William Buckland | |
|---|---|
| Dean of Westminster | |
.jpg) Buckland in 1833 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 12 March 1784 Axminster, Devon, England |
| Died | 14 August 1856 (aged 72) Islip, Oxfordshire, England |
| Denomination | Anglican |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 9, includingFrank Buckland |
| Alma mater | Winchester College, Corpus Christi College, Oxford |
| Scientific career | |
| Known for | Megalosaurus,coprolites |
| Awards | Copley Medal (1822) Wollaston Medal (1848) |
| Fields | Palaeontology |
William BucklandDD,FRS (12 March 1784 – 14 August 1856) was an English theologian,geologist andpalaeontologist.
His work in the early 1820s proved thatKirkdale Cave inNorth Yorkshire had been a prehistorichyena den, for which he was awarded theCopley Medal. It was praised as an example of how scientific analysis could reconstruct events in the distant past. He pioneered the use of fossilisedfaeces in reconstructing ecosystems, coining the termcoprolites. Buckland also wrote the first full account of afossildinosaur, which he namedMegalosaurus in 1824.
Buckland followed theGap Theory in interpreting the biblical account ofGenesis as two widely separated episodes of creation. It had emerged as a way to reconcile the scriptural account with discoveries in geology suggesting the earth was very old. Early in his career Buckland believed he had found evidence of thebiblical flood, but later saw that theglaciation theory ofLouis Agassiz gave a better explanation, and played a significant role in promoting it.
Buckland served asDean of Westminster from 1845 until his death 1856.
Buckland was born atAxminster in Devon[1] and, as a child, would accompany his father, the Rector ofTempleton andTrusham, on his walks where interest in road improvements led to collecting fossil shells, includingammonites, from theEarly JurassicLias rocks exposed in local quarries.
He was educated first atBlundell's School, Tiverton, Devon, and then atWinchester College, from where he won a scholarship toCorpus Christi College, Oxford, matriculating in 1801 and graduating BA in 1805.[2] He also attended lectures ofJohn Kidd on mineralogy and chemistry, developed an interest ingeology, and carried out field research onstrata during his vacations.[1] He went on to obtain his MA degree in 1808, became aFellow of Corpus Christi in 1809, and was ordained as a priest. He continued to make frequent geological excursions, on horseback, to various parts of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.
In 1813, Buckland was appointedReader in mineralogy, in succession to John Kidd, giving lively and popular lectures with increasing emphasis on geology andpalaeontology. As an unofficialcurator of theAshmolean Museum, he built up collections, touring Europe and coming into contact with scholars includingGeorges Cuvier.
In 1818, Buckland was elected a fellow of theRoyal Society. That year he persuadedthe Prince Regent to endow an additional Readership, this time in Geology and he became the first holder of the new appointment, delivering his inaugural address on 15 May 1819. This was published in 1820 asVindiciæ Geologiæ; or the Connexion of Geology with Religion explained, both justifying the new science of geology and reconciling geological evidence with thebiblical accounts ofcreation andNoah's Flood.
At a time when others were coming under the opposing influence ofJames Hutton's theory ofuniformitarianism, Buckland developed a new hypothesis that the word "beginning" inGenesis meant an undefined period between the origin of the earth and the creation of its current inhabitants, during which a long series of extinctions and successive creations of new kinds of plants and animals had occurred. Thus, hiscatastrophism theory incorporated a version ofOld Earth creationism orGap creationism. Buckland believed in a global deluge during the time of Noah but was not a supporter offlood geology as he believed that only a small amount of the strata could have been formed in the single year occupied by the deluge.[4]
From his investigations of fossil bones atKirkdale Cave, inYorkshire, he concluded that the cave had actually been inhabited byhyaenas in antediluvian times, and that the fossils were the remains of these hyaenas and the animals they had eaten, rather than being remains of animals that had perished in the Flood and then carried from the tropics by the surging waters, as he and others had at first thought. In 1822 he wrote:
It must already appear probable, from the facts above described, particularly from the comminuted state and apparently gnawed condition of the bones, that the cave in Kirkdale was, during a long succession of years, inhabited as a den of hyaenas, and that they dragged into its recesses the other animal bodies whose remains are found mixed indiscriminately with their own: this conjecture is rendered almost certain by the discovery I made, of many small balls of the solid calcareous excrement of an animal that had fed on bones... It was at first sight recognised by the keeper of the Menagerie at Exeter Change, as resembling, in both form and appearance, the faeces of the spotted or cape hyaena, which he stated to be greedy of bones beyond all other beasts in his care.[5]
While criticised by some, Buckland's analysis of Kirkland Cave and other bone caves was widely seen as a model for how careful analysis could be used to reconstruct the Earth's past, and the Royal Society awarded Buckland theCopley Medal in 1822 for his paper on Kirkdale Cave.[6] At the presentation the society's president,Humphry Davy, said:
by these inquiries, a distinct epoch has, as it were, been established in the history of the revolutions of our globe: a point fixed from which our researches may be pursued through the immensity of ages, and the records of animate nature, as it were, carried back to the time of the creation.[6]
While Buckland's analysis convinced him that the bones found in Kirkdale Cave had not been washed into the cave by a global flood, he still believed the thin layer of mud that covered the remains of the hyaena den had been deposited in the subsequent 'Universal Deluge'.[6] He developed these ideas into his great scientific workReliquiæ Diluvianæ, or, Observations on the Organic Remains attesting the Action of a Universal Deluge[7] which was published in 1823 and became a best seller. However, over the next decade as geology continued to progress Buckland changed his mind. In his famous Bridgewater Treatise, published in 1836, he acknowledged that the biblical account of Noah's flood could not be confirmed using geological evidence.[8] By 1840 he was very actively promoting the view that what had been interpreted as evidence of the 'Universal Deluge' two decades earlier, and subsequently of deep submergence by a new generation of geologists such as Charles Lyell, was in fact evidence of a major glaciation.
