Reading the Rocks

by Brenda Maddox

  Here see the wrecks of beasts and fishes,

  With broken saucers, cups, and dishes . . .

  Skins wanting bones, bones wanting skins,

  And various blocks to break your shins.17

  His boast of eating his way through the animal kingdom was celebrated. No form of meat or fish was too bizarre to stop him tasting it. Hedgehog and crocodile were among the delicacies he fed his guests. The poet and artist John Ruskin, who as an Oxford undergraduate had been invited to Buckland’s table, wrote in his journal: ‘I have always regretted a day of unlucky engagement on which I missed a delicate toaste of mice.’18 Later, when Buckland was living in London as Dean of Westminster (a post he accepted in 1845, disillusioned with Oxford’s attitude towards science), his dinners at the deanery featured horse’s tongue, alligator, puppies, mice, tortoise, bison and ostrich. He even claimed to have eaten the heart of King Louis XVI, sold by a scavenger in Paris to his friend Lord Harcourt at Nuneham. According to legend, he devoured the whole organ, leaving nothing for its collector.

  In 1822 Buckland achieved fame. He owed it to his exploration of a cave in Yorkshire where he found a rich haul of remains of extinct hyenas.

  The cave had been discovered accidentally, when the ground gave way beneath a workman and swallowed his pick. When Buckland got to the cavern, he saw what he discerned as the bones of hyenas, wolves and bears. Only the hyena bones were intact, suggesting to him that the hyenas had killed the other creatures and dragged the remains back to their den to gnaw the bones. Previously such bone heaps had been taken as evidence that the Noachian Flood had swept tropical animals to northern climes. But that explanation did not explain why the bones had been chewed.

  Exploring Kirkdale Cave was no easy exercise. Holding a lantern, Buckland had to creep on all fours into the dark sloping hole two feet wide and five feet high. Then he had to slide over a foot-thick layer of bone-filled mud before entering dark passages that stretched hundreds of feet back into the hillside.

  The effort was rewarded. He came across the fossil bones of disparate animals including extinct species of hippopotamus and elephant and the skull of a rhinoceros; all appeared to have been broken. By the Great Flood? But there was no sign of water damage. Had they been gnawed? If so, by which animals? Buckland found his explanation in more than three hundred hyena teeth and the bones of seventy-five hyenas. He reasoned that the larger animals could not have been washed into the cave by the Flood as the opening was too small; they must first have been killed, then carried in parts by the hyenas, which then gnawed them; when the waters swept in, the entrance was sealed off.

  Buckland also found coprolites. He was fascinated by these small dark-grey round balls of calcified excrement, which appeared to have been preserved far more than the bones of the animals that had produced them. Despite the prevailing prudery of his time, he showed a complete lack of embarrassment when discussing them. He identified the droppings found in the Kirkland Cave as album graecum – white deposits that were the petrified faeces of extinct vertebrates. To him, they were just as fascinating as the bones and stones. When the keeper of a menagerie which included hyenas supported Buckland’s hypothesis, Buckland responded delicately that ‘though such matters may be instructive and therefore to a certain degree interesting, it may be as well for you and me not to have the reputation of too frequently and too minutely examining faecal products’.19

  Buckland’s well-known interest in ancient excrement inspired De la Beche’s witty etching entitled A Coprolitic Vision. It shows the ‘Reverend Professor of Mineralogy and Geology in the University of Oxford’, wearing gown and mortar board, with a geological hammer in his right hand, standing on a flat rock at the opening of a wide cavern as if it were an auditorium where he is conducting a performance by a deer, a bear, a leopard, hyenas, crocodiles, ichthyosaurs and pterodactyls. Each creature has lumps dropping from its backside, some landing near the reverend professor’s feet.

