Frank Buckland, both intellectually and literally omnivorous

The Man Who Ate the Zoo: Frank Buckland, Forgotten Hero of Natural History. By Richard Girling. Chatto & Windus; 392 pages; £17.99.

ROAST giraffe, apparently, tastes a little like veal. A hedgehog, meanwhile, is “good and tender”. Exhumed panther, however, comes with a weaker recommendation. One such beast, having died in a London zoo, been buried for a couple of days then dug up, was pronounced “not very good”.

Frank Buckland was a 19th-century scientist, surgeon and culinary buccaneer who, as the title of this biography declares, “ate the zoo”. That is to understate his achievements: Buckland ate much that no self-respecting zoo would consider for its cages, earwigs (“horribly bitter”) being a particular low point.

The aim of this was not gastronomy but science. As a biologist and an optimist, Buckland wanted to find a new source of protein to help the world avoid the Malthusian doom that had been predicted a generation before. He had high hopes for horsemeat, but found quality control a problem. Having sampled a bad portion, he came to suggest it should be served in prisons as a deterrent to criminals.

The Victorians were intellectually omnivorous. Buckland’s father was not only canon of Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford but also the university’s first professor of geology and a passionate amateur biologist. (The senior Buckland also, according to legend, visited a country house containing in a silver casket the heart of a French king, which he promptly gobbled up.) The younger Buckland grew up in a home resembling the Caucus Race in “Alice in Wonderland” more than a house in a college cloister: turtle, bear and mouse all appeared in the family home to be studied, dissected—and eaten. The big beasts of science, too, roamed through: Michael Faraday, Baron von Bunsen and Isambard Kingdom Brunel all visited.

Buckland was as polymathic as any. When not dining he would work as a surgeon, advise Queen Victoria on how to rid herself of a plague of frogs and become one of the most popular science writers of his era. And what an era it was. When Buckland was born in 1826, the genesis of humanity was considered adequately explained in the Book of Genesis. By the time he died Darwin’s theory of evolution was spreading rapidly, and the long withdrawing roar of faith was audible.

Buckland, however, continued to see the hand of Creation in every creature. Perhaps it was this that inspired him to defend them. The word “conservationist” didn’t exist yet, but Buckland relentlessly defended God’s creatures. Horrified by seal culls, he wrote a powerful account of one in which it was explained that the pup’s cry “is very like that of a human infant”.

The state of Britain’s waterways appalled him. He found salmon rivers polluted by gasworks, lead, sewage and coal dust. As he wrote with disgust, manufacturers “seem to think that rivers are convenient channels kindly given them by nature to carry away…the refuse of their works”. This, a century before the modern environmental movement, was Buckland’s silent spring.

He would revolutionise the way that Britain saw nature. When he died in 1880, national newspapers joined in a chorus of lamentations that would have “done justice to an emperor”. History, which prefers its scientists to be prophets rather than relics, has been less kind. Partly because of his creationism, Buckland has been forgotten. Today he does not even merit a mention in the “Encyclopaedia Britannica”. This brilliantly entertaining biography argues persuasively why his memory, too, is worthy of conservation.