He continued to live in Corpus Christi College and, in 1824, he becamepresident of the Geological Society of London. Here he announced the discovery, atStonesfield, of fossil bones of a giantreptile which he namedMegalosaurus ('great lizard') and wrote the first full account of what would later be called adinosaur.
In 1825, Buckland was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences.[9] That year he resigned his college fellowship: he planned totake up the living ofStoke Charity inHampshire but, before he could take up the appointment, he was made aCanon ofChrist Church, a rich reward for academic distinction without serious administrative responsibilities.
In December 1825 he marriedMary Morland ofAbingdon, Oxfordshire, an accomplished illustrator and collector offossils. Theirhoneymoon was a year touring Europe, with visits to famousgeologists and geological sites. She continued to assist him in his work, as well as having nine children, five of whom survived to adulthood. His sonFrank Buckland became a well known practical naturalist, author, and Inspector of Salmon Fisheries.
On one occasion, Mary helped him decipher footmarks found in a slab of sandstone by covering the kitchen table with paste, while he fetched their pettortoise and confirmed his intuition, that tortoise footprints matched the fossil marks. His daughter, author Elizabeth Oke Buckland Gordon, wrote abiography of her father that included appendices of positions held by Buckland, his membership in professional societies, and an index of his publications.
On 18 January 1823 Buckland walked intoPaviland Cave in south Wales, where he discovered a skeleton which he named theRed Lady of Paviland,[10] as he at first supposed it to be the remains of a local prostitute.[11] Although Buckland found the skeleton in Paviland Cave in the same strata as the bones of extinct mammals (includingmammoth), Buckland shared the view ofGeorges Cuvier that no humans had coexisted with any extinct animals, and he attributed the skeleton's presence there to a grave having been dug in historical times, possibly by the same people who had constructed some nearby pre-Roman fortifications, into the older layers.[12]
Carbon-data tests have since dated theskeleton, now known to be male as from circa 33,000 years before present (BP).[13]It is the oldestanatomically modern human found in the United Kingdom.
The fossil hunterMary Anning noticed that stony objects known as "bezoar stones" were often found in the abdominal region ofichthyosaur skeletons found in theLias formation atLyme Regis. She also noted that if such stones were broken open they often contained fossilised fish bones and scales, and sometimes bones from smallichthyosaurs. These observations by Anning led Buckland to propose in 1829 that the stones were fossilised faeces. He coined the namecoprolite for them; the name came to be the general name for all fossilised faeces.
Buckland also concluded that the spiral markings on the fossils indicated that ichthyosaurs had spiral ridges in their intestines similar to those of modernsharks, and that some of thesecoprolites were black because the ichthyosaur had ingestedink sacs frombelemnites. He wrote a vivid description of the Liassic food chain based on these observations, which would inspireHenry De la Beche to paintDuria Antiquior, the first pictorial representation of a scene from the distant past.[14] After De le Beche had a lithographic print made based on his originalwatercolour, Buckland kept a supply of the prints on hand to circulate at his lectures.[15] He also discussed other similar objects found in other formations, including the fossilised hyena dung he had found in Kirkdale Cave. He concluded:
In all these various formations our Coprolites form records of warfare, waged by successive generations of inhabitants of our planet on one another: the imperishable phosphate of lime, derived from their digested skeletons, has become embalmed in the substance and foundations of the everlasting hills; and the general law of Nature which bids all to eat and be eaten in their turn, is shown to have been co-extensive with animal existence on our globe; theCarnivora in each period of the world's history fulfilling their destined office, – to check excess in the progress of life, and maintain the balance of creation.[16]
Buckland had been helping and encouragingRoderick Murchison for some years, and in 1831 was able to suggest a good starting point inSouth Wales for Murchison's researches into the rocks beneath the secondary strata associated with theage of reptiles. Murchison would later name these older strata, characterised by marineinvertebrate fossils, asSilurian, after a tribe that had lived in that area centuries earlier.[17] In 1832 Buckland presided over the second meeting of theBritish Association, which was then held at Oxford.
