Buckland

Buckland, WILLIAM, D.D., geologist, was born at Tiverton, Devonshire, in 1784. From Winchester he passed in 1801 to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, of which he became a Fellow (1808); and in 1813 he was appointed Oxford reader in Mineralogy. The same year he was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society, and he was twice its president. In 1818 he became reader in Geology at Oxford, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1822 he received the Copley medal for his account of the Kirkdale Cave (q.v.), which in 1823 he supplemented with Reliquiae Diluviane, or Observations on Organic Remains, attesting the Action of a Universal Deluge, a theory he afterwards saw cause to modify. In 1825 he was appointed a canon of Christ Church, Oxford; in 1832 he was president of the British Association at Oxford; and in 1836 he published his Bridgewater Treatise, Geology and Mineralogy considered with Reference to Natural Theology. In 1845 he was made Dean of Westminster; but under his great and continuous labours to benefit others, his mental faculties gave way seven years before his death, which took place August 14, 1856.—His son, FRANCIS TREVELYAN BUCKLAND, was born 17th December 1826, at Christ Church College, Oxford. He was educated at Winchester and Christ Church, and after five years devoting himself to the study of medicine at St George's Hospital, London, was assistant-surgeon to the 2d Life Guards (1854-63). From his boyhood he manifested an enthusiastic delight in natural history, especially when it could be applied practically to the cultivation of useful quadrupeds, birds, or fish, in which study he was encouraged and guided by his father. He contributed largely to the Times, Field, Queen, and Land and Water, which last he started in 1866. He was also author of Curiosities of Natural History (4 vols. 1857-72), Fish-hatching (1863), Logbook of a Fisherman and Zoologist (1876), Natural History of British Fishes (1881), and Notes and Jottings from Animal Life (1882). He was an acute observer, and his writings on natural history exhibit the results of fresh and original observations in a most interesting manner. He took a great interest in fish-culture, and at his own cost established under the Science and Art Department, South Kensington, a 'Museum of Economic Fish-culture.' In 1867 he was appointed inspector of salmon-fisheries for England and Wales; in 1870 special commissioner on the salmon-fisheries of Scotland; and in 1877 on the Scotch herring-fisheries. He died December 19, 1880. He was not a Darwinian. See his Life by G. C. Bompas (1885).