Francis Trevelyan Buckland
Encyclopedia
Francis Trevelyan Buckland (17 December 1826 – 19 December 1880) was an English surgeon, zoologist, popular author and natural historian. He was the son of William Buckland
, the noted geologist
and palaeontologist.
, where his father was a Canon of Christ Church
. After education by his mother, he went, at eight and a half, to a boarding school in Cotterstock
, Northamptonshire
. From 1837–39 he went to a preparatory school in Laleham
, near Chertsey
. This was run by his uncle, John Buckland, who, unfortunately for Frank, was a brutal master who flogged his pupils quite excessively. Relief came with a scholarship to Winchester College
, a school with an unbroken history of six hundred years. Here Frank Buckland was taught by the Second Master, Charles Wordsworth, who sent letters of praise to Frank's father. Winchester had a harsh regime, but was much preferable to his previous school. Frank was not a first-rate scholar, but managed to gain entrance to Christ Church, Oxford
after failing to get a scholarship to the smaller Corpus Christi
.
Frank studied at Christ Church from 1844–48, obtaining the BA
at the second attempt. At once he travelled to London to begin training in surgery. His father had the advice of Richard Owen
and Sir Benjamin Brodie. Brodie personally escorted Frank to St. George's Hospital and enrolled him as a student under Mr. Caesar Hawkins FRS, Surgeon to the hospital.
Buckland had a liaison with a woman of humble birth, Hannah Papps, who bore him a son in 1851. They married in 1863, but the son died early.
Buckland's early death was presaged by lung haemorrhages, which might suggest tuberculosis
or perhaps lung cancer
. His death certificate is, as so often in those days, unhelpful. He is buried in Brompton Cemetery
, London.http://www.brompton.org/Residents.htm
in 1849 gave him a chance of comparing their methods with those in London. In London most of the nurses were illiterate; one who claimed to read was tested with a label reading "This lotion to be applied externally only". The nurse interpreted it as "Two spoonfuls to be taken four times a day".p48
Buckland made MRCS in 1851. He was appointed Assistant Surgeon (= house-surgeon) at St George's, 1852. A vivid word-portrait was written by a surgical colleague, Charles Lloyd:
in February 1854, and later that year was gazetted as Assistant Surgeon to the Second Life Guards
. This appointment that left him plenty of time for his growing interest in natural history, since the Household Cavalry
were not deployed abroad from the Battle of Waterloo
(1815) until the Battle of Tel-el-Kabir in 1882. Buckland held the appointment until 1863.
and other periodicals and from the sale of popular books. He was much in demand as a lecturer and speaker.
Buckland was a pioneer of zoöphagy: his favourite research was eating the animal kingdom. This habit he learnt from his father, whose residence, the Deanery, offered such rare delights as mice in batter, squirrel pie, horse's tongue and ostrich. After the 'Eland Dinner' in 1859 at the London Tavern, organised by Richard Owen
, Buckland set up the Acclimatization Society to further the search for new food. In 1862 100 guests at Willis' Rooms sampled Japanese Sea slug (= sea cucumber
, probably), kangaroo
, guan
, curassow
and Honduras turkey. This was really quite a modest menu, though Buckland had his eye on capybara
for the future. Buckland's home, 37 Albany Sreet, London, was famous for its menagerie and its varied menus, including, at times, boiled elephant
trunk, rhinoceros
pie, porpoise
heads, and stewed mole
.
His writing was sometimes slapdash, but always vivid and racy, and made natural history attractive to the mass readership. This is an example:
An enthusiastic lover of natural history, he became a popular author. He wrote Fish Hatching (1863), Curiosities of Natural History (4 vols. 1857–72), Log Book of a Fisherman and Zoologist (1876) and Natural History of British Fishes (1881). He also founded and edited the periodical Land and Water. He was appointed Inspector of Salmon Fisheries in 1867, and retained this post for the rest of his life. In this role he was extremely energetic, and made good use of his talent for publicity. He served on various commissions, experimented with fish hatcheries
, and developed an Economic Fish Museum.
Though observant, he was not always strictly scientific in his methods and modes of expression. All the same, Darwin
used some of his material from Land and Water in the Descent of Man, an honour which Buckland did not appreciate, since he was a strong opponent of Darwinism
. But Frank was no theoretician: his life was lived on the practical side of natural history.
Frank Buckland founded the Museum of Economic Fish Culture in South Kensington in 1865, the only remaining contents of which are held by the Scottish Fisheries Museum
in Anstruther.
