102 
LIFE OF DEAF BUCKLAND. 
[CH. IV. 
tasks neatly and quickly, and the only pocket money 
which the children had, was earned by the quantity and 
quality of the work that they did. They were taught Dr. 
Watts’ hymns, and their mother, if she ever found them 
unemployed, would make them repeat the lines : “ Satan 
finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.” Their father 
attributed almost every disaster to laziness, “ which was,” 
he said, “ the root of all evil.” 
The family life of the Bucklands is described so vividly 
in the “ Life of Frank Buckland,” that no apology is 
needed for extracting a passage from that volume:— 
‘‘ In his early home at Christ Church, besides the stuffed 
creatures which shared the hall with the rocking-horse, 
there were cages full of snakes, and of green frogs, in the 
dining-room, where the sideboard groaned under successive 
layers of fossils, and the candles stood on ichthyosauri’s 
vertebrae;. Guinea-pigs were often running over the 
table; and occasionally the pony, having trotted down 
the steps from the garden, would push open the dining¬ 
room door, and career round the table, with three laughing 
children on his back, and then, marching through the 
front door, and down the steps, would continue his course 
round Tom Quad. In the stable yard and large wood- 
house were the fox, rabbits, guinea-pigs and ferrets, 
hawks and owls, the magpie and jackdaw, besides dogs, 
cats, and poultry, and in the garden was the tortoise (on 
whose back the children would stand to try its strength), 
and toads immured in various pots, to test the truth of 
their supposed life in rock-cells. There were also visits to 
the Clarendon, where Dr. Buckland was forming the nucleus 
of the present Geological Museum of Oxford, and to the 
Ashmolean Museum, then under the wise and genial care 
of the brothers, John and Philip Duncan, where the 
children might ride the stuffed zebra, and knew all the 
animals as friends, if not yet as relations. 
