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