The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses

Most of the professors in science were impresarios for their subjects. They did not do experimental work; their task, they believed, was to tell their audience what had already been discovered. They supplemented the theology of the Church of England by providing new proofs of God’s design – not as meticulous as those of Newton but still evidence that ‘in all His works most wonderful, Most sure in all His ways’, as Newman’s hymn asserted. Nevertheless, there was one professor who lived in an apartment in Christ Church – which is at once a college and a cathedral – set aside for the canons, a clergyman unlike the orthodox run of canons. Christ Church was the citadel of the High and Dry party within the Church of England and this canon was a liberal latitudinarian. What was more he was a geologist. He had made his name with his research into the rocks of south-west England and his patron was no less than the Prince Regent himself, who created a special professorship for him in 1819. He was the first president of the newly formed British Association, which had been formed to publicise advances in science. This was William Buckland.

Buckland charged two guineas for attendance at his course of lectures and he drew rapt audiences. He lectured on mineralogy and palaeontology; but he was as competent to lecture on artesian wells and civil engineering. He did not despise applied science, and became chairman of the Oxford Gas and Coke Company. Buckland began lecturing in 1814, and between 1820 and 1835 his lectures were part of the Oxford scene – rather as the lectures by the controversial scholar, Edgar Wind, on the history of art became necessities for the general public in the second half of the twentieth century. But then – the common fate of many dons who are great lecturers – attendance began to drop. A rival in the shape of Newman preaching in the university church of Great St Mary’s took his undergraduate audience away and in 1845 he left Oxford to become Dean of Westminster.

Buckland became a legend not so much for his scientific studies as for his remorseless application of the scientific practice of experiment and observation in his private life. He used to say that he had eaten his way through the whole animal creation and that the worst thing was a mole – ‘perfectly horrible’ – though afterwards he told Lady Lyndhurst that there was one thing worse than a mole and that was a blue-bottle fly. Mice in batter and bison steaks were served at his table in London. A guest wrote in his diary: ‘Dined at the Deanery. Tripe for dinner last night, don’t like crocodile for breakfast.’ He had a Protestant’s scepticism of Catholic miracles. Pausing before a dark stain on the flagstones of an Italian cathedral where the martyr’s blood miraculously renewed itself, he dropped to his knees and licked it. ‘I can tell you what it is: it is bat’s urine.’

Like many scientists his mind subconsciously continued to work on the problems preoccupying him. ‘My dear,’ he said to his wife, starting up from sleep at two o’clock in the morning, ‘I believe that Cheirotherium’s footsteps are undoubtedly testudinal.’ They hurried downstairs and while he fetched the pet tortoise from the garden, his wife mixed paste on the kitchen table. To their delight they saw that the impression left by the tortoise’s feet in the paste were almost identical with those of the fossil.

Their apartments in the quad were at once a natural history museum and a menagerie. They and their children lived surrounded on all sides by specimens, dead and alive, that Buckland had collected. When you entered the hall you might as easily mount a stuffed hippopotamus as the children’s rocking horse. Monsters of different eras glared down on you from the walls. The sideboard in the dining room groaned under the weight of fossils and was protected from the children by a notice: PAWS OFF. The very candlesticks were carved out of the bones of Saurians. Toads were immured in pots to see how long they could survive without food. There were cages full of snakes, and a pony with three children up would career round the dining-room table and out into the quad. Guinea pigs, owls, jackdaws and smaller fry had the run of the house. The children imbibed science with their mother’s milk. One day a clergyman excitedly brought Buckland some fossils for identification. ‘What are these, Frankie?’ said the professor to his four-year-old son. ‘They are the vertebuae of an ichthyosauwus,’ lisped the child. The parson retired crestfallen to his parish.