William Buckland
The Very Rev. Dr William Buckland DD FRS was an English geologist, palaeontologist and Dean of Westminster, who wrote the first full account of a fossil dinosaur, which he named Megalosaurus...
, the noted geologist
Geologist
A geologist is a scientist who studies the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the Earth as well as the processes and history that has shaped it. Geologists usually engage in studying geology. Geologists, studying more of an applied science than a theoretical one, must approach Geology using...
and palaeontologist.
Life
Frank Buckland was born and brought up in OxfordOxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
, where his father was a Canon of Christ Church
Christ Church, Oxford
Christ Church or house of Christ, and thus sometimes known as The House), is one of the largest constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England...
. After education by his mother, he went, at eight and a half, to a boarding school in Cotterstock
Cotterstock
Cotterstock is a village and civil parish in East Northamptonshire, England.-Geography:Cotterstock is on the banks of the River Nene, which flows through the town of Peterborough 16 miles to the north east and empties into the North Sea in The Wash...
, Northamptonshire
Northamptonshire
Northamptonshire is a landlocked county in the English East Midlands, with a population of 629,676 as at the 2001 census. It has boundaries with the ceremonial counties of Warwickshire to the west, Leicestershire and Rutland to the north, Cambridgeshire to the east, Bedfordshire to the south-east,...
. From 1837–39 he went to a preparatory school in Laleham
Laleham
Laleham is a village in the borough of Spelthorne, in the county of Surrey in South East England and adjoins Staines. It is within the historic boundaries of Middlesex. To its south is Laleham Park by the River Thames, across green belt farmland to its north and south east are Ashford and...
, near Chertsey
Chertsey
Chertsey is a town in Surrey, England, on the River Thames and its tributary rivers such as the River Bourne. It can be accessed by road from junction 11 of the M25 London orbital motorway. It shares borders with Staines, Laleham, Shepperton, Addlestone, Woking, Thorpe and Egham...
. This was run by his uncle, John Buckland, who, unfortunately for Frank, was a brutal master who flogged his pupils quite excessively. Relief came with a scholarship to Winchester College
Winchester College
Winchester College is an independent school for boys in the British public school tradition, situated in Winchester, Hampshire, the former capital of England. It has existed in its present location for over 600 years and claims the longest unbroken history of any school in England...
, a school with an unbroken history of six hundred years. Here Frank Buckland was taught by the Second Master, Charles Wordsworth, who sent letters of praise to Frank's father. Winchester had a harsh regime, but was much preferable to his previous school. Frank was not a first-rate scholar, but managed to gain entrance to Christ Church, Oxford
Christ Church, Oxford
Christ Church or house of Christ, and thus sometimes known as The House), is one of the largest constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England...
after failing to get a scholarship to the smaller Corpus Christi
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Corpus Christi College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom...
.
Frank studied at Christ Church from 1844–48, obtaining the BA
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
at the second attempt. At once he travelled to London to begin training in surgery. His father had the advice of Richard Owen
Richard Owen
Sir Richard Owen, FRS KCB was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and palaeontologist.Owen is probably best remembered today for coining the word Dinosauria and for his outspoken opposition to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection...
and Sir Benjamin Brodie. Brodie personally escorted Frank to St. George's Hospital and enrolled him as a student under Mr. Caesar Hawkins FRS, Surgeon to the hospital.
Buckland had a liaison with a woman of humble birth, Hannah Papps, who bore him a son in 1851. They married in 1863, but the son died early.
Buckland's early death was presaged by lung haemorrhages, which might suggest tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
or perhaps lung cancer
Lung cancer
Lung cancer is a disease characterized by uncontrolled cell growth in tissues of the lung. If left untreated, this growth can spread beyond the lung in a process called metastasis into nearby tissue and, eventually, into other parts of the body. Most cancers that start in lung, known as primary...
. His death certificate is, as so often in those days, unhelpful. He is buried in Brompton Cemetery
Brompton Cemetery
Brompton Cemetery is located near Earl's Court in South West London, England . It is managed by The Royal Parks and is one of the Magnificent Seven...
