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Since William Buckland had lectured so often on these beasts, and since he
and De la Beche had been fast friends, Frank made the reasonable inference
that this lithograph had been drawn for his father, and that the bedecked
professor represented Buckland himself. Frank wrote in the preface to the
first edition of his Curiosities:
The frontispiece ... is ... a drawing made many years ago for Dr. Buckland by
the late lamented Sir Henry de la Beche. ... It was originally, drawn as a sort
of quiz upon his geological lectures at Oxford, when he was treating upon
Ichthyosauri, a race of extinct fish-like lizards. The subject of the drawing
may be thus described—Times are supposed to be changed. Man is found
only in a fossil state, in the same condition as the ichthyosauri are discovered
at the present epoch; and instead of Professor Buckland giving a lecture upon
the head of an ichthyosaurus, Professor Ichthyosaurus is delivering a lecture
on the head of a fossil man. (1874 ed., vii)
I bought Frank Buckland's volumes in 1970, during a sabbatical term in
England; they enlivened many a train journey between Oxford and the British
Museum in London. But I also remember a puzzle and a discovery, for I read
Buckland's interpretation of his frontispiece and knew that he had erred. De
la Beche's drawing had deeper and sharper meaning. Frank Buckland had, in
ignorance of the true context, interpreted the drawing (quite naturally) as
gentle and innocent fun directed toward his father. I inferred that the
lithograph had to be a pointed, almost bitter barb of satire directed against the
most curious passage in all three volumes of Charles Lyell's Principles of
Geology —the topic that most geologists regard as the founding document of
their discipline's modern era. Lyell wrote about milder climates of a
geological future:
Then might those genera of animals return, of which the memorials are
preserved in the ancient rocks of our continents. The huge iguanodon might
reappear in the woods, and the ichthyo-
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