Everywhere Buckland was the friend of animals. He urged that pigs should have "pure, clean, wholesome water" to drink. He assisted at the opening of the Brighton Aquarium, a place which American visitors can never forget, and aided in the establishing of other aquaria. In 1873, Mr. Buckland published a "History of British Fishes." All his books went through many editions. In 1874, at the Jubilee Anniversary of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, he spoke against cruelty to seals. He wrote in the "Times": "Captain David Gray, of the sealing and whaling ship Eclipse, and myself first brought forward, some three years ago, the necessity for a close time for Arctic seals. The principal sealing ground is at Jan Mayen Island, thirteen hundred miles due north from London.... The ships (sixty sail) arrive at the ice from the 15th to the 20th March, just as the young seals are born. The seal-hunters at once attack them, and the most horrible cruelty ensues. I quote Captain Gray's own words to me: 'Last year, the fleet set to work to kill the seals on March 26, 1874, and in forty-eight hours the fishing was completely over, the old seals being shot, wounded, or scared away, while thousands upon thousands of young ones were left crying piteously for their mothers. These mostly perished of famine in the snow, as they were not old enough to make worth while the trouble of killing them. "'If you could imagine yourself surrounded by four or five hundred thousand babies, all crying at the pitch of their voices, you would have some idea of the piteous noise they make. Their cry is very like that of a human infant. These motherless seals collect into lots of five or six, and crawl about the ice, their heads fast becoming the biggest part of their bodies, searching, no doubt, to find the nourishment they stand so much in need of.'" In 1876, an international close time was established, prohibiting the killing of seals until after April 3. Mr. Buckland's reports on crab, lobster, herring, and other fisheries were most full and interesting. "Before the young crabs are born," he said, "the mother crab tucks up under her tail her numerous family of from one to two million coral-like eggs, and she sidles on tiptoe many a mile from her rocky home to some sandy flat in the deep sea, where her young family may flourish best. There, or perhaps on returning home, in early spring, the time for all young things to come forth, the tiny crabs burst the egg; yet so unlike their parent, that till lately they were thought some strange animalcula; goggle eyes, a hawk's beak, a scorpion's tail, a rhinoceros's horn, adorn a body fringed with legs, yet scarcely bigger than a grain of sand.