  Buckland’s paper on the Kirkdale Cave received a rapturous reception when he read it at the Royal Society in 1822 and won him the society’s highest honour, the Copley Medal, never before given to a geologist. In his welcoming speech, Sir Humphry Davy praised the paper as marking the moment when geology caught up with astronomy. The new science, he said, had reached the point ‘from which our researches may be pursued through the immensity of age, and the records of animated nature, as it were, carried back to the time of the creation’.20 Buckland was delighted by the recognition. He wrote to his friend Lady Mary Cole: ‘The president and Council of the R.S. have sanctioned my paper with the Copley Gold Medal so that I am now not much afraid of any further opposition to my Hyena Story which my friends at first predicted no body would believe . . .’21

  The Kirkland Cave paper inspired another famous cartoon, this one attributed to Conybeare. It shows Buckland poking his head into a prehistoric hyena den, holding a candle while the live hyenas look up from their gnawed bones and menace the intruder. It was captioned: ‘Mr. BUCKLAND peeping into the Hyaenas’ den, to see what they are about, etc.’. Conybeare was unquestionably the author of the accompanying poem with the unpoetic title, ‘The Hyaenas’ Den at Kirkdale near Kirby Moorside in Yorkshire, discovered ad 1821’:

  Their teeth had the temper of steel,

  Skulls & dry bones they swallowed with zest, or

  Mammoth tusks they dispatch’d at a meal,

  And their guts were like Pappin’s digester.

  Buckland enjoyed the poem and the drawing, which portrayed him as a spy creeping into the past – a time-traveller, with hair standing on end. The poem, printed as a broadsheet accompanied by the drawing, was leaked to the Yorkshire Gazette.22 The sketch has been held as an even earlier candidate than De la Beche’s Duria Antiquior as the first artistic attempt, based on new geological knowledge, to recreate the reality of the ancient past – not through fictional dragons but through representations of extinct animals as they had appeared when alive.

  There was nothing jokey, however, about Buckland’s use of the Kirkdale evidence in his Oxford lectures. A lithograph of him lecturing to senior members of the university shows him holding a fossil hyena jaw over a desk full of fossils with Greenough’s geological map of England in the background. In it he is clearly an academic lecturer of utmost seriousness.

  As an ordained priest and theologian Buckland was well aware that ‘dating the deluge’ was a major preoccupation among his fellow clerical geologists. He himself believed that there had been a huge watery catastrophe so recent that it could be interpreted as the biblical Flood. As he saw it, an extraordinary wave of water had swept across Europe, making extinct the hyenas and other animals found in the Kirkdale Cave. In 1823 he put these arguments into what became his Reliquiae Diluvianae.

  Before the book was done, however, he found an even better cave for his purposes: Paviland Cave in cliffs facing the sea on the south coast of the Gower Peninsula, west of Swansea. The cave, known locally as ‘the Goat’s Hole’, was (and is) accessible only at low tide.

  From his friend Lewis Weston Dillwyn, a Swansea businessman, naturalist and fellow of the Royal Society, Buckland had learned that a trove of bones had been found inside Paviland Cave. On 24 December 1822, Buckland contacted Lady Mary Cole, the remarried widow of T. M. Talbot, former head of the wealthy Talbot family who lived nearby at Penrice Castle. (She was, with her daughter Mary Talbot, one of the upper-class women who often became amateur naturalists at that time.) He begged her to send him ‘a few of the best marked teeth & Bones in a Box by the Mail’.23 She went with two male companions and collected ‘a great quantity’ of bones which she had sent to Buckland.

  In the third week of January 1823, Buckland then went to Swansea to see for himself. He soon found that Paviland Cave would be even harder to enter than Kirkdale had been. ‘Visitors reach it by scrambling up the rocks, which are uncovered for two and a half hours either side of low water,’ Paul Ferris explains in his history of the Gower. ‘Anyone cau
ght by the incoming tide is safe enough there, but has a seven-hour wait before they can get out again. The only other route is the face of the cliff, which is dangerous.’24

  When Buckland, accompanied by one of Dillwyn’s sons and several others, entered Paviland Cave, they unearthed, beneath six inches of mud, a human skeleton. Lying in extended burial position, its bones were identifiable as coming from the left side of the body: upper arm, inner forearm and bone of the forearm extending from the lateral side of the elbow to the thumb side of the wrist. The pelvis lay in place as did the entire left leg and foot, part of the right foot, and many ribs. Most striking was the reddish colour of the bones. Nearby were fragments of ivory rings and curved ivory rods. They also uncovered (nothing escaped Buckland’s eye) a mutton bone that seemed to have been used as a primitive instrument. The visitors assumed the skeleton to have been a murder victim.

