickets, which 
abounded in the valley of the Itchen. 
As a boy he was slow to learn, but what he once under¬ 
stood he never forgot. On one occasion, when he had 
regained several places which he had lost in class, the Head 
Master, Dr. Goddard, said to him, “ Well, Buckland, it is 
as difficult to keep a good boy at the bottom of his class 
as it is to keep a cork under water.” In later life he kept 
up his old Winchester associations by attending the yearly 
Wykehamist dinner in London, and he sent his sons—Frank, 
the well-known naturalist, and Edward, who was for many 
years in the Treasury—to that school. William Buckland’s 
name may still be seen inscribed on a marble tablet upon 
the walls of the Seventh Chamber. 
In 1801 he was elected Scholar of Corpus Christi 