Buckland helped to establish the climate of opinion that made Darwin’s theory of the origin of species within a few years irresistible. He also set a standard of integrity among British scientists. It is easy to forget today how much then the story of the earth’s antiquity, the theory of evolution and the development of homo sapiens were founded on hypothesis and conjecture. Certainly the early geologists such as Buckland and Lyell based their theories on the facts of rock formation; certainly Darwin prevailed because no alternative explanation from the evidence that he produced was convincing. But the mass of evidence confirming and modifying their hypotheses accumulated after they wrote. It is important to remember, too, how many of the early hypotheses and theories were wrong. Buck-land’s story is of a man who published a book which changed his countrymen’s notions of pre-history; who forced himself to acknowledge in public that the main conclusions in that book were wrong; and who failed despite his own personal success to get Oxford to introduce science into its curriculum.

The book that made Buckland’s reputation in 1824 was called Reliquiae Diluvianae (Relics of the Flood). In it he linked the evidence of deposits in other caves in England and abroad with his own findings in the Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire. This was the first fossil cave to be excavated in England. Buckland claimed that it had once been inhabited by hyenas who, it could be shown, had dragged the bodies of other animals into it, since their bones were characteristically splintered and lacked the parts which hyenas are in the habit of swallowing. These bones and teeth now lay on the floor of the cave beneath a thick layer of mud and were found all at the same level. Buckland therefore deduced that the hyenas had abandoned the cave at the onset of a great flood; and that this flood had also swept away the animals which lived about the cave and on whose carcasses the hyenas fed. It was at this stage in the argument that Buckland produced a further hypothesis. All the evidence showed that Yorkshire was once a sub-tropical land where elephants, bears and rhinoceros had roamed. All the evidence pointed to a flood. This, then, must have been the Flood described in Genesis, but it had occurred tens of thousands of years ago and not, as the seventeenth-century genealogists of the Old Testament had calculated, after 4004 BC.

When Buckland announced that it would be prudent to regard the six days of the Creation as six ages, many pious readers were in no mood to feel that the confirmation of the seventh chapter of Genesis compensated for the loss of the first. Nevertheless, there was no such outburst as greeted Darwin’s great book. The evangelical movement in the churches was not so formidable then nor so well organised, and the leadership had not passed into the hands of unintelligent zealots. The Tractarians, who were to rouse Oxford and the country to new heights of religious intensity and intolerance, were still unknown young men: their campaign lay nearly ten years ahead in the future. Buckland’s speculations were regarded as dangerous and daring but they were not repulsive to the Oxford of Copleston, which gave shelter to liberal theology. It was indeed this book that won him his canonry at Christ Church and his European reputation. In 1830 he was asked by the trustees of the Earl of Bridgewater’s will to write under the terms of the will one of eight treatises to ‘justify the ways of God to man’. Buckland spent six years on the task of explaining what geology and palaeontology told us of the earth’s history and then of arguing that the Bible cannot be said to contradict these findings because it is not a scientific textbook. This elicited a flurry of pamphlets from the country parsons, one of whom spent pages deducing from the height of the Himalayas that the waters of the Flood must have risen at the rate of thirty feet per hour; and the Dean of York addressed several grave letters to Buck-land. But as the Archbishop of York was a personal friend of Buckland and the two great periodicals, the Quarterly and the Edinburgh, came out on his side, he had little to fear.

Success and social eminence can easily corrupt scholars – particularly English scholars. Victorian savants found themselves petted by the influential and the great; insensibly they slid into becoming the academic defenders of the safe and the cautious; and then they found themselves expected to condemn the heretical. When The Origin of Species was published the geologist Adam Sedgwick, a famous contemporary of Buckland at Cambridge, used the full force of his authority to discredit it; and when the most eminent of all the English classical geologists, Sir Charles Lyell, after first hesitating announced his support, Darwin showed his appreciation of the danger that Lyell had run when he wrote, ‘In view of his age and his position in society his conduct is heroic’. Buckland had in complete honesty put forward a hypothesis which enabled the story of Genesis in some sense to be reconciled with his geological discoveries. Suddenly he was challenged – and challenged by a young foreigner whom he had befriended. This young man was the Swiss naturalist Agassiz, who had corresponded with Buckland about his work and for whom Buckland had raised funds to enable him to continue his researches. Agassiz put forward the notion, commonplace nowadays, that the alluvial deposits in caves such as Buckland excavated were the relics not of the Flood but of an Ice Age. Buckland was not at first convinced. But he went to Switzerland to study glaciers with Agassiz; got him to England to go over the evidence in his caves; and then renounced his own theories, championed the hypothesis that the Swiss had put forward, and converted Lyell. The mud which had filled the hyenas’ cave in Yorkshire had been brought by the melting snows on the hills, which could not disperse because the Scandinavian ice sheet was jammed up against the east coast of Britain.

