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Up for sale a RARE! "Zoologist" Francis Trevelyan Buckland Clipped Signature.
ES-3772D
Francis Trevelyan Buckland (17
December 1826 – 19 December 1880), better known as Frank Buckland,
was an English surgeon, zoologist, popular author and natural historian. He was born in a reputed family of
naturalists. After a brief career in medicine he took an interest in fishes and
other matters. He was one of the key members and founders of the acclimatisation society in
Britain, an organization that supported the introduction of new plants and
animals as food sources which was influenced by his interest in eating and
tasting a range of exotic animal meats. Frank was the first son of Canon William Buckland, a noted geologist and palaeontologist, and Mary, a fossil collector, palaeontologist and illustrator.
Frank was born and brought up in Oxford, where his father was a Canon of Christ Church. His
godfather was the sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey. Educated
at home by his mother, he went, at eight and a half, to a boarding school
in Cotterstock, Northamptonshire staying with his uncle John
Buckland. From 1837–39, he went to a preparatory school in Laleham, Surrey, run by his uncle, John Buckland, a brutal headmaster 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 he was taught by the
Second Master, Charles Wordsworth, who sent letters of praise to his father.
Winchester had a harsh regime, but was much preferable to his previous school.
While at Winchester he continued to take an interest in animals, trapping rats
and mice, dissecting and sometimes eating them. Students complained of a foul smell
emanating from the remains of a cat under his bed. Towards the end of his
schooling he was dissecting human parts that he obtained from the hospital on
the sly. He was known for his exploits with a lancet. One student with a
dolichocephalous head heard Frank muttering "what wouldn't I give for that
fellow's skull!" He was not a first-rate scholar,
but managed to gain entrance to Christ Church, Oxford in
October 1844, after failing to get a scholarship to the smaller Corpus Christi.
He joined a debating club and the first essay he read was on "whether
Rooks are beneficial to the farmer or not". He became a friend of the
curator at Surrey Zoo and when he heard that a panther had died, he had it dug
up and declared that the meat "was not very good". When the British Association met in
1847 at Oxford, Frank took along his pet bear Tigleth Pileser dressed in
student attire of a cap and gown to the party. Charles Lyell wrote that Buckland introduced the bear
formally to him and other zoologists present. This was not to go on for long as
the Dean finally informed him that "either you or your bear must go". In
1845 Frank went to Giessen for three months to study chemistry under Justus von Liebig. In September 1846 he made a trip around
Switzerland. Frank also attended some of the lectures of his father.
Buckland
studied at Christ Church from 1844–48, graduating at the second attempt. Passing out in May 1848
and at the advice of Richard Owen and Sir Benjamin
Brodie, his father sent him to study surgery in London at St George's Hospital under Caesar Hawkins. He attended classes by Henry Gray where another classmate was Francis Day. During this time he also became
acquainted with Abraham Dee Bartlett who
would send him dead animals at the zoo and he continued to keep many animals. A
visit to Paris 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". Buckland was made
a 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. He left St. George's
in 1853 and in August 1854 he joined as an assistant surgeon in the 2nd 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-Kebir in
1882. Buckland held the appointment until 1863. During this period he published
numerous notes in The Field, began giving talks and writing books.Frank
was elected to the Athenaeum Club in
February 1854, and later that year was gazetted as Assistant Surgeon to the
Second Life Guards. In January
and February 1859, Buckland made a search for the coffin of John Hunter in the
vaults of St Martin-in-the-Fields.
Buckland called Hunter the "greatest of Englishmen" and on 22
February he discovered the coffin after withstanding the noxious air in the
vault. The Leeds School of Medicine gave him a medal for this discovery. Buckland
married Hannah Papps on 11 August 1863, who was an "excellent
nurse" and caretaker for their assorted pets. Buckland's early death was
presaged by lung haemorrhages in 1879 after working in
the winter. In 1880 he had severe oedema. The excess fluid was drained using a
novel treatment of the time, a cannula called Southey's tube developed by the
surgeon Dr Henry Herbert Southey whose
brother, the poet Robert Southey, was a
friend of Buckland. He also had asthma and bronchitis from a history of heavy
cigar smoking. The death certificate records the cause as hepatic disease and
bronchitis although the cause may have been pulmonary tuberculosis. He was
buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.