Life of Frank Buckland

Abstract

FEW Englishmen were unacquainted with the central figure of this admirably written memoir. His ubiquity as a lecturer and inspector, the happy self-forget-fulness and adaptability of manner which associated him with royal princes as readily as with seaside fishermen, and the strong personality by which he permanently impressed all who came in contact with him, made him beyond all other men of his time the representative and the preacher of the subject to which he devoted all the energies of his life. That subject was natural history, a term not without meaning even in the present day of minute and subdivided scientific work, but conterminous with science half a century ago, when comparative anatomy was hardly known, when the microscope was costly and imperfect, when the provinces of nature had not been mapped nor its workers differentiated.

Life of Frank Buckland.

By his Brother-in-Law, George Bompas. (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1885.)