250 
LIFE OF DEAN BUCKLAND. 
[CH. IX. 
most lively interest in all that was going on there, requir¬ 
ing me to tell him what I had learnt at the lectures as well 
as the details of the more interesting cases under treat¬ 
ment in the wards. At the annual Hospital meeting at 
St. George’s Hospital in 1849, at the request of the 
Governors, he undertook the distribution of the prizes 
to the students. It not unfrequently happens that these 
prizes are given into the hands of the successful candidates, 
accompanied merely by a few simple words of congratula¬ 
tion from the chairman ; but by those who were present on 
the occasion of Dr. Buckland’s giving away the prizes, it 
will be well remembered that upon almost every subject— 
Anatomy, Physiology, Materia Medica, Practice of Physic, 
Surgery, Chemistry, etc.—he made such appropriate and 
apt remarks from his vast fund of general information that 
he seemed to throw a charm round subjects which other¬ 
wise would be dull and unentertaining to those not specially 
engaged in their study. . . . Amongst his numerous titles 
Dr. Buckland was Doctor of Medicine of the University of 
Bonn, which honour was conferred upon him, probably, 
under the idea that he was a Doctor of Medicine and not 
of Divinity. He was also Honorary Fellow of the Royal 
Medical and Chirurgical Society ; and my friend and much 
respected tutor in surgery, Mr. Caesar Hawkins, as 
President of that Society, March 1857, thus writes of him 
in his obituary notice :— 
It is, I presume, the connection of geology with com¬ 
parative anatomy and physiology, and through them with 
our profession, which induced the Council in 1825 to 
recommend Dr. Buckland as Honorary Fellow of this 
Society. As a comparative anatomist, Dr. Buckland and 
the late Mr. Clift were long consulted as the chief autho¬ 
rities in palaeontology, by whose decision the supposed 
examples of exhumed bones of deceased giants were 
transformed into those of a modern ox or an antediluvian 
ichthyosaurus. Of his sagacity and readiness of conjecture, 
and the ingenuity with which he followed out to their 
consequences the relation of one fact or discovery with 
.another in anatomy and physiology, many examples might 