, London.http://www.brompton.org/Residents.htm
Career
So Frank studied surgery at St George's Hospital. A visit to ParisParis
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
in 1849 gave him a chance of comparing their methods with those in London. In London most of the nurses were illiterate; one who claimed to read was tested with a label reading "This lotion to be applied externally only". The nurse interpreted it as "Two spoonfuls to be taken four times a day".p48
Buckland made MRCS in 1851. He was appointed Assistant Surgeon (= house-surgeon) at St George's, 1852. A vivid word-portrait was written by a surgical colleague, Charles Lloyd:
- "Four and a half feet in height and rather more in breadth – what he measured round the chest is not known to mortal man. His chief passion was surgery – elderly maidens called their cats indoors as he passed by and young mothers who lived in the neighbourhood gave their nurses more than ordinarily strict injunctions as to their babies. To a lover of natural history it was a pleasant sight to see him at dinner with a chicken before him... and see how, undeterred by foolish prejudices, he devoured the brain." p59
The Life Guards
Frank was elected to the Athenaeum ClubAthenaeum Club, London
The Athenaeum Club, usually just referred to as the Athenaeum, is a notable London club with its Clubhouse located at 107 Pall Mall, London, England, at the corner of Waterloo Place....
in February 1854, and later that year was gazetted as Assistant Surgeon to the Second Life Guards
Life Guards (British Army)
The Life Guards is the senior regiment of the British Army and with the Blues and Royals, they make up the Household Cavalry.They originated in the four troops of Horse Guards raised by Charles II around the time of his restoration, plus two troops of Horse Grenadier Guards which were raised some...
. This appointment that left him plenty of time for his growing interest in natural history, since the Household Cavalry
Household Cavalry
The term Household Cavalry is used across the Commonwealth to describe the cavalry of the Household Divisions, a country’s most elite or historically senior military groupings or those military groupings that provide functions associated directly with the Head of state.Canada's Governor General's...
were not deployed abroad from the Battle of Waterloo
Battle of Waterloo
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday 18 June 1815 near Waterloo in present-day Belgium, then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands...
(1815) until the Battle of Tel-el-Kabir in 1882. Buckland held the appointment until 1863.
Natural history and zoöphagy
Buckland gradually gave up surgery, and increasingly devoted himself to natural history. He made a good income as a writer for The FieldThe Field
The Field is a play written by John B. Keane, first performed in 1965. It tells the story of the hardened farmer "Bull" McCabe and his love for the land he rents. The play debuted at Dublin's Olympia Theatre in 1965, with Ray McAnally as "The Bull" and Eamon Keane as "The Bird" O'Donnell. The play...
and other periodicals and from the sale of popular books. He was much in demand as a lecturer and speaker.
Buckland was a pioneer of zoöphagy: his favourite research was eating the animal kingdom. This habit he learnt from his father, whose residence, the Deanery, offered such rare delights as mice in batter, squirrel pie, horse's tongue and ostrich. After the 'Eland Dinner' in 1859 at the London Tavern, organised by Richard Owen
Richard Owen
Sir Richard Owen, FRS KCB was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and palaeontologist.Owen is probably best remembered today for coining the word Dinosauria and for his outspoken opposition to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection...
, Buckland set up the Acclimatization Society to further the search for new food. In 1862 100 guests at Willis' Rooms sampled Japanese Sea slug (= sea cucumber
Sea cucumber (food)
Sea cucumbers are marine animals of the class Holothuroidea used in fresh or dried form in various cuisines.The creature and the food product is commonly known as bêche-de-mer in French, trepang in Indonesian, namako in Japanese and in the Philippines it is called balatan...
, probably), kangaroo
Kangaroo
A kangaroo is a marsupial from the family Macropodidae . In common use the term is used to describe the largest species from this family, especially those of the genus Macropus, Red Kangaroo, Antilopine Kangaroo, Eastern Grey Kangaroo and Western Grey Kangaroo. Kangaroos are endemic to the country...
, guan
Guan (bird)
The guans are a number of bird genera which make up the largest group in the family Cracidae. They are found mainly in northern South America, southern Central America, and a few adjacent Caribbean islands...
, curassow
Curassow
Curassows are one of the three major groups of cracid birds. Three of the four genera are restricted to tropical South America; a single species of Crax ranges north to Mexico...
and Honduras turkey. This was really quite a modest menu, though Buckland had his eye on capybara
Capybara
The capybara , also known as capivara in Portuguese, and capibara, chigüire in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador ronsoco in Peru, chigüiro, and carpincho in Spanish, is the largest living rodent in the world. Its closest relatives are agouti, chinchillas, coyphillas, and guinea pigs...
for the future. Buckland's home, 37 Albany Sreet, London, was famous for its menagerie and its varied menus, including, at times, boiled elephant
Elephant
Elephants are large land mammals in two extant genera of the family Elephantidae: Elephas and Loxodonta, with the third genus Mammuthus extinct...
trunk, rhinoceros
Rhinoceros
Rhinoceros , also known as rhino, is a group of five extant species of odd-toed ungulates in the family Rhinocerotidae. Two of these species are native to Africa and three to southern Asia....
pie, porpoise
Porpoise
Porpoises are small cetaceans of the family Phocoenidae; they are related to whales and dolphins. They are distinct from dolphins, although the word "porpoise" has been used to refer to any small dolphin, especially by sailors and fishermen...
heads, and stewed mole
Mole (animal)
Moles are small cylindrical mammals adapted to a subterranean lifestyle. They have velvety fur; tiny or invisible ears and eyes; and short, powerful limbs with large paws oriented for digging. The term is especially and most properly used for the true moles, those of the Talpidae family in the...