This was the action of a man of character and generosity. It is also the work of a man of integrity. This kind of integrity is so much taken for granted today among scientists that is it difficult to imagine a time when it cost an effort. Perhaps it still costs an effort to the eminent when their juniors upset their conclusions, but they know well enough that it is quite hopeless to bluster. In the first half of the nineteenth century this was not so evident. Men still thought of truth as a unity. It was not Buckland’s piety that made him leap to the conclusion that he had evidence of the Flood. He imagined himself simply drawing on another set of facts in the Bible which were well-attested and which fitted into the pattern of logical deductions that he had drawn from his findings in the Kirkdale Caves. It was all the more creditable then that, unlike other clergymen and members of the well-established academic circles to which he belonged, he did not fail to change his views even though they might have damaged his prospects.

In the 1830s his prospects at Oxford seemed to glow. Fluent, rapid, engaging, he would stalk up and down amid his audience brandishing a cave-bear jaw or a hyena thigh-bone. He held field days on which he demonstrated the different deposits in the countryside. His ebullience, his sharp voice, his hatred of the dishonest and the bogus, and his own learning established him as an authority. He was a popular diner-out; he would appear at a dinner party carrying his blue bag, from which he would draw fossils and bones and intrigue the company. Another don wrote him the following friendly letter:

On our return last night I found as I thought that a spider had crawled out of the inkstand over a piece of paper; but it turns out to be a hieroglyphic from you which I so far interpreted as to perceive it was an invitation to meet some professor whose name as you wrote it looked somewhat indecent. I shall be happy to wait on you and take the opportunity of learning the Egyptian mode of writing.

He had no rival in his field and might have been expected to have established a school of natural science at Oxford. Yet when he left Oxford in 1845 it was as if he had never existed.

One cause for Buckland’s failure to make any impression on the Oxford curriculum was the strength of the spirit which was embodied in the Dean of Christ Church himself. Dean Gaisford did not take kindly to the peregrinations through the college of the pets that lived in the Buckland household. He thanked God when the family departed for a holiday in Italy and prophesised, ‘We shall hear no more of this geology.’ Yet this was the same Gaisford who had compelled Christ Church undergraduates to study physics. He was a surly, grim, meticulous classical scholar born of an obscure family but who had married the daughter of the Bishop of Durham. Everyone quotes today a sentence which he dropped in one of his sermons to his undergraduates: ‘Nor can I do better,’ he concluded, ‘than impress upon you the study of Greek literature, which not only elevates above the vulgar herd, but leads not infrequently to positions of considerable emolument.’ He spoke from his own experience. When he was an undergraduate the then Dean of Christ Church detected his ability and told him: ‘You will never be a gentleman, but you may succeed with certainty as a scholar. Take some little known Greek author and throw your knowledge into editing it: that will found your reputation.’ Gaisford chose a work on Greek metres by the Alexandrian grammarian Hephaestion, and produced an edition of monumental erudition. That was the spirit which defeated Buckland.

In the 1830s Oxford and Cambridge were in much the same situation. Both had their naturalists and neither acknowledged the existence of science in their curricula. But whereas a century later Cambridge was famous in almost every field of science, and scientists governed its affairs as much as arts men, at Oxford science was fenced in by a shortage of college fellowships. Scientists – and especially technologists – were relegated to the backwaters of the university. However powerful the impression that Buckland made, he scarcely made a dent upon the serried ranks of classicists; and when in fact years later the curriculum broadened it was in the direction of language, law and history: few undergraduates took the science option. The studies at Oxford fit for a gentleman, fit for the ruling class, leading to ‘positions of considerable emolument’ were, if no longer confined to Greek literature, certainly not those that Buckland attempted to popularise. On his death his collection of rocks and fossils was swept away into an inadequate building.

