| SKETCH OF FRANK BUCKLAND. |
FRANCIS TREVELYAN BUCKLAND, who was almost universally known as Frank Buckland, was the eldest son of Canon William Buckland, of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, afterward Dean of Westminster, and author of the "Buckland Bridgewater Treatise," and was born in Oxford, December 17, 1826. He attended school at Cotterstock, in Northamptonshire, and spent two years with his uncle, the Rev. John Buckland, at Laleham School, near Chertsey; attended Winchester College, where Dr. Moberley, afterward Bishop of Salisbury, was head-master, from 1839 to 1844; and in the latter year entered Christ Church College, Oxford, where he took his bachelor's degree in 1848. He then entered upon the study of surgery at St. George's Hospital; passed the College of Surgeons in 1851; and became house-surgeon at that institution in May, 1852. In 1854 he was gazetted assistant-surgeon to the Second Life-Guards. In 1860 he applied for promotion to a full surgeoncy; but a rule was adopted, different from the old tradition of the Guards, that medical officers should be promoted as vacancies occurred in the same regiment, by which promotion was made to go by seniority in the brigade or at the discretion of the colonel; and the preference was given to an assistant-surgeon of older standing from another regiment. Disappointed by this action, and encouraged by the growing success of his literary and scientific career, Buckland resigned his commission in 1863, and devoted himself with ardor to what was to be his life-work in natural history and literature. "Fish-culture was henceforward his chief pursuit, and his life became one of incessant activity, bodily and mental"; but every fact connected with nature was interesting to him, and was held worthy to be communicated to others. He had begun to write in 1852, for periodicals, those articles which were afterward published collectively in his "Curiosities of Natural History." In 1866 a third series of this work was published, and Buckland, associated with some friends, started the periodical "Land and Water," of which he was the inspiring genius till the time of his death. In 1867 he was appointed one of the two Inspectors of Fisheries for England and Wales, succeeding Mr. Frederick Eden, one of the inspectors originally appointed under the Salmon-Fisheries Act of 1861. This position he held and worked in for the remainder of his life he shunned no exposure in the execution of his favorite pursuits, but rather courted it, and professed to enjoy getting wet, whether by being rained upon, or by wading up to his neck in water while searching for eggs. Too many of these exposures, and carelessness in indulging in them, brought on the illness which proved fatal to him. He died, of disease which had begun with an inflammation of the lungs nearly two years before, on the 19th of December, 1880.
