8 
LIFE OF DEAN BUCKLAND. 
[CH. I. 
he was to be seen wading up to his knees in search of 
fossils in the blue lias ; “ of his breakfast-table at his 
lodgings there, loaded with beefsteaks and belemnites, 
tea and terebratula, muffins and madrepores, toast and 
trilobites, every table and chair as well as the floor 
occupied with fossils whole and fragmentary, large and 
small, with rocks, earths, clays, and heaps of books and 
papers, his breakfast hour being the only time that the 
collectors could be sure of finding him at home, to bring 
their contributions and receive their pay ; of his dropping 
his hat and handkerchief from the mail to stop the coach 
and secure a fossil ; of the old woman who, finding him 
asleep on the top of the coach, relieved his pockets of a 
quantity of stones ; of his travelling carriage, built extra 
strong for the heavy loads it had to carry, and fitted up 
on the forepart with a furnace and implements for assays 
and analysis.” 
Buckland’s election to a fellowship enabled him to 
pursue those studies which made him, in the words of the 
historian and President of his College, “ one of the most 
famous of English geologists, and indeed one of the 
creators of the science.” His sitting-room, continues Dr. 
Fowler, was " a large room In the front quadrangle, now 
appropriated to the uses of an Undergraduates’ Library, 
which was fitted up by him, irrespectively of personal 
comfort, as a Geological Museum—probably the earliest 
collection of the kind in Oxford, or perhaps in England, 
arranged on anything like scientific principles.” 
This is the room which, in its state of chaos, Mr. Philip 
Duncan so well describes in a poem dated May 1821 :— 
