TECHNICAL VERSE.

Anticipatory Dirge on Professor Buckland, the Geologist.

BY BISHOP SHUTTLEWORTH.

“Mourn, Ammonites, mourn o’er his funeral urn,
Whose neck ye must grace no more;
Gneiss, Granite, and Slate!—he settled your date,
And his ye must now deplore.
Weep, Caverns, weep! with infiltering drip,
Your recesses he’ll cease to explore;
For mineral veins or organic remains
No Stratum again will he bore.
Oh! his wit shone like crystal!—his knowledge profound
From Gravel to Granite descended;
No Trap could deceive him, no Slip could confound,
Nor specimen, true or pretended.
He knew the birth-rock of each pebble so round,
And how far its tour had extended.
His eloquence rolled like the Deluge retiring,
Which Mastodon carcases floated;
To a subject obscure he gave charms so inspiring
Young and old on Geology doated.
He stood forth like an Outlier; his hearers admiring
In pencil each anecdote noted.
Where shall we our great professor inter,
That in peace may rest his bones?
If we hew him a rocky sepulchre,
He’ll rise up and break the stones,
And examine each Stratum that lies around,
For he’s quite in his element underground.
If with mattock and spade his body we lay
In the common Alluvial soil;
He’ll start up and snatch those tools away
Of his own geological toil;
In a Stratum so young the professor disdains
That embedded should be his Organic Remains.
Then, exposed to the drip of some case-hard’ning spring,
His carcase let Stalactite cover;
And to Oxford the petrified sage let us bring,
When he is encrusted all over,
There, mid Mammoths and Crocodiles, high on a shelf,
Let him stand as a Monument raised to himself.”

When Professor Buckland’s grave was being dug in Islip churchyard, in August 1856, the men came unexpectedly upon the solid limestone rock, which they were obliged to blast with gunpowder. The coincidence of this fact with some of the verses in the above anticipatory dirge is somewhat remarkable.

The following is by Jacob F. Henrici, and appeared originally in Scribner’ s Magazine for November 1879:

A Microscopic Serenade.

“Oh come, my love, and seek with me
A realm by grosser eye unseen,
Where fairy forms will welcome thee,
And dainty creatures hail thee queen.
In silent pools the tube I’ll ply,
Where green conferva-threads lie curled,
And proudly bring to thy bright eye
The trophies of the protist world.
We’ll rouse the stentor from his lair,
And gaze into the cyclops’ eye;
In chara and nitella hair
The protoplasmic stream descry,
For ever weaving to and fro
With faint molecular melody;
And curious rotifers I’ll show,
And graceful vorticellidæ.
Where melicertæ ply their craft
We’ll watch the playful water-bear,
And no envenomed hydra’s shaft
Shall mar our peaceful pleasure there;
But while we whisper love’s sweet tale
We’ll trace, with sympathetic art,
Within the embryonic snail
The growing rudimental heart.
Where rolls the volvox sphere of green,
And plastids move in Brownian dance—
If, wandering ’mid that gentle scene,
Two fond amœbæ shall perchance
Be changed to one beneath our sight
By process of biocrasis,
We’ll recognise, with rare delight,
A type of our prospective bliss.
Oh dearer thou by far to me
In thy sweet maidenly estate
Than any seventy-fifth could be,
Of aperture however great!
Come, go with me, and we will stray
Through realm by grosser eye unseen,
Where protophytes shall homage pay,
And protozoa hail thee queen.”