The Pinecone by Jenny Uglow

Author:Jenny Uglow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Until one element shall do the work

Of all in chaos: until they

The creatures proud of their poor clay,

Shall perish, and their bleached bones shall lurk

In caves, in dens, in clefts of mountains, where

The deep shall follow to their latest lair …

Byron spoke to the masses, but Buckland too was a vivid and eccentric communicator, illustrating his lectures with displays of fossils and minerals, enlivening them with jokes and even ‘impersonations of the gait of extinct animals’.3 He lectured in quarries and hills, sometimes from horseback. At dinners in his Christ Church rooms, packed with specimens and strange pets, guests were served with ‘toasted field mice, crocodile steaks, hedgehog, puppy, ostrich, and snail’, and he aimed, he said, to eat his way through the animal kingdom. For a time, Buckland’s views gripped public attention, although he slowly came to accept that not all strata could have been created by a single flood, and agreed that they showed the signs of many inundations long before there was any evidence of man. The realisation that creatures had lived and died long before humans posed yet another challenge to Genesis, with its story of the eating of the fruit, in Milton’s words,

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