of his experiments in hatching, of consultation, and of the giving of instructions to others who had become interested in the enterprise. He showed his apparatus and explained it at the exhibitions. He lectured at the Royal Institution on the subject, and gave the grave members of that body the novel experience of laughing at the racy humor with which the new science was explained, "while the earnestness with which the national importance of the subject was enforced was none the less impressive." The substance of this lecture was afterward expanded into a book on "Fish-hatching." He was invited up into Ireland to see what was the matter with some salmon-Fisheries in Galway. Seeing a very fine salmon-ladder, he climbed down into it and imagined himself a salmon, congratulating himself on narrow escapes from the nets and crevices below, and thinking how very desirable it would be to get up to his autumn quarters in Lough Corrib. To preserve and make popularly visible the results of his investigations into fish-breeding, he made the series of casts of the roe of fish and of the forms of fish at different stages of growth, which is exhibited at the South Kensington Museum. He next studied oyster-culture, and gave lectures, scientific and popular, on that. These occupations prepared the way for his appointment as Fish Commissioner, and rendered it the most appropriate one that the Government could make.
In studying the problem of fish-passes for salmon, to which he gave a great deal of attention, he made it a principle to enter, so far as was possible to man, into the feelings of a salmon, as he did at the Galway ladder; and so thoroughly did he carry out the principle that he became "as an inspector almost amphibious, wading the pools below the weirs, and feeling the force and direction of the current. . . . No wonder, then, when it was publicly stated that, in his evidence before the House of Commons, he had leaned rather to the interest of the millers than of the salmon-fisheries, he protested that his statements had either been misconstrued or not understood. 'Having placed myself as a shield over the salmon interests, I have, as is the fate of shields, received most of the arrows.'" "With regard to the cultivation of the English rivers, he saw that the conflicting interests could be reconciled without injury to any; and he strove unceasingly, and with no little success, to propagate the belief among all classes that they were each and all interested in the preservation of salmon. He continually lifted up his voice against the pollution of rivers, and told the people of Gloucester that the Chinese, who use everything in the way of manure, call the English barbarians because they pour their sewage into the rivers. The beginning of the illness from which Mr. Buckland died dates from January, 1879, when he was attacked with inflammation of the lungs after having been engaged in packing eggs from Australia in the ice-house of the steamship Durham. He was again attacked in November of the same year, after exposure in a violent snow-storm following the last inquiry it was his privilege to hold,
