Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/415

Rh (on whose back the children would stand to try its strength), and toads immured in various pots, to test the truth of their supposed life in rock-cells." Then there were the visits to the museum, and the afternoon drives, with which the hunt for some natural object was usually associated.

At Winchester, he was known as "a boy utterly indifferent to personal appearance, but good-tempered and eccentric, with a small museum in his sleeve or cupboard," an expert hand in skinning badgers, rats, etc., "and also setting wires at Blue Gate, for cats." A schoolfellow who slept in the next bed to him used to observe him "to get up in the middle of the night, and designedly in half-darkness carefully bind two fagot sticks together, for the purpose, as he said, of accustoming himself to be called up as a surgeon, half asleep, to do some professional duty under adverse circumstances." So we may follow him during his four years at this school, extracting the poison-fangs from adders, dissecting cats, and even successfully attempting the eye of the warden's dead mastiff. With his good-humor and spirits and his uniform amiability and obligingness, he became the most popular boy in the school. "Fond of school-work he was not, but he did his duty fairly, got through his 'construes' somehow, and ground the regulation grist of dreary Greek and Latin verse. Neither did he care for games," Toward the end of his school-days his anatomical studies enlarged their scope, and he undertook fragments of humanity, which he obtained secretly from the hospital and secretly dissected.

Of his life at Oxford, Dr. Liddon observes that there hung an odor of physical science about his rooms, "which increased as you got nearer. If you passed through the outer room into the study, you found the occupant surrounded by friends and playmates, irrational or human, and deep in scientific investigation after his own fashion, which, be it observed, was as industrious as it was irregular." His fellows did not then appreciate the reality or value of the work he was engaged in, "or that he was in fact educating himself much better than most of us were doing." Here we find a friend visiting him at his rooms having to tuck up his legs on the sofa to keep the jackal, which is prowling about the room, from biting them, while the jackal feasts himself upon the Guinea-pigs under the sofa; and we are introduced to Tiglath-pileser, or Tig, the pet bear, who attracted the notice of the British Association in 1846 as a guest in cap and gown at the garden-party, where he was introduced to Sir Charles Lyell, Prince Canino, Milne-Edwards, and Sir T. Acland, and was mesmerized by Lord Houghton.

Buckland's first article was published in 1832, after the author had attempted an unsuccessful paper on the muscles of the arm. Mr. White Cooper, the Queen's oculist, called at the deanery, and was invited down-stairs to see the pet rats. Frank took them out of the cage one by one, and described in a most interesting way the habits and