DR. BUCKLAND’s GEOLOGICAL LABOURS.
Sir Henry De la Beche, in his Anniversary Address to the Geological Society in 1848, on presenting the Wollaston Medal to Dr. Buckland, felicitously observed:
It may not be generally known that, while yet a child, at your native town, Axminster in Devonshire, ammonites, obtained by your father from the lime quarries in the neighbourhood, were presented to your attention. As a scholar at Winchester, the chalk, with its flints, was brought under your observation, and there it was that your collections in natural history first began. Removed to Oxford, as a scholar of Corpus Christi College, the future teacher of geology in that University was fortunate in meeting with congenial tastes in our colleague Mr. W. J. Broderip, then a student at Oriel College. It was during your walks together to Shotover Hill, when his knowledge of conchology was so valuable to you, enabling you to distinguish the shells of the Oxford oolite, that you laid the foundation for those field-lectures, forming part of your course of geology at Oxford, which no one is likely to forget who has been so fortunate at any time as to have attended them. The fruits of your walks with Mr. Broderip formed the nucleus of that great collection, more especially remarkable for the organic remains it contains, which, after the labours of forty years, you have presented to the Geological Museum at Oxford, in grave recollection of the aid which the endowments of that University, and the leisure of its vacations, had afforded you for extensive travelling during a residence at Oxford of nearly forty-five years.
DISCOVERIES OF M. AGASSIZ.[34]
This great paleontologist, in the course of his ichthyological researches, was led to perceive that the arrangement by Cuvier according to organs did not fulfil its purpose with regard to fossil fishes, because in the lapse of ages the characteristics of their structures were destroyed. He therefore adopted the only other remaining plan, and studied the tissues, which, being less complex than the organs, are oftener found intact. The result was the very remarkable discovery, that the tegumentary membrane of fishes is so intimately connected with their organisation, that if the whole of the fish has perished except this membrane, it is practicable, by noting its characteristics, to reconstruct the animal in its most essential parts. Of the value of this principle of harmony, some idea may be formed from the circumstance, that on it Agassiz has based the whole of that celebrated classification of which he is the sole author, and by which fossil ichthyology has for the first time assumed a precise and definite shape. How essential its study is to the geologist appears from the remark of Sir Roderick Murchison, that “fossil fishes have every where proved the most exact chronometer of the age of rocks.”