Buckland was commissioned to contribute one of the set of eightBridgewater Treatises, "On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation". This took him almost five years' work and was published in 1836 with the titleGeology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology.[18] His volume included a detailed compendium of his theories of day-age,gap theory and a form ofprogressive creationism wherefaunal succession revealed by the fossil record was explained by a series of successivedivine creations that prepared the earth for humans.[19] In the introduction he expressed theargument from design by asserting that the families andphyla of biology were "clusters of contrivance":
The myriads of petrified Remains which are disclosed by the researches of Geology all tend to prove that our Planet has been occupied in times preceding the Creation of the Human Race, by extinct species of Animals and Vegetables, made up, like living Organic Bodies, of 'Clusters of Contrivances,' which demonstrate the exercise of stupendous Intelligence and Power. They further show that these extinct forms of Organic Life were so closely allied, by Unity in the principles of their construction, to Classes, Orders, and Families, which make up the existing Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms, that they not only afford an argument of surpassing force, against the doctrines of the Atheist and Polytheist; but supply a chain of connected evidence, amounting to demonstration, of the continuous Being, and of many of the highest Attributes of the One Living and True God.
FollowingCharles Darwin's return from theBeagle voyage, Buckland discussed with him theGalapagos land iguanas andMarine iguanas.[20] He subsequently recommended Darwin's paper on the role ofearthworms insoil formation for publication, praising it as "a new & important theory to explain Phenomena of universal occurrence on the surface of the Earth—in fact a new Geological Power", while rightly rejecting Darwin's suggestion that chalkland could have been formed in a similar way.[21]
By this time Buckland was a prominent and influential scientific celebrity and a friend of theTory prime minister, SirRobert Peel. In co-operation withAdam Sedgwick andCharles Lyell, he prepared the report leading to the establishment of theGeological Survey of Great Britain.
Having become interested in the theory ofLouis Agassiz, that polished and striated rocks as well as transported material, had been caused by ancientglaciers, he travelled to Switzerland, in 1838, to meet Agassiz and see for himself. He was convinced and was reminded of what he had seen in Scotland, Wales and northern England but had previously attributed to the Flood. When Agassiz came to Britain for theGlasgow meeting of the British Association, in 1840, they went on an extended tour of Scotland and found evidence there of former glaciation. In that year Buckland had become president of the Geological Society again and, despite their hostile reaction to his presentation of the theory, he was now satisfied that glaciation had been the origin of much of the surface deposits covering Britain.
In 1845 he was appointed by Sir Robert Peel to the vacantDeanery of Westminster[22] (he succeededSamuel Wilberforce). Soon after, he was inducted to the living ofIslip, near Oxford, a preferment attached to the deanery. As Dean and head of Chapter, Buckland was involved in repair and maintenance ofWestminster Abbey and in preaching suitable sermons to the rural population of Islip, while continuing to lecture on geology at Oxford. In 1847, he was appointed a trustee in theBritish Museum and, in 1848, he was awarded theWollaston Medal by the Geological Society of London.
Around the end of 1850, William Buckland contracted a disorder of the neck and brain, and died of it in 1856.[23] Frank Buckland reported that an autopsy showed "the portion of the base of the skull upon which the brain rested, together with the two upper vertebrae of the neck, to be in an advanced state of caries, or decay. The irritation...was quite sufficient cause to give rise to all symptoms." Frank Buckland attributed the cause of death of both his parents to a severe accident years earlier.[24]
The plot for William's grave had been reserved, but when the gravedigger set to work, it was found that an outcrop of solidJurassic limestone lay just below ground level and explosives had to be used for excavation. This may have been a last jest by the noted geologist, reminiscent ofRichard Whately'sElegy intended for Professor Buckland written in 1820:
Where shall we our great Professor inter
That in peace may rest his bones?
