GEORGE

See also:

• GEORGE BUSK (1807—1886)

BUSK (1807—1886)  , British surgeon, zoologist and palaeontologist, son of Robert Busk, merchant of St Petersburg, was born in that city on the 12th of August 1807 . He studied surgery in London, at both St Thomas's and St Bartholomew's hospitals, and was an excellent operator . He was appointed assistant-surgeon to the Greenwich hospital in 1832, and served as naval surgeon first in the Grampus, and afterwards for many years in the Dreadnought; during this period he made important observations on cholera and on scurvy . In 1855 he retired from service and settled in London, where he devoted himself mainly to the study of zoology and palaeontology . As early as 1842 he had assisted in editing the Microscopical Journal; and later he edited the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science (1853—1868) and the Natural History Review (1861—1865) . From 1856 to 1859 he was Hunterian professor of comparative anatomy and physiology in the Royal College of Surgeons, and he became president of the college in 1871 . He was elected F.R.S. in 185o, and was an active member of the Linnean, Geological and other societies, and president of the Anthropological Institute (1873—1874); he received the Royal Society's Royal medal and the Geological Society's Wollaston and Lyell medals . Early in life he became the leading authority on the Polyzoa; and later the vertebrate remains from caverns and river-deposits occupied his attention . He was a patient and cautious investigator, full of knowledge, and unaffectedly simple in character . He died in London on the loth of August 1886 . BUSKEN-HUET, CONRAD (1826—1886), Dutch literary critic, was born at the Hague on the 28th of December 1826 . He was trained for the Church, and, after studying at Geneva and Lausanne, was appointed pastor of the Walloon chapel in Haarlem in 1851 .

In 1863 conscientious scruples obliged him to resign his

charge, and Busken-Huet, after attempting journalism, went out to Java in 1868 as the editor of a newspaper . Before this time, however, he had begun his career as a polemical man of letters, although it was not until 1872 that he was made famous by the first series of his Literary Fantasies, a title under which he gradually gathered in successive volumes all that was most durable in his work as a critic . His one novel, Lidewijde, BUSS was written under strong French influences . Returning from the East Indies, Busken-Huet settled for the remainder of his life in Paris, where he died in April 1886 . For the last quarter of a century he had been the acknowledged dictator in all questions of Dutch literary taste . Perfectly honest, desirous to be sympathetic, widely read, and devoid of all sectarian obstinacy, Busken-Huet introduced into Holland the light and air of Europe . He made it his business to break down the narrow prejudices and the still narrower self-satisfaction of his countrymen, without endangering his influence by a mere effusion of paradox . He was a brilliant writer, who would have been admired in any language, but whose appearance in a literature so stiff and dead as that of Holland in the 'fifties was dazzling enough to produce a sort of awe and stupefaction . The posthumous correspondence of Busken-Huet has been published, and adds to our impression of the vitality and versatility of his mind . (E .