“The stomach rules the world!” said William Buckland, professor of Geology at Oxford University circa the early nineteenth century. “The great ones eat the less, and the less the lesser still.” He was right about that, really. Nature is just a fight for survival, and to survive a creature must eat. Even plants have to eat, even if what they are eating is nutrients from the soil in which they grow. (Carnivorous plants being the exception to this rule.) Or, as Tennyson put it, “Nature, red in tooth and claw…” Buckland was a nut, though, who felt the need to prove his philosophy—by eating every kind of animal in existence. Don’t believe it? Here are a few items regularly on his menu: mice, served on toast; insects of all variety; moles; dogs; crocodile steaks; dolphins; and ostriches.
During a trip to Italy and to a cathedral where the floors were slick due to the “blood of sacrificed martyrs” (not sure how that’s supposed to have worked) Buckland dropped to all fours and licked said floor, pronouncing the slickness the result of bat urine. He supposedly ate the mummified heart of the French King Louis XIV, thus making of himself a cannibal. He kept a pet hyena, appropriately enough, and his son, Francis, was just as nutty as he was. Despite this nuttiness, both the Buckland men were well liked—except by Charles Darwin, who called Buckland the senior a “vulgar and almost coarse man.” Hey, it could have been worse. He didn’t say the guy was COMPLETELY coarse.