The Man Who Ate the Zoo: Frank Buckland, Forgotten Hero of Natural History by Richard Girling

Author:Richard Girling [Girling, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Amazon: B01BI3CDYI
Goodreads: 32902602
Publisher: Vintage Digital
Published: 2016-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

Frank despaired of taxidermists who failed to set up foxes correctly. ‘In nine stuffed foxes’ heads out of ten, the pupils of the eyes are made round like a dog’s, and not elliptical like a cat’s. The fact is, that a fox being a nocturnal animal, has a cat’s eye, and not a dog’s.’ He observed nevertheless that a fox would wag its tail like a dog if it was pleased,fn3 and he liked the fact that so many inns were named after what he now thought should replace the lion as England’s national animal.

In the same year, 1864, Frank presented a paper to the Zoological Society on his experiments with cross-bred salmon and trout, wrote another paper identifying whitebait as (mainly) the young of herring and sprat, swapped notes on pisciculture with experts in Paris, and visited a salmon fishery in Galway where the owner, Thomas Ashworth, wanted him to explain the wholesale disappearance of newly hatched fry. Frank soon saw what had happened. The rearing pond was swarming with carnivorous water beetles. He did not just explain this to Thomas Ashworth, he showed him. Into a bottle of water went one beetle and two baby salmon. There was but a single survivor. This was typical of the Frank we know: plain-spoken, direct, unsentimental. But there was another side to him, less often revealed, which suggests the inner boy once in a while had to move aside for the inner poet. His first sight of mature salmon swimming in a Galway river roused him to an almost Wordsworthian lyricism.

Oh! You shining lovely creatures! At last, then, I see you free and at liberty in your native element. Mysterious water fairies, whence come ye? Whither are ye going? Why do ye hide your lustrous and beautiful figures in the unseen and unknown caverns of the deep blue sea? Why do ye shun the eye of mortal man? Hitherto I have seen only your lifeless, battered, and disfigured carcases mummied in ice and lying in marble state on fishmongers’ slabs. Who could believe that in life you are so wondrously beautiful, so mysterious, so incomprehensible?

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