February 21, 2000

Noel Annan ( December 25, 1916 to February 21, 2000) was a writer, a Provost at University College London, and a distinguished member of the intellectual elite of the last half century. His books include Leslie Stephen (1951) and a last, The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses, (1999). In the latter book, a love story really, we learn about William Buckland, a geologist at Oxford University, and author of (translated title) Relics of the Flood (1824). Buckland attempted to maintain the traditional unity of knowledge, in which science and theology are an unquestioned whole. Buckland came later to understand his explanation via the flood was inaccurate, and he  publicly acknowledged he had been wrong. But Buckland did not succeed in altering the insular atmosphere of Oxford which after another century, still was not the equal, as a source of scientific research, of Cambridge which had welcomed science in the same intervening decades.

That is the big picture Annan sketches. The details also charm. While Buckland was at Oxford during the mid 19th century, "Dean Gaisford did not take kindly to the peregrinations through the college of the pets of the Buckland household." And later the son of that household returned as an undergraduate there, and pursued the scientific examination which characterized the Buckland family:

The son, Frank Buckland:  "collected the heads of cats and rats as other boys collected birds' eggs. He taught himself to eat hedgehogs, fry mice in batter, dissect the eye of the Warden's mastiff, and snare and skin the headmaster's exquisite cat.....

Dean Gaisford, had already gotten rid of an eagle and a jackal from the young Buckland's rooms. Finally though, he said, "Mr. Buckland, I hear you keep a bear in college, well, either you or the bear must go."

We may feel that the Dean was too patient. In fact Annan's point is that Gaisford, an erudite and humane academic, was simply unable to even glimpse the scientific imagination at work.