Buckland William

Buckland, William, one of the pioneers of English geology, was born at Axminster in 1784, and educated at Tiverton grammar school, Winchester, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from which he graduated B.A. in 1805. In 1813 he succeeded Dr. Kidd as reader in mineralogy, and in 1818 became the first reader in geology in the University, being made F.R.S. in the same year. In 1824 he acted as president to the then newly-established Geological Society, as he did also in 1840, about which time he prominently supported Agassiz in his exposition of the former importance of ice as a geological agent in Britain. In 1825 Buckland became Canon of Christ Church and Rector of Stoke Charity, Hants, at the same time proceeding D.D., and in 1845 he was promoted to the deanery of Westminster and rectory of Islip, Oxfordshire. He died in 1856, and was buried at Islip. His chief separate works were Reliquiae Diluvianae, 1823, and the Bridgewater Treatise on geology and mineralogy, 1836. He was a man of wide sympathies, interested, for example, in agriculture and in sanitation, and was an excellent teacher. His collections, to the accumulation of which he had been enthusiastically devoted, were bequeathed to his university. His name is perpetuated both in that of a recent plant and in that of a fossil cycad. His love of nature was largely inherited by his son Frank, the founder and for many years the editor of Land and Water.