220 
LIFE OF DEAN BUCK LAND. 
[CH. IX. 
thought of for him. I think Sir R. Peel has shown much 
moral courage in making choice of a person of science, 
for it was sure to raise a clamour, and among good people 
too. It has always been quite unintelligible to me how it 
happens that on the Continent, where there is far less 
religion than in England, a man who cultivates Natural 
History, who studies only the works of his Maker, is highly 
considered and raised by common consent to posts of 
honour, as were Cuvier, Humboldt, etc.,—while, on the 
contrary, in England, a man who pursues science to a 
religious end (even who writes a Bridgewater Treatise) is 
looked upon with suspicion, and, by the greatest number 
of those who study only the works of man, with contempt. 
Perhaps you can comprehend this anomaly, I cannot.” 1 
She adds : “ The house is large and very good, but it 
does not look like a very lively abode, for it opens into the 
Abbey and contains the Jerusalem Chamber.” 
The Deanery would indeed easily make four houses, 
the different wings being separated by large landings 
and passages ; and there were sixteen staircases. A long 
corridor, in which hung portraits of former deans, led into 
the Abbey, Abbot’s Place or Palace, and death-chamber of 
1 It is noteworthy that Professor Burdon Sanderson, in his late 
address at the British Association, had still cause to lament the little 
assistance and encouragement that scientific research receives, either 
from the Government or the nation, in Great Britain. Buckland in 
1819, on his appointment as first Professor of Geology, in his inaugural 
address, when speaking of this “new learning,” says: “For some 
years past these newly created sciences have formed a leading subject 
of education in most Universities on the Continent.” Professor 
Sanderson tells us, seventy-four years afterwards, “ Those who desire 
either to learn the methods of research or to carry out scientific 
inquiries have to go to Berlin, to Munich, to Breslau, or to the Pasteur 
Institute in Paris, to obtain what England ought long ago to have 
provided.” 
