RARE “British Naturalist” Francis Trevelyan Buckland Cut Signature For Sale

Up for sale a RARE! "Zoologist" Francis Trevelyan Buckland Clipped Signature.

ES-3772D

Francis Trevelyan Buckland (17

December 1826 – 19 December 1880), better known as Frank Buckland,

was an English surgeon, zoologist, popular author and natural historian. He was born in a reputed family of

naturalists. After a brief career in medicine he took an interest in fishes and

other matters. He was one of the key members and founders of the acclimatisation society in

Britain, an organization that supported the introduction of new plants and

animals as food sources which was influenced by his interest in eating and

tasting a range of exotic animal meats. Frank was the first son of Canon William Buckland, a noted geologist and palaeontologist, and Mary, a fossil collector, palaeontologist and illustrator.

Frank was born and brought up in Oxford, where his father was a Canon of Christ Church. His

godfather was the sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey. Educated

at home by his mother, he went, at eight and a half, to a boarding school

in Cotterstock, Northamptonshire staying with his uncle John

Buckland. From 1837–39, he went to a preparatory school in Laleham, Surrey, run by his uncle, John Buckland, a brutal headmaster who flogged his

pupils quite excessively. Relief came with a scholarship to Winchester College, a

school with an unbroken history of six hundred years. Here he was taught by the

Second Master, Charles Wordsworth, who sent letters of praise to his father.

Winchester had a harsh regime, but was much preferable to his previous school.

While at Winchester he continued to take an interest in animals, trapping rats

and mice, dissecting and sometimes eating them. Students complained of a foul smell

emanating from the remains of a cat under his bed. Towards the end of his

schooling he was dissecting human parts that he obtained from the hospital on

the sly. He was known for his exploits with a lancet. One student with a

dolichocephalous head heard Frank muttering "what wouldn't I give for that

fellow's skull!" He was not a first-rate scholar,

but managed to gain entrance to Christ Church, Oxford in

October 1844, after failing to get a scholarship to the smaller Corpus Christi.

He joined a debating club and the first essay he read was on "whether

Rooks are beneficial to the farmer or not". He became a friend of the

curator at Surrey Zoo and when he heard that a panther had died, he had it dug

up and declared that the meat "was not very good". When the British Association met in

1847 at Oxford, Frank took along his pet bear Tigleth Pileser dressed in

student attire of a cap and gown to the party. Charles Lyell wrote that Buckland introduced the bear

formally to him and other zoologists present. This was not to go on for long as

the Dean finally informed him that "either you or your bear must go". In

1845 Frank went to Giessen for three months to study chemistry under Justus von Liebig. In September 1846 he made a trip around

Switzerland. Frank also attended some of the lectures of his father.

Buckland

studied at Christ Church from 1844–48, graduating at the second attempt. Passing out in May 1848

and at the advice of Richard Owen and Sir Benjamin

Brodie, his father sent him to study surgery in London at St George's Hospital under Caesar Hawkins. He attended classes by Henry Gray where another classmate was Francis Day. During this time he also became

acquainted with Abraham Dee Bartlett who

would send him dead animals at the zoo and he continued to keep many animals. A

visit to Paris in 1849 gave him a chance of comparing their methods with those

in London. In London most of the nurses were illiterate; one who claimed to

read was tested with a label reading "This lotion to be applied externally

only". The nurse interpreted it as "Two spoonfuls to be taken four

times a day". Buckland was made

a MRCS in

1851. He was appointed Assistant Surgeon (= house-surgeon) at St George's,

1852. A vivid word-portrait was written by a surgical colleague, Charles

Lloyd: Four and a half feet in height and rather more in breadth – what he

measured round the chest is not known to mortal man. His chief passion was

surgery – elderly maidens called their cats indoors as he passed by and young

mothers who lived in the neighbourhood gave their nurses more than ordinarily

strict injunctions as to their babies. To a lover of natural history it was a

pleasant sight to see him at dinner with a chicken before him... and see how,

undeterred by foolish prejudices, he devoured the brain. He left St. George's

in 1853 and in August 1854 he joined as an assistant surgeon in the 2nd Life Guards. This

appointment that left him plenty of time for his growing interest in natural

history, since the Household Cavalry were not deployed abroad from the Battle of Waterloo (1815)

until the Battle of Tel el-Kebir in

1882. Buckland held the appointment until 1863. During this period he published

numerous notes in The Field, began giving talks and writing books.Frank

was elected to the Athenaeum Club in

February 1854, and later that year was gazetted as Assistant Surgeon to the

Second Life Guards. In January

and February 1859, Buckland made a search for the coffin of John Hunter in the

vaults of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Buckland called Hunter the "greatest of Englishmen" and on 22

February he discovered the coffin after withstanding the noxious air in the

vault. The Leeds School of Medicine gave him a medal for this discovery. Buckland

married Hannah Papps on 11 August 1863, who was an "excellent

nurse" and caretaker for their assorted pets. Buckland's early death was

presaged by lung haemorrhages in 1879 after working in

the winter. In 1880 he had severe oedema. The excess fluid was drained using a

novel treatment of the time, a cannula called Southey's tube developed by the

surgeon Dr Henry Herbert Southey whose

brother, the poet Robert Southey, was a

friend of Buckland. He also had asthma and bronchitis from a history of heavy

cigar smoking. The death certificate records the cause as hepatic disease and

bronchitis although the cause may have been pulmonary tuberculosis. He was

buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.