Accounts Rendered of Work Done and Things Seen

Abstract

MR. J. Y. BUCHANAN has passed the allotted span of years, but we who are no longer young cannot call him old. Yet he was hard at work in a generation which has all but passed away, and his recollection reaches back to things which are but a tradition to the most of us. He is the last of that happy band who set sail from Portsmouth in the Challenger under Wyville Thomson just seven-and-forty years ago; he was born in another world than ours, when (as he tells us) the only railways on the Continent ran, as kings' playthings, from Paris to Versailles, from Berlin to Potsdam, from Hanover to Herrenshausen. Now in this volume, as in one before, he has “rendered his accounts“ (but only partially) of the abundant work he has cone and the countless things he has seen. The book contains essays both great and small, from letters to NATURE to addresses delivered to universities and learned societies, and the things of which these papers treat are both big and little, for Mr. Buchanan has kept a sharp look-out, conning everything—from the rats in a Bordighera garden (which left the oranges alone, ate the rind of lemons and left the fruit, ate the fruit of mandarins and left the rind) to the great panoramas of earth and sea which for so many years have passed before him.

Accounts Rendered of Work Done and Things Seen.

By J. Y. Buchanan. Pp. lvii + 435 + 3 plates. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1919.) Price 21s. net.