In the short run, however, Gaisford was to be discomfited. For though Buckland left Oxford in due course his eldest son, Frank, came up to Christ Church as an undergraduate and for three years plagued the Dean. The principles of scientific experiment were embodied even more deeply in the son, and his father had trained him to be a keen observer. When he was eight years old a turtle had been sent to the college for the banquet which was to follow the Duke of Wellington’s installation as Chancellor. His father gave it a swim in the fountain in Tom Quad, with Frank riding on its back; and the boy then watched it being decapitated in the college kitchen and noticed how the severed head bit the kitchen boy’s finger. Frank was sent to school at Winchester, and there he followed his father’s principles. He collected the heads of cats and rats as other boys collected birds’ eggs. He taught himself to eat hedgehogs, fry mice in batter, dissect the eye of the Warden’s mastiff and snare and skin the headmaster’s exquisite cat. He dissected the cat’s body night after night until the stench became overpowering … for the other boys. Dissection was his principal pastime and he was heard to remark meditatively, ‘What wouldn’t I give for that fellow’s skull,’ when a particularly dolichocephalic youth happened to saunter by.

At Oxford Frank Buckland was at last able fully to develop his hobbies. He was a large, genial, bohemian figure, often dressed in a German student’s cap and a blue pea-jacket, and would make the quad resound to the notes of a gigantic Swiss wooden horn. True to family custom he lived surrounded by livestock. There were marmots, guinea pigs, snakes and a chameleon which perched on a wine glass, swallowing flies, until, to the delight of the spectators, it tumbled headlong into the preserved ginger. There was an eagle which walked into cathedral during the eight o’clock service: Dean Gaisford ‘looked unspeakable things’. There was a jackal whose yells curdled the blood of nervous freshmen. Most notable of all was his young bear, named after a ferocious Old Testament king Tiglath-Pileser. Tig went to wine parties in cap and gown, watched the boats and lived a full social existence. At one party he met Monckton Milnes. Milnes was at that time known as a fashionable young versifier and man-about-town and happened to have been learning the elements of mesmerism from the well-known bluestocking Harriet Martineau. He decided to mesmerise Tig, who growled ferociously but fell in a stupor to the ground. Dean Gaisford, however, had the last word. He had already rusticated the eagle for its sacrilegious behaviour, and the jackal had also been sent down. ‘Mr Buckland,’ he said, ‘I hear you keep a bear in college; well, either you or the bear must go.’

‘My object in life, to be a high priest of nature, and a great benefactor of mankind,’ Frank wrote in his diary at the age of twenty. He therefore became a doctor. But instead of turning to research after becoming qualified, as his contemporary, Darwin’s great supporter T. H. Huxley did, he accepted a commission in the Life Guards as an assistant surgeon so as to be able to pursue his collection of freaks and animals. He was popular in the mess; though on one occasion he upset the solemnity of church parade when first the men and then the officers were overcome by gales of laughter on seeing Buckland, who was off-duty, stroll by on the far side of the parade ground deep in conversation with a dwarf and a seven-foot-five French giant whom he had been entertaining to breakfast. He later married and set up house near Regent’s Park. Nothing could have been more cordial than the welcome the Bucklands gave to their guests, but they had to be people of strong nerves. Only one room in the house was in theory reserved for homo sapiens, and even this would be turned into a sanatorium for sick animals. ‘Sing up, old boy,’ your host would say to a piebald rat as one entered the room and, sure enough, ‘melodious notes could be heard issuing from its diaphragm’. Pickled snakes would be produced for you from a tank, live ones from Frank’s coat. At tea the hairy arm of the monkey would seize your muffin, while the guinea pigs nibbled your toes under the table. That incomparable memorialist, the High Church radical parson, William Tuckwell, said that ‘You felt as if another Flood were toward and the animals parading for admission to the Ark.’ The fellow-guests were equally unpredictable. Chinese, Zulus and Eskimos were all to be found at dinner. Delicate problems of etiquette presented themselves: should the bearded lady go down to dinner on the arm of Mr or Mrs Buckland? And which arm should you take of the four presented by the Siamese twins? After dinner you could be certain that Frank Buckland would keep the party going. He used to try the effect of chloroform on his animals and once Hag, his favourite monkey, discovered her ancient enemy the eagle almost senseless with anaesthetic: chattering with glee she proceeded to take her revenge, plucking its wings and clouting it over the head again and again. When the time came to take your leave there was no difficulty in obtaining a cab as the parrot was on duty at the front door to call a hansom. But if it was your fate to stay the night, the terrors of the small hours were scarcely endurable. A cold nose and prickles might invade your bed: it was only the hedgehog, which was let loose at night to keep down the black beetles but preferred to drink the soup in the tureen. Or you might wake in the morning to find that the jaguar had eaten your boots. Whether the servants came or left in droves is not recorded, but one supposes that only cooks of an iron constitution could remain at their post. Buckland’s brother-in-law tells us that the windows slammed fast in the street and hearts sank at the house whenever a van arrived at the front door and the servants staggered up the steps bearing a cask containing a grinning gorilla or an imperfectly preserved hippopotamus, ‘its lips curled in a ghastly smile’.

