Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
His gtave sits in a quiet glen not fat from Oxford, surrounded by the
Jutassic ammonite-beating exposures that were his life's avocation. But
Buckland was no mere paleontologist. He was an ordained minister and
elder of the Church of England, and indeed he was devoutly religious. He
was also clearly "certifiable," as my mother would say. Even more than a cen-
tury after his death, stories abound. Perhaps his most memotable act, per-
formed while on a visit to the Natural History Museum in Paris, was reach-
ing into a bottle that held the preserved heart of Louis, the last King of
France, snatching out the dripping organ, and taking a great bite from it,
shouting, "I eat the heart of the King of France!" Ah, nationalism. Lucky for
Buckland the kingly heart was preserved in ethyl alcohol, rather than in
methyl alcohol or formalin.
Early in life Buckland became fixated on two deities, God and am-
monite fossils, and he managed to mix them together in producing a memo-
rable nineteenth-century work known as
The Bridgewater Treatise.
Buckland
thought he could prove the existence of God by showing the perfection of
various aspects of nature, ammonites included. He thus set out to illustrate
how ammonites may have lived.
The Bridgewater Treatise
is of interest to modern ammonite workers be-
cause it presents the first detailed hypotheses on ammonite sutures since the
time of Hooke (and it far surpasses Hooke's interpretations in its detail).
Buckland was obsessed with ammonites during his life and saw thousands of
specimens. He knew intimately the nature of the intricate suture marks lin-
ing the outer shell, and he pondered theit meaning. His explanation for their
presence was novel: He saw them as buttressing structures put into the shell
(by God) to increase shell sttength. The more complex the suture (the in-
tersection of the chamber partition with the outer shell wall), the stronger
the shell. This explanation seemed obvious to Buckland. Just as a corrugated
roof is stronger than a flat sheet of metal would be, so too would corrugated
ammonite septa be stronger than simpler, flatter septa, such as those pos-
sessed by the nautilus. Buckland eventually went to meet his Maker, and his
vast Bridgeii'ater
Treatise
remains a curious and somewhat derisive monument
to one man's life. But among Buckland's theories, virtually all now dismissed