If we hew him a rocky sepulchre
He'll rise and break the stones
And examine each stratum that lies around
For he's quite in his element underground
Buckland preferred to do his field palaeontology and geological work wearing anacademic gown.[26] His lectures were notable for their dramatic delivery.[27] When he lectured indoors he would bring his presentations to life by imitating the movements of the dinosaurs under discussion.[28] Buckland's passion for scientific observation and experiment extended to his home, where he had a table inlaid withdinosaurcoprolites. The original table top is exhibited at theLyme Regis Museum.[29][30]
Not only was William Buckland's home filled with specimens – animal as well as mineral, live as well as dead[31] – but he claimed that he wanted to eat at least one individual of all animal species. Reportedly according to an anecdote recounted byAugustus Hare, the most distasteful animals Buckland consumed were in his opinionmole andbluebottle fly.[32] Ostrich,[33] hedgehogs, tortoises, rats, frogs and snails were among animals reportedly served to guests,[34][31] with Buckland also having been reported as consuming alligators, young dogs, and mice.[34] He was followed in this hobby by his sonFrank.[34][31]
One story recounted by Peter Lund Simmonds in 1859 reports that Buckland served soup to his guests before claiming that it was an alligator that he had dissected earlier that day, to the guests significant shock and discomfort. When asked if he had really served an alligator, he reportedly responded "as good a calf's head as ever wore a coronet".[35] Another account suggests that Buckland served his guests pickledhorse tongue at a luncheon without initially telling them what they were eating.[34]
According to a widely repeated story, Buckland consumed, maybe accidentally, a portion of the mummified heart of the French KingLouis XIV during a dinner atNuneham House,[32][36] though the veracity of this particular story has been questioned.[37][38] The Louis XIV heart story goes back at least as far as an 1863 book byNathaniel Hawthorne.[39]
Charles Darwin criticised Buckland for his behaviour in his autobiography, saying that "Buckland, who though very good-humoured and good-natured, seemed to me a vulgar and almost coarse man. He was incited more by a craving for notoriety, which sometimes made him act like a buffoon, than by a love of science."[40]
Dorsum Buckland, a wrinkle ridge on theMoon, is named after him. Buckland Island (known today as Ani-Jima), in theBonin Islands (Ogasawara-Jima), was named after him by Captain Beechey on 9 June 1827. In 1846, William Buckland was rector of St. Nicholas in Islip and is commemorated on a plaque in the south aisle of the church and the "East Window" was dedicated to the memory of Buckland and his wife in 1861.[41] A plaque is dedicated to him near his summer home by the Old Rectory, The Walk, Islip (10 August 2008). There is also a bust byHenry Weekes in the south aisle atWestminster Abbey.[42]
In 1972, botanist Heikki RoivainencircumscribedBucklandiella, a genus of moss in the familyGrimmiaceae, which was named in his honour.[43] Buckland Peaks in New Zealand'sPaparoa Range was named after him.[44]
The Iñupiat village ofBuckland (Inupiaq:Nunatchiaq) inAlaska'sNorthwest Arctic Borough takes its English name from William Buckland, being named byRoyal Navy officerFrederick William Beechey in 1826.
Talk of strange relics led to mention of the heart of a French king preserved at Nuneham in a silver casket. Dr. Buckland, whilst looking at it, exclaimed, 'I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before,' and, before any one could hinder him, he had eateb it, and the precious relic was lost for ever. Dr. Buckland used to say that he had eaten his way straight through the whole animal creation, and that the worst thing was a mole—that was utterly horrible. ... Dr. Buckland afterwards told Lady Lyndhurst that there was one thing even worse than a mole, and that was a blue-bottle fly.
'22nd - To luncheon at Dean [William] Buckland's. A piece of roast ostrich, which we all tasted ; it was very much like a bit of coarse turkey'
At [William Buckland]'s table at Christ Church the viands were varied. A horse belonging to his brother-in-law having been shot, Dr. Buckland had the tongue pickled and served up at a large luncheon party, and the guests enjoyed it much, until told what they had eaten. Alligator was a rare delicacy, as told in the first volume of 'Curiosities'. but puppies were occasionally, and mice frequently eaten. So also at the Deanery, hedgehogs, tortoise, potted ostrich, and occasionally rats, frogs, and snails, were served up for the delectation of favoured guests. ' Party at the Deanery,' one guest notes ; 1 tripe for dinner ; don't like crocodile for breakfast.'
Our hospitable friend now made us drink a glass of wine, as old and genuine as the curiosities of his cabinet; and while sipping it, we ungratefully tried to excite his envy, by telling of various things, interesting to an antiquary and virtuoso, which we had seen in the course of our travels about England. We spoke, for instance, of a missal bound in solid gold and set around with jewels, but of such intrinsic value as no setting could enhance, for it was exquisitely illuminated, throughout, by the hand of Raphael himself. We mentioned a little silver case which once contained a portion of the heart of Louis XIV. nicely done up in spices, but, to the owner's horror and astonishment, Dean [William] Buckland popped the kingly morsel into his mouth, and swallowed it.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Buckland, William".Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
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