James Silk Buckingham (1786-1855) was a Cornish-born traveller and writer. As a member of Parliament in the 1830s he campaigned for reforms in the army and navy as well as for the temperance movement. He travelled widely to the Middle East, Israel and America, wrote travel books and also founded a number of journals. One of these was The Athenaeum, a weekly London periodical covering a wide range of topics from literature to popular science. In this...