Here his menagerie was larger than ever. The stuffed forms of Tiglath Pileser and Billy the hyæna were in the hall. Jenny, a monkey from Gibraltar, had come to join Jacko, bringing a pet chicken with her, which lived in her cage, and which she fondled as a nurse does a child. Here were tailless Manx cats, lizards, snakes, and fifty or sixty rats, usually kept in the cellar. Young Buckland would often take snakes out of his pockets to show his friends. "Don't be afraid," he said to a young lady at a party, as he showed her some snakes; "they won't hurt you, I've taken out their fangs. Now, do be a good girl, and don't make a fuss;" and he wreathed one snake around her neck, and one round each arm. "His sisters were so often bedecked with similar reptilian necklaces and armlets that they became used to the somewhat clammy, crawling sensation which is a drawback to such ornaments." About this time, Buckland wrote an article on the muscles of the arm, and took it to several periodicals, but none would accept it. Urged by Mr. White Cooper, the queen's oculist, he wrote an article upon his rats, which the friend carried to "Bentley's Miscellany." It was accepted, and thus began his successful authorship. This was subsequently published in his first book, "Curiosities of Natural History," in 1857. He tells of one of his rat families: "One day a poor mother had moved her young about into several parts of the cage, but could not fix on one point. I saw what was wanting, she could not obtain cover for them. I put my hand into the cage, full of tow and cotton wool; she came instantly and took it out of my hand, and covered up her young. But, notwithstanding all this care, and although evidently most anxious for their welfare, this kind mother, obeying, I suppose, some wise law of nature, devoured during the following night every one of the little ones of which she had been so careful the preceding day." After being house-surgeon at St. George's Hospital for some time, Buckland became assistant surgeon to the Second Life Guards in 1854. He had already given his first lecture, "The House We Live in," delivered at a Working Men's Coffee House and Institute established by his mother, in Westminster, London.