Needless to say Frank continued his father’s gastronomic tradition. Kangaroo ham, rhinoceros pie, panther chops, horse’s tongue and elephant’s trunk were carved for his guests, who discovered that the best technique was to bolt a mouthful of meat and chase it with a beaker of champagne. Not all his dishes were a success. Chinese sea slugs were said to taste like calf’s head and glue. But through the Acclimatisation Society and other clubs the craze spread. After the siege of Paris, when it was known how near starvation the defenders had been, rat dinners were given in London and Cambridge. At one time donkey featured on menus: one of Buckland’s successors said that it was ‘delicious … like Tyrolese venison’. But that formidable Victorian society hostess Lady Dorothy Nevill, who had a penchant for baked guinea pig, declared, ‘I tried eating donkey too but I had to stop that for it made me stink.’

And yet there is something instructive and sad in this merry search for freaks and curios. Frank Buckland’s career reminds one that the offspring of academic families are not by any means destined to follow their father’s footsteps. The Annexe about the intellectual aristocracy (see page 304) records those who lived up to their parents’ expectations, but it does not record the many who did not inherit their academic genes – or their firmness of character. Everything comes too easily to them. Frank never had to work at science, he absorbed it in childhood, he never had to work his way in the world. Winchester and Christ Church and his own good nature opened all doors; while his father kept hyenas as part of a scientific experiment, Frank assembled his menagerie for fun. He had become a typical example of the son who follows his father’s calling but without the talent and inner compulsion to carve out a name for himself.

Then suddenly his life changed. For nine years he had been contributing numerous articles to the well-known periodical the Field, articles which formed the bulk of his book Curiosities of Natural History. The editors got bored and told him they had had enough. A few years previously he had failed to get the vacancy of full surgeon to the Life Guards: owing to a change in regulations, it went to the most senior man in the brigade. These two reverses made him take stock. He may also have appreciated how his father, after becoming Dean of Westminster and reaching the age when even the best scientists cease to produce their most original work, turned his mind to practical matters: the application of science to agriculture, sewage and water supply problems in London and Oxford – and the reforming of the antediluvian Westminster School. Frank Buckland got himself appointed an Inspector of Fisheries and at last began to play his role as a ‘benefactor of mankind’. In the 1860s he was primarily concerned with hatching freshwater fish; in the seventies he was using all his charm and energy on a crusade up and down the country to stop river pollution, and by studying the habits of fish to learn how to make them multiply and to stop over-fishing. He was the first to predict for practical purposes the seasonal position of the shoals of fish in the North Sea. He began to study the balance of life within the sea and the effect of ocean temperature on migration. He saw to it that the inspectorate interested itself in the mesh of fishermen’s nets so that fry fell back into the sea. He understood, as his predecessors had to, that to understand the life of sea fishes you must study their food and what affects its abundance. He therefore got the fishermen themselves to make observations and by a modest outlay in prizes filled log-books with their reports of fish culture in the North Sea. He fought the maltreatment of animals that often sprang from ignorance, once saving a swarm of elvers in Gloucestershire from massacre; on another occasion at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ‘made a speech about cruelty to seals. Much applauded. Deo gracias.’