Life of Frank Buckland / by his brother-in-law, George C. Bompas.

  • Bompas, George C.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Life of Frank Buckland / by his brother-in-law, George C. Bompas. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    450/458 page 432
    Buckland emulated White and Waterton in never stating anything as a fact, of which he had not satisfied himself by actual experiment. I once found him cooking a piece of a dead kelt. Good gracious ! I said, how can you eat anything so abominably nasty ? No doubt, he said, it is nasty enough, but how can I say so unless I have tried it? ' I remember his earnest wistful face, as he contemplated a large oyster, of what kind I know not, but it was almost as big as a cheese-plate. He looked at it once or twice with an evident wish to experiment upon its flavour, but although blessed with a very strong stomach, his resolution failed him, and he resolved to make the experiment vicariously. He called in a dustman, and on the prin- ciple of fiat experimentum in corpore vili, offered him a shilling to eat it. The spirit of the dustman was willing but his stomach weak, and he recoiled from the under- taking. Buckland increased the bribe by an added pot of porter. On this the dustman devoured half the tempting bivalve, but suddenly retired without completing the experiment, and the precise flavour of that oyster is still locked unrecorded in the dustman's breast. 1 Well, he has passed away and has left his works behind to speak of him. His works, as his memory, will long endure, a monument of patient, kindly, and scientific observation.' The successive exhibitions of pisciculture at Norwich, at Edinburgh, and in London, and their remarkable popularity, are no slight evidence of the extent to which Frank Buckland had evoked a popular interest in his favourite science.
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