8 4 
LIFE OF DEAN BUCKLAND. 
[CH. III. 
In 1824 Dr. Buckland secured a Royal Charter for the 
Geological Society, 1 and was appointed its first President. 
In February of that year he writes to the Rev. W. Vernon 
Harcourt an account of the first occasion on which he 
presided :— 
“We had a great meeting in Bedford Street on 
Friday last, the largest I ever remember. The great 
attraction was the entire Plesiosaurus which I have pur¬ 
chased for the Duke of Buckingham, and of which Mr. 
Conybeare on that evening read a description ; the speci¬ 
men is nearly entire, and, though a young animal, is ten 
feet long; when full grown it must have been twenty feet 
at least. The neck has the very unusual number of forty 
vertebrae, head like a lizard, neck like a snake, body of a 
crocodile, paddles like a turtle and two feet long, tail very 
short, nearly equal to the length of a saddle ; its neck 
(double as long in proportion as the swan) is an anomaly 
as yet unique. I had also a paper on the Stonesfield 
Megalosaurus ; so that with two monsters of such a kind, 
and so crowded an audience, my first evening of taking the 
chair as President was one of great eclat!' 
The meetings held at Somerset House were termed 
“ Noctes Geologicse,” and very brilliant these gatherings 
were when De la Beche, Conybeare, Smith, Sedgwick, 
Lyell, 2 Murchison, Owen, Daubeny, Buckland, and others 
1 The Geological Society, which was founded on November 13th, 
1807, first occupied apartments of its own early in 1809, at No. 4, 
Garden Court, Temple. In 1816 the Society removed to Bedford Street, 
Covent Garden, and on April 23rd, 1825, while still in Bedford Street, 
the Society was incorporated by a Charter, obtained by Buckland (and 
others), who was at that time President, Charles Lyell being one of the 
secretaries. 
2 Sir Roderick Murchison says: “If Buckland had done nothing 