  In all, Buckland made three visits to Paviland Cave. Discussing the find with his friends, he at first joked that the skeleton might have been that of a tax man murdered by smugglers. Then his imagination got to work. The mutton bone, he decided, was a conjuring tool used by a witch, as were the ivory rods and rings. A quick mental leap led him to decide that the remains were those of a female and that their red colour indicated that she had been not only a witch but also a prostitute. Buckland amplified this theory by pointing out the cave’s proximity to an Iron Age enclosure, or fort, at the top of the hill. Therefore, ‘whatever may have been her occupation, the vicinity of a camp would afford a motive for residence’. He dubbed her ‘the Red Lady or the Witch of Paviland’ and made her a highlight of what would be his best-known work, Reliquiae Diluvianae (Relics of the Flood): Observations on the Organic Remains attesting the Action of a Universal Deluge.

  Later scientific analysis showed that this celebrated skeleton was that of a male aged between twenty-five and thirty. The red stain on the bones has been traced to the ochre found in local rocks nearly 30,000 years old. But facts have not dimmed the Red Lady’s fame. She – or rather, he – lies in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

  In 1824 Buckland was elected to the first of his two terms as president of the Geological Society. (The second ran from 1839 to 1841.) He was president when, on 20 February 1824, the society got its royal charter, which brought, as well as high social status, legal benefits such as the right to enter into contracts and to hold bank accounts. Only five national learned societies shared this distinction: the Royal Society (in 1660), the Society of Antiquaries (in 1751), the Royal Society of Edinburgh (in 1783), the Royal Irish Academy (in 1785), and the Linnean Society (in 1802).

  Perhaps it was Buckland’s good sense that kept the Geological Society from appending ‘royal’ to its name and annoying the Royal Society. In any event, he hosted a celebration dinner on the winning of the charter, appropriately at the Freemasons’ Tavern where the society had been formed.

  On that occasion, Buckland had good reason to celebrate, for at the meeting – the same at which Conybeare presented his description of the plesiosaur – Buckland announced the discovery of a giant reptile with the serrated teeth of a carnivore and the legs, sacrum and vertebral column of a mammal. The find was all the more remarkable because it included a part of a lower jaw with curved and pointed teeth still in place. The gigantic bones had actually been found years earlier, in a stone quarry surrounding the village of Stonesfield, eight miles northwest of Oxford, long known for its richness in fossils. The bones had been brought to the Ashmolean Museum and Buckland, when he became director, by careful studies, had made them his own. He told his audience the name, meaning giant lizard: ‘I have ventured, on concurrence with my friend and fellow labourer, the Reverend W. Conybeare, to assign to it the name Megalosaurus.’25 It was, although none realised it at the time, the first scientific description of a dinosaur. It was also one of the first proofs that in the remote past giant reptiles had roamed the earth as well as inhabiting the sea. (In 1842 the comparative anatomist and palaeontologist Richard Owen gave the beast the Latin name Dinosauria – terrible lizard.)

  The giant bones had already brought the famed Cuvier over from Paris in 1818 to see what was at first termed Megalosaurus bucklandii. Cuvier, who had seen similar large bones in Normandy, returned to Paris all the more convinced that the earth had once been inhabited by giant reptiles. He set about expanding his classic Ossemens fossiles, with illustrations of a great array of specimens. He gave particular attention to the fossils of large beasts such as the rhinoceros and hippopotamus as well as mammoths and mastodons, and in his final volume revised and expanded his earlier work on fossil reptiles. Geology, as he now saw it, was a historical science.

  What remained to be discovered was how and when the age of reptiles preceded the age of mammals.

  A year after his ‘Megalosaurus . . . of Stonesfield’ paper, influential friends arranged for Buckland, aged forty-one, to become a canon of Christ Church Cathedral. This promotion allowed him to move out of the college and into a good and free house, with an income of £1,000 a year. It also allowed him to ‘enter into the holy estate’. He wasted no time. In 1825 he married Mary Morland from Oxfordshire, a fossil geologist who had a great talent for drawing and sketching.

