Anatomies: A Cultural History Of The Human Body - Plot & Excerpts
Buckland was a noted geologist, and the first professor in the subject at the University of Oxford. His masterpiece was Vindiciae Geologiae, a work which set out a new theory for the subject in which fossils predated Noah’s flood, but the Bible nonetheless remained literally true – a cunning piece of interpretation that relied on defining the ‘beginning’ in Genesis as some vague time after the formation of the earth but before the advent of man and other present-day species. He was the first to identify coprolites – fossilized dung – which provide our only direct evidence of what the dinosaurs ate. Against a background of suddenly rising grain prices, he wrote in favour of scientific agriculture, proper land drainage and irrigation, and allotments for the ‘labouring poor’. All this work secured Buckland’s reputation, and he rose in academia and the church to become the canon of Christ Church, Oxford, and later the dean of Westminster. Buckland was not a man to be confined by establishment conventions, however.
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