.
His writing was sometimes slapdash, but always vivid and racy, and made natural history attractive to the mass readership. This is an example:
- "On Tuesday evening, at 5pm, Messrs Grove, of Bond Street, sent word that they had a very fine sturgeonSturgeonSturgeon is the common name used for some 26 species of fish in the family Acipenseridae, including the genera Acipenser, Huso, Scaphirhynchus and Pseudoscaphirhynchus. The term includes over 20 species commonly referred to as sturgeon and several closely related species that have distinct common...
on their slab. Of course, I went down at once to see it... The fish measured 9 feet in length [nearly three metres]. I wanted to make a cast of the fellow... and they offered me the fish for the night: he must be back in the shop the next morning by 10 am... [various adventures follow] I was determined to get him into the kitchen somehow; so, tying a rope to his tail, I let him slide down the stone stairs by his own weight. He started all right, but 'getting way' on him, I could hold the rope no more, and away he went sliding headlong down the stairs, like an avalanche down Mont Blanc... he smashed the door open... and slid right into the kitchen... till at last he brought himself to an anchor under the kitchen table. This sudden and unexpected appearance of the armour-clad sea monster, bursting open the door... instantly created a sensation. The cook screamed, the house-maid fainted, the cat jumped on the dresser, the dog retreated behind the copper and barked, the monkeys went mad with fright, and the sedate parrot has never spoken a word since."
An enthusiastic lover of natural history, he became a popular author. He wrote Fish Hatching (1863), Curiosities of Natural History (4 vols. 1857–72), Log Book of a Fisherman and Zoologist (1876) and Natural History of British Fishes (1881). He also founded and edited the periodical Land and Water. He was appointed Inspector of Salmon Fisheries in 1867, and retained this post for the rest of his life. In this role he was extremely energetic, and made good use of his talent for publicity. He served on various commissions, experimented with fish hatcheries
Fish hatchery
A fish hatchery is a "place for artificial breeding, hatching and rearing through the early life stages of animals, finfish and shellfish in particular". Hatcheries produce larval and juvenile fish primarily to support the aquaculture industry where they are transferred to on-growing systems...
, and developed an Economic Fish Museum.
Though observant, he was not always strictly scientific in his methods and modes of expression. All the same, Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
used some of his material from Land and Water in the Descent of Man, an honour which Buckland did not appreciate, since he was a strong opponent of Darwinism
Darwinism
Darwinism is a set of movements and concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or of evolution, including some ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin....
. But Frank was no theoretician: his life was lived on the practical side of natural history.
Buckland and fisheries
The Buckland Foundation is a charity that funds a Buckland Professor each year to give three public talks in relevant parts of the United Kingdom and Ireland on a matter of current concern in the commercial fisheries. The Foundation was endowed from the estate of Frank Buckland. Buckland sat on four Commissions at Fish and Fishing between 1875 and his death in 1880. Something of the flavour of his views is given by the following quotations from his reports and articles.- "A greater cry should more properly be established against those which deter or kill the fish by noxious materials which they pour into public waters for their private use and benefit...".
- "What objection can be reasonably argued against the employment of revenue cruisers for the accommodation of naturalists, appointed by government ... in order that they make a thoroughly practical examination of the dark and mysterious habits of food fishes."
- "We want also samples of the surface water itself under peculiar conditions, for instance, what is the meaning of the wonderful white appearance of the sea which took place last autumn in nearly all the waters of the northern coast of England? What is the meaning of the occasional red appearance of the sea for many square miles? Again, how are we to devise a mesh of net that shall let go the small soles and undersized fry of other sea fish, and keep marketable fish only?"
Frank Buckland founded the Museum of Economic Fish Culture in South Kensington in 1865, the only remaining contents of which are held by the Scottish Fisheries Museum
Scottish Fisheries Museum
The Scottish Fisheries Museum is an award-winning museum in Anstruther, Fife, that records the history of the Scottish fishing industry and its people from earliest times to the present day....
in Anstruther.