  Buckland had first spotted Mary while travelling by coach to Dorset; he was reading a heavy tome by Cuvier and saw a woman passenger reading the exact same book. On speaking to her he was surprised to find that she had worked as an illustrator on the book. By chance, on that journey, Buckland carried with him a letter of introduction to one Mary Morland as someone he might like to meet in Dorset. They were married by the end of the year and spent a geological honeymoon inspecting caves in France and Sicily, before settling down at Oxford. They would have nine children together.

  Buckland now concentrated on dating the deluge. In 1836 he contributed to the Bridgewater Treatises, an important series designed to help the general public understand science as a manifestation of the wisdom of God. His map, which he incorporated, contained a diagram of an ‘ideal section’ of the earth’s crust and shows that he accorded a vast age to the rocks that had preceded human life. In his book, Geology and Mineralogy, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (1836), he pushed back the last geological debacle from the biblical deluge to the period immediately preceding the creation of man. He declared the language of rocks and fossils to be as much a divine revelation of truth as the Bible. As he presented it, geology made up a history of a high and ancient order, written by the finger of God himself upon the foundations of the everlasting hills. This book was so popular that its first edition print-run of 5,000 (far greater than the 1,500 printed for the first edition of Charles Lyell’s Principles) sold out before it reached the bookshops, despite being the same hefty price of thirty-five shillings. It went on to sell thousands of copies more.

  In time, however, Buckland’s reputation declined. His former pupil, Lyell, was unconvinced by Buckland’s assertion that geology testified to God’s design and that fossils illustrated the progress of life as it developed towards its divine destination: man.

  Lyell consistently and sternly resisted any attempt by Buckland and other clerical geologists to explain the Noachian deluge in geological terms. Using the editorial ‘we’, Lyell wrote: ‘For our own part, we have always considered the flood, if we are required to admit its universality in the strictest sense of the term, as a preternatural event far beyond the reach of philosophical inquiry.’26 Those intent on equating geological phenomena with biblical history, he advised, should remember the remarkable fact that in the Bible a dove flies back to the Ark bearing an olive branch (Genesis viii:11). This occurrence could only mean that the earth had not been universally submerged and that somewhere on the earth, vegetation had survived.

  The Flood, however, was still a delicate issue (and so it remains today for the many who insist on biblical explanations for the earth’s history). Lyell, frowning on ‘diluvial interpretations’,27 argued that the biblical floo
d was taken to have been a universal violent rush of waters and to have covered the whole earth, including ‘the summits of the loftiest mountains’, and that the multitude of volcanic cones in central France must have arisen since the date usually assigned to the deluge (about 4,000 years bc). By that timing, the mountains around Auvergne, with their well-preserved craters, had to have appeared since the beginning of the recorded history of France – perhaps even since the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar in 51 bc; it was impossible to believe that Caesar could have observed these dramatic eruptions and hot lava flows without mentioning them.

  Lyell hoped that his work would not offend orthodox Christian thinkers and ‘would only offend the ultras’.28 He succeeded. The religious periodical press welcomed Principles and called for its study by all those interested ‘in the Great First Cause’.29

  The effect of Lyell’s book on the Geological Society was profound. It persuaded them to renounce the equation of the Flood with the many traces of fluvial erosion, deep valleys and watery catastrophe found around the earth.

  Should Buckland be re-evaluated? He was not universally admired in his time. Charles Darwin wrote in his autobiography that he knew and liked all the leading geologists, ‘with the exception of 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.’ Buckland’s reputation suffered also from the mental illness that clouded his last years and had him sent to an asylum.

  Yet it has been argued that more than anyone else, Buckland made ‘deep time’ acceptable to contemporary thinkers and opened the way to ideas about evolution. In the Times Literary Supplement in 2008, the eminent geological historian Richard Fortey wrote persuasively that William Buckland has been ‘too long tarred with the error of eagerly recognising evidence of the Mosaic Deluge in the fossil bones he dug up from limestone caves. But he soon left the theory behind as new evidence came to light, and he was a crucial figure in showing how the living detail of the prehistoric past could be revived through critical study of fossil bones. He deserves to be recognised as one of the pioneers in re-animating the ancient earth. He discovered the oldest human fossil. One would like to have met him.’30